#353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe

"If people around you don't think what you're doing is a bit strange, maybe it's not strange enough." — Patrick Collison Patrick Collison (@patrickc https://twitter.com/patrickc/) is chief executive officer and co-founder of Stripe https://stripe.com/, a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. After experiencing firsthand how difficult it was to set up an online business, Patrick and his brother John https://twitter.com/collision started Stripe in 2010. Their goal was to make accepting payments on the internet simpler and more inclusive. Today, Stripe powers millions of online businesses around the world. Prior to Stripe, Patrick co-founded Auctomatic, which was acquired by Live Current Media for $5 million in March 2008. In 2016, he was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship by President Obama. Originally from Limerick, Ireland, Patrick now lives in San Francisco where Stripe is headquartered. Also, as you can tell from seeing just a selected segment of his reading list shared in the show notes on tim.blog/podcast, he's one of the most well-read people I know. Please enjoy! Click here for the show notes for this episode. https://tim.blog/2018/12/20/patrick-collison/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description This podcast is brought to you by 99designs http://99designs.com/tim, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together create designs they love. Its creative process has become the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals, and I have used it for years to help with display advertising and illustrations and to rapid prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca. Whether your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99designs http://99designs.com/tim. 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• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would seem an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:51Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:33Tim Ferriss?

  I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body, did not get paid for that, and I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases if I can't get what I need through whole-food meals throughout the rest of the day. If you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they are offering a free 20-count travel pack for first-time users. I always travel with at least three or four of these. This represents a $100 value. So if you buy Athletic Greens, you get an extra $100 in free product. So check it out, athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 3:16Tim Ferriss?

  Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim for your free travel pack with any purchase.

• 3:26Tim Ferriss?

  Why, hello, my beautiful little munchkins. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job each episode to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, life lessons, and so on of world-class performers across every possible discipline. And my guest today is Patrick Collison, C-O-L-L-I-S-O-N, @PatrickC on Twitter, PatrickCollison.com, Stripe.com. Patrick is CEO and co-founder of Stripe, a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. We'll explain what that means in this episode. After experiencing firsthand how difficult it was to set up an online business, Patrick and his brother John started Stripe in 2010. Their goal was to make accepting payments on the internet simpler and more inclusive.

• 4:11Tim Ferriss?

  And the story is fascinating because, in part, there were many incumbents. People thought Stripe had no chance. It was not intrinsically interesting to a lot of the people who might have assessed it. And yet, today, Stripe powers millions of online businesses around the world, and it's worth Roughly $20 billion, making the brothers two of the youngest multibillionaires on the planet. Prior to Stripe, Patrick co-founded Octomatic, which was acquired by Live Current Media for $5 million in March 2008. In 2016, he was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship by President Obama. Originally from Limerick, Ireland, Patrick now lives in San Francisco, where Stripe is headquartered.

• 4:51Tim Ferriss?

  And I thought I'd mention just a few of his favorite books, because he is one of the best-read humans I've ever encountered, and that's saying a lot. He's read, I would have to imagine, thousands of books. And I did some filtering and searching and found a number of them that he considers particularly great in his words. And I'm gonna just list a few, and then I will put these in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. The first is "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," and that's my dog whining in the background. The second is a novel, "Mind Body Problem," that's a hyphen "Mind Body Problem," "Poor Charlie's Almanac," which has come up a lot on this podcast, by Charlie Munger, and

• 5:36Tim Ferriss?

  "Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens," subtitle "Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up." There are many, many more. I'm gonna put those in the show notes for you guys and filter them for only the particularly great, and you can find those at tim.blog/podcast and just search Patrick, and it'll pop right up. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Patrick Collison. Patrick, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to connect, to finally have this long-form conversation, and I thought a good place to start might be by quoting from a text exchange, or rather, one of the

• 6:19Tim Ferriss?

  first texts that I got from our mutual friend, Chris Saka, who's also been on the podcast, for those who don't know him, extremely adept investor and all-around hilarious guy. He's a real character. He's a real character. He's managed to make one or two, or however many billions of dollars, which is amazing, because I got to see him from the early days, when you probably first met him, I guess, maybe a year or two later. In any case, Chris is a character, and he very rarely makes introductions. He very rarely proposes introductions.

• 6:54Tim Ferriss?

  So I pay attention when he does and he sent me as context of I've of course I was familiar with Stripe. I had heard your name before. We had, I think, even exchanged potentially a couple of DMs on Twitter. Right. But he said, and I'm going to edit here for length a little bit, but Patrick is quite literally one of the smartest people I've ever known. Like he puts Larry Page on his heel smart. I don't know anyone who has one read more books and two has a near photographic memory for what he has read. His thoughts are provocative and challenge the status quo. His success is no accident. And then then you can fact check this when we when we get into more of a conversation here, but plus his origin story is great. As I recall, colon, grew up in rural Ireland, took his first communion money and bought a computer, created

• 7:37Tim Ferriss?

  his own operating system while coding over a dial up line. Paul Graham, for those people who don't know the name, basically the Yoda of something called Y Combinator, come back to that. Paul Graham noticed him and invited him to the US. I met him when he was 15 and PG, that's Paul Graham, brought him by the Google offices. Pretty sure he dropped out of Harvard or MIT, et cetera, et cetera. He's also a pilot who when Obama made the trip to Cuba invited along a few top entrepreneurs like the Airbnb founders. Patrick said he would meet them there and rented a small plane to fly himself from Florida. Okay, pause. Now, Chris and I were also exchanging text messages earlier today because I wanted to ask his permission to to read that. And there are two more things I'll add as background

• 8:18Tim Ferriss?

  color and then we can we can get amongst it. So the first, he says, quick story. Octomatic, and we can get into that, but this is, this is one of your previous companies, was a front end on eBay that allowed sellers to upload a bunch of products at once and scale their operations. One night, someone from the Netherlands wrote them an email that Octomatic didn't support Dutch. Literally in the middle of the night, they wrote back something like 15 or 30 minutes later, saying, quote, it does now, end quote. And then this is a very Saka-esque expression, fucking legends, period. And then

• 8:49Tim Ferriss?

  He said also, when we sold their first company, I held a little closing celebration at that bar below my house, is then plays District. This is in San Francisco. Well, they were both underage, but Patrick's brother John got negged from the bar, literally could not get into his own celebration for selling a company, becoming a millionaire. I will never forget that moment. It crystallized, quote, "What's happening out here is different. There's no hierarchy predicated on seniority. Smart, young people who bust their asses don't have to, quote, 'work their way up,' end quote." So that is all by means of introduction.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think we should probably just end the podcast right now. I don't think there's any possible way that any human alive today or who's ever existed in human history could possibly live up to that.

• 9:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, no pressure, nothing to live up to now. But I think we can, we can start with very comfortable ground, and that is books. Let's talk about books. You have many books. I want to say 600 or more in the recommended reading section on your website. Maybe I'm getting it wrong, maybe it's been changed. And you've categorized them. You have some in above average. You have others as labeled particularly great. And those range, this is from quoting from a Wired article in the UK, but they range from imperialism to engineering, democracy, on and on and on. What makes a book particularly great?

• 10:17Tim Ferriss?

  And which of those do you end up recommending the most or gifting the most to other people?

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Hmm, I think, well, I find personally, actually, that it really matters a lot sort of when I read a book and sort of the frame of mind that I'm in at the time, sort of when I stumble across it. And often I'll kind of start a book, you know, at some point and maybe revisit it sort of months or in some cases even years later and find that it has kind of a completely sort of renewed resonance or significance or something. And so I think there's kind of, you know, Chris and Marc Andreessen and others talk about this idea. And of course, many people at this point talk about sort of product market fit and founder market fit. I think with books, there's really something around sort of reader book fit

• 11:09Speaker 03

  and the kind of particulars of that moment. And so, you know, just by way of example, I've been thinking a whole lot of late about the importance of cultural capital and how it is that people choose what to do and to aspire to and focus on and try to make happen in the world and the degree to which they're willing to take risks and the importance of visions and the importance of mentors and people to look up to and all that. Anyway, and specifically the idea that perhaps in the first half of the 20th century or maybe the first two thirds of the 20th century, there are lots of examples of that and perhaps, I'm not sure whether this is the case or not, but maybe perhaps there

• 11:53Speaker 03

  are fewer of those today. Anyway, thinking about this of late, and of course, I'm not the first to point this out or raise this as an issue, but I stumbled upon just a couple of days ago, a book published by, I'm probably going to get the name wrong, but there's a center at ASU, it's like the Center for Science and Possibility or something like that. I'm pretty sure I'm getting that name wrong, but it's along those lines. And they actually published a book of science fiction written by, well, I guess a whole host of authors with a foreword from Neil Stephenson about exactly this idea, the importance of

• 12:36Speaker 03

  optimistic visions and kind of science fiction as sort of flagging points on the horizon that might be interesting directions to try to paddle towards. So anyway, I think that for books, this kind of matching of your mindset and what's important to you at the particular moment with the content itself sort of really matters. I think corollary of that is that it's actually valuable to, or I at least find it useful, to buy a lot of books that seem interesting and high quality, but before I'm necessarily ready to read them at that moment. And maybe I'll read the beginning or a couple of chapters or something, but not really commit to finishing it. And

• 13:25Speaker 03

  But I'll leave it out around the house, like there's books on the bookshelves, there's books on the kitchen table, there's books, you know, beside the couch, there's books in my bedroom, there's usually books on my bed and so on. And, you know, it's kind of in your mental landscape and I often find, I guess, that kind of six months later or eighteen months later, something happens, something, you're reminded of something and you realize, oh, man, I really should get back to whatever book it is.

• 13:53Tim Ferriss?

  I was just gonna say, if it's helpful, I was going to ask about the Dream Machine.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Hmm, yes.

• 14:00Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe that illustrates how you vet books or

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:07Tim Ferriss?

  hold on to books that are particularly valuable, because at any given point in time, even if you have six to eight books around your house, there are hundreds of thousands of books published every year, right? So there's a, there's a selection challenge.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Yes. Okay. Well, so first off, I think you should mostly ignore the books that are published every year. And take advantage of the fact that, you know, quite a lot of books have been published, say, you know, up to ten years ago. But the books published up to ten years ago, people have had a lot of time to kind of filter through them and sort of try to select the, you know, the real gems there. And of course, there are a lot of false negatives, like there were a lot of great books that just never, for whatever reason, got the attention they kind of deserved, or maybe that, that sort of, they don't have the salience they ought to have for you. But, but I, I really think people should be kind of much more biased towards older books than they are. I think the Dream Machine is a good example of this, and I think there are kind of two things, I guess, that stand out in the Dream Machine.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  The first is Mitchell Waldrop, the author. He really spent the time, well, I guess I should describe what it is. It is a book about the history, well, it is nominally a biography of JCR Lichtleiter. And, you know, many people were responsible for the creation of the internet, but I think Lichtleiter has more claim than any other single person to being the individual kind of causally responsible for its creation. He funded a lot of the early researchers. He sort of tried to bring the community together and he really kind of instigated. Much of the movement that led to ARPANET and the Internet and so on. And it's this amazing book about, obviously, one of the most important inventions in the history of humanity.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  And Mitchell Waldrop spent the time to sort of, I mean, years, to really understand in depth, not just kind of the specific sequence of events that led to this happening, but the kind of milieu and sort of intellectual environment and thinking and landscape that it all came from. And so the book starts way before Leclerc was doing anything, because there were kind of all these different kind of fields and disciplines and sort of strains of thinking that Leclerc built on. I think it's, you know, pretty rare that an author either takes the time or has the time to kind of really go deep in that manner.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  And it's striking that if you look at sort of how The Dream Machine came to be, he was funded by a grant. As I recall, it was the Sloan Foundation, I could be wrong on that, but I believe it was the Sloan Foundation. You know, they thought this was, I mean, obviously, kind of a super important period in history, but sort of, you know, Waldrop was not on sort of toiling under the clock to get a book out by Christmas. He, you know, he was really trying to sort of, to capture an important series of events in the arc of technology. So that's really what stands out about that book.

• 17:09Tim Ferriss?

  How did you come across that book? Because was it in print or out of print at the time that you came across it?

• 17:17Speaker 03

  It was, it was out of print. There were a couple of copies on Amazon. And I, after I finished it, I was so excited about it that I went and bought a whole bunch of them to give away to people at Stripe, to give away to my friends. And, you know, fairly quickly we exhausted Amazon's pretty limited supply. I think I first heard about it from I think some combination of Brett Victor and Alan Kay. Alan Kay, many of your listeners will already know about. For anyone who doesn't, he was a researcher who worked at, who's kind of best known for

• 17:55Speaker 03

  working at Xerox PARC, which is this amazing industrial research lab that was kind of, played a sort of formative role in the creation of the GUI, the graphical computer interface, and Ethernet, the kind of, one of the main networking technologies, and object-oriented programming, which is kind of the main programming paradigm that's used today. And so they were just like really critical in kind of the history of, you know, what we consider modern technology, modern software. Anyway, Alan Kay worked there and was one of the kind of leading, you know, researchers there. And then Brett Victor is one of the most interesting kind of researchers, software, I don't know, creatives, working today.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  And I remember Alan saying that The Dream Machine is the, kind of, is semi-unique among kind of computer history and technology history books, and that really kind of gets it right. And obviously, you know, we're a pretty young field, and so there hasn't been a whole lot of kind of research and, you know, deep scholarly scrutiny, at least the extent that there might be for, I don't know, math or physics or something. But this book really stood out. And, you know, the technology industry is not an industry that sort of spends a lot of time looking to its past, in a way that I think is really both a strength and a weakness in that, you know, people are always trying ideas that have failed kind of tons of times

• 19:18Speaker 03

  before, and they're kind of oblivious to the fact they've failed tons of times before. And that really is kind of a good thing, because sometimes, you know, the fact that it has failed five times before does not mean that it's going to fail a sixth time, but it, you know, cannot, of course, also in some ways be a weakness, where we don't kind of build on ideas that precede us. Alan Kay's line about this is, computer science is a kind of pop culture, where it's sort of this kind of brownie in motion, rather than kind of really building layer by layer. And so, anyway, in that broader culture, I think The Dream Machine is kind of an outlier.

• 19:50Tim Ferriss?

  And you mentioned Alan, I should, I should, I will just mention a quote that perhaps people have heard, which is often misattributed, but it is, I think, correctly attributed to Alan, which is the best way to predict the future is to invent it.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:05Tim Ferriss?

  That may be a quote that, that people recognize, but perhaps not in association with the name.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Alan, I would say is, I mean, kind of quite widely recognized as, as a genius, but despite that, I think he is still kind of underrated. I think he, I think he will be even more highly regarded in 50 years or in 100 years than he is today.

• 20:30Tim Ferriss?

  You are, you're a young guy. What is your age currently?

• 20:35Speaker 03

  I'm 30.

• 20:36Tim Ferriss?

  30. Wow. Time for, time, time to order a walker on Amazon Prime. You are a student of history. You mentioned something in relation to assessing books that has popped up in my homework, or to research rather, for this conversation. And that is that perhaps one shouldn't overweight with a recency bias the books published in the last year. You should give books a chance to fail or persist in a sense. And feel free to correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but I've also read that you've,

• 21:16Tim Ferriss?

  you've talked about how it is risky for people to emulate the sort of companies de jour, those startups, companies around them that are contemporaries that are doing well. And that it's, it seems like you have made more of a study of the greats in the earlier days of the valley, or by extension, companies like Microsoft, where the outcomes are more known. Could you talk about that, that a bit?

• 21:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:45Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe perhaps some of the things that you've gleaned, or any lessons that have stuck with you? And I'd love to dig into perhaps some of the conclusions you came to, even if temporarily after studying these greats. And one example, which, which may or may not be a good example, but what came up in doing some reading for this is that You observed that Google, Facebook, Amazon were created with conventional org charts in some respects. So why, so you questioned the value, please correct me or elaborate

• 22:25Tim Ferriss?

  on this, the value of innovating in that particular capacity because there would, and now I'm laying on my interpretation of that, which is there are potential unknown risks in doing so and

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 22:38Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of questionable upside in throwing more unknown variables into something like that versus other places where you could focus. So could you, could you, could you maybe expand on that and then

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:52Tim Ferriss?

  Share any other conclusions or lessons that you, that you came to?

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Well, I think, I think the kind of general idea here behind this is, I think people often conflate the question of sort of what it would be good to see others do versus what you should do yourself. And kind of what I specifically mean is people have tried a lot of different kind of organizational structures and methodologies over time, right? And, and of course, while in broad strokes, many things have remained the same in terms of maybe some of the characteristics required for leadership, or the importance, or that which makes kind of a human satisfied in their work around sort of having kind of

• 23:36Speaker 03

  the opportunity to have autonomy and to kind of build mastery and having a kind of mission they believe in and so on. So there are lots of things that remain the same. There has been kind of some evolution in that, you know, organizations, you know, Google today say does not look especially like maybe IBM of 1950. You know, there's parallels, but you know, very material differences. However, I think that, you know, most of the experiments have failed. Most efforts to do something that's kind of substantially different to the kind of best practice of the day, most of those efforts fail. And so I think when

• 24:17Speaker 03

  you're designing a particular organization, doing something that like truly might kill it is just like a pretty risky thing to do. And evidently, the way Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others are organized, Amazon, what have you. You know, I'm certain it's not perfect. I'm certain that not only can you do better, but you can do substantially better. I really believe that. But at the same time, it's kind of empirically adequate to be Google, Facebook, you know, Apple or Amazon. And I think doing better is just really pretty difficult. And so I actually love the fact that people are experimenting here.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  The rise of remote organizations that, you know, have no physical headquarters or, you know, attempts to have, I mean, Buffer has been trying sort of, you know, this kind of radical transparency down to kind of compensation. Some organizations like Medium and Zappos tried or are trying holocracy. And so I love the fact that all these experiments are happening.

• 25:24Tim Ferriss?

  Can you define holocracy for a second?

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Well, I don't deeply understand it, but I think it is, I think, I believe, as I understand it, the core idea is having kind of differing kind of decision-making bodies, like groups of people that are kind of responsible for major areas of the company, rather than having a kind of more traditional hierarchy. And so perhaps, again, this is my superficial understanding, but so perhaps you might have, you know, some set of people who are responsible for making compensation decisions, some other set of people who are responsible for deciding, you know, what the product strategy should be for next year, and some other set of people who are responsible for, I don't know, figuring out how, you know, how the office should be decorated.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  But the kind of, those sets of people don't need to kind of map on to, you know, some traditional hierarchy and making out of, they can be partly overlapping or, you know, bigger or smaller or whatever. And, you know, that's, you know, point one describes that. I don't think that's You know, a priori, a ludicrous idea, you know, maybe that'll work. But I think kind of the sort of the bias should be that for any radical departure from the kind of prevailing status quo, it's probably not going to work. I think, you know, there's probably a 90% chance, maybe higher, that kind of any any meaningful deviation is a bad idea. And so, again, to kind of return to what I was sort of getting at at the beginning,

• 26:54Speaker 03

  I think we should celebrate the fact that all these experiments are happening and should really cheer them on and should really hope that they succeed. And kind of we ourselves should choose maybe some small number of experiments that we really believe in to, you know, to engage in. But I think for these kind of, you know, really high important or high importance, really hard to change, sort of trapdoor decisions, like what kind of organizational structure, you know, you're going to have, I think you actually want a bias towards being relatively conservative.

• 27:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you don't, you might be supportive of monkeys being shot into space, but you don't necessarily want to be one of the first 10.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  No, that's exactly right. But I really think, like, one of the strangest things to me in the world, you know, as I look at it, is that people kind of don't celebrate this experimentation enough, sort of, like, if it doesn't seem to them like the right thing to do, they get kind of offended by it, or it, you know, it seems to, there's some kind of emotional response to it. Whereas I think, at least the response I try to kind of cultivate in myself is, I think that's a bad idea, it does not make sense given my model of the world, and I'm delighted it's happening. Like, that's so great. And if it fails, well, you know, that's unfortunate. And if it succeeds, you know, we all get to learn something. That's kind of, that's what's so great about the transmission of knowledge, that if it works in only one particular small instance, everyone gets to benefit from it. That's so cool.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  And yet, when people try kind of, you know, strange things that don't kind of match our kind of, again, pre-existing comprehensions, you know, there's some combination of mockery or dismissiveness, or, again, the kind of emotional objection. Whereas I really think we should be encouraging and celebrating them. And, you know, the weirder the effort is, the more they deserve our support.

• 28:49Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to talk about what maybe some of the things you did differently, but not not only what you did differently, because that's sort of a, in some respects, a causal factor, but in some respects, a downstream effect of thinking differently or seeing things differently. So what did you guys know that other people didn't? Because I've heard multiple people comment on the early conception of Stripe, or considering entering a crowded market with ton of existing incumbents with regulatory and institutional barriers

• 29:30Tim Ferriss?

  to entry, all of these types of factors. Why did you decide to pursue that? What did you see that other people did not see in that case?

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Well, I think there's two different kinds of knowing, right? This kind of conscious, explicit knowing where you see that there's kind of a prevailing belief or something, and you understand why it's wrong, and you have some kind of proprietary insight that everyone else doesn't have. I think there's another kind of sort of quote unquote knowing, which is just you have a belief or a model of the world, and you don't even realize that it's different to others. It's kind of some deeply internalized thing that just for whatever circumstantial reasons you happen to have ended up with. And I think for us, it actually wasn't so much that we had a, in the beginning, this kind of comprehensive deep understanding of the space and realized how everyone else was mistaken. We just had

• 30:26Speaker 03

  like a particular perspective, you know, because of how we, where we came from and how we got started, and we were lucky. We turned out that kind of that model we had and that outlook kind of matched the world at that time. But I really, I think it's very important that You know, we don't kind of drink our own Kool-Aid here and overread into our sort of supposed insight. I really think, you know, it was, it was really just a lot of circumstance and good fortune. But I would say the kind of particular things that differed about Stripe and kind of our outlook were, we just didn't think that the kind of regulatory and kind of partnership slash banking barriers were actually that bad.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  You know, they kind of sound intimidating and obviously you have to kind of do a lot of work there that maybe lots of other software companies don't have to do. But, you know, it's fundamentally feasible. I mean, ultimately regulators and banks and so on are comprised of good people who want to do the right thing and may speak a different language or whatever, but are, you know, they're reasonable. And I guess the other thing is we really had this mindset because of, I guess, where we, where we came from, that the kind of developers and makers and software were just going to continue to become increasingly important.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  And it's really amazing where, kind of when we started out, we, kind of our idea was that developers would just, like, we'd build a good product and developers would start using it and, you know, that, that, that would be the story. And we didn't even know that was such a kind of a stupid distribution strategy and go-to-market mechanism. We didn't even know how much enterprise marketing and enterprise sales motion and all the rest, we were kind of skipping over, we just kind of had this very naive understanding of the world. However, we were lucky where the world really, I think, started to change around 2010, 2011,

• 32:29Speaker 03

  where companies around the world, and especially in kind of the US and Europe, really got the memo, like, big traditional companies, that they would have to take advantage of what software was making possible and really transform themselves if they wanted to kind of survive and prosper. And so, you know, fast forward kind of five or six years later, even the kind of... More traditional kind of stodgy or companies that would have needed this kind of super complex enterprise field team to kind of engage with. They were actually now starting to listen to their own developers.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  And when the CTO said, hey, I really think we should be using this kind of much more straightforward or sort of much more powerful technology, unlike a decade before, they were actually being listened to. And so, again, this isn't sort of a thing we knew in the way that we could have, you know, argued for it in 2010, but it was a thing we kind of was somehow in our bones. And again, we were just lucky where we started right around when the world started transforming this regard. And actually, we did this, we did this survey earlier this year, where we kind of surveyed a whole bunch of, you know, I don't want to say kind of traditional, but sort of not software companies. We sort of surveyed companies, you know, fairly broadly across multiple industries.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  And we just asked them kind of what's holding them back. And, you know, that's a very imperfect methodology, of course, because, you know, it's hard to know what the kind of candidate answers there should be, and maybe, you know, these questions are, do they all interpret it the same way and so on. But the kind of very high level thing that sort of came back was that companies across the board report kind of availability of software engineers and just like ability to kind of do things with software as being as big or even bigger a constraint on their progress as access to capital. And that's just such an amazing fact, right? In that sort of, you know, economics for, for, it's history, basically, has been sort

• 34:38Speaker 03

  of a science of, in some sense, you know, access to and kind of distribution of capital. And we're just at this kind of moment of transformation where, I mean, on some level, you can exchange, you know, capital for software, talent and output and so on, but it's actually really hard to do. And I think companies globally are really struggling with figuring out how to make that happen. And so, anyway, we just had the good fortune of getting started right when that came to be the case.

• 35:04Tim Ferriss?

  So there are definitely, I shouldn't say synchronicities, but sort of fortuitous timing aspects to it. And I think that, of course, lady fortune, good luck or bad luck is always a factor, but it's, in a case like this, necessary and not sufficient, right? There are certain things within your control, assuming we don't get into a really long, confusing discussion about free will. Let's just assume there are certain things that depend on you making very specific decisions. There are these forks in the road. And I'd love to talk about some of the things that you feel like you did right, or small things

• 35:46Tim Ferriss?

  that turned into big things. And I'll read, I want to read just a very brief paragraph from the Yoda mentioned earlier, Paul Graham. And for people who are interested in learning more about Y Combinator, we can talk about it, but it's, and this is going to be vastly simplified, but for people who have never heard this before, Y Combinator, often abbreviated to YC, is the SEAL Team Six Harvard of, and let's just call it startup incubators of sorts. They accept a class. It is a very small percentage, I want to say, single digits at this point, it would have to be, in terms of the number of applicants. And there are

• 36:25Tim Ferriss?

  many, many well-known companies that have come out of Y Combinator. And Paul has many fantastic essays online, which people should read.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  YC is one of the most amazing inventions of the past 20 years. And I think PG's essays are still a goldmine that, sort of like Alan Kay, I think are still, like, people kind of know they're great, but I think they're even better than people appreciate.

• 36:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, for sure. And a lot, and many of them, I've also read his book, many of them are...

• 37:04Tim Ferriss?

  They are not timely in the best possible sense. They are, they're, they're based on first principles. And an example of that, I always mess up the headline, but I think it's the maker's schedule versus the manager's schedule, something along those lines. People can find it, I'll put it in the show notes. But this particular essay talks a bit about Stripe. And it says Stripe, quote, "Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone would have sat back and waited for users, or could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact, they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition. Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the, in the other companies we funded, and none took better advantage of it than Stripe.

• 37:48Tim Ferriss?

  At YC, we use the term, quote, 'Collison installation,' end quote, for the technique they invented. More diffident founders ask, 'Will you try our beta?' And for people who don't know, that terminology just means effectively a rough draft of a, a product. "Will you try our beta?" And if the answer is yes, they say, "Great, we'll send you a link." But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe, they'd say, "Right then, give me your laptop," and set them up on the spot. Right? So that seems like a small thing, but it, it doesn't strike me that if that's the beginning of certain types of snowballs and user acquisition, that is a really important, or could be a really important differentiator.

• 38:31Tim Ferriss?

  This, so what are, what are some of, feel free to take this in any direction, but some of the, the other things that, that you guys got right. And I, I do remember even in Silicon Valley, which of course is a, can be an echo chamber of sorts, but there was a lot of talk, even at the periphery of my circles, and I am non-technical, I'm not a developer, about how easy Stripe was to

• 38:57Tim Ferriss?

  Implement, right? Seven lines of code or X number of lines of code and you're set up. And I'm sure that, I'm sure on some level was a very conscious decision, not only in terms of product, but also in terms of positioning. So can you talk about some of the early decisions that in retrospect were really important?

• 39:16Speaker 03

  So I think, there are two that really jump out to me where, you know, I think

• 39:25Speaker 03

  that were actually kind of somewhat deliberate. Well, I'll give two and maybe I'll think of more. So one is, you know, we had sort of grown up reading Slashdot, you know, this early kind of tech news website, but it was kind of crowdsourced and Hacker News and Twitter and blogs and, you know, all these kinds of services. And I guess we just sort of had a belief that how people found out about things in the world had changed. And in particular, the kind of the market was getting more efficient. And by efficient, I mean that it was becoming

• 40:07Speaker 03

  more likely that people would come to discover the kind of quote unquote correct thing. That maybe kind of 30 years ago or something, because there were sort of much slower or fewer kind of distribution channels, that who won and what got used, we kind of determined more by marketing budgets or by sales tax or whatever, but that there was a new kind of sort of transparency and kind of efficacy and information dissemination that the internet now made possible, that shifted the way that sort of a product could really get adopted. And so just very concretely, our sales and marketing strategy for a very long time was

• 40:50Speaker 03

  was writing blog posts that we just thought were, you know, good and interesting, or at least we hoped were.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  And building a good product and hoping that people would tell others about it. And I really don't think that that would have worked 10 years previously. It was kind of the internet had changed, but we just kind of made a very deliberate bet on these kind of superior distribution channels. And I think that actually really helped us in two big ways. One is it's kind of obviously cheaper. And so you look at a lot of other companies, especially companies selling to businesses, and they spend vast gargantuan amounts of money on their kind of sales and marketing strategies. And so early on, we just, we didn't have to do that. And so it was kind of transformatively impactful in that sense.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Maybe if we'd had to kind of, you know, spend a lot on sort of getting started, it perhaps would have been, you know, that could have been a severe enough barrier that we wouldn't have gotten over it at all. Maybe the company would never have happened. So that's first. The second is-

• 41:55Tim Ferriss?

  Can I pause for one second?

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 41:57Tim Ferriss?

  Do you recall any of the blog posts that if you were to do kind of an 80/20 analysis and look at those that really moved the needle? Do you recall any of the topics or just your basic approach?

• 42:08Speaker 03

  Well, I remember a guy who worked at Stripe and who still works at Stripe, his name is Evan, he wrote a blog post about how to debug Python, which is a programming language, with GDB, which is a debugger. It didn't really have much to do with Stripe. It was actually, it was a really good blog post. And this is probably back in 2012. And as I remember, that got a whole bunch of traffic. And it, you know, as a consequence, people kind of found out about Stripe and maybe kind of realized that we knew something about what we were talking about from a technical standpoint. And it moved the needle for us back at a time where really nobody had heard of us.

• 42:50Tim Ferriss?

  It's also, if I may, I'm caffeinated enough now to feel the need to jump in and commentate, but the, it's also a really good example of an editorial honeypot that will attract the types of people who are technically probably in positions to, given that sort of point in time that you discussed earlier, where CEOs are listening more to CTOs and CTOs are listening to the actual on the front line-

• 43:20Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 43:21Tim Ferriss?

  -coders. It was, it's a very smart way of talking around the product in a sense that a lot of those technical folks in my experience are also semi allergic or very highly allergic to what they perceive as anything salesy. So you were able to sort of bring them into the fold without directly explicitly selling anything.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  Yes, well, this actually brings me to kind of the second thing that I was going to mention in terms of the other kind of helpful consequence of kind of marketing ourselves this way, which is it actually kind of created better incentives for us. Because if you think about sort of more traditional marketing, and by the way, to be clear, I'm not dismissing in any way kind of traditional sales and marketing. I mean, Stripe has salespeople and marketing people and they, they're immensely important in sort of in the organization we're now building today. And so I'm kind of specifically talking about kind of strategies to kind of get started in the early days and to kind of get some initial traction. Anyway, that said, and the super valuable thing about sort of pursuing these kind of non-traditional channels is if you think about a traditional marketing organization

• 44:25Speaker 03

  and kind of what it's, or traditional marketing in general and kind of what the incentives are, the incentives are to kind of talk up the product or to kind of pre-announce things ahead of when they're actually ready. Because if you're sort of talking at people and showing them these fancy presentations or whatever, but they're not actually using the product directly, you know, if they find out sort of a year later that it sucks, well, you know, that's kind of fine, or at least it's fine in the short term, because you know, you've already got the revenue for the sale or something. Whereas if you have to compete on the merits of the product and just kind of rely on people kind of being honest about how well it works or doesn't, that kind of forces you to just build a kind of product development organization that can compete. And so it might be harder to kind of get that initial traction, but if you can get

• 45:09Speaker 03

  there, you actually really have kind of an upper hand relative to kind of more traditionally incentivized companies, because they've probably gotten a bit lazy and a bit ossified and just a bit less competitive on this access. And once you can make the battle about the quality of your product and the quality of your product development. You know, if you can get the battlefields to be sort of on that axis, you really have a huge advantage. And our experience was the incumbents just couldn't react. And they kind of realized that Stripe was kind of getting some traction and starting to get some mindshare and developers and startups were starting to use it. And what's really amazing to me is kind of how little happened.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  And I think it's not because, I mean, obviously for a while they just kind of dismissed us. But even after they stopped dismissing us, you can't just kind of click your fingers and be like, okay, now we're going to start creating good products. It's such a deep cultural and organizational thing that it's very difficult for competitors or potential competitors to shift there. Whereas if you just have a better marketing campaign, that's super easy to copy. Anyone else can buy a competing billboard or pay more for the Google Ads or whatever. And so again, we didn't kind of realize all this in advance, but I think that ended up really helping us.

• 46:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I want to underscore something you just mentioned briefly, which is Google Ads. This is, well, two things. Number one is that if I look back at the, however many at this point, 70 plus startups in my own investment experience, the vast majority of overperformers focused almost to the exclusion of PR and marketing on product in the early days.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 46:59Tim Ferriss?

  And number two is if I look at the bottom performing, say, decile of companies, they almost all got very distracted by PR and marketing, particularly in the first year or two, generally first year of existence, especially if they were blessed, in other words cursed, with a lot of high praise from outlets in one or two pieces. It's very seductive as a silent song.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 47:30Tim Ferriss?

  And the last thing I wanted to say, just to underscore something that you mentioned, which is really important, is if your customer acquisition is predicated on paid acquisition.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:46Tim Ferriss?

  That makes you a, just a sitting duck for incumbents.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 47:51Tim Ferriss?

  Who have larger budgets.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:52Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, and they can just decide to bleed chips for a period of time until you run out of chips.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:00Tim Ferriss?

  So, so, yeah, it's really, really important. So I'm glad you, you mentioned it.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  There's always a kind of a seductive psychological temptation where if something isn't growing, to tell yourself that it's because, well, you know, I haven't invested enough in distribution. Uh, it's kind of harder to, uh, sort of, uh, come to realize or to tell yourself that, well, you know, maybe our baby is just a bit too ugly. Uh, and so I think people are just very psychologically biased uh, towards, um, sort of blaming anything about growth on, uh, on things that sound like sales or marketing. And then the, yeah, I mean, kind of related to, um, what you just said. One of the just really strange facts about the world, and I don't kind of fully understand why this is the case,

• 48:47Speaker 03

  uh, is how hard it is for organizations to build good software. And, you know, I know that sounds strange in that, I mean, lots of organizations build some software, but like, it is just really weird, right? You know, if you, if you think about sort of what a, what a really good website or iOS application or whatever it kind of is and feels like. Um, it's really strange. I mean, it's not easy to build a really good website or iOS app or whatever.

• 49:16Speaker 03

  But it's not rocket science. And given that it's not rocket science, um, why are there so few of them? Like, just think of kind of any big major company, um, and think of their website or app. Like, it's probably pretty bad. Um, it's kind of janky, it looks old. Like, the animations already work right. It's kind of, it's laggy, all that stuff, right? But that's weird. Um, they probably have, uh, they probably have a nice building and nice headquarters. Um, and, you know, if they, like, there are many things they can decide to do and, and just like, do it pretty competently. They can kind of turn their capital advantage, uh, into a, uh, into a sort of, an advantage in some other area.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Um, like if they, um... I don't know if they want to have a great fleet of cars. You know, they can very reliably turn capital into a great fleet of cars.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  But for some reason, they can't seem to turn, and in fact, they can probably even turn capital into like a cool advertising campaign. You know, there's enough good agencies. But for whatever reason, they can't turn capital into good software. And you know, it would be immensely valuable for them if they could, but they can't. Or at least they don't. And I don't think it's for lack of trying or lack of kind of realizing this. And so I think actually small companies don't realize how much of an upper hand they have here. Where if they can create a product that is kind of

• 50:54Speaker 03

  so much better than the status quo that they start to get sort of organic traction. Once you attach a real sales and marketing engine to that, it's going to be really fricking hard for a big company to effectively compete. Because again, this kind of organizational transformation into being good at software is just is just so profoundly hard.

• 51:14Tim Ferriss?

  Another place that I've seen a lot of would be entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs spend a lot of time on company name and brand. Okay, so I was joking with, I was joking with Chris Saka earlier via text. And I was just saying, I'm really impressed with the phenomenal outcomes and very rocky beginnings with like difficult names that you guys have had with companies.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 51:41Tim Ferriss?

  So you have Octomatic, right? Which, which I'm sure was not always spelled correctly by people.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  Not uniformly, no.

• 51:50Tim Ferriss?

  And Stripe.

• 51:53Tim Ferriss?

  What the, could you just give us a brief description of the original name of what would later become Stripe and just like walk us through some early iterations because I want sure and the rea- what I'm, what I'm hoping to do here and I don't want to make this too leading of an introduction to what you're going to say, but is that you're like the, the future of your company is probably not going to hinge entirely on the first name that you give it is where I'm trying to go with this. Um, and the product, so, so maybe you could just tell a bit of the story.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  We, we are definitely a powerful example that, uh, um, that as you say, it is not. Uh, and so Stripe was originally incorporated as, um, slash dev slash finance, Inc. Spelled S L A S H D E V S L A S H, et cetera. Um, like the, it was the slashes actually spelled out and, and the reason for that is, uh, you know, we, well, it's, it's a long story. I won't bore you with it. It was like a, a programming joke, but you know, we thought it was funny. Um, I think it was, uh, the, the rest of the world, you know, to, to our shock and surprise did not quite find it as funny as we did. Um, and, uh, uh, and the, um, the, the first name of the product was, uh, slash dev slash payments, uh, because,

• 53:11Speaker 03

  you know, we, we sort of wanted a slightly broader company name than product name. Um, and, uh, and you know, extremely confusingly, uh, while the company had all this S L A S H stuff spelled out, the product was just D E V payments.com. And so kind of the, the naming schemas didn't even really match. Uh, and so, you know, we would have these meetings and, you know, we describe what we do and we're already fighting an uphill battle here. I mean, you know, we were, um, as John says, uh, sort of, um, you know, three squirrels in a trench coat, sort of trying to masquerade as like a, a real thing, uh, and like evading all these questions about, you know, where exactly is your headquarters? And, you know, how do we say, how do we not say our bedroom, uh, in a way that's not a lie? Um, and, um, uh, or, you know, how do we say?

• 53:56Tim Ferriss?

  We have an open floor plan.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. Yes.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, we really embrace remote work. So we were already fighting a bit of an uphill battle. And then at the end of the meeting or something, they'd ask us our name or for our business card or something. We'd have to hand over this thing that doesn't even look like a company name. They'd look at it and it's like, oh, but what's the company name called? We're like, actually, sorry, sir. It's this thing. So it was just, it was all bad. And not only did people often misspell it, but it was kind of a moment of celebration if anyone ever correctly spelled it. And so we kind of came to accept the need for a name change. And naming things, as I'm sure you know, is pretty hard.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  And so I remember, I think it was the winter of 2010, which was a very wet winter out in California unusually. And I just remember all these kind of dark evenings at the office for as soon as you kind of got stuck with your code or with some problem or something, we'd have sort of a little discussion about, well, what could we name this company? And we had all these books around the office, I mean, just all sorts of random stuff. You just paged through them and like come up with a word and toss it out to the group and be like, well, should we call our company this? And so I remember John was trying to learn how to ride a motorcycle. And so we had a motorcycle repair manual and so we had a lot of motorcycle words. Should we call the company Carburetor? Which fortunately did not make the cut.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  So it was not going well, as you're hearing. We eventually decided to write a little script to just like come up with kind of random potential names and actually to kind of check whether the relevant domain names were available. Because it was important for an online company that we kind of have the .com domain. And I can't even remember how, but Stripe is one of the words that ended up sort of on our list of names to check. I think we were just at some point trying to think up kind of single, monosyllabic English words that didn't have some kind of strong pre-existing association. And Stripe, it turns out, was available relatively cheaply. It was, you know, it was.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  I think ten or twenty thousand dollars, which you know, that's not cheap in some sense, but compared to the costs we were living of having a terrible name, it seemed like a good deal.

• 56:16Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's, what year was this?

• 56:18Speaker 03

  This was like twenty ten.

• 56:20Tim Ferriss?

  So that's astonishing to me. That's actually, I mean, for a dictionary word that is a noun that recognizable, that's astonishing. Did you, did you negotiate or have someone negotiate on your behalf, or was that the opening offer they made to sell?

• 56:35Speaker 03

  Honestly, I'd have to go back to check the details, but, but there wasn't a big, lengthy negotiation. There was maybe a little back and forth. Yeah, no, we really lucked out. I mean, what helped us, of course, is we weren't wet at any of these names, right? You know, if, if the guy had said, you know, it's two hundred thousand dollars, well, you know, that would have been exactly two seconds of thought and we'd have moved on to something else.

• 56:58Tim Ferriss?

  Undercarburetor.co.uk

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. As it really helped that, you know, we were happy to entertain anything at all. And, and the last thing worth mentioning there is, you know, we, okay, we bought the domain and started, you know, rename all our code and the website and everything. And then one day in early January, we kind of flipped the switch and everything became Stripe. And we'd somehow on the checklist of all the things to change and do, we neglected to add an entry for tell our customers. And so, you know, people woke up in the morning to go to devpayments.com and check their sales and whatever, and, you know, they get redirected to stripe.com. And so we got a lot of sort of confused customers being like, are you guys hacked? Have you been phished? You know, what's going on here?

• 57:44Speaker 03

  Fortunately, back in January two thousand and eleven, we had very few customers. And so when I say we got these emails from customers, I mean, probably all five of our customers emailed us. So it was not a huge customer support burden.

• 57:56Tim Ferriss?

  What, I do want to talk about maybe perhaps some inflection points for the company. Since you certainly have more than five customers now, I mean, you have, what is it, eighty percent of American adults have purchased something? From a business powered by Stripe. Now, I know that doesn't mean that there are eighty percent of American adults are Stripe customers per se.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:20Tim Ferriss?

  But you now have millions of businesses in one hundred thirty plus countries. So something happened between those two points in time.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:27Tim Ferriss?

  But so it'd be easy to talk about a lot of the highlights, a lot of the inflection points, and we will do that. But lest this appear like it has been homerun after homerun every time you've stepped up to bat. What I'd love to talk about, if you're willing, are some of the harder periods, maybe near death experiences, moments of doubt. And to make it as personal as possible, right? So not necessarily in abstract about the company going through a tough time, but periods when you have struggled. And to give us one or two examples of that, and then how you kind of found your way out of that period would be, I think,

• 59:06Tim Ferriss?

  certainly of interest to me and hopefully would help humanize the otherwise seemingly superhuman Patrick Collison. This could also be a personal period, could be, could have been high school, college, a difficult family situation, could be anything.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  I will, I'll give kind of the Stripe version, the personal version. So, so kind of with those caveats on the Stripe side, just the thing that I think is kind of important to communicate is, despite things having been relatively smooth in that macro sense, it often is just extremely hard. And I remember sort of early on, after, I remember after one particular meeting back in, I don't know, two thousand and eleven, two thousand and twelve.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Like just after the meeting, the API broke, and so.

• 1:00:01Tim Ferriss?

  So the API, application programming interface, could you just?

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:00:05Tim Ferriss?

  Just explain what that is.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  The core Stripe payments engine broke, and so our customers just couldn't get paid and couldn't accept payments from their customers. And, you know, we didn't have many customers back then, maybe there were a hundred or something, but, but, you know. There was still a hundred businesses. It felt like a huge deal.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  And, you know, we fixed it. It was only down for me thirty minutes or something, but I remember feeling kind of really bad about that. And then I just remember kind of, it wasn't like there was something particularly special at that day, but I remember just kind of, I guess, reflecting on the sort of enormity of the challenges that, you know, we would face in the future and all the work we still have to do and all the stuff that was still broken and all the people we had to hire and all the customers we have to convince to use us that, you know, we had not yet convinced. And it was just kind of this moment of vertigo. And, I mean, I just remember being kind of immensely dispirited and kind of talking to John about, well, you know, is there really actually any point doing this?

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  And again, what's kind of important to me about that moment is not that kind of things were actually all that bad, but kind of the opposite. Objectively, they were fine. That day wasn't really much worse than the previous day. But I think the kind of, there's this kind of inevitable thing when you're creating something where, on the one hand, you have to be kind of very optimistic, because if you weren't optimistic, you wouldn't bother doing it, especially in the face of such hardship and uncertainty. You also have to be very pessimistic because you have, I mean, there are tons of problems and you have to be kind of very kind of tuned to spotting them so you can go fix them. And so you kind of exist in this kind of superposition, this juxtaposition of kind of pessimism and optimism, and you're kind of an extreme on both axes. And that's just like a weird psychological state.

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  And to remain in it, as you must, for kind of many years is, it's just not normal. And you're kind of, you're always sort of necessarily over-extrapolating from limited data because again, you kind of should be in that like, you know, one particular customer decides not to use you, or one particular person leaves the company, or, you know, just like some small thing happens. But you kind of have to be really asking yourself, well, is this a trend? Is there, has something changed? Is something systemically broken, whatever?

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  And because you're kind of always extrapolating from, from these bad things, while maintaining this kind of long-term optimism, I think that is just a recipe for, for real, you know...

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  Psychological hardship. And I don't want to overstate it in that there's all the obvious acknowledgements about we're immensely lucky, among the lucky people in history to have food and shelter and health and all these things. But humans hedonically, the hedonic treadmill is very powerful and we rapidly adapt to kind of take all those for granted. And so the fact that maybe in the scheme of things, we should feel very grateful and lucky and you can kind of tell yourself this narrative to try to keep things in perspective. The reality is that it is just kind of pretty pummeling on an ongoing basis, even for Stripe,

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  which perhaps from the outside might look like this kind of really neat little story. There have been many such moments where it just seems hard.

• 1:03:34Tim Ferriss?

  What did the conversation look like with John that day? Do you recall any of the specifics? I mean, was it more commiseration so you could get out of your system? Were you actually talking to him to determine if you should proceed or not? What did that look like?

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  It was more the former, like more of this just sort of general dejection. We didn't seriously think about stopping. I think both of us are, it's less I think we're both really determined and more I think we're just stubborn. And so the idea of stopping, it didn't seem like a, I guess it didn't feel like an option for us. Determination sounds glamorous to me and I'm not sure we have that, but I think we're just dogged. But yeah, it's more like, you know, people have different kind of emotional sort of cycles and kind of his sine wave was kind of displaced from mine. And so fortunately, and you know, he's a pretty cheery guy, that day when I was super

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  dejected, he was, in his chipper way, he was telling me, that'll be fine. And you know, you give it another 24 hours or something and you know, the world looks a bit different.

• 1:04:48Tim Ferriss?

  There's something you mentioned just a few moments ago, I think is worth trying to reiterate to make sure I understand it, which is the importance, I mean, the existential importance in the case of a lot of startups of being able to

• 1:05:10Tim Ferriss?

  Remain consistently optimistic enough that you can summon the energy and doggedness to continue while also being very good at envisioning problems and worst-case scenarios and bad outcomes so that you can avert them.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:05:26Tim Ferriss?

  And

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:05:28Tim Ferriss?

  It's tricky. It's really tricky.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:31Tim Ferriss?

  It's true also for Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Well, and it's tricky. It's kind of not natural. And it's not a kind of mindset that I think most normal situations in the world kind of train you to have.

• 1:05:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And it can be really, really stressful. This is something I've observed not only in founders, but also in a lot of investors, particularly those who can make money by betting on, in some fashion, apocalyptic or black swan events that cause a lot of damage or that are very scary. And people who are not just betting on the long side, but betting on the short side. And I mean, of course, we get into derivatives and stuff like that.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:06:09Tim Ferriss?

  But it's they're thinking about the edge cases that could really be

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:06:18Tim Ferriss?

  catastrophic for them and/or others.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  Right. Although when you're starting a company, you sort of have to be kind of both the sort of super-long, optimistic, you know, I'm just going to buy this stock and hold it for decades trader. And you kind of have to be the sort of the catastrophic, you know, Taleb-style, you know, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, sort of catastrophe trader. And you're you kind of have to be both. And that's just weird. And I guess the thing that I think is maybe important to understand for folks is it's kind of intuitive that if a company or a new effort of any sort is not going well, that things will feel hard and you'll often feel dejected and life, at least insofar

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  as work goes, is not great. But the weird part is that even if things are going well and the effort or the company or whatever is succeeding, things will still often not feel great. And no one sort of told me that before I started.

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  I sort of thought that, well, if the company is succeeding, then clearly it's going to be, I don't know, not necessarily fun, but at least it'll feel good day to day. Whereas the actual reality is that you're always necessarily operating at the kind of outer edge of what you can handle. Because, you know, if there was, if you'd spare capacity, you'd just take on more. And so you're kind of therefore inevitably always, you know, on the cusp of feeling that you're, you're sort of going to fall over. And, you know, even as we record this podcast, I mean, at this kind of moment, I feel sort of right on the edge of what I'm, what I'm able to handle.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  And on the one hand, I sort of, I don't wish it were otherwise in that I sort of enjoy testing myself and kind of finding my limits and developing and stretching myself. But on the other hand, you know, when you stretch your muscles, that's painful.

• 1:08:17Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it also makes me think of a conversation I had with Laird Hamilton, who's one of the most legendary big wave surfers of all time. And I remember I was chatting with him. He's got to be, I don't know how old he is, he's one of those guys who sort of defies any type of expectation of age affecting performance. I think he's in his early 50s, but still goes hunting for some of the biggest waves in the world. And I remember I was chatting with him at one point and he said he'd been tooling around on some easy waves earlier that day. And I asked him roughly how big he thought they were. And then he was like, ah, you know, 20, 25 feet. He's like, once it gets to 20, you can start to have fun. And I'm paraphrasing everybody. He's like, once you get to 30s, like you really like kind of want to watch yourself.

• 1:09:00Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, once you get to over 50, you're really not allowed to fall. And it's when you are...

• 1:09:09Tim Ferriss?

  And I've never been in this position, but having spent a lot of time around founders and very fast growing companies, when you do have at least the perception, and which I think is reflective of reality, that you are effectively always on the edge of redlining. Because as you said, if you have extra capacity, you open the door to fill that capacity. Who are some of the people you've leaned on, or who have been helpful, alive or dead or otherwise, I'm not sure what otherwise would be in that case, but zombie, to help you navigate this, or learn how to surf that kind of wave? Because it is, it is fucking unimaginable for most people, I've, I've only seen it

• 1:09:49Tim Ferriss?

  as a spectator, really, what it takes to, to kind of have your face pressed up against the windshield, right, in the, in the Formula One car that is a Stripe, or an Uber, or any of these companies. It's, it's really hard to fathom what it, what it takes and how much it resembles a professional sport. So, so who, who are what has been helpful in learning to navigate that?

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  Well, um, maybe just before answering that, to kind of add something to, we were just talking about, that it relates to what you just asked. There's, there's a period in, in my life where, you know, I did feel a bit, not really lost, but, um, you know, it certainly wasn't clear exactly what direction I was going in. And so, um, we sold our first company, and I lived in Vancouver for a while, worked for that company, kind of exploring some other stuff as well.

• 1:10:53Tim Ferriss?

  This is the live career video?

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  Exactly, yep. And then I moved to live with my then girlfriend in Zurich. Um, and so I lived in Switzerland for a while. Uh, and then, and then I actually went back to college, because I dropped out of college pretty early and, um, When I went to school, I sort of thought, well, maybe I want to become like a physicist or a mathematician or something like that. And, you know, who knows how successful, if at all, I would have been. Maybe I wouldn't even have made the cut, but I kind of had that ambition, aspiration. And I sort of felt that we'd started the company so early and it happened so quickly that I hadn't kind of really fully tested whether that was kind of a good idea or not. And so I went back to college for a second time and

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  to kind of do mostly math and physics. And so did that. And then while there, John was also in college at the same time, that's kind of when we went to start Stripe. But if you'd looked at that kind of two-year period, it was drop out of college, start this company, move to Vancouver, move to another country, go back to college, then start this other company. And like when we started Stripe, it did not seem very promising. I mean, it seemed like this, you know, silly little developer payments thing. And again, it was another two years before it even launched. And so maybe that whole kind of four-year period, I think to many people who knew me or just kind of were around, like I'm sure

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  it looked kind of pretty scattered, kind of weirdly planned, maybe misdirected. And they wouldn't be entirely wrong. I mean, I certainly was not kind of pursuing some grand master plan. And I think I was actually really lucky where, you know, from sort of an early age, my parents were very okay with myself and John sort of charting our own course. And, you know, you get these kind of real sort of hothouse environments where there's a lot of pressure to go to this school, go to this college, pursue this career path, whatever. You really kind of feel like you're on these kind of narrow train tracks. And I would say that our upbringing was kind of the opposite, where really our

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  parents, even when we wanted to make sort of very ostensibly kind of strange and surprising decisions, our parents kind of supported us. And so when I was a 15-year-old and wanted to take a year off school, to kind of just like program full-time, my parents were supportive of that. Or when I wanted to sort of drop out of school to go take this totally different exam system, my parents were okay with that. And so I, you know, we kind of had this upbringing where our parents supported us in that way. And when in my kind of, you know, teens, early twenties was kind of trying to figure out what the kind of right direction was, I wouldn't say that was kind of a lost period, but it was, again, it was definitely a highly exploratory one. And so just kind

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  of to your question of, you know, periods of real hardship, I think a lot of people either don't get the opportunity to sort of explore multiple directions like that, or they're kind of, either others don't give them the opportunity, or they sort of, they don't kind of give themselves the permission to just kind of have a few, you know, slightly lost years where the narrative isn't super clear. And those periods can be hard, because kind of by definition, you're not exactly sure where they're going. And it's very kind of disorienting to not know where you're sailing. And you can and do feel a bit adrift. And so, looking back on that, I actually feel like it was kind of really important

• 1:14:26Speaker 03

  in kind of giving me confidence and perspective. But at the time, it definitely felt a bit unmoored.

• 1:14:32Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think that you, I think this is really important for a number of reasons. The first is that, and this is going to sound like a fortune cookie, but there is a quote, I can't, I can't recall who it's attributed to. I want to say Emerson, but Emerson's kind of like Abraham Lincoln on the internet. It's like everything gets attributed.

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  Yes, it's him or Oscar Wilde.

• 1:14:51Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. Right. So not, not all, not all who wander are lost, right? So there's a difference between being lost, which is you have a destination and you have gone off track, or you are preoccupied with where you are currently located and don't know where you're located versus exploring and wandering.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:15:08Tim Ferriss?

  The second, which is, I suppose, more a follow-up question than a point, is, is this. I'm very curious how your parents, and maybe you can also just tell us a little bit about what your parents did professionally, or how they spent their time. But how your parent, what your parents did to cultivate excellence, or clear, and or clear thinking, without necessarily pigeonholing the direction of either of those, right? So if you, if a biographer at some point is writing the story of your life, you give them unfettered access. How might they they answer that? What are the what are examples they might give?

• 1:15:50Tim Ferriss?

  Things your parents said, annual routines that you guys had, or whatever, anything that comes to mind?

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  Well, um, we were kind of, um, we we grew up in very rural Ireland, right? Um, the kind of the middle of the countryside, um, surrounded by kind of farms and fields. Uh, and, you know, we were kind of really, we had to kind of figure out ourselves what was going to be entertaining and interesting and fun. It wasn't just kind of provided, um, you know, to us by the environment. And so we kind of grew up as these sort of free range children. Um, and we were lucky where, uh, there were lots of books in the house and we, you know, read those pretty voraciously.

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  You know, our our parents, uh, I guess I'd say that the thing that our parents did is, there's a million things, but the the kind of the two that really, um, the three that stand out are, they kind of showed us the world. They took us to the library every day. They sort of took us, you know, traveling in the summers. They, um, if there were interesting guests coming over for dinner, we weren't kind of, you know, dispatched, uh, you know, upstairs or told to get an early dinner before the adults came. We were sort of thrust right into the middle. So they kind of really took us seriously and showed us the world. Um, the second thing is they they really gave us kind of agency on autonomy and kind of treated us as adults. And, you know, that was kind of, it went two ways.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  And that on the one hand, they gave us a lot of freedom. On the other hand, they kind of expected quite a lot of us. And so our youngest brother had to get some pretty major surgery in the US back when John and I were, I don't know, maybe 10 or 12 or thereabouts. Uh, and so they were gone to the US for, um, several weeks, um, maybe more than a month. Uh, and we were left mostly alone, um, for for that month. Uh, we had a neighbor who Checked in on us every day and made sure things were fine, but we spent most of the time alone when we weren't at school. And they, from myself and John's standpoint, that was fantastic.

• 1:17:59Speaker 03

  We really, we loved the freedom, but of course, they reciprocally expected us not to give them cause to regret it. And then the third thing is, whenever we expressed interest in something, they really tried to find opportunities to kind of, when there was a small shoot of interest, they looked for opportunities to water it. But they never thrust those opportunities on us, or I never felt that kind of, or rather, they never thrust the interest on us. I never felt that I was following a track laid down by somebody else.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  And so I remember randomly mentioning, when I was 12 or 13, that learning, I don't even remember why I thought this, but the learning Ancient Greek seemed interesting. I think I just read some Homer or something, I mean, a translation, and the language seemed interesting. And I was just saying that as some kind of random throwaway remark, I guess, the way a kid does. And sure enough, my mom went and found somebody, like literally a local monastery, who was willing to teach Ancient Greek, and then she told me about this. And so for two years, I went to that monastery once a week after school and learned Ancient Greek. And that interest never went super far.

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  I haven't read much Ancient Greek in the last 10 years. Me neither. But, you know, yeah, but it was the kind of thing they did. And obviously, some other interests like programming, they really took hold in a deeper way. And so, I don't have kids today, but I do kind of...

• 1:19:47Speaker 03

  Reflect a lot on the kind of childhood we had because it was pretty different in multiple regards to sort of the childhood of the people around us and like especially when I got to college in the US, it was sort of so foreign for me, the idea that like people were so laden with extracurriculars and sort of burnishing their college resumes, you know, from age 12 or earlier and the kind of the period of sort of teenagerhood and adolescence was kind of so intense whereas for myself and John, it really felt kind of exploratory and that we were given a that our parents were kind of life coaches or

• 1:20:27Tim Ferriss?

  Like facilitators.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  mentors while we were, yeah, exactly, while we were roaming, but that kind of all the, yeah, exactly, I think that they were playing a supporting role rather than, you know, having us be kind of, you know, with these friends in college, it felt like they were kind of at the front of a locomotive and the locomotive is speeding along down the tracks and they're just kind of hanging on for dear life, being, you know, pushed along by the by the little cattle protector.

• 1:20:54Tim Ferriss?

  When when you had these dinners, this is something that is that has popped up a few times in conversations with a number of folks on the podcast, that parents had them included in specifically dinner discussions when interesting house guests would come over.

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  That's interesting. I never, it's interesting that that's coming out.

• 1:21:17Tim Ferriss?

  It's come up a few times, not dozens of times, but enough where it piques my curiosity to dig into it a bit. Would your parents encourage you to ask questions? Would they? Was there, and actually, just so people can paint a picture in their own minds, what, did both of your parents work? One of them, what did they do professionally or how did they spend their time? Just so we have a little context.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  So both of them worked. Our dad, for most of our childhood, ran a small, kind of lakeside hotel, 24 bedrooms. And so he was kind of, it was a few miles from our house and he spent a lot of time there. And of course, for us as kids, I mean, it was super exciting. I mean, this hotel was like this, this giant playground as far as we're concerned. You know, I think the staff didn't always appreciate that, but we loved roaming around it and going and sliding around the, you know, polished function room floor and all the rest. And our mom started a corporate training company back right around the time I was born. I think she, she had left her previous job and then I was born.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  And, you know, I think after a couple of weeks, she decided, oh, I don't know, this kid isn't that interesting. And so from the house, she decided to start this company that would kind of provide corporate quality management training. And so you've probably heard these acronyms like ISO 9000, these kind of certification programs.

• 1:22:42Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And so kind of through all these American multinationals setting up shop in Ireland, and there's kind of a lot of appetite for sort of making sure that we're kind of doing things properly and well and so on. And so she started this business, again, providing this training. And so basically, all through my childhood, she was running this business, well, for much of it out of her house, and then they kind of got a separate office. But sort of it was, it was always part of the picture. And so kind of from our standpoint, starting a company was really not some kind of strange foreign thing. It was, it was, it was pretty normal. I think whatever your parents do is kind of, almost, you know, from the child's perspective is just kind of, is normal. And I'm sure if our parents had been astronauts, you know, being an astronaut would just seem like a totally normal career.

• 1:23:26Speaker 03

  And so, so that's what they did.

• 1:23:29Tim Ferriss?

  And you mentioned travel.

• 1:23:33Tim Ferriss?

  Could you, was it, is there a particular trip that comes to mind? And I'd be curious, there are many different ways to travel. And there, just as there are many different ways to live and choose places to live and so on. So we, we probably won't have time to get into how your parents ended up where you grew up, if they started there or ended up there, which is a whole separate side of things.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:23:57Tim Ferriss?

  Could you describe perhaps a particularly memorable trip?

• 1:24:03Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:24:03Tim Ferriss?

  And how you traveled with your parents, like what that looked like?

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, so, so we went almost every summer camping in Europe. And so we'd take the ferry to Europe, which, you know, from Ireland obviously isn't that far. And we'd bring, you know, some tents or a little caravan. And we'd just go kind of driving around the continent, staying at all these different campgrounds. And Europe turns out to kind of have all these really great, nice campgrounds. Almost every town has one. And so we'd, you know, stay a few days here, maybe a week there and so on. And it would be France and Germany and Austria and Hungary and Italy and whatever. And I have these kind of incredibly fond memories of, of those trips. And I mean, they'd be like a month long.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  And, and they were great, I guess, because they were kind of long enough that you didn't feel kind of pressed for time. We're like, okay, today we got to go see, you know, this, that and the other. You kind of shifted into just kind of camping mode. And, and there were enough changes of scenery and environment that you sort of just got to take a whole lot of different things in. I mean, honestly, the other thing that was great about them is even though, you know, being in Ireland, there wasn't kind of a whole lot of distraction. We were able to just kind of, you know, read a lot or kind of focus on our own things. On these trips, you, you could focus and read even more. And so honestly, the most kind of vivid memories I have mostly of these trips,

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  it's not sort of going to see the such and such or so and so. It's like particular books that I read. And I mean, I remember, you know, we kind of load up the, the car and the caravan, which is like heaps and heaps of books. And, you know, you'd have these long drives, like, you know, eight hours, 10 hours, and just kind of reading in the car the whole way.

• 1:25:57Tim Ferriss?

  As I'm listening to your stories and more about your childhood and so on, a lot of which is brand new to me, I'm simultaneously looking at a page on your website, patrickcolson.com/advise. And this may not apply to everybody in my listenership. I think a lot of them do apply to many different age ranges, but it starts with if you're 10 to 20, these are prime years. So a lot of folks will fall outside of that, but I wanted to touch on a few of these.

• 1:26:32Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:26:33Tim Ferriss?

  And one is, alright, so these two kind of go together, but one is make things and then there's a line following it. But then following up on that, it says more broadly, "nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview."

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:26:55Tim Ferriss?

  "The correlation between it and those around you shouldn't be too strong unless you think you were especially lucky in your initial conditions," or, this is my language now, "you choose your environment like a place like San Francisco," or whatever it might be.

• 1:27:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:27:07Tim Ferriss?

  But the, and I suppose even then, if the correlation is too high, you should be careful.

• 1:27:12Speaker 03

  Absolutely, for sure, for sure.

• 1:27:14Tim Ferriss?

  But the, so Mike, my question here is going to be a little meandering, so bear with me, but, okay, there are people who seem to not care what other people think and develop their own worldviews because they have a predisposition in that direction, in the sense that you can have a very good basketball player, there are certain skills you can work on to become a better basketball player, but if they say you should try as hard as possible to be tall, it's going to be difficult to change that attribute. There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who...

• 1:27:56Tim Ferriss?

  Are somewhere on the spectrum, let's say, and have may actually have diagnosable, say, Asperger's, which in some previous times could have been a very maladaptive trait.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:28:10Tim Ferriss?

  That would have been a selection criteria for removal from the gene pool that is now, in this new context, in fact, in some instances, a competitive advantage because their sort of lack of absorbing worldviews from others or feeling that pressure enables them to come up with their own perspective and orientation.

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:28:35Tim Ferriss?

  So if we filter those people out, right, because they may be similarly difficult to imitate in a sense as a basketball player is to imitate in their height, how are there any books, any documentaries, any approaches, or just any mental models or anything at all that people can use to internalize thinking for themselves, to practice coming up with their own worldview, like, what is, what are your thoughts?

• 1:29:09Speaker 03

  Well, this is kind of the, this is the big question, right?

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  And yeah, maybe there are kind of two halves to it. What are heuristics you should have and use for kind of who and what to listen to? And then, yeah, secondly, separately, how do you, how do you think for yourself? And I think, okay, I'll start enumerating some particular heuristics or tricks. I'm not sure this is a complete answer, but the first is when you see a smart person

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  holding a point of view, and especially strongly holding a point of view, that's kind of different to your own, rather than trying to figure out how they're wrong, trying to, I mean, that's valuable, but you'll inevitably do that. You're kind of, your emotional brain will ensure you do, trying to figure out how they're right, like. What is a sensible worldview in which what they believe or what they're saying actually kind of does make sense? And that doesn't mean they're right, but sort of trying to figure out, like, if they're not stupid, why would they believe this? And so, you know, I am, I'm personally, you know, very in favor of kind of openness to immigration. I've obviously benefited from it myself.

• 1:30:31Speaker 03

  I think there should be more of it in the world. But I think we can't just kind of dismiss people who oppose immigration as kind of, you know, nativist bigots. I think we're gonna have to ask the questions and just try to understand, well, what could or would cause somebody to harbor concerns there, right? So that's one, sort of trying to figure out what worldview helps have a view make sense. A second one is, and we kind of touched on this at the beginning of the conversation, just exposing yourself to more worldviews. Because I think a lot of people, well, everyone finds it more comfortable to be around kind of views that accord with your own and models that accord with your own.

• 1:31:14Speaker 03

  And so there's a kind of deliberate seeking out of discomfort. And, you know, I do some of this myself in kind of who I follow on Twitter and what I read and even who I spend time with, sort of trying to make sure that, like, I expose myself to people who have kind of smart, thoughtful, and really like pretty different perspectives on important matters.

• 1:31:40Tim Ferriss?

  Can you, I have to pause because this just seems too fertile to let go quickly. Are there any people on Twitter you could give as examples? You just said they're smart and thoughtful, so you're, it's not, you know, you're already complimenting them.

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right. You know.

• 1:31:57Tim Ferriss?

  We could also bookmark and come back to it if it's hard to come up with.

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I have a, let me see if I can think of a few. Let me think about that and come back. But it's a good question. And maybe the other one is the kind of general heuristic or habit here or something is just to not get mad and to not get offended in that, you know, outrage and offense and anger are They're sometimes useful, of course, but I think they're sort of useful.

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  They're less useful than, well, they're overutilized. They're not useful as often as they are invoked. And I think, for whatever reason, the kind of, the ability to not take offense and to kind of, to sort of inspect and to try to understand and to even try to kind of really extrapolate from an idea or a set of ideas or a worldview without taking offense at it, that's not something that for whatever reason is kind of really valued in our culture, but I think is actually super important.

• 1:33:26Speaker 03

  Can you, as has been said, can you run an idea in emulation in your head? Like in computers, people talk about, you know, running VMs, right? I mean, AWS, you upload your software, your code, they run it on their servers, but they run it in emulation and they kind of, in a little sandbox to make sure that it can't kind of break out and affect other users' applications. And so kind of similarly, can you run an idea and scrutinize it and inspect it and kind of follow its consequences, you know, without it kind of bleeding out into kind of the rest of your brain and sort of infecting your whole worldview? I think the ability to do that without kind of getting angry or taking offense is really

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  super powerful because if you can do that, you can then afford to kind of, in a way, you can be less careful about what ideas you inspect and scrutinize. And so you can just kind of, you can be much more sort of far-reaching and kind of broadly-ranging. And then...

• 1:34:28Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any people in your life or who you're aware of you particularly respect for being good at? Doing this, doing this meaning being non emotionally reactive to opposing viewpoints. And I should say also, I'm looking at your followers on Twitter, which people can find at Patrick C. That's your account. And I just want to give an example of two contrasts. So you have one harsh Sika, S I K K A.

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:34:57Tim Ferriss?

  Bio, applying biological constraints to building intelligent, robust and generalizable systems at Harvard, at Georgia Tech, at UC San Diego, right next to at Relo Almighty, Almighty Relo. And bio is Almighty Relo the Hustler. Say hello to the bad guy. They say I'm a bad guy, dot, dot, dot. So those are a lot of professors, a lot of researchers. Also, here's a friend of mine you follow, Graham Duncan, really interesting guy.

• 1:35:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, he's awesome. Um, I made a list of some people I follow at PatrickHawson.com/People. And I wouldn't say that all of them are excellent at this, at sort of, sort of not taking offense and at sort of trying to find the best in some particular idea, or trying to find, you know, whatever truth is in it. But I would say as a general matter, they are.

• 1:35:55Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. And why is it, when I look at some of your posts?

• 1:36:04Speaker 03

  I also have a Twitter list called Reading, which is basically the same list, but it's been easy, easy to follow format. And so, you know, anyone can go follow that list. And I think actually a reasonable number of people now do.

• 1:36:17Tim Ferriss?

  And you seem to, whether it's Reading or People, have an intense interest in, I'm looking at your PatrickHawson.com/People right now. Yeah, you do have some great, John Arnold is definitely worth checking out for a lot of folks who will not recognize that name. Of course, Stuart Brand, a lot, lots of, lots of good people on this list. So I encourage people to check this out. But coming back to one name that popped up when I was looking on your Twitter account, which I think you also recently. Shared pseudo Erasmus.

• 1:36:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:36:49Tim Ferriss?

  So Economic History and Development Economics. This feed contains no current events, no political news, no culture, and no capital letters, history of economic thought. Why do you seem so interested in economics, economic progress? In some cases, economic history certainly can seem very niche, but I suspect there's a lot more to that. Labor repression and the Indo-Japanese divergence is the pinned tweet by pseudo Erasmus. Why read so much of this type of stuff?

• 1:37:25Speaker 03

  Because it's so important in that arguably the single most important thing kind of about our lives compared to other lives that have lived in human history is that we have the immense good fortune to have been born in wealthy societies. And that has had so many consequences in our lives, right? I mean, it means that our, you know, our parents are way more likely to be alive, our siblings are far more likely to be alive. We get to work on things we find sort of way more interesting than, you know, tilling in the fields or foraging for bushes. It means we're sort of exposed to kind of the full, you know, a more complete picture

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  of the kind of variety and complexity and fascination or fascinating material of the world. I don't need to obviously enumerate all of this, but just like it's astounding compared to sort of all humans who ever lived, just how amazingly lucky we are. And again, that luck is we were born into a wealthy society. And so I think kind of one of the most urgent and important moral questions is why doesn't everyone get to do that? And how can we change the world such that more people do? Last week, I was in Africa.

• 1:38:48Speaker 03

  I was in countries including Senegal and Ethiopia and Rwanda. And those countries are obviously far less wealthy than the US. And the people there have far less opportunity. And their lives are far less comfortable. And so I think there's a real moral question. What can we do to put them on an equal footing with us? And indeed, how can we raise the waterline for all of us? Such that, you know, while our lives are amazing compared to the people who lived, you know, before us, you know, there's still tons of terrible things that happen. You know, people die of cancer. And people die of death caused by pollution.

• 1:39:33Speaker 03

  And, you know, while some people in society today get, you know, fantastic educations and have the good fortune to have, you know, great colleagues and meaningful work, you know, a lot of people don't, et cetera, et cetera. And so I see kind of economics and economic history as being really a kind of moral anthropology and sort of cultural analysis and structural analysis of, well, how do we solve this centrally, foundationally, this question that really takes primacy?

• 1:40:09Tim Ferriss?

  And if you, if, I want to thin slice this a little bit and dig, dig on this because it's, it's something that I've thought a lot about without any concrete conclusions that have bounced around quite a bit. And I'll explain what I mean by that. So the, the question that I'll want to ask, but I'll give some, some background on my personal experience is, if, if we are using a term like economic progress or, or economic prosperity, what the component pieces are of that that have the, the greatest benefits and the fewest side effects?

• 1:40:54Tim Ferriss?

  And the reason I... Phrase it that way is I've I've also spent some time in Africa, not in not certainly, I would I would doubt in as many countries as you have, but I've spent time in Kenya and spent time in Ethiopia and in Ethiopia was mostly in the Tigray region in some very, very poor areas. And I was chatting with a lot of the folks we interacted with, those who those who spoke English or those with whom I could communicate through translator. And something that's one thing that struck me in Ethiopia was how much people smiled. Yes.

• 1:41:35Tim Ferriss?

  Now, that doesn't mean they don't need clean drinking water, does not mean they wouldn't benefit from footwear in some instances. There are all sorts of there are all sorts of not just comforts, but necessities and infrastructure that would almost certainly have tremendous upside and benefits with very few downside. Yes. Possibilities. And I was talking to some people who lived in Tigray about how happy Ethiopians seem to be. And I heard on several occasions, it wasn't just one, these were in different locations, people say, oh, yeah, people are really happy until they get TV.

• 1:42:19Tim Ferriss?

  And I and I asked them why that was. And they said, well, once we get TV, we they didn't use these words exactly, but in effect, once we can see the Kardashians and all of the amazing things and toys and cars and and fashion options that all these other people have, we become dissatisfied with where we are and what we have. So that kind of stuck with me and I didn't have a resolution to that necessarily. But how do you how do you think about which components you're trying to solve for or to optimize for?

• 1:42:56Speaker 03

  So I think happiness is certainly kind of a tricky measure, right? And as you say, there's kind of this sort of sociological and kind of comparative version of it. And the phenomenon is seen where kind of, to some degree, I guess this is another version or another way of saying what you just alluded to, which is the kind of the happiness you have with your level of wealth is kind of a function of the wealth of those around you. And so if you find out about more people who are above you in some income table, that might actually kind of depress your happiness slightly. However, it's also kind of pretty robustly the case that there are some things that

• 1:43:39Speaker 03

  are just kind of absolute inputs into happiness and that, you know, kind of your health or chronic pain or whether your kids die or not or whatever, you know, these really do matter, right? And I think in the example of Ethiopia, I mean, while kind of on the one hand, I think, you know, as I guess you saw, you know, it's not like this is a country where sort of everyone is sort of in the perpetual depth of despair. It does rank in the in the bottom half of sort of, you know, global happiness surveys. And actually, Max Roser has this, you know, he does a lot of kind of data visualization

• 1:44:24Speaker 03

  around kind of development economics, and he has this wonderful visualization, this kind of scatter plot of happiness against kind of per capita income. And sure enough, what you see is it's certainly not a, you know, a perfect correlation. There are all these other factors, maybe kind of cultural effects or these, again, comparative questions and so on. But broadly speaking, the correlation really is very, very strong. And so I guess another version of maybe the kind of complexity you're getting at is when you look at this kind of these intertemporal comparisons, when you sort of look back at how people, how happy they reported themselves as being, you know, 60 years ago. You know, obviously, they had kind of, you know, inferior health outcomes or they didn't

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  have as many leisure options or they couldn't travel as much or whatever. So, you know, their kind of lives on some objective level were worse. But, you know, their happiness scores aren't that bad because, you know, I guess, you know, on some level, they kind of didn't know what was missing. But I see that as more being a More being something that's tricky about happiness surveys than something about kind of fundamental human wellbeing in that if I like the fact that our baseline shifts as we realize that better is possible does not mean that the gains are illusory.

• 1:45:44Speaker 03

  And if, you know, if if half of my kids died, but I still scored myself as being pretty happy because I didn't even realize that some, you know, that not having that happen was even an option, you know, I such that when that problem was solved, my kind of self-reported level didn't change that much as I, you know, adjusted to the new normal, I don't think that means that that gain, that improvement is not very, very real.

• 1:46:13Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sure. Totally. And I was.

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  Not that's what you're saying. I know. I think the core point you're making about the complexity of happiness surveys, I think, is 100% right.

• 1:46:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's very, very slippery and.

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  Yes. Actually, Scott Alexander, Slates Our Codex, has a really good blog post about just like the trickiness of these kind of happiness surveys, where I think the core message and data from them is kind of correct, but but kind of a lot of specific, I think, interpretations and kind of comparisons about to make are a little bit fraught.

• 1:46:46Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, not to, I don't want to cast aspersions on all social sciences or anything like that. A lot of it gets very squishy and it's so highly multivariate when you're trying to assess something like this in the field that even the definitions by which the polls or surveys are being conducted get very, very subjective. And I was looking at a recent National Geographic, I suppose I would call it a.

• 1:47:16Tim Ferriss?

  Pole, it was reasonably well constructed for what I could tell, to try to assess the happiest places on earth. And what I found striking about it was was was not necessarily the some of the the frontrunners, although I did find how different they were interesting in the sense that you have, let's say Denmark, Singapore, which is particularly interesting because it's so brand new in a lot of respects. And it was kind of a grand experiment. And Costa Rica, very different places. What I but what I found striking was that Bhutan,

• 1:47:55Tim Ferriss?

  which is talked about all the time as among, for lack of a better term, kind of hippie new age circles as being very forward thinking because they focus on what was it like gross national happiness instead of GDP, is in fact, one of the most unhappy places. And that something like gross national happiness can be used as kind of a, don't look at this thing in front of you, look over here, because we're focusing on it can be looked, it can be used as a distracting factor from the from the things that are actually quantifiably bad. Yes. So there's that. What have you found? I mean, in so we've talked about the,

• 1:48:39Tim Ferriss?

  I suppose, the certain aspects of the wide divergence of economic prosperity across the world. My my question would then be, now what? Right? What are what are the levers to to pull? What actually matters? I mean, there are a lot of people squandering a lot of attention and energy trying to fix this in a thousand ways, 900 of which probably aren't going to amount to much. What are the what are the Archimedes levers in a situation like this?

• 1:49:14Speaker 03

  Well, I guess the first thing I'd say is I think that question you just asked is the big question that I think we should all be obsessed with. Like, I think, you know, I think you should ask every guest that question. I think people should be, people in positions of influence or where they can have, you know, great impact, like, they should be obsessed with it. It is the, it's, it is an issue of true moral importance. I don't think there's going to be any silver bullets and kind of panaceas. And, I mean, obviously Stripe is kind of, you know, one iron in that fire, where with

• 1:49:57Speaker 03

  Stripe, you know, we hope to contribute, I mean, we frame our mission as to grow the GDP of the internet, I mean, kind of very directly around economic growth. And like, on some level, you know, that sounds pretty arcane, I don't think there are many other companies that sort of are, you know, framing their mission relative to GDP, but I mean, it really does get back to this, this idea we've been discussing, where I think that's actually like a very urgent cause. I think, roughly speaking, you can sort of break it down in two ways, this kind of, actually maybe, maybe three ways, where this kind of, how do you raise the level of countries that are kind of behind the frontier? So, emerging markets, developing countries, how do you raise them to kind of where we are today?

• 1:50:40Speaker 03

  And there are these kind of tantalizing examples, that like, that is actually possible. And so you look at, you mentioned Singapore, you look at Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, to some degree Vietnam, of course China, though China still has quite a ways to go. But, I mean, there are these amazing examples of countries that have really transformed themselves in remarkably short periods of time. You know, South Korea is perhaps kind of the best example, just in terms of the magnitude of the change in like, just a couple of decades. And so, you know, we might think, like, perhaps if you, if you look at Africa, and kind of no other countries existed, you might say, well, just inevitably, it takes centuries for this catch-up to happen, and, you know, maybe we can kind of accelerate it a little

• 1:51:23Speaker 03

  bit, but like, you know, there's no way this can happen overnight. That's empirically not true. We have these examples of countries in which it happened, you know, in a kind of, in a grand arc of history sense, it happened essentially overnight. And so what is it about South Korea that kind of made that possible? And can we enact the same transformation in Egypt or in Ethiopia? So I think that's kind of one dimension of the question. I think the other dimension is how do we, how do we advance at the frontier? And so if you think about, you know, Western Europe or North America or Singapore or Japan, whatever, how do we, how do we make progress here? And I think so much of that is how do we, how do we enable new things to happen?

• 1:52:08Speaker 03

  How do we have new technology get deployed? How do we have entrepreneurs start more companies? How do we unleash the potential of more people who want to do more weird things? How do we make sure that when somebody spots an opportunity for improvement that doesn't get kind of squished by the kind of, you know, stultifying sort of deceleration of the status quo? How do we make sure that it gets kind of encouraged and amplified? And again, obviously kind of Stripe is, you know, an effort in this space, as Indeed too is, is Pioneer. And the third one is, well, how do we, how do we just generate new knowledge? How do we, you know, understand the world more deeply and just what is it, you know,

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  intrinsically possible so that, you know, so we have more buttons to push on the, on the sort of, on the switchboard? And so I kind of break it down in those sort of three ways, and I think they're, they're all kind of quite different questions and all really incredibly important.

• 1:53:06Tim Ferriss?

  I agree that they are very important, and I'd love to revisit for a second, if you have any thoughts, South Korea, it's come up a few times. What, what are some of the observations you've made or things that you think are interesting about South Korea? Like the, anything, any specifics of what they've done?

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

  Well, ironically, it's actually the, it's the richest country in the world by GDP that I've not been to. So, so, you know, I caveat my answer with, with sort of that.

• 1:53:47Speaker 03

  Having said that, there's actually a really good book on this topic called How Asia Works by Joe Studwell, I believe. And basically, he's trying to answer kind of exactly this question of why, you know, why did South Korea and Taiwan and China and Vietnam and so forth, why did they diverge from Philippines and from Indonesia and, you know, to a significant degree from India and so forth? And basically, the answer he gives, and he marshals kind of fairly compelling evidence

• 1:54:24Speaker 03

  for it, is the following: land reform, protected but competitive industrial and kind of export industries, and then third, tight control over the consumer credit sector. And that obviously seems like a very kind of arbitrary basket of things, but he makes a pretty strong case for it. And, you know, just to provide a little bit of color on that, like, the idea is that kind of first, you want to make sure that people own their own land so they can kind of farm it more effectively, they can kind of reap the rewards, the fruits of their own labor, and so that kind of gives you this immediate bump in kind of national income when people, you know, can sort of invest in something they really own themselves.

• 1:55:07Speaker 03

  The second thing is, well, most of these countries have no kind of meaningful, you know, export industries or these kind of, you know, value-added export industries, and so you kind of want to encourage the creation of like a national car company or something, which of course, South Korea successfully did, or maybe do some electronics manufacturing or whatever. And you want to kind of subsidize that, but you do have to force them to compete internationally because they just kind of, if you just protect them and they just serve the domestic markets, you'll just end up with a worse and less efficient version of stuff that exists in the rest of the world. So you've got to force them to compete. And the third one is, you want to kind of restrain the consumer credit industry such that sort of rather than, you know, giving credit to consumers to go and, you know, spend it on leisure or whatever it is, I guess, that consumers might choose to do, that

• 1:55:51Speaker 03

  you kind of direct all of that towards industrialization, economic progress, and sort of catch Up growth with the rest of the world. And then, once you catch up, you know, then maybe you should kind of give it to consumers because, you know, who else are you going to give it to? You've reached the frontier. But the thesis of the book is that kind of reining it in in the development phases has really served those countries well. So that is basically the prescription as Joe against Studwell lays it out. And I'm no expert here, but I've really spent quite a bit of time sort of trying to better understand this question. And it's certainly the best cut that I've seen. Another one that's kind of worth mentioning is James Fallows wrote a piece for The Atlantic back in the 90s called, it's not called How the World Works, but it's some title like that.

• 1:56:35Speaker 03

  But if you search kind of James Fallows trade and if you include List, this German economist as a search term, then you'll find it. And it's again, kind of about, it's basically about the South Korea question.

• 1:56:48Tim Ferriss?

  Great. And I'll put all of these links. There have been a few things that have come up with maybe reference checks required. So for people listening, I will have my team check on all that stuff and we'll put links into the show notes. So you'll be able to find those at tim.blog/podcast. On South Korea, just to add the, a maybe ridiculous sidebar. Another head scratcher about South Korea is that for many years in the last decade, they have produced the best break dancers in the world. And people who are curious to see what that looks like can check out B-Boy Pocket for some ridiculous footage.

• 1:57:31Tim Ferriss?

  And how that came to be is also a gigantic mystery to me. But I'm hoping that perhaps I can find online, there is a, I want to say, The History of Japan in Nine Minutes, something like that on YouTube, which accomplishes that feat by omitting most proper nouns, particularly names of people. But it gives you a really nice synopsis. I'm going to try to find something similar for South Korea and put it in. The show notes. So we have just a little bit of time left. What I would love to talk about, because this is something that I, I feel like I'm pretty good at, and this is

• 1:58:10Tim Ferriss?

  decision making, but I still know there is a ton of room for improvement. And I, in the process of preparing for this conversation, came across a transcript of a conversation in which you talked about increasing the speed of decision making. And it made me think a little bit of, I think it's the Eisenhower matrix of sort of prioritizing the important but not timely quadrant and so on. But could you talk about making your, your framework for making decisions, or how you have cultivated making faster decisions? Because this is,

• 1:58:53Tim Ferriss?

  I think, so important, and it's along with the, the involvement of now successful entrepreneurs as kids at the dinner table. The focus on making fast decisions, even if there's like a 10% or more error rate, pops up a lot. Like Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn fame, another kind of good example of that. I would love to hear you talk, talk us through that, because on a day-to-day basis, I know that's important, and yet I just, I need a kind of methodical way to practice it more, if that makes sense.

• 1:59:34Speaker 03

  Yes. Let me think for a second. I think that, I actually think that decision making is probably a little bit overrated as, as kind of a question, in that

• 1:59:50Speaker 03

  Or an area of study in that investors, obviously, this is their job, right? And that's kind of all they can do in some sense, invest or not. And, you know, find if they're, you know, certain kinds of investors get to actually help the companies they invest in, and so they have kind of other levers at their disposal, but kind of in some simplified model, it's like, you know, do you click the button or not, do you pull a lever or not? And I actually think that kind of in our lives, things rarely have that character. Sometimes you have a true binary decision, right? Like, do I go to this college or that college? Do I take this job offer or not? And it's sort of, it's a sort of an investing or investment-like decision.

• 2:00:33Speaker 03

  But it's not usually that. And I think that the kind of, the question I would sort of encourage people to kind of think more about is, how do I get to make better decisions? As in, how do I make sure that the decisions I'm confronted with end up being better? Like, you know, it's not like, how should I choose an option A and B? But how do I make sure that both options A and B are as good as possible? And there's also C, D, and E, and that those options are great, too. And that's about sort of how do you, how do you explore the space to make sure that you sort of, actually, well, just to kind of return to maybe the example we just mentioned, it's like, you know, do I go to this college or that college?

• 2:01:16Speaker 03

  It's, I mean, there's also a C there, which is, well, should I go to college? Or it's, you know, should I, should I become a doctor or a dentist? But, you know, maybe the answer is that, you know, you should, you should become a biochemist. And so the way I find myself in conversations with people is really trying to push them. It's less on sort of how do you make a decision and more about how do you? Jolt yourself out of the kind of particular kind of furrows that you're in and realize the possibility space and the world is just so much bigger than perhaps people are thinking

• 2:02:01Speaker 03

  about it. And so, I mean, it happens to all of us. It happens to me. The kind of, your horizon's narrow, you get stuck in your existing models, you kind of get used to conceiving of the world and the options in front of you in a particular way. And it's more about how do you repeatedly pull yourself out of that. How do you do that? Are there questions you ask? Are there? I, um, I think, I think certain, certain people are great at this. Like, I have a friend, Michael Nielsen, and What was the last name? Nielsen, and N-I-E-L-S-E-N. And he's just exceptionally good at sort of, you know, you're sort of, you know, thinking, well, should I go up or down?

• 2:02:44Speaker 03

  And he's just great at sort of pointing out all the different ways in which you could go sideways. And it's like, or, you know, you're, you're, you're sort of living in flatland on this kind of two-dimensional plane, and he points out, maybe you could go up. And, and so I guess the best, yeah, the, the best ways that I found are sort of particular people, people who just sort of seem to think laterally, and kind of, in my head, they're kind of thinking sideways. And, and I think the second best way is exposing yourself to kind of more perspective and ideas, you know, in all the ways we've kind of already discussed. But I think finding the people who just think a bit divergently, the returns are really high.

• 2:03:29Speaker 03

  And I think having, having that sort of little board of directors around you, that's kind of an imperfect analogy, because it's not like there's a specific set for me. I kind of tend to go to different kinds of people for different kinds of issues, and it's not like they actually have any formal power, obviously. But just kind of that notion of there being these sources of perspective that are quite different to you, I think that's, I think it's just really very powerful. I think valuing those people and, and building those relationships really pays off. There's, there's a, this, you mentioning that, the

• 2:04:05Tim Ferriss?

  Peer group or virtual or real board of directors with divergent thought processes made me think of a book that really helped me a long time ago. I've been meaning to revisit it, but it's actually a combination of two books. And I don't know how well these would age if I were to pick them up now for where I am, but I would want to say about 15 or 20 years ago, found them very, very helpful. Edward de Bono is the author. There's one book, I want to say it's lateral thinking. The other was something along the lines of the six thinking hats. And the conceit or the premise behind the latter is that you

• 2:04:46Tim Ferriss?

  create a virtual table of advisors who represent different, a different extreme perspective, right? So you might have the pessimist, you might have the innovator, you might have the fill in the blank, and there are a set of questions and priorities that each of those have. So you run your situation through the lens of each of those thinking hats. And I found that tremendously valuable for, as you put it, getting out of flatland.

• 2:05:18Speaker 03

  Well, and the amazing thing is, well, I read about this study. I've not confirmed whether or not it has replicated, but the idea that people can improve their own decision making by simply choosing other people, I mean, basically exactly along the lines of what you just said, and imagining what they would say, like specific other people, imagining what they would say, and then averaging over the responses. But that's like a really amazing fact, because of course, this is all occurring in your own head. And so the idea that by kind of just simulating other people, and then again, kind of performing this kind of averaging computation over their responses, that's actually better, is really like a

• 2:06:01Speaker 03

  pretty trippy thought. And yet, I mean, it kind of makes sense to you, right? Because you can actually, for certain people, predict, I think, with relatively good accuracy, what they're likely to say. That's kind of a way of getting out of your own biases.

• 2:06:14Tim Ferriss?

  Totally. And in fact, I haven't done the averaging of responses, but I do have a number of friends. Who have very well-developed characteristics I would like to develop more myself. And one of them who comes to mind is Matt Mullenweg.

• 2:06:33Speaker 03

  He's great.

• 2:06:35Tim Ferriss?

  He's amazing guy, CEO of a company called Automatic, M A T T Automatic. If people can put the two together now. So Matt Mullenweg, Automatic, in any case, brilliant guy, not to be confused with Octomatic. But so Matt Mullenweg.

• 2:06:49Speaker 03

  Automatic is way, way, way more successful than Octomatic ever was.

• 2:06:54Tim Ferriss?

  So Matt, Matt Mullenweg is one of the calmest people on average I've ever met. And this is particularly noticeable when he is going through circumstances or encountering business situations or personal situations that would elicit a really strong emotional response from most people I know, even high achieving people. So I very often, when I am, feel myself on the verge of getting spun up about a given situation, will ask myself, what would Matt say?

• 2:07:33Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 2:07:34Tim Ferriss?

  Because I've had him talk me off the ledge so many times, away from making rash, ultimately would have been really bad decisions, often some type of quick emotional response to who knows what, it could have been anything. And so I have found that really useful and I've done that also with people like Richard Feynman, for instance. Surely, I think it's, surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, one of my favorite books of all time. So it does not have, it does not have to be someone you know in a direct, personal

• 2:08:14Tim Ferriss?

  sense, but it helps if it is someone who you have, you feel you know well, right? And so I'm glad you mentioned that because I've personally used that. Matt, for whatever reason, I suppose for many reasons, tends to be one I go to a lot because I wouldn't say that calmness is always my defining strong suit.

• 2:08:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I think having those, that pantheon of people, both kind of.

• 2:08:43Speaker 03

  People you actually know and then sort of, you know, people you know from afar and maybe they're living, maybe they're dead, is just super powerful. And I guess there's something about kind of us as humans where we're sort of uniquely well adapted to being influenced by and understanding other humans. And so, sort of, rather than, I think, thinking about sort of decision making purely this kind of abstract science, but actually embracing the fact that it has this kind of deeply human character to it, and, you know, you can really kind of use that to your advantage. And, you know, I'm sure many, I know many guests in the show have talked about the importance of kind of being deliberate and

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  intentional and kind of selecting your peer group and the people who influence you. As in, you know, one thing you can do is you can sort of try to make sure that people around you don't influence you too much, and that you kind of are, you know, truly original and coming up with their own thoughts and so on. Or you can embrace the fact that they do and they inevitably will, and just be careful about who they are. And try to make sure that they'll shape you in sort of ways and directions as you want to be shaped. And I think that's both more effective, but also a more fulfilling way to go about it.

• 2:09:58Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to confess also that I thought, when you were talking about binary decisions first, whether it be investing or, say, college, where I thought you might go, which I'm glad you didn't, because now we have more to discuss, is that there are many decisions where you cannot possibly make an informed

• 2:10:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:10:27Tim Ferriss?

  decision based on complete information.

• 2:10:30Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:30Tim Ferriss?

  And that's part of the reason why I find Eisenhower very interesting to study, is that he had a lot of military experience, in which case you cannot, you do not have the luxury of taking forever to gather information to make a decision. And in many cases, you, the only way you can have more complete information is to make what might be

• 2:10:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:10:52Tim Ferriss?

  Wrong decision and then and then course correct.

• 2:10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. This is back to this point, I think, of you're dead right to kind of flag this. And I think it's back to this idea that just try to get better. Try to get yourself into a position in which you can make a better decision. And one way you can do that is by kind of exploring for more options right now. Another way you can do that is just make the decision and like remake it if you have to, because that can. The remaking of us can often be a better decision because you'll have much better information. Once it's augmented with or once you have the kind of additional information that, hey, this branch really does not look promising. And I know that because I tried it for, you know, two months. And again, I think another way in which the kind of framework of sort of optimizing decision making

• 2:11:37Speaker 03

  can be kind of a little bit harmful is it sort of characterizes. Or I guess it focuses on the locus of the decision itself, whereas who cares? You don't necessarily need to be sort of that good at decision making if you sort of get really good at remaking the decisions when and as necessary. You know, you mentioned that, you know, I fly, you know, both John and I have been flying for more than 10 years. And, you know, when you're when you're flying a landing, you're always off track, always off track. And, you know, if you if you if sort of there was a big discussion of like, how do you make sure that you get established on like precisely the right glide slope when you start? You know, I don't think that'd really be that productive. I think it'd be sort of pretty frustrating.

• 2:12:21Speaker 03

  Instead, it's all about like the constant feedback and course and error correction. And I think that's kind of as a general matter, a better model for life. And that even a lot of the decisions that look pretty trapped or may not necessarily be. There's a really good book that I very highly recommend called The Inner Game of Tennis. It's kind of.

• 2:12:44Tim Ferriss?

  Timothy Timothy Gall, right?

• 2:12:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And, you know, obviously, one of the kind of general messages of that book is that so much of doing things well is about being really good at seeing just what is happening. And kind of then sort of training your conscious and subconscious to kind of make the requisite corrections. And that intuition really resonates with me.

• 2:13:06Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so glad you mentioned that and it it's reinforced, I think, a directional change for me or not not really it's it's not a directional change it's a like reformatting of the thinking about the problem, right? Because you could have the best solutions imaginable for the wrong problems and you're not going to get where you want to go. In my case,

• 2:13:27Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:13:27Tim Ferriss?

  I think I focused excessively on getting better at decision making without really refining that to say that, you know, perhaps the better question to ask is how can I get better at or better could mean faster, develop more confidence in experimenting very quickly and then undoing or redoing the decision. Because that is, that is, you know, for instance, I've in the last year focused on getting very good at renegotiating commitments, which I think for a long time philosophically or morally I was just objected to it until I realized that all of the people I know, I shouldn't say all, but most who are kind

• 2:14:11Tim Ferriss?

  of paragons of execution will occasionally just say, fuck, I bit off more than I can chew. I need to go back and renegotiate some of these. I need to go back and have uncomfortable conversations and wipe my calendar of the handful of things that I committed to six months ago because it just does, I have more information now. It does not make sense.

• 2:14:28Speaker 03

  Yep, yep, yep. And there's all the kind of hyperbolic discounting that we engage in with regard to our future selves and over commitments that ensue and all the rest. And I think also, well, there's another, I think, fabulous book that kind of touches on some of this, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming.

• 2:14:44Tim Ferriss?

  The Art of Doing Science and Engineering?

• 2:14:47Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. And the last chapter especially, I mean, the whole book to some degree, but especially the last chapter is, I think, really applicable to and relevant to really almost anyone. The last chapter is called You and Your Research. It's actually kind of a talk that I'm sure a lot of people listening to the show have have previously kind of read or heard. But Hamming worked at Bell Labs and he, in the book, kind of often quotes and cites John Tukey, this amazing guy who sort of also worked at Bell Labs and is the sort of father of of data visualization. And like a lot of kind of

• 2:15:29Speaker 03

  Data visualizations and analyses that we're familiar with, that we think of as being standard, you know, John Tukey actually invented. But there's this Tukey line that it's far better to have an approximate answer to the right question, you know, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. And again, I think this gets back to the same idea that it's somehow more important to be making the right decisions, to have the right options than to be perfect at choosing between a specific set of options.

• 2:16:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right. You know what? Yeah, that's really on. I would like to sit and digest that myself. And so it's probably just for recency bias for people listening, a good place to start wrapping up. And I know where we could go for hours more, so maybe we'll do another round sometime.

• 2:16:21Speaker 03

  That'd be great.

• 2:16:22Tim Ferriss?

  But are there any parting recommendations, requests, suggestions, words of wisdom, anything at all? Questions you'd like to pose to the audience in a place where they can respond, or a way in which they can respond? Anything at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up?

• 2:16:40Speaker 03

  I mean, I guess to whatever extent... Well, I wrote in that list of advice that if people around you don't think what you're doing is sort of a bit strange, that maybe it's not strange enough. And I don't think you should always be heeding that, but I do often wish that people did more strange things in service of, or in pursuit of, real sort of long-term economic and technological progress. And so, you know, that's kind of figuring out how to help people to do more weird, strange,

• 2:17:25Speaker 03

  and original things in service of that is kind of... That's my particular goal, trying to arm those upstarts and those misfits. And, you know, but it's a very big space. And I would, you know, very profoundly welcome more participants pushing for that cause.

• 2:17:50Tim Ferriss?

  Here, here. And people can give a wave of hello on Twitter at Patrick C.

• 2:17:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:17:57Tim Ferriss?

  They can-

• 2:17:57Speaker 03

  And by the way, I think your podcast is a fabulous effort in this direction.

• 2:18:02Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks so much. That really means a lot. And that's certainly a hope of mine. I mean, that is a hope of mine. I so enjoy having these conversations. And it's opened so many doors for me in terms of my own thinking and questioning so many of my own assumptions. That, you know, I hope cumulatively that it does help nudge things into a more positive direction along the lines that you mentioned. So I appreciate you saying that.

• 2:18:35Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, no, I won't bore you or flatter you with praise here. But I think, I mean, to my perspective, certainly, and I listen to a lot of podcasts, that there's kind of a lineage of podcasts that can kind of be traced back to this show. That there's a model that you prototyped and have continued to implement. That now a lot of other podcasts are kind of somehow, you know, a different version of.

• 2:19:11Tim Ferriss?

  Which, you know what, which I'm excited about because hopefully they'll do an even better job. And I've been so excited to see certainly Jocko Willink run off and create his entire empire. And then you have Cal Fussman and Peter Tia and others. It's really fun. And Hamilton Morris, I'm waiting for your podcast, Hamilton, too, as are thousands of people.

• 2:19:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And right. And, you know, these aren't competitive in the sense that, you know, Robinson Crusoe was kind of one of the first novels and, you know, turns out that was a big space. And it was not a bad thing when more novelists came along. And so kind of similarly, I actually think that sort of, I'm not even sure the podcast space is the podcast space per se. It's more the sort of the serious, in-depth, long-form exploration. But even though that obviously is kind of way bigger now than it was five years ago, it still seems to me that it's actually still quite early.

• 2:20:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's so early. I agree. It's really, really early. I had people tell me when I was contemplating starting a podcast that the ship had already sailed. I mean, it's a pretty smart people with a lot of experience and they were telling me then that the ship had sailed and I'm telling anyone who's considering starting a podcast now that it's not even close. The ship hasn't even been built.

• 2:20:33Speaker 03

  This is one of them really interesting and surprising things where people keep feeling that spaces are too late, when in fact they're, you know, not only not too late, but like still in the first 10%. Mark Andreessen talks about getting to Silicon Valley in, you know, the early 90s and thinking, "Man, I'm too late." And the endless kind of similar examples you can point to. And I mean, we worried about it with Stripe, obviously. And, you know, yet we kind of came to realize that actually, you know, the internet as a whole is still in its earliest innings.

• 2:21:11Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, definitely. Yeah, there's always, there's always, I mean, Stripe is a great example of this. There's, I mean, there's always a market for great and that is not dependent on creating or shipping something today or this afternoon. There's always, there's always room for that. Well, Patrick-

• 2:21:31Speaker 03

  I meant that.

• 2:21:32Tim Ferriss?

  Patrick, I appreciate you taking the time and-

• 2:21:35Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 2:21:36Tim Ferriss?

  This has been a lot of fun and for everybody, for everybody listening, I will put links to everything we discussed, the papers, the books, the sites, some of the folks on Twitter, all of these things in the show notes, which you can find at tim.blog/podcast. Just search Patrick or Collison and this episode will come right up. You can scroll down to find it. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before

• 2:22:18Tim Ferriss?

  the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've- ...found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 2:23:04Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:23:46Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:24:30Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:25:15Tim Ferriss?

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