SPEAKER_00: all right everybody it's a huge show today it's friday we're bringing back our heavy hitters for interviews and today you're not going to believe it shopify ceo and founder toby luka is back he's amazing this is his third or fourth time on the show we've got a great rapport he's super honest he's super candid we go deep on running companies scaling companies my god what a massive pull forward the pandemic was for shopify the stock price dealing with employees with rsus underwater what an amazing interview he's so thoughtful this is a must listen slow it down keep it on 1x speed

SPEAKER_06: and you're probably going to want to listen to it twice stick with us this is an amazing episode

SPEAKER_07: this week in startups is brought to you by spoken finally there is a way to build culture and connection that is designed for remote spoken stories it's fast it's async yet it's human check out get spoken.com slash twist to get three months free that's g-e-t-s-p-o-k-n without the e dot com slash twist masterworks is the first company allowing investors exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class twist listeners can skip the waitlist by going to masterworks.io slash twist and helpware helps you outsource the tasks that slow your team down from data entry to world-class customer support helpware can help make you bionic go to helpware.com slash twist to get

SPEAKER_11: one thousand dollars off your first invoice all right everybody really excited to have friend of the show toby lutka on the program again how are you doing toby i'm doing very well how are you

SPEAKER_14: treason i'm good i you know it was a crazy summer oh for people who don't know toby founded shopify and uh he did that in 2004 i met him i don't know chamath and i went up to canada and i interviewed

SPEAKER_17: you i don't know 10 years ago maybe you were first on the show uh actually it was 2013 so it's almost 10 years um it's true and you were on in 2021 as well and so we've watched the company grow and it was extraordinary during the pandemic my lord did the company grow and then you had a quick pullback

SPEAKER_18: it's been a crazy three years for the company huh yeah and running it it's been a crazy ride um not for faint of heart um i mean it's a funny thing it's like you know you like shopify is a celebration of

SPEAKER_22: entrepreneurship and so um i uh see no reason for me not going through some kind of dramatized version of it it's like a roller coaster is um as you know is uh is what it is it's like you you there's

SPEAKER_23: high highs and very low lows and um one thing observation about building a company as it gets

SPEAKER_21: bigger and bigger is that the um the time between the highs and the lows uh starts uh getting shorter

SPEAKER_24: shorter and shorter and sometimes you have multiple ones in the same day um and uh um yeah so there's this certainly been one of those high oscillation uh uh yes if i've ever seen one here it is interesting

SPEAKER_26: how as entrepreneurs we perceive every year that goes by this business will become more stable and

SPEAKER_17: easier to operate we'll just be flying at a nice height and there'll be no turbulence and everything is going to be stable and i think that's happened to like three businesses in the history of tech and it happened in the third decade like you look at apple you look at microsoft and google like sure they're on cruise control now like three of them great money printing machines of all time but then

SPEAKER_04: you look at like airbnb or facebook or intel like chaos right it is it never gets it very rarely gets

SPEAKER_29: easy i think is the truth yeah i wonder i wonder what you think about why this is because like i mean i mean

SPEAKER_22: once a you know notable thing about this the set of places that seem to get more stable and more

SPEAKER_23: predictable ends up being that they find like some quasi i mean a very very good business model that's kind of self-sustaining or being a government or something where they slow down too so i imagine

SPEAKER_21: that there's a lot of books and articles written out there is by people who have encountered this and so people are like their pattern recognition or like they are like they think it's more common but um that's just an aspect of only people who have time to write books of people who find these business models so um so there's like an overexposure of this kind of experience in reality i i mean this is one cool thing about shop advice like the millions of entrepreneurs we get to speak to and like everyone's in the same boat right like it's it's just it's it's it's a it's a crazy thing to do this and it's it's hard but it's also exhilarating i i i would be getting pretty bored if things got very

SPEAKER_33: stable and predictable i think you would be too right of course of course i mean the fact that it's so

SPEAKER_35: dynamic and you know maybe it has to do with there are some businesses if they can capture you know

SPEAKER_17: close to a monopoly or you know they've basically got a lock on it a duopoly you know you look at the duopoly of you know ios and android and the loyalty and their focus i mean it's probably some combination

SPEAKER_11: of that google search just you know and everything else google does you know outside of search like

SPEAKER_17: it's kind of variable what what's been the thing that hasn't changed during this crazy period because you have the pandemic you got the stock market correction you have a very big competitor who is extremely good at what they do yep and they changed who's running the company and i think you know that

SPEAKER_11: means you got somebody who's super focused in there running the company maybe as somebody who wasn't as focused i'm talking of course about amazon so through this last three years what has been the thing that hasn't changed and what has been the thing that's been most challenging yeah i don't know if

SPEAKER_23: it sounds lame but like um i mean there's a huge difference between things outside and inside of a company right like it's it's it's like inside the company we've been like there's a mission that we're following right like and it's like you know we build the best software we know how to build um we are getting information from the rest of the world about like you know what should we build what's what's needed what's useful um there were some significant changes around the beginning of a

SPEAKER_21: pandemic about like i mean click to like curbside delivery and these kind of things um but like um largely like if uh it was actually with all the craziness and this sort of churn and talking but the talking was all induced and like like it's like mom sending a message saying hey is this as bad as it sounds like it's just like if it's bad or is this like what did you guys actually you know i i remember a lot of people at shopify said hey for the first time during this like this pandemic my parents actually started being interested in this business i'm part of you know like so suddenly everyone paid attention uh which which you know again uh variable outcomes from that but like we've just sort of you know same thing like uh we celebrate with people who are um reaching for independence and uh we make the software hopefully vastly better over time and so the company just keeps getting better i think it's best version of that shop ever existed by by by a mile um but externally people seem to think differently about the company and like if if you sort of overlay stock price on um this sort of um gradually every day getting a little bit more excellent kind of thing that i perceive internally and you're you're superimposed with stock prices like um people are they uh of

SPEAKER_30: different minds about how this is going which is kind of like it's an interesting experience by itself right like it's just just i mean i have this fantastically privileged um experience of having

SPEAKER_21: uh you know ron started writing first lines of code on something which when became a company which when you know eventually became a public company and have a ticker symbol and now i sort of have seen multiple parts of the business cycle and um i i i i'm pretty uh people are always like how do you deal with the you know all the distraction or the noise for the pressure and these kind of things and and i'm like i i just that has never really affected me so i'm almost like a bit of an observer to the whole thing and it's just like it's just like you kind of get the sense for like man how group ends up

SPEAKER_41: forming opinions and like you know how is all this reflexive and you know anyway i i don't know that's if that's the answer you bargain for but like it's like it's just always it's an endless fascination to me about like observing these things um and every once in a while then someone has to

SPEAKER_44: remind me saying hey you're not just an observer you're like in this arena and then i'm like okay

SPEAKER_11: yeah right well i mean if you think about it you have complete information on the business uh you know

SPEAKER_17: where the business is going so you're in the room where it happens you're making the decisions with your team you know the road map you're watching you know your customers use the product and you are studying you know their behavior and then you have outside commenters who have partial information and

SPEAKER_11: so their view of it and they have other things going on in their lives whether it's journalists or analysts or competitors or just you know the people on social media and so they're just commenting with incomplete information and you of course are just watching month over month the product get better consumer uh customers visiting stores and closing transactions so yeah it is very strange uh to be a public company i think for a lot of folks especially when you have too much attention right i mean arguably

SPEAKER_17: you know the press wanted to know who was gonna win inside of uh calmer inside of the pandemic this became an obsession with cnbc and everybody else who's gonna win who's gonna win and they basically

SPEAKER_11: picked two categories uh telemedicine and e-commerce but you did a really great blog post where you show this incredible bump and then i guess a reversion to the meme maybe you could talk a little bit about

SPEAKER_38: the bump you saw during the pandemic and how that smoothed out um and just became more of a straight line

SPEAKER_21: uh eventually yeah so i um this is sort of e-commerce adoption rate uh e-commerce is a

SPEAKER_23: percentage of overall retail and and how it evolved um i mean this is very easy to um uh understand i'm i'm sure like the moment no one could move around anymore people could not reach retail stores also people could not spend their money on uh experiences or like go to bars and so on so um uh what what

SPEAKER_21: happened at the beginning of a pandemic is like um people very much switched spending um uh to like partly saving in fact and and and the other part to goods and the goods were predominantly acquired

SPEAKER_23: for e-commerce and that created a massive massive leap forward in terms of uh you know gmv in in in for our emergence and business for a platform there was actually points in time there like during this

SPEAKER_51: period where uh the cloud providers almost ran out of service it was it was actually i don't know cpu

SPEAKER_43: like like yeah yeah storage well so so you you i mean i'm sure you're familiar and your listeners are

SPEAKER_21: familiar with the concept of a bank run uh that can happen so there was basically a bank run going on

SPEAKER_23: on cpu instances uh and um just because everyone like was that was growing and you know companies have projections about utilization rates and they're building ahead of those but like there's not a lot

SPEAKER_21: of in it for you to like build massively ahead that's just carrying more costs on the books right so like um so suddenly everyone realized we are going for these leaps forwards in utilization and uh probably haven't done all the optimizations we wanted to get done right at this moment and then um uh people are sequestering resources that are not utilized it's kind of niche like so just lots of interesting stories from best from from this time we really saw this like everything just um uh you know became very very busy quickly um and so i so i was wrong about this i actually expected this to be a um very very uh um long-term a stepping stone event for for e-commerce adoption because um my theory was that people just like there's just a lot of people who have never experienced it like it's just like not in the habits like people when people say hey i i need this thing it's it's

SPEAKER_23: just you know for for you and me the first thing we think of is just probably get out of a phone and buy it or order it or something and um i sometimes actually have to remind

SPEAKER_21: us if i could go to stores um because i've sort of fallen out of a habit especially for corvette and i imagine this would be a more of an effect i think that is uh and then like as the lockdown orders came down it actually like then basically to where uh e-commerce penetration that would have

SPEAKER_17: been if things it was honestly gone and 10 of people were buying online it shoots up to 16 it goes up 60 in six months maybe yes yeah out of necessity and then it just comes slowly back down and if it

SPEAKER_14: had gone on the regular pace it maybe would have been at 14 or something so you know net net it's

SPEAKER_11: probably a 20 speed up or something acceleration yeah do your remote employees feel disconnected i bet

SPEAKER_00: they do well spoken is the workplace podcasting platform loved by startups like robin hood udemy and 15 5 and spoken just launched a new way for companies to build connection and community remotely it's called spoken stories you might know stories from instagram where only you can add to them but spoken stories are different spoken stories can belong to a company or a team in fact your entire team or smaller team units can add to that specific story and you can create stories about anything maybe you want to celebrate wins maybe you want to do some shout outs give people credit maybe talk about your travel or birthdays anything product updates and you don't have to wait for an off-site or hold awkward zoom happy hours to connect with your team nope spoken stories is designed for remote teams it's asynchronous and it's fast yet still human leaders this is a really easy way to get to know your employees and recognize them they want you to try it so you can get three months free at getspoken.com twist remember that's spoken with no e get s-p-o-k-n dot com slash twist get s-p-o-k-n dot com slash twist getspoken.com slash twist for three months free take out the e for excellent which is fascinating when i go to a

SPEAKER_17: store now i don't know if you have this experience but like for me going to the movies or the store it's like going to a museum or like going to an amusement park where i'm like whoa this is special i'm in a place where there's things on a shelf and i sort through them and there's a person who helps me navigate through all this stuff i just the whole concept is so foreign to me and of course the stock went up crazy that's a distraction inside the company i would take it yeah so how do you manage that because it's kind of hard to keep people this is what i've heard from a lot of ceos who go through this you know you you like you as the founder very easily could just be like whatever my net worth x or y or z it doesn't really affect me i'm past that escape velocity but for somebody who maybe is you know a rank and follow person this can get very distracting do i have a million dollars in rsu's or

SPEAKER_06: five or two or five hundred like this is the majority of their the wealth is in there and it could change everything so what how is that to deal with and and people you know sitting there

SPEAKER_67: refreshing the stock price instead of pushing code sometimes yeah i mean we've always had a uh

SPEAKER_21: um somewhat inspired um uh uh policy internally but i mean it's hard to do this in a digital world now but uh um if anyone was seen to look at the stock price or it was on the monitor or something like this and doing a presentation like you had to buy um uh uh like donuts basically tim hortons of kind of anything um i know tim hortons yeah yeah yeah all those maple donuts yeah delicious

SPEAKER_30: um so so so um uh whenever you saw uh uh tim bits and in the in the in the kitchenette you knew

SPEAKER_21: someone got caught uh that's kind of like um i i i think that helped i don't know if it helped but that was there as a little bit of a touchstone uh along those lines so so people knew to not like spend all the time to at least talking and about it the other thing is like i i i and i made a point of this many many many times uh uh with great frequency as in the run-up is i i reminded everyone we did not get 50 smarter in the last like two months um no so you know just like because the stock went up 50 like it's just this is like just remember like at some point the stock will go down 50 and we also didn't get 50 worse or dumber or whatever we want um like it's not this is this is not us like we work on the real market value of this business which is unknowable and what the stock market is trying to do is creates um consensus plus a million other things that um like for what like the approximate value given current long-term thinking like how how the time horizon of a market shifts itself and um uh there is times where the market loves potential um uh which of which we have a ton and so there's times where market just doesn't it just values performance of which we have a ton too but the our marketplace was very reflective of those things uh multiplying together and and then all the potential goes out that just can uh look like this so i don't know how much it helped but it was all i got at the moment because i mean the the like the market beta drove shopify to insane levels and then that came out again um so so so the the roller coaster was pretty severe i don't recommend that to most folks and um uh yes people like but from a perspective you're asking specifically from employees perspective which is much more complex it's it's easier to reason about these things in the abstract and in in the sort of sort of

SPEAKER_23: society level but this is a very much a individual kind of experience because everyone like this is the the weirdest part of experience is that um um everyone around you joined at different times and so there's no common ground there's no shared experience and of course the people who might like who have a worst experience like axiomatically have to like like they'll have to spend most time

SPEAKER_21: either you know talking about it or or just trying to figure out what what this means for them so so um you you end up in this situation where um like you you're gonna be acutely aware of some really unfortunate unfair uh like occurrences of timing like i i think i even put that into a post like it's like the way we've designed our compensation packages with the stock options and rsu's um uh it's just like sudden like the market beta matters a lot right like it's like and and and and and confidence of investor classes it's like um if russia invades ukraine the day before you join your lifetime earnings might be very different than the day if you would have joined a couple days earlier or if a stock grant would have been a couple days earlier and and that just seems like a weird

SPEAKER_23: dependency for like figuring out how to compensate people right so anyway um well you made a tool for

SPEAKER_10: this this is i reached out to you the second i saw this because i said why doesn't this exist but

SPEAKER_17: how come this hasn't existed before so we'll pull it up on the screen here for the audience who's watching in video and you know there's obviously two pieces to come you can have some stock you can have your salary and you said well i i'm i think what you said was let's give people the ability to

SPEAKER_11: scenario plan because this is new most people who come work at a company have never had stock options i don't know of a hundred people coming to work at shopify in 2022 i don't know maybe half of them have had this experience maybe have had it that sounds about right yeah so and you're in canada

SPEAKER_17: too so in canada it's not like there's many shopifies there i mean you had rim but it's like a handful so maybe explain what you built and how it's been received by the employee base and we have it on the

SPEAKER_06: screen now so you can you can actually sportscast it if you like and describe what we're seeing here

SPEAKER_82: yeah i think i think what i talked about earlier is a good setup um it's sort of um framing because

SPEAKER_21: you know like but you know i i um my background of it the last time we nerded out on like our tech backgrounds right like i'm i'm i'm very much a techie of all of uh like i don't know hacking central casting right like it's just like i just like i like i love computers i love software um i thought about that that will always be a programmer but eventually what i realized though was um i i really just like building systems and uh yeah computers are programming so baby good like like they're fantastic for people who like building systems because you write the code you design system and then it keeps doing it forever sort of in my at some point i had to make these uh decisions about and and like what do i want to do and do i want to do the ceo thing for longer public companies office kind of things and and and sort of clarifying idea there was you know actually most of the consequential most

SPEAKER_23: consequential systems in the world are actually both you know human systems like the companies themselves and you know incentive systems and just like like like like how do you you know it seems like every problem both solving in the world is a problem for which you need a lot of people working from very diverse backgrounds working together with aligned incentives and and and and just like you

SPEAKER_21: know basically basically but all i'm talking about is the modern company um so so i i i i find sometimes then something that we all do causes a very bad like it's sort of an observably

SPEAKER_87: bad variable it's variable it's probably best like bad yeah it's not necessarily bad it can actually be

SPEAKER_10: very good yeah yeah flip a coin it's like a decision making in a poker hand you know yeah

SPEAKER_30: could go really well it could go really bad right and and and i i think um uh it just seemed like the decisions were on the wrong side like i i think the company like i i'm a big fan of treating

SPEAKER_21: the company as like uh professional like a professional sports team everyone's adults everyone like people have agency right like and about about their decisions and so we were we were thinking about like well like i we actually ran some polls like that we just picked like we found like the the exact salary that the most of the people in the company shared for various reasons between different groups and just like surveyed um how much they think they earn and and and we got

SPEAKER_30: like almost no agreement uh back like everyone they didn't even understand no their compensation was

SPEAKER_17: yes even though it's in a document somewhere and it comes into their bank account but it's not easily

SPEAKER_94: a certain discernible to them like i've seen this happen before i've had to explain to people do you know what you got paid last year here's your salary here's your bonus here's your carry in a

SPEAKER_17: venture firm here's what your future earnings will be and they're like yeah i don't make that much

SPEAKER_10: they literally don't know how much they make and it's usually they underestimate i find yeah i i've

SPEAKER_30: seen i i've seen this same uh dynamic and it's it's it's really not like um i'm not blaming the the

SPEAKER_21: people at all it's just extremely complex we have leaked the implementation detail of highly complex financial instruments um to uh like the institution of employment um for tax optimization purposes mostly right like this is why uh like a lot of uh equity uh happens which you know it's all fine and good but like um um you know these these complex instruments usually come with owners manuals and and and like there's actually um uh rules governing how much we can say about the potentials of of these things because

SPEAKER_99: we don't we can't make statements about uh looking statements no bueno yeah so so so in in the end

SPEAKER_21: it's like this seems really unideal we use tools like everyone has like uh workday i don't know how much this is our usage of workday but when i when i looked at what is what you actually see especially when the stock price is like underwater compared to when you joined in your workday instance about your stock and just like every cardinal sin of your ex was kind of uh like the entire line of your equity just disappears when the strike so so i actually i had people um in in and i like not in my office but like on in in in zoom because we're extremely upset because they actually thought it was once it's years out it never comes back it just wasn't they lost it they don't just removed from the ux so anyway like i remember this is in like probably over sharing here but like we're like okay so two things we're gonna do first we're gonna take over the ux like this is this is it's we're a product company we're good at this like all shop photos takes the insane complexity of a world of commerce and makes it uh usable by by people by hopefully everyone so um this is the same problem let let's go build the ux now what do we want from this can can once we own the ux can we actually move agency over and so this is sort of went into this concept of can we just let people choose like because you know sometimes executives coming in said like hey i would actually like yes you're doing 50 50 but can i have like slightly more like if this is available to executives it should be available to everyone um i i i i just think if you're a top employee you and you're sophisticated

SPEAKER_11: when it comes to your equity your rsu's restricted stock units for people who don't know that you're

SPEAKER_106: gonna be like hey listen you were gonna pay me 200 grand you were gonna give me 40 000 in options i already made money at my last company i'll take a hundred but can i get a little more equity exactly

SPEAKER_17: and it's a negotiation that people are willing to have with the top five percent of the organization but it's it's so hard to do that with everybody but you found a way to make it easier which is this is like a mortgage calculator you know sometimes you go calculate your mortgage you

SPEAKER_11: got your score you got your down payment and so people can actually understand and move sliders

SPEAKER_21: back and forth i probably need to speed up on this like i mean the biggest changes we made here is like we actually uh uh just moved everything to like here's your annual income like uh it's calculated based on um uh you know the grand value like we just like like figured out a heuristic by which we can convert the old system a new system and then everyone got an offer um to uh here is what the new system what your wallet size is and uh for everyone who opted in which was basically everyone now it's like something that every quarter you make a decision and you get the stock options that you choose and you get them at that value so like then so so this is like like this is actually the real differences are in the system so we've moved completely away from three-year grand maybe um you're just getting whatever the agreed value is is the one you're getting there's some discounting i think as you have on the screen right now but like um it is for people to choose rcs or stock option

SPEAKER_06: depending on what they want but so if i take more stock i get a little extra because i have more skin in

SPEAKER_30: the game i take it and it's and it's more risk you're you're you're you're like it should be risk

SPEAKER_21: adjusted to some degree right like um um and frankly we in some cases like just for cash flow purposes we actually want people to take uh to to to check take options because they but yeah they are playing that purpose on our side as well so we have the ability to um offer incentives to for people to go into options um which which we are not doing much with but in the future you can imagine um that they might like if if everyone's in cash maybe there's more discounts for uh on on the options to get people into that or whatever i think i think there's a it's just a lot uh that that becomes a lot easier and there's a common ground truth of what everyone is making that doesn't record like that where you don't forget that you're also getting equity where you don't forget that you're like us use made like

SPEAKER_44: like this is pre-tax and post-tax and like it just everything becomes very comparable easy

SPEAKER_00: in this market we're all sick of hearing so much bad news my god layoffs inflation funding drying up but early stage investing is slowly starting to heat up again trust me i know i'm doing all these meetings so all is not lost folks it's not all bad news and i want to tell you about one of my favorite startups and this one's out of new york city it's called masterworks masterworks is an alternative asset investment platform and they're focused on blue chip art now you know alternative asset allocation is projected to grow and it's projected to grow at an average of 17.5 within the next two years according to market intelligence firm cerule associates masterworks grew to 500 million dollars under management in just five years wow and so far they've averaged 29 net returns for their investors and i've made a couple of investments myself on the platform i have a basquiat i'm so proud that i own a little bit of that and when i see the picture i just think oh that's awesome i own some art super innovative what masterworks has done and masterworks if you didn't know is one of the only startups in the world to become a unicorn after its first fundraise they've done so well there's a huge wait list to get on the platform but you can skip the line jcal style at masterworks.io twist that's masterworks.io twist so you can skip the line see important regulatory a disclosures at

SPEAKER_17: masterworks.io cd what's great about it too i think you know you you had this great post where you're like hey listen we're not a family we're a sports team we're here to win we're here to get better at our jobs every day everybody's got a role on the team everybody should be thinking about their

SPEAKER_11: contribution uh and listen if you if you don't make a contribution like you can't be on the team that's kind of how teams work whereas in a family if you're a screw-up you're still part of the family like we've all got somebody in the family who's a complete screw-up um but being a product first company like this and then letting people have agency is so brilliant because what i find is sometimes people will come to you as the leader of a company and and i've been through this to a much smaller scale but they're looking at you like well why are you doing this to me or like i am

SPEAKER_17: this is being put on me i i don't have the ability i'm just a victim here and it's like you're not a victim you chose to work at this company and now we're making it even easier for you to choose

SPEAKER_11: long term versus short term hey maybe you need cash now you got over your skis with your mortgage or you got to take care of a parent you don't want to go long you just need cash great but you can set

SPEAKER_17: it quarterly that's a bold decision my god the finance organization must have fought it's crazy

SPEAKER_119: yeah they must have been like no toby yearly every two years what did they say to you when you came up

SPEAKER_120: with this idea well i asked for by week uh like twice a month i i just want to do it with a paycheck

SPEAKER_24: to which i pointed out rightfully but a lot of our like our european employees like are getting monthly

SPEAKER_124: so like anyway um you asked to do it twice a month the finance team wants to spit the coffee out

SPEAKER_30: i i just wanted to do it i mean you always ask for you know the idea when you figure out where you land

SPEAKER_21: but like um uh yeah like i just basically wanted to make it like super independent of uh like like you choose how you want it and like it comes out to you in terms of cash rsu's or stock depending on what you what you choose um again stocks a little bit down you get actually more stock because again the the money is like you know stock stock goes up whatever you've like took a stock you you have in a bank is worth more like it's it's kind of it works like think about the counterfactual to uh if you would have been on the system all along um um like this would have been like the internal like a lot a lot of internal complexity would have not existed uh with the system which is interesting because like i mean i've been trying frankly to get to the system for for for for many years i it's

SPEAKER_22: it's not like it wasn't it wasn't the first time uh we we talked about uh uh like this um and i have a

SPEAKER_21: particular sort of um propensity for wanting to rethink things especially if everyone does the same thing but i'm get really suspicious of it that's usually a way to do it better i don't by way i don't know if this is better like that i will report back um there there are clear downsides that people can

SPEAKER_23: level at it like for instance it's clearly not as retentive as like a three-year uh option grant right like um right so so what you're saying is yeah if you if you want to lock people up give them

SPEAKER_17: the gold in handcuffs like making them negotiate every couple years you could lord it over them a bit more so if you were in lorded over mode as a as a as a management team you were like well we can kind of have our thumb over these folks but i i suspect if you want the best folks giving them agency creates a less um parental child relationship and more of a peer relationship

SPEAKER_21: exactly what i'm going for you you're spot on i i did uh you you like my note on leadership i i wrote one on uh leaving well um which is like there's basically three things you can do in a company you can leave too early which sucks for you you can leave um uh too late which actually sucks for you and for the company um and and and you can leave right on time which works for everyone and and i think um the sort of retentive component of uh uh of stock options like the golden handcuffs very very often just simply cause with that like like like the bad sides of these things it's like people who actually really want to be somewhere else stay around because they have to and honestly that just actually doesn't work for the company or you you you become more bitter over this um i i think everyone should be working where there can be a superstar uh and yeah so it's i i like i'm not

SPEAKER_06: happening now i don't i don't know if you've been following and i don't want you to have to comment on

SPEAKER_17: other peers to your company but i will you know you look at google and facebook now you know sundar is like you know people need to recommit and facebook is like you need to reapply to another part of the organization and they they won't even do layoffs right they won't take the medicine just say we're cutting 10 they're like we're gonna reorganize make all these units smaller you have to reapply to go to another place and a lot of this has to do with stock comp a lot of it has to do with kind of like forcing people to reapply for their jobs and it's dysfunctional and to your point if you're a player if this was the nba we want you to get as many minutes in the game as you deserve minutes to go around maybe you would be better off playing for a team with the worst record and playing more minutes and maybe that's better for you and that's really what you want as a boss nobody wants to deal with this dysfunction and the dysfunction at google has really built up you know google's initial idea i remember talking to i'll just say senior senior people in google even at that in the early days and they were like we have a money printing machine we're hiring every talented person we have we can find and if they're super smart and talented we'll figure out what job they do later and then somebody told me like and if they're working here they can't build a competitor it was literally google took the money printing machine and was like it would be like somebody

SPEAKER_00: like the yankees or like the knicks being like we have so much money at the lakers we're just going to pay the top 10 these 10 players to be on our bench as backups even though we know we can't put

SPEAKER_17: them in the game so they're not on other teams that could win the championship it was a crazy move

SPEAKER_38: but nobody wants to live with that dysfunction yeah i mean it's game theoretically perfect to do

SPEAKER_22: it right like it's like it's you want like it's a great strategy like i mean i think google actually literally had a bench right like um they've even called it that for a while i don't know like i i

SPEAKER_21: think i think um i mean there's cycles and there's there's fashions and i think i think um i'm always suspicious about how these stories end up being reported i sort of see like how um i don't like people end up right i mean obviously writing about shopify and like

SPEAKER_22: it's amazing the ability but people to sort of like turn something into something that sounds like this sort of brush like random decision that came on a whim but actually like i happen to know we've been you know discussing you know from philosophy like sociology and first principles for like three years and like we like we built something completely different but like uh you know sort of above the iceberg component of it is being uh like reasoned about and you know i i i think

SPEAKER_21: actually all this is probably good because um uh uh because i think like most companies are just i think they're starting to see their role again as uh uh companies right like and and i think people have tried to to to move companies into the realm of i don't know like sort of like mock uh academia a little bit um and that has downsides and um i mean i i i mean but like i think there's some companies which went so far to like move like like see what value there is in daycare um to to extract and i guess

SPEAKER_22: run the counterfactual to the rest of the industry to like make make the workplace a little bit more like

SPEAKER_21: that i think that's um like outrageous and i'm glad i never had to participate in better kind of experiments on the employee side so like i think um you know humans are awesome and like it's so much better than everyone seems to think you know like just like like you know it's hard to create environments which are creative and um but like if you if you put your mind to it uh and don't like just copy everything that worked for others uh and and try to build something that's like uniquely worth worth it for kinds of type of problems that you you are solving and that arguments your company culture you you end up with something that you're just creativity comes from everywhere and where people hopefully fall in love with the products you're creating and um where they're kind of everyone's holding each other accountable or actually reaching over um you know someone falling behind and like helping women saying like hey here's like the thing you're missing uh and and let's work on uh on on your growth so you can be part of this team and you

SPEAKER_23: know that's exactly what everyone wants isn't it like so we're hiring with people who are like super signed up for this kind of thing we pay extremely well for like um um but we paid in an almost paternalistic way where we make all the decisions about what's good for you and so this is this was our opportunity to just switch over to something that's cohesive of a way we want to run the business

SPEAKER_35: well i mean you're also going to self-select for people who want agency and the people who want agency i think are going to correlate with people who make good decisions on their own and when you're running a business i mean speed matters you got serious competition you want people to make

SPEAKER_17: decisions and you don't want people sitting around a lot of companies have had big challenges because nobody wants to make a decision and that's kind of why startups exist how many times have you been

SPEAKER_00: slowed down by time consuming tasks like data entry and rescheduling all these meetings imagine how productive you could be if you dropped all that back office stuff and you started focusing on things like growth and product well help where is people as a service and it's gonna make you bionic and before i even finish this ad read i just want you to go to help where.com twist and sign up and get a thousand dollars off right now basically help where helps outsource tasks that are slowing your team down the mundane stuff data entry to more complex tasks like customer support and even ai operations and wait until you hear about their clients doordash google microsoft amazon and more you know people are scaling they got big data sets ai operations you get the idea all of these mundane tasks can be done by helpware imagine all of your top performers and now imagine them wasting zero time on back office tasks and having them all focused on growing and building your business that's what's possible with help where so go to help where.com twist to get one thousand dollars off your first invoice that's right h-e-l-p-w-a-r-e.com twist for one thousand dollars off and hey welcome to the twist

SPEAKER_06: family help where let's talk a little bit about uh layoffs you had to lay off a bunch of people

SPEAKER_11: uh that's a first for you uh how did you come to the decision and you know just how was it for you

SPEAKER_149: as the founder to have to go through that i think for the first i think that was the first time you

SPEAKER_30: had to do it at that it was yeah it was definitely the first time to do it it was i mean crushing is the only work it's like it's it's uh i i see um i i i believe in like this well-defined uh different

SPEAKER_21: tasks i uh you know build a company that's really really really worth working for and um i feel like

SPEAKER_23: every job offer is um our commitment that this is the right place for you to join like that that your career is going to go better when you join here um and our mission is going to move further when you

SPEAKER_21: join here this is like actually the the the concept of employment is the agreement that this is like the optimal uh uh a a thing a thing to do for the next alignment tree alignment between these two things yeah so so uh it's crushing um partly like for for multiple reasons it's as if you have the individual experiences which uh uh yeah and you hear about it of course and and and you want to do people right and and you have to tell people that you're going to do something which is going to be a very consequential thing in their own careers um and um that they have no agency over that is actually where we have like to make a decision for them and sometimes for no fault of their own and it's crushing because um i uh made these commit like i i see that i have made these commitments and in some cases i probably was wrong some people should have taken uh like an offer of a company that didn't have to go through through this now i couldn't have known this back then but still it's uh it's falling short of my own standards so some of our hardest days um i uh the reason why we had to do it well um i mean we could have also chosen not to do it like it would have been possible uh uh to to to to potentially not do it i think that would have been easier on everyone but actually worse on the people that might have been affected this is like this is a hard thing to to to argue for and and people ought to take the other side for me to steal to to steal men this but um the reason why i say this is like we had to hire ahead a lot for um the e-commerce um uh explosion that we

SPEAKER_26: talked about earlier just like the servers right the the servers should have been had next year or maybe even two years capacity so you're hiring what for a year or two years from now in terms of you're

SPEAKER_21: thinking yeah we've been more than uh oh man we more than doubled this was like up 6 000 people in two years or something like uh or more even like it's it's we we expanded a lot um because um you know there's you know like we we did not want to compromise product we see uh so for instance customer support as a product it's like again we meet people very early in my entrepreneurial journey they they often um they are courageous but like um their commitment waivers they they might actually call us to to to ask what's the next task um they uh like they um they they are not sophisticated yet uh like like like they are on the learning journey but they are there's a lot of new things to learn but after they start uh like they often people start the shop first before they incorporate or do anything else um so so uh you know that's then then when someone talks to us we see this as actually our product um um uh represented instead of through web browsers for people and uh so um that required a lot of you know getting getting ahead and um because we didn't want to compromise this this uh the quality um uh that they set for ourselves um on on those things so you know there's all sorts of reasons where we had to build capacity ahead of uh demand because it just takes a while to hire you and onboard and um when we didn't need once we knew like once we had the data um it's like well we can now engage

SPEAKER_22: and saying okay well let's change the job you're doing let's find something else let's but or allow

SPEAKER_21: people in certain groups like maybe start a bench right like that's like that's not fair to everyone else right like so so but in a company dynamics perspective it's just it would it would compromise the company we are in the way we are solving problems and so clearly the right decision yeah i mean

SPEAKER_17: yeah to steel man it for you like everybody comes into this concept like we buy in that this is a dynamic environment and the reward for working in a dynamic competitive capitalistic system is that you can win you can lose you can make mistakes and so everybody kind of buys into that and it's double opt-in people can leave at any time and the company can change its plans and that's why the west and capitalism in the west has won versus authoritarian societies that can make unilateral decisions to

SPEAKER_11: pick winners like literally in a competition where the government can pick the winner say china um or

SPEAKER_17: any other country they can't beat competition rabid dogged gritty competition will always win will

SPEAKER_11: always win and we were sitting here i don't know last year two years ago i was in this debate with my besties on all in sometimes oh my god like china's gonna roll us and i was like hmm i'm not so sure i'm not so sure that you know if they don't let entrepreneurs battle it out in the arena you know

SPEAKER_17: that's why we're battle tested here and you have this giant competitor in amazon you got to wake up every day and these two gladiators go at each other this is the the next jump point i wanted to go to you uh with you they have a tenuous relationship an unpure relationship with their partners you have a pure relationship you support people who want to sell stuff on the internet you they only work with you to the extent you help them amazon studies the people on their platform and let's just be honest

SPEAKER_06: you know uh call it what it is amazon basics 50 other white label brands they copy them they pull the rug out from under them and uh you know it's becoming a bit of an antitrust issue for amazon so obviously you don't have to comment on their antitrust issues but i'm curious when people call that customer support line you talked about and customer support as a feature as an actual product is brilliant uh shout out to tony shea rest in peace our friend from zappos who really you know i think set a standard here for everybody lost a good one there oh it's so brutal um i just thinking about him a lot when i was at burning man um and uh you know you think about his his

SPEAKER_17: contribution there and you think about what your advice is to those p those people who are selling when they come in to your ecosystem what what does a person say on the phone like hey should we put our

SPEAKER_11: stuff on amazon or should we go direct how do you think about that if you were giving advice let's say one of your siblings or a cousin started a store what would you advise them privately and say like here's how to think about getting something out of being listed on amazon or baby here's the things

SPEAKER_30: you should be concerned about i mean so this might be actually surprise you i wouldn't like reflexively

SPEAKER_21: say no it depends a lot on what you what you're selling um i mean if if if you're selling any kind of necessity you but you definitely want to be on amazon because that's how people look for them but it can be the right strategy as long as you go in the eyes wide open like amazon is in no way doing

SPEAKER_23: something here with the store brands that hasn't been done in retail forever like this is exactly what kirkland is this is like you know there's like entire like a trader joe i think is the sort of north american version of aldi right like it's just like all store store brands um the retail industry is like a beautiful manifestation of capitalism in its very pure form like what's not right the question is always like what do you need to different differentiate yourself like if you have a unique

SPEAKER_21: product like that's and go on amazon you soon will not have a unique product same with if you go on like aliexpress you will also very quickly not have a unique product anymore but if if a particular product is uh like we find that very rarely it's actually the product straight up uh but again in our capitalist um like in our adam smith uh society we we tend to think about economics a little bit too much about utilitarian value like goods and so like like are much more about there's a lot more emotion in there there's a lot more like belonging in there there's so like um the story it's there's a story but like you like this there's like how often have you had this situation where i don't know like you you encounter someone who um uses a similar brand maybe like car type or or or um something you're excited about and and you feel an instant connection because there is one like it's this exists this is not made up right this is hobby book so um uh you know so if your core concept of your uh business is um that you stand for something as a business and that you have um uh like that that there's a community of people like even um you should probably be everywhere because you should look for people who are opting into your idea and your worldview even everywhere and that can involve amazon like people making different choices about this you know so you know we have we have a lot of shopify stores uh people who were on amazon and then they publicly got uh uh you know copied and um uh left there and i

SPEAKER_23: think i don't know about the current status of all birds but they have a complex history for instance and they're they're one of our favorite stores because they start on shopify and then then public

SPEAKER_55: as one of our customers which is just such a cool um uh i didn't realize that they were

SPEAKER_56: built on your sack wow yeah yeah it's a super and great like amazing entrepreneurs and and so

SPEAKER_21: um uh it's just so so i guess what i'm saying is i don't have a straight up answer because it really depends on like like on you amazon is just a sales channel at the end of the day it's a very good one it's protect like at times it might be the best in the world and for some categories at least um uh and uh people should like entrepreneurship is tough enough don't don't don't uh say no to a channel for some idealistic like idealistic reasons or do it if that's cohesive of your brand but like um i i maybe amazon can play a role and i love the idea of just putting a sliver of your

SPEAKER_17: product offering there to kind of acquire customers get the brand out there so people don't get nothing when they go on the site but then have these more unique things and you know i think there's some you know sharp edged sharp uh elbowed business practices that i think we do need to think about with them i think they should just get out of the basics business like get out of the house brand business and then just this idea of like maybe leaning on people about their pricing like it should be up to the merchant to decide what the price is in whatever store they want if they want to charge one price on their store and one price at target in person and one price at you know amazon that should be you know uh up to the the merchant themselves talk about like the the pace of delivery

SPEAKER_11: there was this idea that like everybody wanted everything immediately and then i've seen signs that maybe for some categories if you need deodorant or quart of milk of course yeah get it to me as quick as possible but it does seem like maybe we went too far in fulfillment and people are now choosing i i could get this a little bit slower if it was cheaper or can i get less boxes maybe get to talk about what you're seeing there in terms of fulfillment what what do consumers want and

SPEAKER_24: what's the best practice yeah i mean i'm i'm knee deep in this right like because we're building

SPEAKER_21: warehouses and all these kind of things so like uh it's um i mean that is uh probably a favorite like i i just find the the delivery world and the fulfillment to be absolutely fascinating it's it just

SPEAKER_22: has all the kind of components of like 90s uh piece like computers like it's it's like it's like it's like where you build your own computer from like components and and get your motherboard get your power supply buy a case yeah put some memory in well and then you go to a radio shack and get a faster quartz and sort it in because that's the best way you know it's just like like like people are doing these super unscalable non-productized things too it's like building a muscle car you're like

SPEAKER_56: it's a carburetor i need to put different rims on this yet we are expecting every retailer to go

SPEAKER_21: through this uh it's clearly not um uh meant to be for them and so we are like this is actually

SPEAKER_22: something shopper is trying to fix of course but like sooner is better but like there is a depending it is exactly the sort of necessities sooner is everything um so it's almost like like if you can't meet make get things this fast don't play it's like it's no there's no demand

SPEAKER_21: not past like two days three days speed um if if you are in uh another category like uh anything that's a uh like something you want rather than something you need um like you know sneakers or birds or whatever sooner is better it's a better experience it's um it's it's a digital equivalent i guess um of um when you go in a physical store and music is perfect lighting is great the stores don't squeak the people the help is uh like like the people the store keeps are um friendly and um uh so it's part of experience it will get you uh the thing you really want which is lifetime customer value it'll get repeat customers because uh you know a lot of the first sales actually uh have met margin uh especially with uh the sort of occurrences of uh uh advertising changes now and um it's really afterwards that you pick up uh margin um uh so so it's a it's a big part of that but it's it's it's not nearly like it's it's it's a fairly it's a curve then it drops off at like probably seven days at which point like never again it's my it depends on again what it is it's usually um a little bit earlier but we separate this out in a couple of things and and and what we are working on super hard at dropify um is that um in the future for even for the smaller retailers what you will see on a on a product page is is is a shop guarantee which says this thing will either be with you like tomorrow uh two days from now or before the weekend those are actually the three things of significance the last one is overlooked um because um a lot of the things that people want they want for the next weekend that's a super common thing oh that's fascinating it's like your home projects

SPEAKER_22: like you're um you know you're gonna play you have time to unbox like you have time to unbox

SPEAKER_203: just unboxing all this stuff coming to our houses is a little bit time consuming it is yeah so so so

SPEAKER_21: these have a free guarantees that we think are of a lot of value um we are going to have thousands and thousands and billions of dollars um we allocate to a thousand thousand people and billions of dollars we are going to allocate towards making it so that um from a buyer perspective they can get things with such guarantees from as many small businesses as possible because that's fundamentally hard to do but

SPEAKER_23: like um it's very valuable and no one's built this what amazon's built is a very different thing which is unique to them they have warehouse of 20 million skews whatever like and all of them can randomly be boxed together that's not the way small small medium businesses work they have smaller

SPEAKER_21: catalogues and so on the details don't matter they'll get it done and i think that um you know like at this point we found that there's a there's an increasing amount of small businesses that actually have started um rightfully um renaming free delivery to sustainable like uh uh like actually like um slower delivery options is what i meant to say um to uh more sustainable because it like the faster it goes the most likely it goes on a plane which is uh not carbon neutral at all so um you know i i think people will pick different places on on this some people are really interesting in terms of

SPEAKER_17: the abundance we have in society i was just reading an ft article before i got on the show and they were just talking about how there's now all these examples of gdp going up while emissions go down and you're like well of course you can have both it's called technology it's called thoughtfulness and i'm finding as a consumer and maybe it's because i have kids and i'm getting older but i'm just thinking about my footprint i'm thinking about waste i'm making you know my iced coffee at home instead of buying a ton of blue bottle boxes you know i got rid of the salsa cases of salsa coming you know laqua train coming every two weeks with cases and just drinking iced tea instead and i do

SPEAKER_06: think people really care about that that footprint let's talk about payments you got you have your

SPEAKER_180: own payment channels now right you have shopify uh payments i think you call payments yeah um and

SPEAKER_21: then shop pay which a lot of people have some familiarity with right like because that's when you see you buy something from someone and you get like a code and then it all just zooms through i love

SPEAKER_180: that oh that's so smooth when you just go to a website and it's got shop pay so you're you're kind

SPEAKER_06: of like uh going against stripe there or paypal you have that built into the system why would people use the you know the shopify payments versus stripe it's basically a wash in terms of cost but it's

SPEAKER_21: just more simple and elegant uh well it's actually like like a lot of the software underneath shop payments is stripe this is one of the longest standing partnerships and technology if you're actually sometimes wondering with patrick about if there is any other like partnership that has seen both companies grow as much as shopify did and striped it from the point where we started first partnering uh almost 10 years ago um and and you know we like so that's been that's been really really one of a great success stories there so um stripe is our uh you know technology partner for for a lot of uh these components um we certainly have enough uh like a bit of a big enough chunk of world of logistics software and uh word of commerce software to to keep us busy so um why did people use it well i i mean it's it's the reason people come to us now it's like it's it's convert like your your conversion rate is going to be massively lower if you don't have shop pay it's it's it's it's such a uh common uh like like card abandonment rates on every non-shopify e-commerce software are through

SPEAKER_55: the roof because people get to the checkout can't find shopping and leave it's death it's death to

SPEAKER_17: see like fill out my information again like literally i i see this sometimes where i'm like i'll wait till i'm at my desktop or my for some reason this website is not letting me autofill and i'm like how do you not get autofill right in 2022 like this is table stakes like they're but you know i understand they're they got some small store they don't even go through the user checkout process ever they just set

SPEAKER_11: up their store they never even think about the ux because i don't know whatever they're selling you know some bespoke product they're not software experts what do you think about this uh buy now pay later phenomenon um is that like here to stay and people love it or is it faddish what do you how do you even think about that and in your role in it i i mean so it's something

SPEAKER_30: people people buy uh uh i mean it's something we offer for for merchants who wanted and it's it's it's

SPEAKER_21: a it's a there's some groups it's extremely popular with uh partly because um i mean there's a lot like the credit cards are engaged in um they're taking a lot of risks which you know to to their credit they're very very courageous companies um because uh you know usually companies of their size are not courageous um so the the way this courage manifests is like in fees that they are pushing and um um yeah you know like consumers on one side are deciding hey maybe i should just get a debit card and just use buy now pay later to basically get credit back and because that actually allows the underwriting to happen to people who are willing to do it much uh more economical and uh so that's one aspect it's especially with the with younger um purchasers that's a very very common thing this is why you see buy no pay later so much um or why initially it became such a big thing so quickly um and then uh you know high aov for for it's a big unlock for high aov for high cost merchants like the mattress uh peloton bikes and so on like things that cost like a big like fairly big outlay is

SPEAKER_17: considered purchases yeah it can it can take a considered purchase and maybe make it a little more yeah take a little bit of the friction out right like yeah okay if i'm paying for it monthly i mean i don't i i don't need to do it and like sometimes i get these offers and i'm like wait a second zero percent and i can pay for it over three years for my iphone maybe i should do that and i'm

SPEAKER_11: like i don't care like uh but it does seem to be a really elegant solution for some merchants

SPEAKER_180: who like you're saying have those you know headwinds against them maybe it makes sense yeah yeah it it

SPEAKER_21: it it it makes i i'm you know some of the data like again it's it's not a universal solve but it for for some business it is a absolutely massive change um and really and then made it made a massive difference yeah like a massive difference for their cash flows massive difference like expansion of their products um you know the amount of people who like could purchase it um it's so again your credit is i mean our economies are built on top of credit right like um um our economies get um you know for better for worse right like uh you know like sometimes people are bad with credit i think

SPEAKER_23: that might like that that periodically occurs and then we usually go in some kind of correction um

SPEAKER_21: but uh like there's a lot of brainstorming about how to do credit well and it's like now starting

SPEAKER_206: to be done by companies like you know a firm is just extremely good at it um uh for brilliant yeah

SPEAKER_23: exactly i mean he's like sort of i mean he he's done this kind of underwriting even at paypal uh back in those days so so he's been thinking about this longer than everyone else and you know the software industry is like it's just the way software books gives new possibilities and you know the credit

SPEAKER_21: cards are all you know as if they continue like this just uh pushing everyone to like rethink uh of um you know where the underwriting ought to occur and so i think it's it's i mean to your point

SPEAKER_23: competition is good and so i'm i'm um you know if all the buy now pay later will eventually do it's like do it's like get a credit card products to be improved to to to absorb some of uh um uh uh you know um experience of this because it's just kind of it's it's it's structured more fairly it's a lot more above ground it's more clear how much it costs in the end yeah then i don't know what they're

SPEAKER_17: paying they get this like huge credit card bill and they everything is obscurified and you know max is really smart at architecting these things he's gonna know like yeah this this 25 in this cohort yeah no problem let them rip they can they'll pay their bills they got a job we got the we got the data here they're gonna pay their bills hey this group yeah we might want to pump the brakes or give them a different deal and just make it up front and you know throttle them if need be uh but yeah it's i i am looking at it going i hope people aren't maxed out on their credit cards yeah and they're doing buy now pay later that's the only one i'm worried about is like those two groups of people are competing to empower people to make purchases i just hope that they have insight into what each other are doing in some way right like yeah i guess the merchants do and your technology

SPEAKER_33: does i mean they do uh but that's the right thing to worry about you know when you're hiring people

SPEAKER_11: today uh we've seen some generational shifts like we're gen xers we just want to work and crush it put 50 60 hours a week in like we take really pride in careers what are you seeing with these younger generations because you're hiring a lot i'm sure plenty of millennials obviously but you got a lot of gen z's probably coming in and i'm assuming your work from home mostly how are you managing this younger workforce we hear a lot of like maybe they don't have the same work ethic some of them

SPEAKER_17: maybe they don't want to come to work labor participation in the united states i don't know if you've tracked these numbers but we're you know in 1999 we we had 70 now we have 61 62 like we've got a whole swath of people missing from the workforce here in the united states i don't know about canada

SPEAKER_06: i do find my canada i have a lot of canadian employees and i find they stay longer they work harder more consistent more appreciative of the job i don't know if that's your experience as well it definitely is mine but but how do you think about employment and hiring and just managing great people in a time when it seems like maybe some people don't want to come work a lot of people are opting out of

SPEAKER_22: working but i mean we should acknowledge that there's probably an unbroken chain for as long as

SPEAKER_21: humans have been around that like one generation voice about the next one's book ethic right like so sure probably because i think work looks different uh in in a way but like uh and and as included um every generation will wrestle with a couple of really really really really bad ideas that i just kind of get very deep into the firmament and then people like have to just sort of work out right like i i i you know that might have been communism at some point you know like and and um uh you know hopefully people are paying attention to the report cards there um that that society's gotten back for how that goes um and it definitely doesn't work out no it really doesn't it's it's like

SPEAKER_56: this there's a lot of reasons for why you should not want that um it's so weird that people

SPEAKER_17: are like hey tell me more about socialism and communism yeah yeah just type in russia breadlines 80s like when we were growing up in the 80s they were like on the news they showed you people in line to get one of one type of bread like anybody want that like one type of bread at a store and there's

SPEAKER_30: not much left i'm not even making this like this is not as me making a bad statement about the next

SPEAKER_22: generation even like i'm just sort of offering an example of like here's like a real confusion that existed that uh you know existed although i mean i do know there's flirting with uh that direction uh of of of a political spectrum again i i think um by the way i think the bread lines um it's actually funny people are like actually having pretty fond memories of these bread lines i i know enough people from east germany that uh who actually like that was the simplicity of it so so which is of course post-factum rationalization after you you have no skin in the game anymore however i think the real tragedy is always a waste of human potential right let's like like again zero authority to even choose how you're going to contribute to the greater good right like it's that that's that seems like a like we should stop aspiring to that right when someone like i don't know how you steal men but

SPEAKER_94: that somehow improves society right so just think about how everybody just didn't have the tyranny of choice and everybody just contributed to one type of bread we all just had wheat bread and it was

Chamath Palihapitiya: incredible yeah it's it's some weird yeah like post it's some weird throwback to

SPEAKER_11: simplicity maybe or something that was elegantly simple and it's like no that was not elegantly simple that was a lack of abundance and suffering and starving and boredom like and a lack of freedom

SPEAKER_21: is what it was so so what is your assertion there like that um uh the the the sort of anti-work reddit

SPEAKER_30: uh sort of if if you make a category out of this this is sort of a current um thing that that that's

SPEAKER_21: the problem it's it's it's it's interesting i mean we see some of this in in in companies um like

SPEAKER_22: sometimes there's a sometimes we see things directly reflected that was like trending like a couple like a while ago in anti-work as an idea just like that comes up in a q a it's it's i mean that's that's

SPEAKER_254: quiet quitting like i'm gonna phone in i'm gonna do the least amount of work like your manager should

SPEAKER_17: be able to figure that out and there's always been people who phoned it in the one i think is the most fascinating is the people who have three jobs and they're developers and they're so good at it they're like here's how to manage your three concurrent phone calls and laptops and the desktop monitoring like there was a story in the wall street journal today about this like desktop monitoring software that has always existed in customer support by the way or if you're a trader or if you work at a sales desk or you work in finance they've always had your desktop locked down

SPEAKER_06: they know your keystrokes they have to because there's money on the line and transactions and all this kind of stuff but that kind of stuff is you know people are now having to think like if there's abuse in the system i think bad managers are like well there's abuse in the system therefore everybody has to suffer and it's like i don't buy that but i don't run it i don't run

SPEAKER_08: thousands of boys i run dozens but how do you think about the abuse in the system

SPEAKER_149: as portrayed in the media and subreddit because i don't even buy that this is like a widespread

SPEAKER_21: problem i think it's like a five percent problem if that it's a it's a small but uh it's a small thing that people make it out to be but it's it's also like absolutely fascinating in terms of it it's a problem that couldn't exist in any other decade like in in office it's just like you can't you can't do free jobs if you have to show up to office so like um um so so um i i i have not encountered the like person who is so good but they can actually truly do free jobs well i i i'm i'm i'm i i think there's lots of people who potentially would have a capacity to do this but i don't think they could pull off a context switches so like i i just don't i don't fear that um

SPEAKER_17: that's the kind of thing if it did i did it's in my mind if you have somebody on your dev team yeah or your sales team or a writer whatever it is and they're so gifted they can pull off three jobs concurrently without anybody knowing about it that's a failure of the three managers at the three companies they didn't identify their excellence and make them the cto or vp of engineering yeah you didn't challenge that person that's like having steph curry on your team and you never thought like to tell him like you know what you should shoot some threes you should shoot from the

SPEAKER_35: logo like let it rip kid like that's the failure of management to recognize excellence i i i i was i

SPEAKER_21: mean you're you're thinking exactly right like i i have um i think people have a tendency to want to to solve um problems at the wrong layer like and spend a on a book on investing into it like somehow making it work i think almost universally these problems uh if if if there's a problem that people encounter are actually problems with performance management clearly there's no clear set of expectations of what you want from someone and if if your performance management uh is isn't well good enough to say that hey this person is um utterly underutilized and therefore should have like could do so much more for a mission or is like totally phoning it in because they're actually like in like three zoom calls at the same time and have a camera splitter that goes into all directions um and and and like then then it's um i i don't know like this should just show up now it's it's certainly harder like uh to do in in in in a digital world but like again like also at hiring you you you like this is everyone has to like this exercise for every company individually but like part of your hiring process is like i mean depends on what you need but like we we want hard-working smart ethical people because if you only get two of those things a third one will kill you every single time so um so so you you like you're you're in all these instances you're missing ethics um because you you're kind of defrauding or ah it's a fraud is made to pick a word but like

SPEAKER_262: no i mean like people know when they're doing unethical stuff yeah it's unethical to adapt

SPEAKER_21: at the very least your colleagues around you right like the rest of your team um even if you don't

SPEAKER_23: believe that companies like a worthy of consideration for ethics as well uh um but like your colleagues

SPEAKER_216: certainly shouldn't you shouldn't do us too yeah no it's completely unfair listen you got to go

SPEAKER_11: uh i i think you i do i got you for over an hour it's so great to talk to you and it's so great to see you do well by the way you know i do private company investing that's my thing i invest in 50 100 companies a year but i was watching the stock market this summer and i sold like a bunch of these like etfs i had a bunch of stuff and i was like i'm going to pick the 10 companies that i think make the most beautiful product and have the great leadership and like literally bought shopify shares this summer so this entire thing i now have to do a disclaimer i'm a shareholder uh and uh i was just talking to um tim ferris actually in the like last year yeah talking about like how amazing like

SPEAKER_06: you are as an executive and thinking from first principles and building this stuff and like you know you have to make bets on people uh and their vision and it's just such an easy bet for me at least

SPEAKER_11: to bet on you for the next decade i'm buying shares in companies that i think 10 years from now i feel comfortable that like the leadership will have done a great job just listening to their

SPEAKER_06: customers and building products and making them like 10 better every six months whatever it is five or ten percent like compounding you know innovation you know innovation is just so powerful and you just watching you build this company has been so great and i'm just super stoked to be a shareholder now so uh yeah back to work for you i can't get a second hour anymore before you know yeah yeah yeah yeah

SPEAKER_21: this is all you allow me out of my cave um but that was a super nice thing for you to say so it's like i i'm like that's that's extremely kind so thank you very much yeah all right listen brother uh

David Friedberg: it's it's great to watch you do that uh if you want to go work at a great company

SPEAKER_17: uh i don't know if you guys have a bunch of open racks now or probably some strategic ones uh you know this is i think going to be one of the great companies of uh our generation shopify.com go look at the job postings and if you want to build a store and be an entrepreneur like it really is an

SPEAKER_11: incredible career path to to sell stuff online you got how many merchants now how many just as we close here how many people are two over two million that's unbelievable yeah i the thing i'm seeing is all of

SPEAKER_17: these now um uh i'm following all the influencers like tick tock youtube etc and they all kind of like top out in their ability to make ad revenue and they're like you know what i should do i should do what kim kardashian does and i'm just watching the influencer set so i i literally found an influencer i wouldn't say which one in canada and i was like you should be an entrepreneur and we started talking i was like i'll give you 25 000 to just incorporate and see if you can build a business out of this because you you got past a million followers but there's like 10 different ways and the first thing i said was like what about creating like shopify store and like the people in your orbit you could

SPEAKER_06: just sell like this kind of branded product and then mash the content to the product and he was like yeah that's incredible and like just great that you exist to to empower people to be entrepreneurs it reminds me of ebay back in the day you know uh they're just empowering people to to have agency in

SPEAKER_11: their life all right brother thank you so much cheers brother see you soon always always fun to be on

SPEAKER_278: always thank you thanks for having me okay what an amazing interview with toby so candid

SPEAKER_06: great guest and we really thank him for coming on and giving us so much of his time next up producer

SPEAKER_285: rachel is back with okay boomer enjoy okay boomer i understood the assignment hi everybody thank you for listening to this segment of okay boomer today i'm talking to a reoccurring guest jules terpak if you don't know jules is a digital culture commentator and today we're going to be talking about our lives moving more and more online so hello jewels hey rachel how are you i'm good so before we start the show um where can people find you on social media i have a lot of people asking yeah at jules terpak i'm mostly on twitter and tick tock i'd say awesome and i know you do most of your videos remote um but i kind of like being in person so do you mind if we just switch this over to your office i guess awesome all right we're gonna do the rest of this actually in person with jewels and i'm gonna go hop on a train over to grand central and see her there see you soon bye all right thank you jewels so much for

SPEAKER_294: having me today in your office this is one of the only recordings i've done irl i don't do that many so

SPEAKER_295: this is pretty cool for me i'm uncomfortable yeah well you know what somebody's got to do things to make you uncomfortable and honestly i would be way more uncomfortable if i was in the metaverse i don't know about you um but today i want to talk about um is the metaverse where we're going because we already have apps like be real that everybody knows i'm a huge fan of um we're posting those be reals basically at the same time as your friends you get one notification a day it's instantaneous if you don't know what be real is google it you're living under a rock we always talk about it on the show um but it got me thinking if we're if we already have apps like be real where we're watching our friends doing what they're doing at that very moment the exact same time we are what's the next step like

SPEAKER_303: how more instant can we possibly get yeah like you just said everything's becoming more instantaneous

SPEAKER_306: so the news cycle is getting so much shorter when it comes to like on twitter and tick tock like if you aren't talking about something within the first 12 to 24 hours like the wave has already passed and we're seeing that with be real too in terms of almost like replicating the in real life experience so like everyone kind of feels this col this collective feeling of being somewhere all at once yeah because what we're seeing on be real and i mean that's not new like twitter i think has always had that more instantaneous feel to it when a current event happens like you run to twitter twitter because you can search the name of the current event and funneling in it's everything in real time that was most recently tweeted so that's always been there and in terms of like clubhouse and everything we're just getting yeah inching more towards collective experiences online to again

SPEAKER_307: replicate this in real life thing we're seeing a lot of full circle situations with netflix starting to do weekly drops like yeah cable always was in the past because people they're finding that people

SPEAKER_306: love that more in the way that let's like the streaming service to social media transition and like everyone talking about something all at once and feeling yeah embraced together almost we were kind

SPEAKER_310: of talking about that too before this recording started how like interesting it would have been

SPEAKER_295: if there was like a be real like all centered around euphoria so yeah you can't like watch euphoria with your friends you're in a different city but what happens if the like hbo people knew exactly like when

SPEAKER_311: the shocking times were going to happen in euphoria and every time that happened you'd get a notification you would have to take a photo of your reaction um like seeing those like immersive experiences happening

SPEAKER_295: that instantaneous can't be that far away from what we're doing right now do you think that there

SPEAKER_304: is a chance that netflix or hulu or hbo is going to come out with like their own social media platform

SPEAKER_306: anytime in the near future i don't know about that because i think we're all very overwhelmed with how many social media platforms we have i said this in an article with like tech crunch of like we can only compartmentalize like first of all our identity and also like spread our minds with so many apps like yeah social media apps right now there's more than five that are strongly positioned like how many can you click through during the day you know i have my typical rounds of twitter tick tock instagram and for me i can't really go over that like yeah i don't get on facebook or snapchat anymore because i'm like it's just too much for my mind so we're going to see in this it's kind of this i don't want to

SPEAKER_307: necessarily say monopoly or like these super app situations where like there are certain platforms that are all encompassing and take the power over every single aspect of this industry is what we're kind of seeing we're seeing tick tock just is now about to release tick tock now which is separate from the tick tock app it's going to be a copy of be real so yeah we're just seeing that and like you we had talked about earlier today like instagram's trying to inch that way as well so yeah that is

SPEAKER_295: super interesting too it's funny how um we saw instagram kind of try to copy be real um in a report that came out and basically there was like yeah like they're creating it internally it'll probably come out as like something that that comes out in your story everyone's that i was talking to was like why would we want be real for our instagram story like we already have close friends be real is for at least for me i don't know about you be real is even smaller than my close friends and then um there's another platform copying it snapchat i believe and both of them like kind of

SPEAKER_323: tried to like sort of copy it and tick tock just came in basically the same exact yeah no remorse

SPEAKER_295: basically the same thing it's like oh dang okay so it is interesting seeing that like this like almost like timed experience that will become a new normal in social platforms moving forward and be real as the app as we know it right now could cease to exist because we do want to consolidate the apps that we use um just to become more user like more user friendly the one thing that um i do balance between though with apps is actually where i get my news um i love like the axios app a ton like that's one of the apps i freaking love i use this one um platform it's called feedly mostly on my laptop where i like sort through a bunch of like different news articles that come from newsletters um i don't use the wall street journal app i think like axios i guess and reddit would be where i get my news the most but i'm always down to try new news app so that's the only category of app that i want that i'd like be interested in seeing like a new one pop up um and recently you showed me a new one you said it

SPEAKER_332: was called vol volve or volve i'm not sure yeah lv yeah and it's basically their tagline was tick tock

SPEAKER_295: for news right and all the news that we see is just like it fits within one screen i think it's

SPEAKER_307: like half your screen so it's really really short as a visual so it's like aesthetically pleasing but it also has like yeah yeah three to five sentences about something they're from vetted sources whether it's like legacy media or just like more like established independent media on the come up that curate from but um i've been utilizing it here and there over the past few weeks since i was introduced to it and that it does have that tick tock feel like you go on you see like the quick bits of things throughout the day you can pick your specific things that you're interested in i did like of course like tech and like social media all this different stuff um it's just a nice like quick bit of information that doesn't have like all the personal mixed in as like on twitter i get a lot of my news but like of course within that those scrolls there's a lot of like just people like shitposting or whatever yeah so it doesn't have that yeah do you think like there's going to be

SPEAKER_295: any other industries to come out and like tick tockify themselves like how other platforms have been like be reeling themselves how we've seen obviously news try to now tick tockify themselves with uh

SPEAKER_311: this volve app but is there like anywhere else that you see could probably like pick up on this

SPEAKER_306: i just feel like i can't think of a specific other one right now but it's just the way things are moving in terms of first of all people's lack of focus but it's not even just like lack of focus it's all a product of the information overload that we're all experiencing so people can only like if they're giving more than 30 minutes of their day to something that's like that's a huge chunk of time and people realize that so there's all this consolidation in terms of length of media that's happening so that

SPEAKER_307: people feel like they they even give it interest in the first place because they see longer than 10 minutes

SPEAKER_306: on the video if they see anything they're like i i don't have the time for this there's a ton of stuff on the internet that i could be scrolling through that's shorter and might be more concise

SPEAKER_307: to give me my information so it's kind of like all industries have to adapt to that type of messaging

SPEAKER_295: i agree um i want like a podcast version actually i don't know if i want this because i think i am definitely like a uh a outcome of somebody that grew up even though like when i was little i didn't

SPEAKER_311: have like a device or anything like that i don't think i really got into tech um really heavily probably until middle school um that's probably like we're the same age that's probably when like

SPEAKER_295: we first were allowed to get on that kind of stuff now you see kids a lot younger but i we basically grew up with technology and like our our like formative years i guess um so i'm definitely a product of like the attention economy at the biggest sense possible and i was in trader joe's the other day you have to go downstairs and trader joe's um to the one i go to no internet right so that's like my my audiobooks time and i was like you know what would be really cool if there's a

SPEAKER_323: hilarious talk for hear me on tick tock for podcasts so they're like 30 30 seconds snippets

SPEAKER_295: and it just bundles through like a bunch of 30 seconds snippets that i could like download right so it'd be like an hour of 30 seconds snippets or something and if i didn't like a snippet yeah yeah yeah if i didn't like the snippet just like tap the side of my airpods or whatever um i use wired headphones but if i used airpods this would be cool like use case like tap the side of my airpods have it go to the next like 30 seconds snippet and i'm like whoa this is crazy like my attention span is going so small i uh like i saw a tweet the other day and i retweeted it because it was like we need shorter podcasts and i was like yeah like yeah love the 30 minute and under podcasts like that's how long my grocery shopping is that's how long like if i'm going on a run it's probably around 30 minutes like that that for me is like such a sweet spot um and then for youtube videos it is probably around 10 minutes for me i think like i get a lot of good content from a 10 minute video anything longer i'd go to hulu or netflix like by that point you know it's it's i would rather watch like a documentary or something uh obviously there's like exceptions like commentary videos where again i could like kind of get up and walk around my house like clean or something but for videos that

SPEAKER_311: to sit down and watch my attention span is totally 10 minutes on youtube that's a good point in the way

SPEAKER_318: because um i have friends yeah like in the film industry and everything and just like even the

SPEAKER_306: quick jump cuts in movies are just becoming shorter again to help yeah attention also it's like i saw like an author talk about on twitter recently you know you're you're not competing with other books you're competing with every type of media which has always been true but just like as this media

SPEAKER_307: landscape gets bigger and it's democratized and involves everyone like every user online if you're a public user and you post your creator or whatever it's kind of like an overused word but like

SPEAKER_359: you're competing with all this media you're not just competing with books like it's affecting

SPEAKER_294: everything how do you think like that's going to impact the creator economy moving forward or

SPEAKER_295: like creators as a whole like you said in the movie industry we've seen it impact things like jump cuts do you think a shorter retention span is going to affect the creators well i think it just goes back

SPEAKER_306: to what we're saying people needing to adapt in order to cater to the masses now you have to cater to people who just want short form content of course there's still going to be people who want to

SPEAKER_307: utilize long form content for a wide variety of reasons but yeah creators need to get accustomed to be more concise in their messaging and hopefully in doing that they don't uh take away value though because they're of course in longer form there's a lot more nuance and therefore when there's more nuance there's more value so people have to become great storytellers yeah in order for it to

SPEAKER_295: resonate in a way that's like healthy for humanity yeah no you've seen this impact too on things including writing um i use like the hemingway app which is like a platform that you can use on your computer and it basically teaches you how to write like hemingway who is really famous for writing short sweet concise things um and it just kind of it's like grammarly for making your stuff really short and sweet like i totally recommend it if people are trying to write like a newsletter maybe um and i'm like well this is kind of crazy like trying to write things uh super clear and concise versus like how you were taught um in school to try to do like creative writing classes meet the word count yeah exactly hit a word count and i'm like whoa like how how times have changed like i'm like they really need to stop teaching kids uh to hit this word count and do a lot of these creative writings so true because oh i had to take writing classes in college even though i was like a stem major and i was like you know what would have been great as a writing class for a stem major is to learn how to write these like short concise pieces because now like creative writing has not helped me that has not helped me at all like nobody cares what color this guy is they care what's happening with netflix you know what i mean yeah and the creator economy has just showed

SPEAKER_306: the type of messaging that people are compelled by um you know people who took over the writing spaces and just the media spaces for before or you know more highly educated had gone to certain schools and like the type of language a lot of people use in different books and everything it's just like not appealing to the masses and it's not easily understandable for the average person there's also an element there like how concise can you make it in a way that is like it's not dumbing it down it's not simplifying information it's just like again humanizing

SPEAKER_307: this information for as many people as possible to be compelled by it so that these algorithms can pick

SPEAKER_376: it up and show it to your ideal audience as well it's it's all here it's funny how like we're seeing

SPEAKER_295: this too like across all different types of industries like i mentioned this already that i love axios and now that we're talking about it one of the reasons why i really like them um is everything's like a bullet format so for example like one of their newsletters that i love is called pro rata it shows me all the recent um venture capital raises that happened that they know of like that day and all of them are done just in bullet point and it's like this company raised to this much led by this person um and it tells me everything i need to know in like two or three sentences and that's for me i absolutely love that and um i wonder if that's going to kind of move over into things that we see over like books because i read a ton audiobooks i do listen to it two times speed so i guess or if i'm not listening to two times speed it's definitely still sped up i almost never listened to an audiobook not sped up um but for which i guess that kind of already makes it a little bit more consolidated so my brain is like keeping up with it but for a book book like one that i'm physically holding um i don't read them on an ipad i tend to just read them with paper and everything like that imitate it it takes a long freaking time it takes a while and i um i'm reading a book right now i think it's called books oh it is it's like an ad it's called the confidence game

SPEAKER_323: but it's actually taken me like so and a welsh's rapper is my bookmark but it's taken me a long struggling time to get through the first and i don't mind it at all it's a really good book i'm like highly recommend it but it's taken me like probably like a week to kind of get through the first chunk of it right which is a long time compared to like how i'm blasting through audiobooks

SPEAKER_335: and like that's interesting it's almost like it's weird because like books have chapters yeah like

SPEAKER_392: youtube on podcast has like every right with chapter marks yeah yeah yeah it's like books have chapters but it's like when it's fiction books it's like you can't just like read certain chapter i mean you can't skip around yeah yeah and when it's non-fiction you can kind of yeah like i don't know the

SPEAKER_307: storyline isn't always like crazy important but that's interesting i bet you and this is just like

SPEAKER_323: like looking into the future i bet you there's going to be if this doesn't already exist like basically like a spark notes but still in written format for people like me who still like to read but

SPEAKER_311: tweets and yeah like basically a book be like yeah this is pride and prejudice but like only like the like a 10 page version of pride and prejudice like this is what happens yeah like a tweet

SPEAKER_323: threadified like version of classical books and like i totally wouldn't be surprised if that happened and maybe not for a book like where you're reading it for the craft of writing because there is something to be said about reading a book for the craft of writing which i totally understand and respect i know like writers yeah like i totally understand the craft of writing and um but i'm probably about

SPEAKER_295: for more informational books which just tends to be what i read i'm not i'm not a huge um unless it's like a sci-fi book like i don't know if i really read a sci-fi book that's been tweetified but the informational books i'm talking about here like to straighten it out like that can't be that far away

SPEAKER_411: like there's no way well that's why like every like video is the future is such large messaging because

SPEAKER_376: yeah at the end of the day it like keeps you stimulated visually and also like obviously

SPEAKER_306: psychologically when you're learning everything and there's this weird thing of like people having to learn how to navigate video even if they are writers or whatever like that is like the main way of communicating like across platforms right now everyone's trying to get their peak into video and um a company i work with often is uh descript oh i love descript and they have stats on like by 20 30 how many hours a day we're going to be like watching or like immersed in video it's literally

SPEAKER_295: like it's 24 hours but tick tock though is like the app that does it the best because you need to scroll through it um in order you don't need to i guess you probably can just oh no they they loop if you keep it on you need to scroll on it so you need to look at the app you need to be holding it you need to be it really does engage you in all senses um and it's funny like everybody wants like the most condensed version that gives you the full picture uh the quickest way possible and we've been seeing this a lot efficiency efficiency yeah with journalism where um the increase in this like write

SPEAKER_311: first edit later culture where even news cycles people are posting on the internet and even though it might not be like the full story or accurate information they just want to be the first to have

SPEAKER_295: it posted and then once more information comes out they can edit it later and there's a bunch of different news sources um that uh talk about this i know ryan holiday um has written a book that um has gone over this like incredible amounts so he's it's like just go go no time for reflection or solitude

SPEAKER_306: like and then it's like like you're saying these news sources that put stuff out it's like they're just putting it out to be a part of the attention economy and have it have something out there for clicks

SPEAKER_307: and but like the information lacks value and nuance because yeah you faced this though right with

SPEAKER_295: like posting and people like commented before like oh you're late on stuff when it's like 48 hours

SPEAKER_306: later yeah because i wasn't posting about something within the first 12 hours because like you can't do rigorous analysis of a topic or of a current event within that short of a time frame like if you're posting within the first 12 to 24 hours about something it is a high emotion yeah

SPEAKER_307: reaction it's you can well there's a objective reporting like okay what happened yes that's fine like objective reporting but like if you're you can't do subjective reporting that is like diligent within that short of a time frame yeah and promote the vast majority of topics yeah i completely agree

SPEAKER_295: with you and do you think um that's going to impact how young people how our generation in particular um watches the news because i know that's something that we're both pretty interested in like the latest tech news um obviously a huge portion of our podcast is about that how do you think we're

SPEAKER_304: our generation in 10 20 years is going to be consuming news well i think our generation right

SPEAKER_306: now is like i have a lot of positives to say about our generation but like i don't know the words reactionary reactive like just like so there's too much high emotion online right now and it's called causing a lot of polarization and like i'm just polarization just like easily easy bullying and everything because people don't care about the context they care about how this information is memefied to them on the internet and like how entertaining it is everyone's like looking at things through an entertainment lens right now which is disgusting but it's becoming such an extreme that i think like we're slowly going to see like a peak soon and then like a 180 of people being like

SPEAKER_307: this is not sustainable and this is like terrible for my mental health mental health is terrible for humanity's health um but right now like we're seeing that like extreme on entertainment and

SPEAKER_311: memifying everything it's just yeah i even think people that are like a little older than us and having kids you're starting to see this like style of parenting where they're like taking their kids

SPEAKER_295: out to maybe this also was in part during the pandemic and people having the ability to leave um super condensed areas and live in more remote areas but i've seen my friends a little bit older than me my age having kids and them being like yeah we do not want our kids exposed to like technology like we were and i'm like wow this is so interesting because we're just now like seeing the like we're the generation that is having the effects of social media yeah like so that's super super scary and hopefully you know in the next 10 20 years like we're talking about we'll still be putting information out online but i don't know if it will necessarily be in the forms of like for you short form content over on tick tock for me longer form content over in podcasting i bet you it's going to be something like brand new that we haven't seen before and i'm kind of excited to see what that's going to be

SPEAKER_306: it's definitely like what is the next level of this all is interesting which yeah it feels like it's an immersive side of things and immersive technology like ai is democratizing a lot but then like this more immersive technology is it's expensive to get involved in so like i think we've seen such a discussion about independent creators over the past three years like oh this growth of creators and independence blah blah but i can see it easily like when things are expensive like the power goes back to the big players in the game and like institutions because they have the money to back people to thrive in these spaces so like that's another interesting part of media right now because it's really democratized right now because like tick tock you just film on your phone and you can post it and

SPEAKER_436: like it can be super casual but like this immersive stuff that's much more intense production i also see

SPEAKER_295: like um creators like you said right now it's so easy like the barrier to entry is pretty low but in a few years from now i can totally see these becoming like agencies owning certain like there's also um axel weber is a tick tocker that was like kind of accused of this i believe of coming from like an agency as a tick tocker and like almost being planted but basically i think that the disney kids like how our generation had miley cyrus uh selena gomez like those uh people like as disney employees yeah kind of have like tick tock employees and have creators like come to the app um and owned under an agency obviously they'd get paid a lot less but at least it would be consistent work maybe they could have benefits yeah and i just sustainability yeah yeah and i'm like huh like i think that's the next level of child acting it's not mommy bloggers it's not like uh charlie d'amelio like dancing on screen yeah it's

SPEAKER_445: like agency-backed children on tick tock so tick tock clubhouse yeah mickey mouse clubhouse oh my god not to be confused with like the audio app that was like yeah the mickey exactly what i'm talking

SPEAKER_295: about beanie spears justin timberlake all them were part of the mickey mouse clubhouse like there will be i can see it now a tick tock or whatever the social media platform is clubhouse and that's

SPEAKER_392: scary like that's freaking that that makes me a little nervous there's a lot of conversations going on about sharenting right now though i don't really like know what the the two words together

SPEAKER_307: but it's like sharing and parenting yeah like oversharing yeah um i think we're gonna see laws soon about kids on social media which is like i don't even think that's like an obvious yeah i'm just curious to what extent they'll be because it goes into the conversations we talked we're talking

SPEAKER_306: about off camera like like we you don't have to have consent to record people in public but now there's this conversation of what do you have consent to broadcast and then the way of like news and like people on tv have to have uh waiver forms signed by people that they're featuring in media like is that going to move on to social media because right now these viral content platforms like there are strangers again getting meme-ified and blasted across the internet that were not asked to yeah do so as well and it goes back into the sharenting thing like these kids don't they they like to dance whatever but they don't have a say in what's supposed about them online they don't understand what the digital footprint is and i don't think any of us understand the weight yet until something like we talked about in our last podcast something bad happens and it's a wake-up call for

SPEAKER_307: everyone of like the value of our data and the value of like our digital footprint yeah um it's

SPEAKER_457: gonna be interesting it's really scary to think about but um hopefully yeah i was like we did to

SPEAKER_323: end on a really negative scary note jules thank you so much for talking to me today um i think this is a really good conversation talking about where we could be going in the future and like i say quite frequently although i love having online friendships irl for me is definitely the way to go i know this

SPEAKER_444: isn't your thing but hopefully we can do this again soon i enjoyed it thanks rachel and thanks everyone

SPEAKER_462: for tuning in