Tobi Lütke

the perfect storm right now of where individuals and small teams have more ability to do greater and greater things than at any other time.

I don't know, this is really absurd, but if you look at

sort of global GDP through all time.

There's charts for this.

Like, I think Our World in Data is a great website which has these kind of things.

You can look at from, like, like, Christ's time.

We had, like, for 2,000 years, GDP on planet Earth is exactly a...

map for how many people were on planet Earth.

The only way to create productivity, if you will, which is what GDP measures, and of course these are approximated numbers because no one actually reported GDP in the 1800s, but the only time productivity on planet Earth went up is when a person was born or when a piece of burden was added.

And so then we have industrial revolution.

We figured out how to use steam to make kinetic energy and then electricity.

And suddenly these things decoupled.

Suddenly we could use kinetic energy to make things.

We could make factories and steel and railroads and all these kind of things.

And wealth in the world, due to productivity, just massively increased.

This is where

everything we like about the world, about the economies we have, about the standard of living, about how many people we can keep alive.

All this stuff happens because of this one moment.

And now we have another thing that we put on top because not just kinetic energy, we can also project intelligence into worthwhile tasks in a loop forever until they're fixed or until we know they're not fixable.

So because of that, we now have a small group of people who not only have the skills that they show up with.