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Good morning. Toronto comedian Ryan Zeitz is blowing up online for detailing his unique work-from-home set-up. What makes it so special? Easy access to the Leviathan rollercoaster, for one.  

Yes, Zeitz works nearly every day at Canada’s Wonderland, using his season pass to access the park’s VIP lounge and the dining plan to get two meals per visit. “I usually work for about six, seven hours,” he told Now Toronto, “and then hop on rollercoasters for the last hour or two that the park is open.” Hard to imagine any office devising an RTO perk that beats that.  

Today’s reading time is 6 minutes.

Markets: Canada’s main stock index dropped for the third straight day yesterday and fell to a 12-day low as Iran war tensions, tariff uncertainty, and a screwy bond market all spooked investors.

U.S. tariffs on Canadian imports aren’t increasing — today, at least.

What happened: Donald Trump paused a threatened tariff hike on Canadian imports and teased a new trade deal less than two hours before the new 50% duties on billions of dollars of Canadian imports were scheduled to take effect.

Why it matters: The new tariffs would have meaningfully increased the average levy facing Canadian imports and punished a broader sector of Canada’s economy, including exporters that had until now been mostly shielded from the trade fight by CUSMA. In that sense, this is positive news.

Yes, but: The devil will be in the details, and two major questions are still unanswered. First, will this pause just create another tense deadline for Canadian negotiators in three days’ time? And second, what concessions will Canada have to give up to reach a larger agreement with this White House?

Parti Québécois won’t hold an independence referendum while Trump's in power. PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said his party will hold a referendum on Quebec’s independence should they be elected this fall, but they will not do so until the U.S. president is out of office. Plamondon, who is currently leading in the polls, said that the future of Quebec cannot be “hijacked by the upheavals of American politics, nor by the outbursts of an unpredictable president, nor by fear campaigns.” (Associated Press)

OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT for teenagers. The AI company says the new version of its flagship chatbot will have stronger parental controls and safety guardrails to limit topics like self-harm and violence. Similar to Meta, OpenAI has faced several lawsuits alleging its products are harmful to children and that adequate safeguards are not in place, particularly when it comes to mental health. (Reuters)

Disney is suing the FCC. Disney alleges the U.S. Federal Communications Commission retaliated against Disney-owned ABC for its news coverage — including remarks made by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel — by ordering an accelerated review of its broadcast licences. The suit points to multiple instances of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr that suggest the White House would openly pressure the network into changing its editorial programming. (Axios)

📡 What else is on our radar: 

With the recent acquisition of PC Financial®, EQ Bank is creating more opportunities for Canadians to get value from routine purchases. To celebrate its new role as the exclusive financial services partner of the PC Optimum™ program, EQ Bank is bringing rewarding experiences throughout August to earn and win PC Optimum™ points.

Following the kick-off in Toronto last week, EQ Bank is hitting the West Coast with its Vancouver Pop-Up Pavilion in the Grandview Real Canadian Superstore (3185 Grandview Highway), August 20-23, from 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Stop by to:

Can’t make it to the pop-up? The Grand Scan Contest, brought to you by EQ Bank, is still running. It’s the biggest-ever PC Optimum™ points giveaway and one lucky winner will take home 25 million points. 

EQ Bank is popping up one more time before summer ends. Calgary, here we come!

🤝 Meet Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. She’s the CEO of global software provider Xero, a minority owner of the WNBA’s Toronto Tempo, and a Silicon Valley veteran. We sat down with Sukhinder to talk about SaaSpocalypse fears and what she learned from a colleague’s free fall from the edge of space. 

You've talked a lot about the importance of maximizing the fear of missing out as an executive. What was the genesis of that?

I’ve learned that you have to minimize your fear of failure and maximize your FOMO. If your fear of failure, what I call FOF, is even bigger than your FOMO, you won't act. So where most people say visualize the positive, I would say visualize the negative, pre-mortem the failure state, think about what you would do if that happened, and try to shrink it enough to act. 

When I was at Google, I worked with a guy named Alan Eustace, who was one of the original VPs of engineering. Alan ultimately took a sabbatical because he wanted to build a human flying machine. He morphed that into an ambition to create a suit that could take him to the edge of the stratosphere and parachute down. Not only did he make it to the edge of the stratosphere and skydive down, he set the world record for speed in doing so, and survived. And this is not a daredevil, this is a very deliberate engineer. I asked him, “Alan, how did you do it?” And he said, “well, we practiced every failure state. We pre-mortemed every scenario.” So by the time he went to the edge of the stratosphere and jumped out and free-fell for minutes, his heart rate stayed completely steady. 

What do you make of SaaSpocalypse fears? Do software companies still have a real moat in the AI era? 

We think we have a moat — more than a moat, we think of AI as a tailwind. What do I think is happening in the market at large? I think the market hasn't discerned, in totality, the difference between software companies that will benefit from AI and those which AI will potentially threaten the existence of. It's just lumping them all together. We see ourselves in the former category. Our customers are small businesses who are short on time and often short on cash. Most of them do not have big technology departments. Who do they look to, to give them technology at a good price? People like Xero.

You recently became a minority owner in the Toronto Tempo. What's been the coolest part about owning a professional sports team?

My love of sports has been long, but obviously it was cemented by running StubHub, because it's an entirely sports and live events experience. I think the coolest part has been being a part of the ownership group. It's the most diverse ownership group I've seen in sports. You've got myself, you've got the Williams sisters, Lilly Singh — one of YouTube's biggest stars — you've got Masai Ujiri, the Lowrys who just joined, the owners of the Montreal Canadiens, the owners of the Ottawa Senators, and Larry Tanenbaum. When I sat in the ownership meeting, sitting around the table watching all of the diversity of experience, gender, ethnicity, just the representation in the room — that is my favourite part of the Tempo.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Read the full Q&A here.

In the most consequential legal challenge it’s faced, Meta will have to prove that its platforms aren’t a new generation’s cigarettes.

What happened: The social media giant began its defence yesterday in a case brought by 29 U.S. states accusing it of deliberately harming young users through the design of its platforms and violating youth privacy laws. 

Catch-up: The structure of the legal argument follows a near-identical playbook to the litigation against Big Tobacco back in the ‘90s. That strategy already proved successful in its first test: in a case earlier this year, a California jury found Meta and Google directly liable for a 20-year-old’s mental health issues and ordered the companies to pay damages.

Why it matters: If Meta loses this case, it could be forced to fundamentally redesign its platforms, including getting rid of features like infinite scroll and content recommendation algorithms. That would set a precedent that could eventually force others — like YouTube, TikTok, and Snap — to do the same.—LA

📱 US$2.9 billion. How much consumers have spent on TikTok so far this year, which has been the top app in the world for in-app purchases for the last four years. The platform is now exploring a new feature that would allow users to send each other money through direct messages, similar to e-Transfer or Venmo.

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