Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO) - Craft, Beauty, & The Future of Payments

Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking  with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe. Patrick, first question: you have an excellent compilation  of advice on your blog for people 10 to 20, and you say there that once you turn 35 you'll  write some for people in their twenties. What advice do you have for us now, for the people  in our twenties now? Wait, when's it coming? I haven't really thought about that. The one I've  been wondering at recently is I said for that advice for people in their tee

ns, they should  go to San Francisco. And I wonder for people in their twenties if they shouldn't go to San  Francisco. And I'm being glib. And I think there's a significant set of people who should in fact  go to San Francisco. But the thing that I wonder about is for there is a set of career paths that  I think some set of people ought to pursue and would derive most fulfillment from pursuing. And  that are really valuable for the world if pursued, that require accumulating a lot of expertise

and  really studying a domain in tremendous depth. I think San Francisco valorizes, and look, this is  also San Francisco's great virtue, San Francisco valorizes a kind of striking out on your own  iconoclastically dismissing the sort of received wisdom and the founding archetypes and lore of the  Steve Jobs and the Bill Gates and all the rest. And I'm way less successful than  those people, but to some extent, Stripe in as much as it fits a pattern,  is an instance of that pattern. And look, th

at's great, and I'm happy that phenomenon  exists in the world, but I don't think that... The world needs lots of other things, right?  And I don't think San Francisco particularly, I'm again using San Francisco as a kind of  metonym for cultural orientation, but I think that San Francisco doesn't really encourage the  pursuit of really deep technical depth. And we're recording this in South San Francisco. And South  San Francisco is most noteworthy in the corporate world for of course being the

headquarters of  Genentech. And Genentech was co-founded by Bob Swanson and Herb Boyer. And they produced cheap  insulin for the first time with recombinant DNA. Herb Boyer couldn't have done that at age 23.  Herb Boyer first had to accumulate all of the knowledge and the skills required to be able  invent that over the course of a multi-decade career. And then, I don't know what age he  was when he finally went and invented it, but he was not in his twenties. And I feel San  Francisco perhaps

doesn't culturally encourage one to become Herb Boyer. Or yesterday  at the time of recording this podcast, Patrick Hsu, one of the co-founders of Arc,  which maybe we'll speak about later in the show, this is a biomedical research organization we  started a few years ago, he announced this new phenomenon of bridge editing, which is  a new recombinase where you can insert DNA into a genome. And it's pretty early, but  it might turn out to be quite consequential. And in order to do something like

that,  you have to study for a long time and just acquire a lot of basic and not so basic  technical skills. So anyway, the thing, and I don't quite know how to synthesize it  yet, but as I think about advice for people in their twenties... Look, I'm not going to  normatively pretend or presume to know in which direction one should go in one's life.  And obviously there are successful examples of basically every strategy. And I'm really glad  that you're doing what you're doing at what age? 23.

23. So that's- But a podcast isn't... I'm not  imagining recombinant DNA or anything. I think my advice might be maybe you should do  something like what I did or I'm trying to do. But there are other paths as well. And I think a  lot of really important invention in the world. And a lot of the things that I'm most happy  are happening actually require a very different trajectory. And I think there are counterfactual  versions of my life where I pursued that path and... Well, who knows how well

it would've  worked. Anyway, sorry, last point in this, and San Francisco is just very status oriented,  I feel in this way. Maybe status oriented is... Everything is status oriented, so that's kind of  tautological. But maybe really what I'm saying is I feel San Francisco, the entrepreneurs are held  in excessively high regard, in my view. And look, I guess I like entrepreneurs and I think  entrepreneurs as an aggregate group in the world, all the companies built on Stripe I  think are great,

but there's just a strange version of it in San Francisco that  I think should not be people's only fixation. Yeah, what I like about this and what I  like about you is just you have this sort of a sense of contrarianism of the thing people  are expecting to hear from you in a given moment, you just really want to just tell them  the opposite of. I don't even know, I feel like when EA was a little  bit more popular, you're like, "Here's the problems. Here's why progress study  is important." And

when it was done in its depth, like, "Hey guys, pay attention." But  on this particular piece of advice- Michael Nielsen says that every field in science  has way too many adherence or way too few, but the market is almost never in sort of the  right equilibrium. And I think something like that might be... I think the reflexive... In a  contrarian way, I'll say that I think reflexive contrarianism for the sake of it is also tired.  And if you are just contrarian to the prevailing mood, then you

're just following the prevailing  mood, but with a sign bit inversion or something, so I don't endorse that either. But I think the  herd is a really powerful phenomenon. Actually, one of the learnings of my adult life  has been that, everyone knows and says, or frequently hears, that you should be  very wary of following the prevailing tides and moods and winds and everything,  but it's freaking hard to do in practice. So what practically does that look like to hone  your craft in any of these

disciplines that take a long time? You've spoken and tweeted about  some of the problems with modern universities. Is that still the def facto path? Do you want to  be the great biologist at Arc hires or something? Well, in many domains, I don't know. So in  hardware, which is not a small domain, most things in the world involve stuff and things, and  I just have no facility with or experience with doing things in hardware. And so if you wanted  to become a super skilled practitioner there, wha

t's the best career path? I don't know.  Maybe it's to drop out and join SpaceX or something. I'm not necessarily endorsing  just pursuing the most establishment and credential-oriented path. I think people should  try to find the gradient of maximal learning in whatever it is they care most about. And yet,  the question then is what that is. For biology, look, not that I'm a biologist, but it is very  clear that in order to do really good work, there are a lot of bench skills and... Well,  ther

e are bench skills one has to acquire, and then there just is a lot of actual  specific knowledge, where the body... Well, any kind of life, it wasn't designed  with neat fundamental principles the way that maybe physics was. A lot of it is obviously  evolved and contingent and messy and complicated and all the rest. And so there is a lot of  just specific factual stuff to learn. And I think for those two reasons, I think there  are very few successful pure autodidacts in biology where you, at s

ome point in  virtually every case that I'm aware of, have to have had direct experience in and with a  top lab where you're seeing how people actually do it in practice. And actually maybe this also  ties back to some of what we were discussing previously to your question about the founders  and what they learn from each other and so on, I think there's an interesting book Apprentice to  Genius that follows... I can't remember if it's three or four. It's three generations of  scientists. So som

eone who mentored somebody else, who in turn mentored another scientist.  And they were all extremely successful. And the book is kind of description of what they  all did, but also this kind of reflection on: what is it that was transferred? And  for example, one thing it describes is: well, one of the most important and subtle  questions in science is problem selection. Just how do you choose what to work on?  No one tells you what to do. And you do have to answer this question multiple  times

. With a company in some sense, you just have to decide once. And then  it's kind of, well, maybe it's an iterative process from there. Whereas in science, you're  frequently pursuing completely new problems. And of course you need to choose something that's  sufficiently important and hard that it would be important if you succeeded, but also that it's  not so intractable that you can't actually make any progress. And so the book describes how  this is part of what the mentees described that th

ey learned from their mentors. Another  thing they talk about is just learning about high standards and what high standards actually  are. And when I talk to people in other domains, this is so frequently the thing that I hear from  them, that when they worked with X person or Y organization or in Z environment or whatever, that  they learned what great actually is. And that just permanently changed their sense for what their  own standard for their work ought to be. And so maybe one version of

what people in the twenties  should do is get some ideas to domains you're interested in or care about, but then figure  out: where can you learn the highest standards? Where are the highest standards embodied and  where can you go and experience that firsthand? Before we get back to Stripe and  Arc Institute and everything, I want to just touch on the Parker study stuff for  a second. So there's a view that says, "Listen, if we improve the NIH 10% or whatever percent, are  we really making a de

nt in the fact that ideas are getting harder to find over time? And how much of  a difference do institutions make anyways, just if it's just about a number of researchers and  how many people in your society you can put into research?" It's not like Singapore can have a much  more effective scientific institution that lets it compete with America and science or something  like that. What's wrong with that intuition? Noah Smith and others have talked about...  I can't remember the term he used,

something like money-ism. He had a funny  phrase. But sort of this idea that we assume there is some kind of constant  elasticity between investment in some particular outcome like building a semiconductor  factory in Arizona or a new bridge or whatever, and the outcome of the factory or the bridge.  And one, the conversion rate between those inputs and the output is not a cosmological constant.  Maybe any of these things could be done for a half or a tenth or whatever of the cost. But  two, the

re are even deeper questions as to: is it possible at all or what else would have  to change for it to be possible? And what are the other constraints? By just talking about  these things and funding and dollar terms, you're making the implicit assumption that the  only relevant constraint is the financial one, where in practice maybe it's permits or  it's labor shortages or it's other things. Anyway, in the context of the NIH and science and  R&D, I'm really skeptical of this same approach bein

g brought to bear where we can just talk  about the amount that we're spending on R&D, and think that that's implicitly a useful  measure of the output. And to a fairly close approximation, there were around 1% as many  practicing professional scientists in the US pre-World War II as post-World War II, or  say even 1950. And the other epiphenomena and papers or patents and so forth, it tends  to follow pretty similar ratios. And we got a lot of pretty good stuff in the first half  of the century

. And despite increasing the amount that we spend by between two and maybe  slightly more than two orders of magnitude, not quite three, it's not clear to me that  there is a direct linear relationship. And so when analyzing the NIH or how  we should pursue any of this stuff, I'm inclined to try to get way more, I guess,  concrete and tactile. And try to think, "Okay, what would success here look like at... Well, what  is happening today at the micro scale and what are the actual problems? And t

hen what could success  look like at the micro scale? And then what might it look like to scale that up?" And just to  give one kind of pointed example of that, we ran a survey of the FAST Grants grant recipients  after FAST Grants, asking about their normal work and not about anything to do with FAST grants  itself. And we asked them if they had flexible funding. That is to say if they could spend their  research dollars, their current research dollars, however they wanted. So not if they had m

ore  research dollars, just if they could direct their current dollars however they wanted, how much  their associated research program would change. And we gave them three options: not much,  a little and a lot. 79% said a lot. So four out of five said that their research agenda  would change a lot if this constraint was removed. And so should the NIH funding  level be X or 1.1X or 1.2X or whatever, that seems to me like a bad way to analyze this  question as compared to, for example, perhaps:

how bound and constrained should an NIH grantee  be in choosing their research agenda? Maybe, if their judgment was way better than  that of the committee's. Not saying it is, but maybe it is. Who knows? And maybe there's  a 5X improvement to be generated just by making that one switch. So yeah, I'm very skeptical  of these financially oriented frameworks. Maybe the financial is not the right word  for it, but just trying to map inputs to outputs is the framing which you're using  to compare the

pre-World War II inputs to what's happening now. And if it was particular  to the scientific institutions, you'd expect, for example, that things that are disconnected  from the NIH specific structures. Obviously you've talked a lot about already it is getting  harder to find paper. And sector through sector, it's not like NIH is running Moore's  Law progress, but even there, you see you need exponentially more researchers  to keep up the same level of progress. So it does seem important to hav

e these level  effects that are one time in the case of something COVID where, yeah, we need that level effect  right now. But if we're framing it in terms of hundreds of years from now, this is going  to be the thing that increases growth rates, which is the sort of framing that is also supplied  when talking about the progress of these things. Does that make sense in that context, when all  these sectors are seeing these slowdowns which seem consistent with just like, yeah, this is  how the ec

onomy and science progresses over time? I don't know is the short answer. I think  it's really puzzling. I think the constancy of US GDP growth is, I think, just one of the  weirdest things. And I don't know if we've got explanation for it. But also I don't think  that it's... Or sorry, an obvious thing to do would be to shrug and say, "Okay, well  just, it's overdetermined or something, and that's just how countries work." But  you can look at other countries where it's obviously manifestly not

the case. And so what  is it that's weird and special about the US? The thing that I wonder about in a lot of these  cases is you could get many of the observed system phenomenon characteristics if we weren't actually  adding productive capacity. That's a simple way to explain a lot of it. And that if you're just  adding exponentially more unproductive capacity, then on a stylized level, a lot of  this stuff would just fall out of it. Now, I'm not saying that we're necessarily doing  that, but

it could be that maybe we're making them... Well, there's lots of ways where  that could be what's effectively going on, even if it's not the case that the marginal people  or things or organizations themselves are bad, it's just somehow how the components interact. But  the fact that you could get these exponentially diminishing returns through the addition  of evermore nonproductive capacity makes me not persuaded that the low hanging case is  necessarily true, and give some weight to the pros

pect that yeah, it is fundamentally structural  or cultural or organizational. And just to give a micro-example there, and it's a very basic and  an obvious one, but I think it's interesting to compare the SpaceX R&D budget to the NASA R&D  budget, and to actually look at those two time series together. And maybe we're just returning  to the financial point again, but it seems pretty clear that the trajectory of NASA's efficacy has  not fully followed the trajectory of its inputs. Yeah. Although

the point about the marginal  inputs we've put into science have not been as effectively used or as high quality as what  was before, like the 1X is a much higher quality 1X than a 100X. It's not clear what you do to  fix that. If it's just a case that there's a limited of John von Neumanns in your society  that are part of the pre-World War II 1X, it's not like we can just put 100X more John  von Neumanns type physicists into science. If the binding constraint is the  number of John von Neuman

ns, then yes, that's bad news I guess. There's  not a lot we can do on the margin. But I'm not sure that it is. I guess I keep  going back to the cultural and the sociological point where, so Gerdie and Carl Corey, they  ran a lab at the University of Washington, St. Louis. And six of their students, if  I recall correctly, went on to win Nobel Prizes. And they had a well-known lab and they  got good students, but they weren't the most prestigious lab in the world. It's not like  they got to che

rry pick every year the single most promising person. And so something was  going on there. And there's a book about it, and it tries to get into this a little bit. And  I don't know that I can figure out quite what it was. And there was also some good fortune where  they got into molecular biology at a good time. But I think there were these kind  of hopeful data points where, again, they were obviously extremely brilliant  people, but I think that the thing that distinguished them and their st

udents was not  that they were these seven sigma martians, I think rather that they found organizational  structures and cultural practices that really worked. I think those are at least in principle,  more replicable. Now, you might still say, "Okay, fine in theory, but how do you actually do  that?" And I think that's the big open question. Even though there are lots of scientists and lots  of universities, there's a lot of homogeneity today in how science and in particular how  biomedical sci

ence is pursued and basic research in an academic context before there's any  commercialization or prospect of it in sight. And I don't know that the model is necessarily a bad  one. Certainly we're not particularly claiming that it's a bad one, but sort of the construct of  universities, labs, PI, a principal investigator running the lab. That person applies for grants,  primarily to the NIH, maybe supplemented by other sources. And grants reviewed by committees  with study sections as they cal

l with pretty rigid scoring criteria and so on. That's the  structure. And it just seems suboptimal to me. Homogeneity is bad in basically any ecosystem,  especially ecosystems where you're seeking tail outcomes. And we thought that for a variety of  reasons, well, from first principles that other models should be possible. And we had specific  ideas as to how one particular model might be a good idea and complimentary to status quo. In  very short terms what's different about Arc is, one, scien

tists are funded themselves  to pursue whatever they want. So it's curiosity-driven research, whereas NIH  grants are given for projects. And second, we build a lot of in-house infrastructure so  that scientists can draw upon other platforms and other capabilities that they don't have  to go and build and maintain themselves. Whereas again, in the standard university  academic context, scientists would virtually always have to do that in-house. And because of  the natural scale constraints on an

y given lab, that effectively circumscribes the ambition of  a possible research program. And then thirdly, we try to provide career paths for people  to remain in science if they don't want to become principal investigators, where the  university structure commingles the training purpose of academia with the execution.  Where the people who are doing the work are typically the grad students and the  postdocs, who are both themselves at least nominally on the career path of themselves  eventuall

y becoming principal investigators. And there are lots of people who, for all  sorts of different very valid reasons, love science and love the pursuit of research, but  don't want to be a manager running a lab, choosing their own research programs and dealing with all  of the overhead and typically grant applications that are concomitant with that. And so with Arc,  we have a real emphasis on hiring scientists who have finished their postdocs, finished grad  school, and just like that's what th

ey want to do in their lives. And again, isn't really a career  path for them today. And one of the things that's actually really exciting about the discovery that  we mentioned that came out yesterday, this new bridge editing technology, is that work was led by  one of these senior scientists who'd finished his postdoc. And it's not clear to me that he wanted  to go on to become a PI, but he loves science and he's an amazing researcher, clearly. And so  he's able to go and to have that career a

t Arc. And in addition, the prospect of these mobile  elements being usable in this way for this genomic insertion, whatever, that's a pretty speculative  out there thing. And had he applied to the NIH to go and pursue that... He didn't, so I don't  know what the outcome would've been. But Jennifer Doudna's work was, if I recall correctly, funded  by DARPA because her CRISPR NIH applications were rejected. And of course, Carly and Corico's NIH  applications for mRNA vaccine work were famously re

jected. So it at least seems very plausible  that it wouldn't have worked out. And so, look, all these things are random. And I can't  make any definitive themes about what would've counterfactually happened, but it seems  plausible to me that this thing announced yesterday wouldn't have happened or would've been  less likely to happen in a different environment. When we think forward 10 years or 20 years, this  specific line of research where you understand the effects of genetic architecture o

n different  traits. And also you can edit and invert, insert whatever the DNA arbitrarily.  You've followed sickle cell anemia. You've done the obvious things. What does  that lead to? What are you excited about? Well, the thing that I think is really interesting  about it is using it as a new kind of telescope. By which I mean when people hear about CRISPR,  there's an obvious excitement and a legitimate excitement around using this to cure things  directly in the body, using it as a kind of t

herapeutic. But you can also use CRISPR to try  to figure out what's going on in cells and in cell cultures in a structured way. And so, excuse  me, the body is interesting in that it has this switchboard like the DJs, I guess, at those fancy  mixing sets of 20,000 genes. And with CRISPR, you can systematically go and perturb each gene  one by one, like mashing all the keys in sequence, and try to figure out, well, what the effects  of perturbing this versus that are. And if you do that in a cel

l culture where you can subject  the cells to some stressor or some treatment or whatever, you can see differentially how different  perturbations affect different cell outcomes. Or you can just use it for synthetic data  generation more broadly, where you could perform all these perturbations and then sequence and  see what's happening in the cells and so forth. And single cell sequencing has come a long way.  Anyway, point is there's a lot you can do with all this gene editing stuff for discov

ery and for  data generation in the broadest sense. And that's really compelling because for a lot of diseases  that they're complex in the fields jargon, meaning, yes, they're complex in the colloquial  sense, but they're specifically complex in that they're not infectious. They're not just  some pathogen getting into you. And they're not monogenic, like Huntington's where it's one  specific mutation. Instead, it's some combination of environmental factors, but maybe some genetic  factors as we

ll, and it's somewhere in between. And by figuring out... And that includes  most autoimmune diseases, most cancers. ... And most cancers, to some extent  cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disease, the big ones we haven't yet solved. And  so then coming back to these functional genomics technologies, what's interesting I think is trying  to figure out how it is that the genetic component of those diseases happens and works and so on.  And even if that's only a small contributor, it ca

n potentially shine light on  just what the general pathway is. And so the question would be, and look, this is  speculative, none of this has actually happened, but by figuring out the genetic interactions  between genes and, say, Alzheimer's, can you figure out how Alzheimer's arises,  which we don't understand today? And then once you understand how Alzheimer's arises,  maybe you can use conventional technologies and targeting to figure out how to inhibit that  or to modulate those pathways.

And so yeah, that's what we're really excited about  from a functional genomic standpoint, and there's kind an AI angle as well  that we could talk about if you want. Well, I don't think the binding constraint  on harmful use of biotechnology or bioweapons today is pure biological capabilities.  Like if some set of incredibly capable, intelligent people wanted to cause tremendous  harm with, well presumably with pathogens, but with something biological, they wouldn't  necessarily need to invent

anything new. They would just need to apply currently known  techniques in a malevolently directed fashion. I think there are some concerns and some risks  there with respect to things that don't invent new technologies, but do make them more  accessible. And so I think the question is what would the effect on the world be  if there was a sufficiently sophisticated LLM that it could help anybody synthesize  and disperse smallpox? I don't know that the laws of physics prohibit such an LMM  existi

ng. I presume they don't. And would the world be fine if such an LLM was widely  distributed? Maybe, but maybe not. Right? So I think there is that kind of threat factor,  but my point is I don't think knowledge at the frontier of biology is the relevant margin here.  And if we take seriously that this is... I mean, we don't need crazy AI risks to motivate this.  The world is perfectly capable of originating really severe pandemics and pathogens itself, plus  all the other diseases that are not

pathogenic, so we got other problems. But whether we  care about the possible dual-use harms you just mentioned, or we just care  about the things that already exist, to ameliorate both of those, we do  need enhancement of our capabilities. There are a lot of biological problems we don't  today know how to solve. And so I think in that respect, if one were to do what you're proposing  and try to advance the defensive side of this, I don't know that what one would do would  necessarily be that di

fferent because the largest fundamental capabilities  that we would presumably need to have that we don't today have. And by  trying to solve current human diseases, I think you're probably also pursuing  something pretty close to the best steps to solve the potential diseases that  malicious actors could cause in the future. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean,  zooming out from biorisk in particular, just how are you thinking about AI these days? Well, I think everyone has to be sort of  high-perpl

exity in the sense that... I mean, the verdict that one might've given at the  beginning, we're recording this here pretty close to the beginning of 2024, the verdict one  might've given at the beginning of '23, '22, '21, back, say, the last eight years, those would  all I think have looked pretty different. I mean, maybe Guern might have scored the  best from 2019 or something onwards, but broadly speaking, it's been pretty  difficult, I think, to forecast. And so I think the basic position to

a first order  has to be one of some degree of humility. I think as your blog post identifies, the big question  right now is to what degree scaling laws hold, and I guess if they hold, then what  exactly is it that we're... Well, asymptoting is maybe a presumptuous word, maybe  it's not an asymptote, but what is it that we're approaching? We don't necessarily know the  shape of that thing, whatever it is. And yeah, I think it's a lot of... Yeah, I think how  one should feel needs to be or ought

to be very sensitive to the exact parameters of those  curves. And I just don't think anyone knows the true value of those parameters actually are. So  it's clearly going to be important, is already important today, and it has a pretty central  bearing on both Stripe and Arc, and we'll see. Yeah, I wonder if the meta lesson here, and I  totally agree with that sort of general sentiment, but I wonder if the meta lesson that we got  from COVID, for example, and with things like Fast Grants was yo

u obviously can't predict these  things in advance, but the most important thing, even in addition to these specific sort of  countermeasures we're trying to come up in advance is when the thing is happening, having competent  individuals who can synthesize and organize information, and also having these new initiatives  and institutions to get the right thing done. Yes, the adaptability premium is probably  going to go way up over the next decade. Yeah. And with that in mind, and I know you  ha

ve already a couple of day jobs, but yeah, I feel like something like Fast Grants, when the  time comes down to it, I don't know, it should be like, "Uh." You'd be one of the top people you  could think of in terms of having expertise and respect in a wide range of domains and competency  as a leader. I don't know, just keep it in the back of your mind or maybe in the middle of your  mind, given how far we are into the transition. Well, Fast Grants was three beloved squirrels  in a trench coat,

or I guess, well, I was one of the squirrels, so I don't know, I'm so full  of it, but it was also with Tyler Cowen who's an amazing person, a great friend, and then  my wife who's also one of Arc's co-founders. And so Fast Grants was not this giant, impressive  edifice that would qualify me for anything at all. But it doesn't have to be giant,  right, to have that kind of big impact? Yeah, I guess as an objective matter, that's true.  I mean, look, John and I try to be very self-aware of the li

mits of our expertise, which are very  proximate to us. And I'm sure if something like that was necessary, they'd be... Look at Operation  Warp Speed. They chose a super effective domain expert, Moncef Slaoui, to run that, and it was  just monstrously successful, truly remarkable. And I don't know who the Moncef Slaoui of, I guess it  would depend whatever the problem in question is, but I think my recommendation would be figure out  who Moncef is and go hire Moncef. And I think it's extremely u

nlikely... I think anybody who deemed  me the Moncef of that thing is probably mistaken. I think you're being too humble,  but just staying on Fast Grants, now we have the retrospective of how effective  the Fast Grants recipients were compared to the other grants that were given out by, let's  say, the NIH or NSF. To your knowledge, what has been the reaction of these  institutions to the discrepancy between the speed and effectiveness of Fast Grants?  Have they analyzed their protocols and wha

t happened during COVID? Is there any sort  of retrospective there on their part? Not to my knowledge, but I don't want  that to sound like an indictment. Maybe they've done a lot of reflection  and I just don't don't know about it. I don't think I would know about it,  even if it had happened. So I don't know. I mean, look, most... Well, I don't know anything  about the response at CDC or FDA or NIH or NSF or any of the relevant organizations or  their international equivalents. And so none of

what I'm saying should be taken as  specifically, not only not critical of them, but not even a comment to them. I just don't know  what they did. But in general, organizations are not awesome at self-reflection. I think I assume  as a default prior that some of the dynamics we discussed at the beginning of this are rooted  there, where none of the people who started those organizations are there today. And so what  exactly are the incentives of those leaders and I haven't... Yeah. It's not clea

r to me who would  have the incentive to really take stock in a fully objective and self-critical way to figure  out what was done well and what was done poorly. I promise not to be too myopic about AI, but  one more question. Long term, we can't forecast, maybe even medium term we can't, but near term, it  looks like we might have things that look like AI agents and they might need to trade. What does the  financial infrastructure for AI agents look like? Yeah, I think that's a really interesti

ng  question. And I think automated or autonomous transactions, I mean, they already  exist to some extent today. I mean, lots of services have usage-based billing,  and a lot of the expenses being incurred are autonomously incurred. No human is pushing a  button when Stripe does most of what it does with cloud computing and incurs some costs  with some cloud service. It's in some kind of extremely primitive way happening today, and  I assume it will follow some gradient where some of those deci

sions are either directly  or indirectly being made by an LLM or some LLM equivalent or whatever. And I think  there'll be some almost unnoticeable smooth continuum up to very considerable degrees  of autonomy. But it's not that we're going to wake up some month and be like, "Oh my  God, suddenly the bots have been unleashed." And I think there'll be interesting  questions there around, I mean, this will now sound very parochial and maybe  getting excessively tactical or something, but I think t

here'd be very interesting questions  around the legality of those in terms of are these treated as the responsibility of the owner or  is there any degree of independence granted? How does liability work? Which rails are best  suited? What kind of transaction velocities are we talking about here? Because if  it's a billion transactions a second, then the properties of that system should look  very different to is it one giant clearing transaction every day? And again, if we just  use the analog

y of the usage-based services, those tend to incur liabilities in tiny  increments, but then to settle on a monthly basis when you pay your bill, so maybe these  agent transactions will have that character. So I think there were, excuse me, a  lot of practical applied questions, but I think what you're saying around these  autonomous transactions conceivably being an important dimension is very true and real and is  one of the interesting ways in which the economy might change and expand over th

e next decade. And  I think it's possible that crypto plays some role here where we take a KYC and AML very seriously  for humans, and we want to know the human that is associated with some particular financial  activity. Obviously that's a murkier question in the context of some AI agent. And if we, in  some blurry sense, look at crypto as the part of financial services that is defacto exempt from  AML by design, then yeah, maybe that plays a role. How long before Stripe was founded do you thin

k  a product like Stripe could have been invented? That's a good question. Well, depending on  what exactly you define Stripe as being, I think conceivably decades earlier in that, I  mean, on some level, PayPal is a kind of Stripe, and there were many payments companies  before PayPal and you could go all the way back to cash registers or something. So  it depends on these definitional questions. I mean, the particular secular tailwinds that we  benefited from around the rise of app stores and

the on-demand economy and maybe the startup  boom post-YC, and after the financial crisis, those particular tailwinds were idiosyncratic  and specific to Stripe, and I guess the GFC was '08-'09, and Stripe was founded in 2010. And  so as much as you define those as being core, then not that much earlier, but mostly my  story of Stripe is one of market inefficiency, and I do wonder why much of  this didn't happen sooner. Yeah. I always find it really  interesting when there's these cases where it

wasn't even the case that,  "Well, it could have been started sooner, but there was nobody in the market."  There were many people in the market and they weren't just random people. They  were technology companies headquartered in San Francisco who were in the market. Do you have  some explanation for why it didn't occur to them? I'm hesitant to generalize too much because, well, I only have maybe N=1 experience and so I think  it's dangerous to extrapolate from that. Maybe N=2 now with Arc as

a very different kind of  organization, but an organization nonetheless. Or if you include all the features of  Stripe, N equals like 10, 20-something. Yeah, okay. So yes, depending on your definition,  maybe there's some kind of samples out there. I guess my general view is most  products and most businesses, things can just be done much better. And I  think moats are typically kind of overrated. And I mean payment's a great example  of a domain where on a logical basis, you would say that ther

e are so many sources of  defensibility where there's the network effect of the account holders, and there's the data network  effect/economy of scale for fraud and so forth, and there are regulatory moats and barriers, and,  and, and. And yet, not only does Stripe exist, but there are lots of other... I mean, there's  a whole FinTech ecosystem today. Right? So yeah, I think it gets down to deep questions  of what's the binding constraint on just the number of effective organizations that exist

in  the world, and for any given sector, why is it that number of companies rather than twice that  number of companies and so on? I think it's about motivation and ideas and people's willingness and  determination to organize talent and so forth, but these kinds of more sociocultural explanations  rather than... I mean, Hamilton Helmer is probably the leading scholar of some of the sources of  defensibility for businesses. He has this niche, but very well-known in the niche, book called  7 Powe

rs, and it tends to disaggregate all the various sources of market power in this respect.  And I think that is true and important in so far as it goes, but nonetheless, it's kind of strange  to me that nobody had done Stripe before Stripe. When you think about the fact that moats are  overrated and just doing the thing is underrated, what is Stripe's mode in that context? Does that  make you think differently about Stripe's moat? Yes, one. And I guess I do think that one  can have organizational

and cultural moats, and maybe this contradicts what I was just  saying, or maybe it's consistent with it in the sense that it's a kind of cultural explanation,  and I think that in as much as we have a moat, it's because we have a very good understanding of  our domain and a set of people who actually care about solving the problems and who are, I don't  know, continually paranoid at the prospect that we might be forgetting something important instead of  trying to figure out what the important

thing that could supplant Stripe's approaches is and making  sure that we build those first and so forth. I think organizations that are...  I mean, there's... You're familiar with Conquest's Laws and there's  Conquest's Third Law, I guess, which is that one should model organizations as  if they're run by a cabal of their enemies. And obviously or presumably it's tongue in cheek,  but it's interesting to try to think about, "Well, what is the kernel of truth  in that and why would it be there?

" And I think what's going on is that I think most  organizations when they start out are actually trying to achieve their stated goals, like  somebody started the organization for a reason, and probably it was for the stated reason. But  then over time, that person and that set of people who initially populate the organization depart  and some set of new people come to take their place and there's multiple versions of that.  There's generational turnover on a continuous basis. But say for the f

ifth generation, why are  they there? And to what degree do their particular specific local incentives align with the nominal  originally stated goals of the organization? And I think there can be a lot of misalignment  there where they're following a local path, and conceivably even the leader of the organization,  not even through any fault of their own per se, necessarily, just they're human and they  have their own incentives. And again, the original kind constitutional incentives of  the or

ganization might be quite different. And so I think this phenomenon is a fact of life,  and I think these kinds of explanations for me are much more explanatory in trying to figure out  why some of these things either happen or don't. And to your question, in as much as Stripe has  a moat, what is it? I think it's that... I mean, others can judge to what degree it's actually  manifested and rooted in practice. I think it is, but I'm a biased observer, but I think it  would be that people at Stri

pe really care about solving the problems that  we say we are trying to solve. Yeah, the point about the misalignment over  generations or over time is interesting. And actually, do you have examples of institutions  which have, for decades or hundreds of years, managed to keep their original, not only mission  statement, but the organizational competence? Because you think of tech companies,  even the oldest tech companies have not been around that long, and they're some  of the biggest tech co

mpanies in the world, and the median age of the corporation is  famously low. What is a good example here? I think some of the explanations around the  effects of shareholder capitalism and sort of the idea that shareholder capitalism as a  mechanism does in fact have some consequence with respect to the incentives of organizations  and their long-term fates. I think those theories have some credibility, and I think it is very  plausible that shareholder capitalism even attenuates the durations

of these organizations.  I'm not saying that's definitively true, but I find it credible, the idea that it is.  It's not clear to me that that's necessarily bad, even if it is true in that, are we on the  side of the humans or of the aggregate innovation in the world, or on the  side of the corporation's qua legal entities? And yeah, it's not clear to  me, the answer. It should be the first. At the same time, or maybe in fact  consistent with that, if you look at, say, Europe or some other place

s like in  Denmark, there's, for reasons related to the tax code there, a lot of organizations are  either controlled or very substantially held by nonprofit foundations. And so Novo Nordisk,  for example, the GLP company, but Maersk, the shipping company, I believe also Lego, a  lot of these corporations are controlled by, and again, usually have a lot of their stock held  by foundations. That has the secondary effect in many cases where they actually do embed, in a  legally binding constitutio

n, their mission. And so I'm not an expert on Nova Nordisk,  but I happened to get a book about it over Thanksgiving. And actually, there's also a  book on the Danish industrial foundations, but it's enshrined in their constitution  that they have to make insulin broadly available really cheaply or at least  cheaply in Scandinavian countries, and then I think they're allowed to charge market  prices elsewhere. And I think that... And then the rest of their profits, they have to...  They're again

, legally obligated to reinvest in R&D. Is that somehow causal in the fact that  they then invented one of the most remarkable pharmacological discoveries of the last 20 years  in these GLP-1 agonists? I mean, plausibly. And so yeah, I think these questions around why  it is that the median age of organizations and corporations is what it is are definitely  interesting, and I suspect it's a somewhat contingent aspect of how we've chosen to  organize large corporations in the US today. The thing

you were mentioning about this firm seems very similar to the  export-led growth in Asian- Totally, 100%. Yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah, yep. You have tariffs. This one company, you're  tasked with making the cars, but you better make the cars good. You have no competition,  but you had to invent the best car in the world. Yes, yes, yes. And I think, I mean, we are all fans of Smith and Ricardo and all  these characters, and even they, I think, are sort of less dogmatically attached to free  trade tha

n perhaps people today interpret them as being. But I think people like Friedrich  List and those other, not quite contemporaries, but quasi-contemporaries are maybe  on a relative basis underrated. And I do think, I mean in as much as you believe  the kind of sociological cultural skill, whatever, even vague alignment, not in the AI sense,  but just in the more interpersonal sense, in as much as you think these  are important and explanatory, then yeah, I think you end up thinking  about some o

f the things you just raised. That's really interesting to hear you say that  because if you think about Stripe's mission, it's to facilitate global trade, to make sure  that some firm from India can compete with any firm in Nigeria, whatever. So the room for you  to have this sort of learning curve where you're less efficient than the global competition  should be less if Stripe exists, right? Yes, yep. Isn't Stripe the anti-List company? Well, it depends which version of List. And to  be clear

, I'm not specifically endorsing these tariffs and trade barriers. I think the history  associated with them is checkered at best. Sure. Look, I think it's possible that if you have  a specific sector where you have clear goals and a credible path to actually achieving  some substantial degree of success there, and, and, and probably some  more conjoined propositions, then maybe some degree of activist  trade policy might be the beneficial thing to do. I don't think that describes most  sectors

in most countries at most times. Yeah. Right. Huh, that's so interesting. I think  there's an interesting thread here in how it relates to Stripe Climate in that you're,  I don't know, subsidizing these learning curves that these East Asian countries did  for their own internal companies. I mean, you haven't picked out a specific  company that's going to necessarily be the key of carbon sequestration.  But yeah, how do you think about this? Well, maybe a way to unify the two points, and  I'll sp

eak about Stripe Climate in a second, is that I think I guess it's Say's  Law about demand creating supply, and in as much as Stripe aggregates more  and more global demand, I guess part of the, I don't know... It seems too self-aggrandizing to  call it the theory of Stripe, but some vague hunch in Stripe is that that aggregation of demand can  have important expansionary effects with respect to the ensuing supply. And yes, Stripe Climate is  some version of this hypothesis applied on a much sma

ller scale than Stripe itself, but still  real and well, we'll see, maybe important. And the basic idea, just for folks who aren't  familiar, which I assume is most of your audience, so we observed in 2018, I guess, that everyone  seems to agree that carbon removal will be very important, and even if we decarbonize the economy  on the kind of timescale that optimistic people on the most optimistic timeframes, there'll still be  an accumulated stock of carbon that is a problem. It sounded pretty

weird. There were virtually no  carbon-removal companies in the world in 2018. Maybe there were two or three or something. No  companies had ever purchased from a carbon-removal company. These were really sort of science  projects. And so we thought, "Well, somebody's got to start, and it might be valuable to not only  transfer some dollars, but to kind of confer some credibility on this sector." Not that Stripe is  the world's most credible company, but it's better than nothing. And so we start

ed contracting  some of these carbon-removal companies. That went pretty well and they seemed appreciative  of us. And so we thought somewhat more about this. And we then, in 2021, formed Frontier, which is  an AMC, an advanced market commitment. So inspired by the first AMC, which was a pre-commitment to  purchase vaccines for developing world countries for diseases that... I mean, well, either were  kind of market failures where pharma companies hadn't pursued the vaccines or were just like th

e  profits weren't sufficient to pay for the program. So we decided to this for carbon removal.  We raised $1 billion. Stripe was the first investor. We're not actually investing, we're just  buying, so they're the first company to commit, but then were joined by Shopify and Alphabet  and Meta and JP Morgan and a bunch of other companies. And now there's a fairly active sector  of carbon removal companies. I think Frontier has contracted with between 40 and 50 companies, the  overwhelming majori

ty of which didn't exist when we started out with this. And actually, we  ran an anonymous survey back the end of last year and we asked them to what degree was the  existence of Frontier somewhat causal in their starting the company in the first place. Again,  this is an anonymous survey, and I think it was 74% of the companies said that Frontier played  a causal role in their starting the company. So yeah, I think these inducement  effects can be pretty significant. Yeah, that's huge. Well, wh

at  are other ideas you've come across where an AMC would be an effective  instrument of moving forward the tech? That's a good question. We've actually  been having some of that discussion internally. It's not that we plan on doing  it ourselves necessarily, but just wondering, are there people we should share our technology  with, not that it's even technology per se, but share our experience with or  something and try to help along? I mean, I think there's still a lot of  stuff in the biomedi

cal field, and I mean, patents are pretty useful insofar as they  go, but there's a lot of innovation that seems like it would be socially beneficial that  patents don't provide a way to cover the cost of. Patents don't provide a way to cover the cost of,  and so there was some excitement a few years ago about mannose, which it's a sugar. And there  was one paper or maybe a few papers, I can't remember that suggests that maybe tumors will  selectively take up mannose rather than glucose, but the

y can't actually metabolize it properly  until they just die. And so maybe this could be an effective onco treatment of some sort. But  mannose is a generic sugar, it's been understood for more than a century and you couldn't patent  it, importantly. And so it's not clear who has the incentive to even fund the work to test whether  or not this would actually work in practice. And this is not an endorsement of mannose,  but just there are things of this shape where there's something where you can

clearly see,  wow, that might be very beneficial, but it's not totally clear how the economic structure of  the market can make it possible. So I think there are still a lot of those across the biomedical  landscape. Look, there are still a lot of vaccines that could in principle exist that don't, Lyme  disease, there's one vaccine that was withdrawn from the market over some safety concerns that I  think were misplaced, but it's still no vaccine. It's not even that well understood. Right?  Peo

ple who have chronic Lyme disease, we don't know if it's legit or not. Exactly. Yes, yes, yes. But it's  a good question. Maybe some of your listeners will have ideas for  fields for we sorely need an AMC. Yeah. I want to go back to Stripe for a second. So  you're famously appreciative of craft and beauty, but also you appreciate the power of  scale and growth. Is there a type... And speed. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. But is there a type  of craft that is just not amenable to speed, growth, sca

le? If you think like a Japanese chef,  he's learning to cook rice for a decade and then he can move on to the sushi or something, is  that just not competitive in the modern world? Craft, scale and speed, I don't know they're  strictly necessarily intentioned in every case, but they're definitely frequently intentioned.  So just yes, I think is one short answer to that. At the same time, a lot of the most  successful companies are those that I think are distinguished by the extent to which  the

y exhibit appreciation for and skill in realizing craft and beauty. And so LVMH is  one of the largest companies in the world, and that's literally their business. I think  Tesla is pretty good at this. They're good at many things, but including this, obviously  there's Apple. TSMC, it's not the Japanese sushi chef you mentioned, but it is the TSMC  chip sushi chef in Taiwan. And so much, again, tacit knowledge and difficult to transfer skills.  So I think it might be the case that craft and the

pursuit of it is as important as it's ever  been. And certainly as Stripe has gotten larger, I think we ourselves have come to greater  conviction in this where I think part of what's interesting about these aesthetic qualities  is they're generally speaking unquantifiable. I don't know if they're intrinsically  unquantifiable, maybe you could train a model to do so or something. But today they're  broadly speaking unquantifiable, and yet they influence people in significant ways. People  very

demonstrably care about aesthetics and if they're a company, they care about the aesthetic  characteristics of the products that they produce. Just like on an intuitive level, people know that  that's true, but it's difficult to manage that at an organizational level where there isn't a P&L  associated with it. And if you're screwing it up, you don't see a neat time series decline.  But over the 14 years of Stripe, we have, through a not exactly trial and error, but just  by studying cases where

things worked well at Stripe and cases where things worked less well  and what customers responded well to and so on, it really seems clear to us that even in  a domain like ours where we're selling primarily to businesses, that this  is something that's truly important. And also getting back to what  we were discussing previously, you want in as much as the sociology and the  cultural explanations of defensibility are real, the best people consider themselves craftspeople  in their domain. And

they really, above almost all else, want to work with the best other people.  And so I think it may almost be true that even if from a customer facing standpoint, craft was  not valued by the market. You actually might still want to build an organization that index  is very heavily on this because you just want the best people for other reasons. And now as it  happens, I think customers do in fact value it and I think the evidence is broadly consistent  with that. But yeah, I think it's very ha

rd to assemble groups of the best people if you don't  take the practice of the work super seriously. What kind of beauty or craft or  simplicity is more important, interface or implementation? There's  famously that essay that Unix is successful because the implementation  is simple and not the interface. The interface is kind of simple, but  there's a lot of asterisks and caveats and edge cases that Unix doesn't handle for you. But Stripe does, right? And look, presumably it depends what you'r

e  building, right? For TikTok, it's probably more important that their interface is simple  and even if their implementation's a mess, that's probably okay, not saying it is, I have  no idea. Whereas for Stripe, people are on some level purchasing our architecture or purchasing  their ability to do certain things and some set of things rather than some different set  of things because of what our architecture makes easy and makes possible. Now, if by  interface you mean the visual gooey interfa

ce, then maybe we can draw some separation there  but we don't really draw that distinction. We think of the interface to Stripe as being the  architecture we're selling. No one else seems to agree with me, but I often think of Stripe as  similar to Mathematica, where we're selling a self-contained universe to model whatever it is of  interest to you and that you care about. And we're providing some primitives and some interfaces  and tools and so forth to enable your modeling, but fundamentally

we're helping you do  something in your own terms. And in that sense, I don't think the architecture and the  interface are necessarily that separable. That's a really interesting analogy.  Although, if you think of Mathematica, the entry that that's giving you to is just the  Platonic objects of math. Whereas for you guys, it's like the entry is to visa error codes,  right? The end object is not the Platonic... That's true though, in both cases... Yeah, I think  yes. So the analogy falls down

in a few respects, but look, the idea of a transaction is pretty  fundamental and is roughly as old as the quadratic equation or something, the transaction's older.  And Mathematica, especially today... Excuse me, today now to a very impressive extent, supports  all kinds of crazy arcane stuff. If you go through the more obscure packages in Mathematica, you  can definitely find things that are, I think, much less broadly employed and understood even  than visa error codes or something. But yes,

look, these are not the same. It's more  just I find it to be an interesting source of intuition. And I think what Wolfram has  done with Mathematica is pretty amazing. Yeah. Another way in which I'm curious how you  think about this, one way in which Mathematica maybe differs is if they had to make a change  to Mathematica, big deal, somebody has to learn new syntax. If you make a change, it's like  billions of dollars of transactions don't happen. Right. How does that change the way you think

about  the initial architecture and just the stakes? Yeah, that's a good question. Well, actually  first a point on just beauty with respect to architecture, then I'll answer that one. So  just as a side note, I think it's interesting that API design in general doesn't get more  study as a discipline and as a practice, I think it plays a significant role in the fate  of platforms or can. I'm not saying it's always the determinative thing, and if you get it right,  there can be compounding positi

ve benefits and the converse. And I think it's really striking that,  say, with mobile app development, which was one of the most dynamic and fast moving ecosystems of the  past 10 or 15 years, that so many of the objects in the classes, say, in iOS development, our  prefix with NS, less so now with Swift, but for much of the iPhone's history and the NS of course  refers to Next Step back from Next in the '90s. But that when you get API design and  architecture right, it can be so enduring over

literally multiple decades and even  the face of what are otherwise frenzied evolutions in everything around it. And Unix  of course, is another example of this where, yes, Unix has tons of shortcomings, but  the architecture has basically worked for now more than around half a century.  And so we're also trying to impress upon people at Stripe the importance of multi-decadal  abstractions. And I think people sometimes respond to that thinking that that's some insanely  lofty, implausibly ambiti

ous, I don't know, hyperbola. But no, I think that's actually just  what happens when you get this stuff right. And if in fact you get a right, you can just  reap these... Or really the people building on your platform can read these incredible benefits  for a very long time. To the Mathematica point, they, I know, take backwards compatibility  really seriously where you can run programs written 20 years ago unchanged in today's  Mathematica, that really raises the stakes in API design for obvio

us reasons. And we have  that same problem ourselves where when we think about introducing something new, it's not just  does this exigently address the particular need that's motivating it today, but do we think  we can stand behind this in 2044 and how do we think the world might evolve around us  such that it all remains coherent? And we certainly don't always get that right but  that's on some of what we're trying to do. I see. I think the card networks generally, Visa  and MasterCard, are p

retty a good equilibrium where it's easy to judge today with the world as  it exists in 2024 but I think you have to look at the world as it was when they started out and the  particular problems that they're solving. And I think when you compare the financial landscape  in the US or in the western world to those in other places, it's certainly not clear to me  that the US has gotten a bad hand so to speak, or is somehow stuck in any meaningful way.  So the card networks do a couple of things. O

riginally, they were designed to replace a  store credit, it was a credit card originally, not a debit card. And that was important and  availability of structured consumer credit I think is actually a pretty big deal and pretty  beneficial and especially beneficial typically for lower income people. And then with the advent of  jet travel and mass market tourism and so forth, then they helped supply traveler's checks and  various worse alternatives like carrying cash around in your bag. And the

n with the internet,  they were substantially involved in enabling online transactions, I think that the fact  that they got the architecture so right, that so many of these different use cases  were able to be addressed by their core design is just really impressive.  And the guy who designed all this, Dee Hock, I think he was a remarkable  person. And even people complain about interchange and lest I sound like a defender  of the card ecosystem, Stripe is on the... Well, it depends, you could

look at it multiple  ways, but many people would consider Stripe on the wrong side of the interchange cost equation in  the sense that we are giving away the interchange revenue to other companies. And so I don't think  I'm structurally biased in favor of interchange, and yet I will say I think it's pretty  interesting what interchange made possible where it's a distribution incentive fee where  you're paying other entities to go and do the work of recruiting these customers and convincing  them

to get a card and getting them to maintain the card and to pay it off at the end of the month  and all this stuff. So you're paying for that, just the pure distribution. There's a person  at the end of the flight telling you, "Hey, sign up for the United credit card", or  whatever, but that's what the energy... In both cases, that guy annoys me. We'll get to the counterfactuals in a second. So  there's that, there's paying for the actual credit issuance itself and then there's the customer  sup

port and all the ancillary things around the dispute handling and so forth. And then I think  it is interesting to look at the cases where for whatever contingent reason the card networks  didn't arise, so Germany is one of the classic ones. And from our vantage at least, dealing with  the online economy in Germany as compared to the US is so much worse. If Stripe could push a button  and have really broadly adopted cards in Germany, ala the US, we would push the hell out  of that button. You ca

n look at China, which on the one hand does have Alipay and WePay  or WeChat payments are really ubiquitous. And so in that sense, they're very digitally  enabled from a transactional standpoint, but those products don't tend to be  as sophisticated with consumer credit. And so yes, the transaction fees for transferring  money that you in fact already have, that's super cheap, but I think you need to look it on  a fully loaded basis where, okay, but what about the cost of actually getting the cr

edit to  make the purchase in the first place as a credit card would enable? And I think as you look at  these other counterfactuals in other places, one feels a gratitude for what it is that  Dee Hock and Visa and MasterCard and the card networks made possible. And look, I'm not  saying they're perfect or anything, but I think that I'm most interested in critiques... And  I'm not saying again that one can't make them, but just I'm most interested in critiques from  people who've really studied

the ecosystems of other countries because I think it's easy to  underestimate what we got in their invention. Yeah, maybe there's a tester's defense thing  going on here. If you had to design payments from first principles now, does it make sense that all  these things you mentioned, taking on credit risk, the chance of fraud, disputed adjudication, should  that cost 2 or 3% of each transaction that happens in the economy, what would payments look like  if you had to design that from first princ

iples? Well, we're seeing a live version of this  experiment play out for the first time in many years in a number of countries today  where central banks are becoming more active in designing national payment schemes. And so Pix in  Brazil launched in late 2020 I think, but I'm sure you've heard of UPI, the central bank... UPI was  the instigator here where it's the central bank payment system in India and it was tied up with  Aadhaar and their national identity system and so on. But that inspi

red a lot of central bankers  in other countries to go and build their own UPIs. And so yeah, Pix in Brazil launched in 2020 and  now a significant majority of all Brazilian adults are weekly active users of Pix. Again, even  though it launched 2020. So it just had this incredibly rapid adoption curve. You have Swish  in Sweden, across East Asia, Japan, Thailand, Switzerland, central bank after central bank are  deciding, hey, we should have our version of this. And so this is a reinvention of t

he payment system  from scratch. For hard to understand reasons, things typically seem like once you layer  in the customer support and the consumer protection and the fraud prevention and the  anti-money laundering controls and the credit, the things just for some weird reason seem to  asymptote at around 2 or 3%. It's important to also note that a lot of the 2 or 3% beyond  just covering the costs, much of the surplus ends up getting remitted to consumers in  the form of rewards. Not in every

country, but in many countries. And if you look at the  public reports from various banks in the US their interchange revenue where they're getting these  delicious fees on every transaction as you put it, a lot of that is going straight back out the door  to the consumers themselves and so on. So anyway, it's not clear how exactly one should think about  the economics, if it's going back to the consumer, should you include that as a transaction tax  or is it just a weird circular relationship?

I've not seen any evidence to suggest that  the 2% or thereabouts is massively inefficient in the scheme of things. I'm not saying it's  the optimal level, maybe 1% would be better, but within some range of 1 to 3%, it's probably  reasonable. As we think about some of these ad valorem fees and figures, I think the place where  there's even more change at the moment that we find ourselves thinking more about is actually  the changing structure of global tax where the idea of there's been a reason

able amount of  innovation, in the tax domain over the last century where income taxes got pretty high, then  we value added taxes and so on. The new thing, at least in the online context is jurisdictions  remitting, or excuse me, or imposing sales taxes on businesses that don't have any  locus in the jurisdiction in question. So you're a podcaster in the Bay Area and the  Dwarkesh merch store will have to pay the town of Uppsala in Sweden will have a special tax  on baseball caps, and you will

need to know about that particular tax on baseball caps and  any baseball caps that you are selling to the Uppsalans. You'll have to collect that amount from  the buyer, report to Uppsala and then eventually figure out how you're going to get that money  to Uppsala. Obviously there's this combinatoric problem of buyer jurisdictions and product types,  and then all the different jurisdictions that you have to remit the money to. And those amounts,  we're not talking three basis points. The taxes

in question are often 5% or 10% or something  so it's not trivial. And so just as I think about the funds flows on the internet and how all  that's evolving and unfolding, I think changes in tax law are actually a much bigger deal than  anything about the transactional economics. Yeah, but by the way, it's not the Dwarkesh  podcast. It's Lunar Society Podcast LLC registered on Stripe Atlas. Any merchandise I sell in  the future, Stripe will take care of that. Yes. Okay. Well, if there's  ever an

y Stripe complaints... No, it's great. It's been super useful honestly, it would've been much bit more difficult  to get business the operations going. Sorry, I know you're supposed to be interviewing  me, but did Stripe play any, even on the margins, counterfactual role in you charging for  anything? This is the thing we're always interested in when we talk about growing the GDP  of the internet, it's not like get the existing GDP onto our rails. It's where on the margin  can we cause there to

be economic activity that isn't already occurring? So you did in  fact start the podcast before incorporating, but were we causal in any fashion in  the merch or anything of that nature? To the extent that Substack would  not be convenient place to get payments from to begin with, that's a  differing thing. And also if I do... You wouldn't charge for the newsletter  if Substack hadn't made it super easy? Yeah. And also if I do an ad or  something, I wouldn't even know how to begin with getting t

he money if I  didn't already have an LLC through Stripe with an associate banking account that I'm  going to get the money through. So yeah, probably counterfactual responsible  for a lot of the monetization. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Appreciate it. So what  are some unexpected compliments to payment processing you see in the future?  So all this stuff, Atlas, identity, fraud detection, in retrospect, it might have  not have been obvious that back then there was a good compliment. Now it d

oes seem that  way, what would be like this in 5, 10 years? Honestly, our problem ends up being that too many  things, more things that we can possibly pursue looked like compliments in that every business,  almost by definition has revenue. And so we obviously want to help them generate and accept  and manage and orchestrate everything pertaining to that revenue. But once you're in that flow  and you just go through the steps of running a business, a lot else looks relevant and somehow  connect

quite directly. When Stripe started out, it definitely wasn't cool. It was the opposite,  it was just a couple of us and we thought that we could make this superior payments API. And for the  vast majority of its history, Stripe has, I think, attracted people who are drawn to unglamorous  infrastructure challenges and problems. We are not a company that specializes in making  beautiful cars. We make roads and I bring all of that up because I think it's relevant  to this compliment question wher

e in our discussions internally, a lot of it and are the  significant majority of it is still about, okay, where are there actual practical shortcomings  and limitations in even our core bread and butter? And payment processing might be a  slightly too limited term to use for it. Maybe it's more about just global programmable money  orchestration, which yes is consumer to business payments. The sort we were just discussing  in, say, the context of your Substack, but it's also business to busines

s payments. It's also  payments where those credit or lending involved, it's also how you hold money. It's how you  convert money between different currencies. It's how you represent money that's held by  different legal entities and how we make it possible for even individuals or small businesses  to act as micro multinationals and all this stuff. But those problems that we just skimmed over,  even though they all directly pertain to the movement of money, they're not small. And if we  could ju

st solve those really effectively, then Stripe will be a very consequential organization  and I think force in the world. And I think the counterfactual importance of building some of  this stuff as we go to newer markets that are on a relative basis more poorly served is actually  increasing rather than shrinking. In the US there were payments companies before Stripe, and maybe  if Stripe had never done its thing, eventually you'd have found some way to monetize a newsletter  or something like

that. But if you're in Albania, the set of options available to you is far more  restricted and so I think that the marginal impact as we expand globally increases quite  a bit. So anyway, that's all to say that even though we are interested in and do today pursue  some of these direct adjacencies, I think that the core problem of global money orchestration  remains a really just big and unsolved problem. Does that look like being a better interface  for all these complexities and glossing them

over under the seven lines of code? Or  does that look like actually replacing the rails and the infrastructure to make  all this more efficient and effective? The former. The former, it's just not that  useful to build financial ecosystems that are self-contained. Right? A financial island is not  that helpful. It's much more valuable to build, I don't know, a financial... This is mixing  metaphors, but a financial air network or something. But I think we would much prefer that  Stripe plugged

into every existing system and rail and domestic organization rather than  that we tried to come along and supplant them. And this has been Stripe's strategy very  deliberately from the beginning where there were lots of companies when Stripe started out,  they were trying to do their own thing and go their own way. Whereas our belief was, you  got these, it's classic, Metcalf Law stuff of by enhancing the capabilities of an existing  ecosystem, you create quite a bit more value. Okay. Let's go

back to Stripe. Is Stripe a writing culture for the benefit of  the writer or the reader? It can be both. But which ones are more so? I think there are actually really considerable  benefits on both sides because for the reader, it's not just that it's maybe more efficient to  communicate stuff through text, though in many cases it is. But also there's this intertemporal  benefit where future readers can try to understand the through line and the thought process that  led us to this point. And I

think that's very considerable. But it's also true that I think  that, I write things and lots of people write things in order to organize one's own thoughts.  And if that ability was taken away from me, I think I'd be meaningfully less effective so  how exactly those balance out is hard to say. Maybe... They're not actually separable.  That's my answer. Literate cultures are just a different thing. I don't mean literate  in some faux intellectual way. I just mean, maybe 'textual cultures' is a

better term  here where Bruno Latour spoke about how he thinks part of how the printing revolution like  Gutenberg's caused the scientific revolution was by making knowledge more rigid. Where before,  if some observation didn't match some claim, you can always shrug and be like, "Well, the  person who transcribed that thing just made a mistake or whatever." And so by making  things more rigid, it's easier to break them. And then you can notice discrepancies  between, the theory or the claim or

whatever. Then you can notice discrepancies between  I guess the theory or the claim or whatever and the actual reality. And I think there's some  version of that organizationally where, I mean, I'm not drawing that precise parallel,  but there are analogous dynamics where the nature of oral cultures and contextual  cultures are just quite different. And the kinds of collaboration that are possible and  the kinds of consistency that can be achieved, it is just fundamentally different. And is fro

nt  or rear wheel of the bicycle more valuable? I guess theoretically you can have a unicycle, but  as a practical matter, you do just need both. I know I said no more AI questions, but on  this particular point, it actually seems very legitimate to me that you might expect  firms that have a lot of writing to be the first to experience a productivity gains of AI,  because there's all this context that the model doesn't have available readily. I don't  know if that's something you anticipate? I

think that's probably true. Yeah, I don't  know. And if the model is really good, maybe you should be able to pick stuff up quickly,  but I think most organizations are not recording all of their meetings for a variety of reasons.  And if they're not, then yeah, there is this question of what is the corpus? How do you get up  to speed? So yeah, my guess is that'll be true. Tell me about the internal LLM you built. Oh, we didn't build an internal LLM. We built  an internal LLM tool for making it

very easy for people to integrate LLMs into production services,  but also just into their regular workflows as humans. So the ability to work directly, I guess,  with the LLM as a standard chat agent as lots of people have built, but then also to integrate  that with some of our tools for querying and accessing data. Or maybe most interestingly  with sharing prompts across different people. And so somebody might discover, I mean, one  of my favorite examples actually is somebody put together a

prompt for optimizing  SQL queries and it doesn't always work, but sometimes it does. And it's very cheap  to ask us, "Got any ideas for optimizing the SQL query?" And sometimes it'll come  up with some good stuff. And so yeah, the collaborative abilities there  have proven surprisingly high return. And I don't know what the total number of  invocations is, but I think we're making millions of invocations per day now. There are  just dozens of dozens of actual production use cases across Stripe

and all sorts of really ...  I mean, the financial services ecosystem is in some way a giant analog to digital exercise  because humans are analog and intentions and identities and all these things have, there's  always some degree of uncertainty around them and some noise. But then transactions are  digital and we often find in these analog to digital conversions that LLMs can be a  surprisingly interesting augmenting tool. And actually on that point about the, I  don't know, the flexibility an

d the edge cases in the way humans interact with  these systems. I mean, in some sense, Stripe is a really high stakes bug bounty  program if somebody hacks it, not only your financial services, obviously money's in  play. But if there's reliability issues, not just because of a hack, but because you  deployed the wrong way, a significant percentage of world GDP would grind a halt at least while  it's down. How do you deal with that kind of responsibility? How do you keep the uptime  and keep th

e reliability while deploying fast? Yeah, this is one of the things  we've spent the most time on. I mean, back to this point about wanting to be the  place with the best people, and the value of focusing on craft so that you can have the best  people. In the context of software development, one of the things that developers really hate is,  well, actually two things that developers hate: slow development cycles and it'll  ship in the next release in a month, and that kind of thinking. Developer

s also  hate being paged at 2:00 AM for incidents. And so yeah, given the criticality of the  businesses that we serve, which is in rough terms, 1% of the global economy, I mean, it's not  totally clear how to measure this because we're not measuring ... GDP is defined as final  goods and Stripe is not only selling final goods, and so in theory there could be a bit  of double counting. But Stripe is mostly selling final goods. We're not used for, by and  large, for giant supply chain shipments.

So, I think maybe there's a mismeasurement of 10%  or 20% or something. But long story short, I think it works out about 1% of global  GDP. It's about $1 trillion a year. As you say, that then makes us really terrified  of outages. And so we work so hard to enable fast iteration and development cycles without having  outages. And just to put some numbers on it, we deploy production services that are in the  core charge flow around 1,000 times a day. Most of these services are automatically deplo

yed, so  when anybody makes any production-ready change, it just goes into production and it's meticulously  and carefully orchestrated so that it at first is just running some small sliver of traffic and then  incrementally more traffic until it's everything. So about 1,000 deploys per day at roughly, or  somewhat in excessive five-and-a-half nines, like 99.995% reliability, which works out to  about, I think about 100 and ... Yeah, two, two and a half minutes of unavailability  per year. It's

not that we have obviously two and a half contiguous minutes of  unavailability, but that's what it approximates. Even though it tends to happen  as background radiation throughout the year. And getting to that point, yeah, just takes  a huge amount of investment in ... And then those security properties  that are less readily measured, but analogous to those figures. And I  guess Silicon Valley doesn't tend to, I'm perhaps being now unfair and attributing  things to Silicon Valley, but maybe a

lot of the tech industry doesn't place a lot of value on  process and operational excellence. We culturally value the spontaneous and the creative and the  iconoclastic and the path breaking But building mechanisms that can enable really reliable,  enable the very reliable provision of important services at scale and removing the sources  of variability that can really cause a bad day for a very large number of people, I don't  think they get quite as much cultural credit. But yeah, we have adop

ted all sorts of ...  For example, we found that this kind of a core feedback loop around ... None  of this sounds like rocket science, but defining what it's that we care about and then  building automated measuring systems to obviously measure to what degree it's actually happening  in practice. And then to try to figure out, well, in the cases where we're not living  up to that, what is the reason? And then to actually intervene and to improve the  system so that that's not happening. And the

n importantly, to build secondary controls  that detect instances of deviation long before they actually cause a production problem or  anything. But just where we understand the behavior of the system in sufficient detail that  we can instrument it in some upstream way. Most of what I said there I think was well understood  by production engineers in 1930s. So again, I'm not claiming that it's any kind of radical  breakthrough, but we have found that the adoption of these practices in really te

nacious multi-year  form just yields really high returns. And there may be other organizations that both ship at that  rate and maintain that sort of developer velocity at this combination of scale and reliability  and security. But I don't think there are that many. And I think it's a real testament to the  remarkable folks at Stripe who made it happen Last point, but actually the fact  that you have this huge internal tooling and the testing is once you get  the AI engineers, they can just pus

h the commits and you have the infrastructure  set up that it can be readily evaluated Across the board, I think so much comes  back to what has to be true for us actually to be able to build and to take seriously  this goal of building the best software? And it's easy to say that as some lofty,  vague, hand wavy aspirational statement, but if you take that seriously as  a goal, and if you think of, well, what would you have to measure if you were  actually going to pursue it in earnest? And par

t are the characteristics of organizations  that do produce it, I mean, you get down to, well, customers have to really like your stuff. So  okay, well, how can we measure that and how can we systematize the process of making sure that there  aren't progressions there? And so we have this concept of experience journeys, which are sort  of pathways through stride that we really care are always implemented at a really high quality  level. And it has to be true that developers can iterate very quic

kly. And we just spoke  about how to make that happen. And, and, and. And so, I feel like maybe a theme through  everything we've talked about is actually taking the goal seriously. And I feel like  a lot of what we do at Stripe is, again, I disclaim any genius in it, I think  it's just the very earnest, repeated, serious and long-term application  of taking the goal seriously. A few more Stripe questions. 1% of global GDP is, it's such a staggering number. When you think  about where further gr

owth for Stripe comes from, does it come from the internet economy expanding?  Or does it come from Stripe becoming a larger share of the internet economy? And to the extent  that Stripe is growing faster than the internet, if we consider that the beta in your  case, where is that alpha coming from? That's a good question. Well, the customers  that Stripe observes are outgrowing the internet economy as a whole, like in aggregate. Now at  some point, those have to converge for obvious mathematica

l reasons, but we're 14 years in and  they haven't converged yet. So I think there's a lot of headroom there. And say Stripe is handling  around $1 trillion a year, when Stripe started out, the global economy was $60 trillion to $70  trillion-ish, and the global economy is now around $100 trillion. And so we still have quite a bit  of headroom before the amount of activity that is coming out of Stripe is really butting up  against the ceiling of global economic growth. And of course, it's not li

ke there's no  ceiling on global economic growth and for all sorts of reasons, it could be  vastly higher than it is. And I don't even mean new technologies or AIs or  whatever, but just obviously all the basic per capita math you can do around what  if everybody had an income on par with the US? And I think it is. One of the reasons I am so  interested in working on Stripe is I think it's the old line, the Lucas line, about how when  you start thinking about differential rates of development in

countries, it's hard to think  about anything else. Why does Brazil have the particular income and GDP level that it does? Why  does Poland have the level that it does? Why did Ireland have the trajectory that it did where we  went from being the sick man of Europe to now one of the wealthiest countries there? And I feel like  Stripe is some applied version of this question in practice where you're building software products  but, in some sense, connected to or touching upon these questions of,

well, why aren't there  more countries? Excuse me, why aren't there more countries? Why aren't there more companies?  And what determines the growth rate of a company? When you start the merch store, why does it have  X level of buyers rather than 2X? And I actually think those questions, I think those remain  fruitful questions. We actually haven't optimized the meta system of business to any particularly  great extent. For the vast majority of business businesses have been offline inefficient

, analog,  everything. And it's really only over the last one to two decades that a significant share of this  has been meaningfully digitized. And the prospects for efficiency gains and optimizations there  are still pretty significantly under explored. And we find incredibly basic things like  just extending capital to businesses. I mean, the reason we do that is not to generate profit  from the loans, but because we find that the businesses who we extend the capital then just  grow faster on

a sort of persistent subsequent basis. Or trying to figure out how does a business  decide which countries it sells in? And you'll find even for the smallest business through to  some of the largest businesses in the world that these are very ad hoc and not particularly  deeply thought through questions. Why don't you sell in Mexico and Brazil or whatever? IT  was like, "Well, it seemed kind of complicated, and so we didn't quite get around to it  and so forth." And so I think there's, to your q

uestion about where does the growth  come from? I think that there's still an awful lot of low-hanging fruit in just asking  some of these incredibly basic questions. So, when we think about the way in which  Stripe will continue to grow in the future, in some sense, it'll obviously involve a lot  of big businesses and you're now processing a significant amount of Amazon volume. There's  these other businesses you're doing deals with. First tell me how you think, it kind of makes  sense how an e

xponentially growing startup would contribute to exponentially growing growth for  Stripe. How does Stripe keep growing at the same trajectory when it is existing big businesses  that you're partnering with? And the second, also the case for why these startups matters so  compelling. A new thing is coming into this world, then we should really support it  and make sure it happens. Why is it compelling that Amazon can fulfill  orders more efficiently or something? Yeah, those are very good questi

ons. So, on the first one, you're right. Stripe is  doomed to eventually grow at the rate of the economy. And there's just a question of  how long it takes to get there, right? Now, the good news is I think it can be a very  long time because as we just discussed, there's so much low-hanging fruit around different  optimizations and improvements that are possible. And so I think it'll be many decades before that  happens, but it's true that will eventually occur. On the second question about wha

t's the, it's  obviously virtuous or compelling or exciting to foster all these nascent startups and to be  an anti-incumbency force, but what's the case for supporting established businesses? I think  people misunderstand where a small business, typically, not in every case, but at least  in the cases where we denote them startups, there's usually an embedded innovation. And  the innovation is all that the company is. They have a new idea and they're going to do  something better or different o

r whatever. And so generally speaking, we like innovation, and so  we've positive sentiments towards that startup. But there's a lot of innovation that comes  from large, established businesses. That's not all they do. There's also just running the  existing thing. And so maybe it's a smaller share, but the aggregate fraction of innovation that  comes from established businesses is really large. And we have to be cognizant of the  cognitive bias of the startups perhaps being somewhat more conspi

cuous and maybe on a relative  basis, the improvements in turbine technology, or in fab technology, or in insulation  technology that come from established businesses. Choose any sector of the economy  and a significant fraction of the important inventions that occurred over the last 10 or  20 years will have come from the incumbents. And so, I think as a general class, and  Tyler of course wrote a book on this, I think big business is underrated.  And if you look at the survey data, people tend

to have very positive sentiments,  not only towards startups, but towards small business as a class. Whereas even though  they've negative sentiments or relatively negative sentiments towards big business, not that  bad on an absolute basis, but not as favorable, I think it's true that established businesses tend  to pay better, they tend to be more efficient, more of the innovation in our economy comes from  them, and they produce a lot of consumer surplus. I think the specific case for Stripe

working with  them is typically they're coming to us not because they want to take the thing that they're already  doing and just go to all the work of transposing it to Stripe, but because either they want to do  a new thing that they're just not doing today, and so it's associated with some new  business line or some new innovation or invention or whatever, or they've  spotted the opportunity to, I guess, to maybe not produce a new product,  but to meaningfully change how they provide an exis

ting one in a fashion  that again, yields consumer surplus. And that sounds very abstract and theoretical, but  in practice, what it tends to mean is they want to take this thing they're selling in this market and  sell it in many more markets. Or they've realized that they're selling it in this kind of modality  and they should sell it in other more convenient ways. They should sell it on mobile or something.  And each of those, if it's successful and people actually buy it in any significant n

umbers, I  guess we're getting this decentralized signal from the economy that there's now something of  value being provided that wasn't heretofore. And as I take stock of the businesses, like  the enterprises that are in the process of migrating to Stripe or that did, so the last year,  whether it's the large retailers or the large global manufacturing firms or shipping companies,  things like this, it typically has one of those two patterns, new product or current product  sold to people who

weren't buying it before. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you think about just  the big trends in this society that are needed to solve our big problems, like Moore's  Law or the cost of solar or something, these are just, you have marginal improvements  over many decades. Big tech or big companies are just able to invest a lot of  money into doing the R&D here. Relentless iterative  improvement, yes, is underrated. Can I ask about John for a second? Sure. So, you guys recently published for  Charlie's A

lmanac and subsequently Charlie Munger has passed away.  Did Munger ever comment on your relationship, and if or whether it  reminded him of his and Buffet's? Not to me, but he knew John better, and so it's  possible that he did to John. Yeah, I don't know. What have you learned about marriage from John?  I mean, that this sort of coequal and intense, lengthy partnership is the closest  thing that you have is marriage, right? Well, I'm relatively new to the practice of  marriage, so maybe in a d

ecade I'll be able to extract the generalizable commonalities. I  suppose the general thing I would say is I think working with people you're close to is underrated.  And I'm doing Arc with Patrick Sue and Sylvana, Fast Grants was with Tyler and Sylvana, Stripe is  obviously with John. And actually John was also, I should mention, instrumentally involved in  Arc's formation. It would not have happened without John. And could give more examples,  but I feel like for all the ventures of any signif

icance in my life, they've not only been  with others, but been with other people that I'm very close to and where I had and would like to  have an enduring relationship that outlives them. And sometimes one hears the advice that you  shouldn't work with friends or maybe you shouldn't work with your partner or something like  that. And look, all these things are idiosyncratic and there are instances of every possible  permutation. But for me it's been a really rewarding experience. And I think J

ohn and I can  work together for ... You never know life, but I think we'll probably work together for decades.  And for us, it's been a really, both an important source of just meaning and, again, fulfillment.  But also I think there's a real complementarity. And I think that Stripe would be a less effective  company without either of us. I don't just mean from a bandwidth standpoint or something, but  I think we both bring different things to bear. Maybe the final question I'll ask you is  wha

t really strikes out to me about you, I mean, there's many things, obviously, but  one of the things is just how broadly you think of your job description. To the  extent that you think of if science is slowing down and civilization is stagnating,  that'll be bad for the GDP of the internet, so you can better get on that. Or if COVID keeps  going on, that's not good for business. Maybe that's not the way you thought about why you  needed to do Fast Grants. But in some sense, the extended phenoty

pe of what you think your  job is just incredibly broad. And I just wonder, is that trainable? When did you get  that? How do you think about that? I guess I just think about it as ... And this is  not false humility, just trying to do things that are useful and that contribute to civilization.  We're incredibly lucky that we get to live in this improbable, some combination of carnival and  city and sprawling edifice built by all the people who came before us. And I think it's not perfect,  nor

is it future prospering fore ordained. And we get to experience it for a pretty brief glimmer.  And it seems rewarding to do things of utility. And I mean, it's true that part of,  again, what's to us compelling about Stripe is that it pulls us into so many  different nooks and crannies of the world, and that generally it's value aligned with the  prospering of the world, as you say. And yeah, you can justify or at least view it somewhat  consistent some to these other pursuits with respect to s

tripes goals as well. But I think  it really just comes from a desire to be useful. Patrick, I think that's a great place to leave  it. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. hey everybody I hope you enjoyed that episode  as always the most helpful thing you can do is to share the podcast send it to people  you think might enjoy it put it in Twitter your group chats Etc just splits the world I  appreciate you listening I'll see you next time cheers