YouSaid · the spoken record

Patrick Collison

lines on the record: 111
first: 2018-12-20
most recent: 2018-12-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“With a lot of experi This is one of the really interesting and surprising things where people keep feeling that spaces are too late when in fact they're not only not too late, but still in the first 10%. Mark Andreessen talks about getting to Silicon Valley in the early 90s and thinking, man, I'm too late. And the endless kind of similar examples you can point to. And I mean, we worried about it with Stripe, obviously. And yet we kind of came to realize that actually the internet as a whole is still in its earliest innings.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Entire empire. Of people. And right, and these aren't competitive in the sense that Robinson Crusoe was kind of one of the first novels. And it turns out that that was a big space. And it was not a bad thing when more novelists came along. And so kind of similarly, I actually think that sort of, I'm not even sure the podcast space is the podcast space per se. It's more the sort of the serious in-depth long-form exploration, but even though that obviously is kind of way bigger now than it was five years ago, it still seems to me that it's actually still quite early.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, no, I won't bore you or flatter you with praise here. But I think to my perspective, certainly, and I listen to a lot of podcasts, that there's kind of a lineage of podcasts that can kind of be traced back to this show. There's a model that you prototyped and of the continued to implement that now a lot of other podcasts are kind of somehow a different version of.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I guess to whatever extent, well, I wrote in that list of advice that if people around you don't think what you're doing is sort of a bit strange, that maybe it's not strange enough. And I don't think you should always be heeding that, but I do often wish that people did more did more strange things in service of or in pursuit of real sort of long-term economic and technological progress. And so that's kind of figuring out how to help people to do more weird, strange, and original things in service of that is kind of, that's my particular goal, trying to kind of arm those upstarts and those misfits. And it's a very big space. And I would very profoundly welcome more participants pushing for that cause.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is often vague, then an exact answer to the wrong question, which can also be made precise. And again, I think this kind of gets back to the same idea that it's kind of somehow more important to be kind of making the right decisions to have the right options than to be perfect at choosing between a specific set of options.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's right, and the last chapter especially, I mean, the whole book to some degree, but especially the last chapter, is, I think, really applicable to and relevant to really almost anyone. The last chapter is called You and Your Research. It's actually kind of a talk that I'm sure a lot of people listen to the show have previously kind of read or heard. But Hemming worked at Bell Labs and he in the book kind of often quotes and cites John Tukey, this amazing guy who sort of also worked at Bell Labs and is the sort of father of data visualization. And like a lot of kind of data visualizations and analyses that kind of were familiar with that kind of we think of as being standard, John Tukey actually invented. But there's this kind of Tuqui line that it's far better to have an approximate answer to the right question.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, yep, yep. And there's all the kind of hyperbolic discounting that we engage in with regard to our future selves and over commitments that ensue and all the rest. I think there's another, I think, fabulous book that kind of touches on some of this, the art of doing science engineering by Richard Hamming. The art of doing science and engineering.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And obviously one of the kind of general messages of that book is that so much of doing things well is about being really good at seeing just what is happening and kind of then sort of training your conscious and subconscious to kind of make the requisite corrections. And that intuition really resonates with me.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get really good at remaking the decisions when and as necessary. You mentioned that I fly both John and I have been flying for more than 10 years. And when you're flying a landing, you're always off track, always off track. If there was a big discussion of how do you make sure that you get established on precisely the right light slope when you start, I don't think that'd really be that productive. I think it'd be sort of pretty frustrating. Instead, it's all about the constant feedback and course and error correction. And I think that's kind of as a general matter, a better model for life. And that even a lot of the decisions that look pretty trapped or may not necessarily be. There's a really good book that I very highly recommend. Called the inner game of tennis. Tim”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. This is back to this point, I think, of you're dead right to kind of flank this. And I think it's back to this idea that just try to get better, try to get yourself into a position in which you can make a better decision. And one way you can do that is by kind of exploring for more options right now. Another way you can do that is just make the decision and remake it if you have to because the remaking of us can often be a better decision because you'll have much better information once it's augmented with or once you have the kind of additional information that hey this branch really does not look promising and i know that because i tried it for you know two months um and i again i think another way in which the kind of framework of sort of optimizing decision making can be kind of a little bit harmful is um it sort of characterizes uh or i guess it focuses on the locus of the decision itself whereas who cares you don't necessarily need to be sort of that good a decision making if you sort of”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing you can do is you can sort of try to make sure that people around you don't influence you too much and that you are truly original in coming up with your own thoughts and so on. Or you can embrace the fact that they do and they inevitably will and just be careful about who they are and try to make sure they'll shape you in sort of ways and directions that you want to be shaped. And I think that's both more effective, but also I want to say a more fulfilling way to go about it.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I think having that pantheon of people, both kind of people you actually know and then sort of people you know from afar and maybe they're living, maybe they're dead, is just super powerful. And I guess there's something about kind of us as humans where we're sort of uniquely well adapted to being influenced by and understanding other humans. And so rather than I think thinking about sort of decision making purely this kind of abstract science, but actually embracing the fact that it has this kind of deeply human character to it, you know, you can really kind of use that to your advantage. I'm sure many I know many guests in the show have talked about the importance of kind of being deliberate and intentional in kind of selecting your peer group and the people who influence you as an, you know,”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and the amazing thing is, well, I read about this study. I've not confirmed whether or not it has replicated, but the idea that people can improve their own decision making by simply choosing other people. I mean, basically exactly along the lines of what you just said, and imagining what they would say, like specific other people, imagining what they would say, and then averaging over the responses. But that's like a really amazing fact because, of course, this is all occurring in your own head. And so the idea that by kind of just simulating other people and then, again, kind of this kind of averaging computation over the responses, that's actually better is really like a pretty trippy thought. And yet, I mean, it kind of makes sense to you, right? Because you can actually for certain people predict, I think, with relatively good accuracy what they're likely to say. That's kind of a way of getting out.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specific set for me. I kind of tend to go to different kinds of people for different kinds of issues. And I thought they actually have any formal power, obviously. But just kind of that notion of there being these sources of perspective that are quite different to you. I think that's just really very powerful. I think valuing those people and building those relationships really pays off.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nielsen and NIELSEN, and he's just exceptionally good at sort of Thinking, well, should I go up or down? And he's just great at sort of pointing out all the different ways in which you could go sideways. You're sort of living in flatland on this kind of two-dimensional plane. And he points out maybe you could go up. And so I guess the best ways that I found our sort of particular people, people who just sort of seem to think laterally and kind of in my head, they're kind of thinking sideways. And I think the second best way is exposing yourself to kind of more perspective and ideas in all the ways we've kind of already discussed. But I think finding the people who just think a bit divergently, the returns are really high. And I think having that sort of little board of directors around you, that's kind of an imperfect analogy because it's not like there's a”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Base and the world is just so much bigger than perhaps people are thinking about it. It happens to all of us. It happens to me, the kind of your horizon scenario, you get stuck in your existing models, you kind of get used to conceiving of the world and the options in front of you in a particular way. And it's more about how do you repeatedly pull yourself out of that. How do you do that?”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's about sort of how do you explore the space to make sure that you sort of actually, well, just to kind of return to maybe the example we just mentioned, it's like, do I go to this college or that college? There's also a C there, which is, well, should I go to college? Or it's, you know, should I become a doctor or a dentist? But maybe the answer is that you should become a biochemist. And so the way I find myself in conversations with people is really trying to push them. It's less on sort of how do you make a decision and more about how do you jolt yourself out of the kind of particular furrows that you're in and realize the possibilities”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me think for a second. I think that I actually think that decision making is probably a little bit overrated as kind of a question in that or an area of study in that investors, obviously, this is their job, right? And that's kind of all they can do in some sense, invest or not. And, you know, fine if there are certain kinds of investors got to actually help the companies they invest in. And so they have kind of other levers at the disposal, but kind of in some simplified model, it's like, you know, do you click the button or not? Do you pull a lever or not? I actually think that kind of in our lives, things rarely have that character. Sometimes you have a true binary decision, right? Like, do I go to this college or that college? Do I take this job offer or not?”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, Sudwell lays it out, and I'm no expert here, but I've really spent quite a bit of time sort of trying to better understand this question. And it's certainly the best cut that I've seen. Another one that's kind of worth mentioning is James Fallow's wrote a piece for the Atlantic back in the 90s called How the World Works, but it's some title like that. But if you search kind of James Fallow's trade and if you include List this German economist as a search term, then you'll find it. And it's again kind of about it's basically about the South Korea question.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The creation of like a national car company or something, which of course South Korea successfully did, or maybe do some electronics manufacturing or whatever. And you want to kind of subsidize that, but you do have to force them to compete internationally because they just kind of, if you just protect them and they just serve the domestic market, you'll just end up with a worse and less efficient version of stuff that exists in the rest of the world. So you've got to force them to compete. And the third one is you want to kind of restrain the consumer credit industry so that rather than giving credit to consumers to go and spend it on leisure or whatever it is, I guess the consumers might choose to do that you kind of direct all that towards industrialization, economic progress, and sort of catch up growth with the rest of the world. And then once you catch up, then maybe you should kind of give it to consumers because, you know, who else are you going to give it to? You've reached the frontier. But the thesis of the book is that kind of reining it in in the development phases has really served those countries well. So that is basically the prescription as Joe.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A fairly compelling evidence for it is the following land reform protected but competitive industrial and kind of export industries and then third tight control over the consumer credit sector. And that obviously seems like a very kind of arbitrary basket of things, but he makes a pretty strong case for it. And just to provide a little bit of color on that, the idea is that kind of first you want to make sure that people own their own land so they can kind of farm it more effectively. They can kind of reap the rewards, the fruits of their own labor. And so that kind of gives you this immediate bump in kind of national income when people invest in something they really own themselves. The second thing is, well, most of these countries have no kind of meaningful export industries or these kind of value added export industries. And so you kind of want to encourage the”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, ironically, it's actually the richest country in the world by GDP that I've not been to. I caveat my answer with sort of that. Having said that, there's actually a really good book on this topic called How Asia Works by Joe Studwell, I believe. Basically, he try to answer kind of exactly this question of why did South Korea and Taiwan and China and Vietnam and so forth, why did they diverge from Philippines and from Indonesia and to a significant degree from India and so forth? And basically the answer he gives, and he marshalls,”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Western Europe or North America or Singapore or Japan, whatever, how do we make progress here? And I think so much of that is how do we enable new things to happen? How do we have new technology get deployed? How do we have entrepreneurs start more companies? How do we unleash the potential of more people who want to do more weird things? How do we make sure that when somebody spots an opportunity for improvement that doesn't get kind of squished by the kind of stultifying deceleration of the status quo, how do we make sure that it gets kind of encouraged and amplified? And again, obviously kind of Stripe is an effort in this space, as indeed too is pioneer. And the third one is, well, how do we just generate new knowledge? How do we understand the world more deeply and just what is it intrinsically possible so that we've more buttons?”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“themselves in remarkably short periods of time. South Korea is perhaps kind of the best example just in terms of the magnitude of the change in just a couple decades. And so we might think perhaps if you look at Africa and kind of no other countries existed, you might say, well, just inevitably, it takes centuries for this catch-up to happen. And, you know, maybe we can kind of accelerate it a little bit, but there's no way this can happen overnight. That's empirically not true. We have these examples of countries in which it happened in a kind of grand arc of history sense happened essentially overnight. And so what is it about South Korea that kind of made that possible? And can we enact the same transformation in Egypt or in Ethiopia? So I think that's kind of one dimension to the question. I think the other dimension is how do we advance at the frontier? And so if you think about, you know,”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty arcane. I don't think there were many other companies that sort of are framing their mission relative to GDP, but I mean, it really does get back to this idea we've been discussing where I think that's actually like a very urgent cause. I think roughly speaking you can sort of break it down in two ways. There's kind of actually maybe three ways where there's kind of how do you raise the level of countries that are kind of behind the frontier. So emerging markets, developing countries, how do you raise them to kind of where we are today? And there are these kind of tantalizing examples that is actually possible until you look at, you mentioned Singapore, you look at Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, to some degree Vietnam, of course China, though China still is quite a ways to go. But I mean, there are these amazing examples of countries that have really transformed”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I guess the first thing I would say is I think that question you just asked is the big question. I think we should all be obsessed with. Like I think you should ask every guest that question. I think people should people in positions of influence or where they can have great impact. They should be obsessed with it. It is an issue of true moral importance. I don't think there's going to be any silver bullet and kind of panaceas. And I mean, obviously Stripe is kind of, you know, one iron in that fire where with Stripe, you know, we hope to contribute, we frame our mission to grow the GDP of the internet. I mean, kind of very directly around economic growth. And like on some level, that's”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, Scott Alexander Slatesar Codex has a really good blog post about just the trickiness of these kind of happiness surveys, where I think the core message and data from them is kind of correct, but a lot of specific, I think, interpretations and kind of comparisons we want to make are a little bit fraught.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not that that's what you're saying. I know. I think the core point you're making about the complexity of happiness surveys, I think, is 100% right”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does not mean that the gains are illusory. And if half of my kids died, but I still scored myself as being pretty happy because I didn't even realize that not having that happen was even an option such that when that problem was solved, my kind of self-reported level didn't change that much as I adjusted to the new normal. I don't think that means that that gain, that improvement is not very, very real.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very, very strong. And so I guess another version of maybe the kind of complexity you're getting at is when you look at this kind of these intertemporal comparisons, when you sort of look back at how people, how happy they reported themselves as being 60 years ago, obviously they had kind of inferior health outcomes or they didn't have as many leisure options or they couldn't travel as much or whatever. So they're kind of lives on some objective level were worse. But their happiness scores aren't that bad because I guess on some level they kind of didn't know what was missing. But I see that as more being something that's tricky about happiness surveys than something about kind of fun.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the example of Ethiopia, while kind of on the one hand, I think, as I guess you saw, it's not like this is a country where everyone is sort of in the perpetual depth of despair, it does rank in the bottom half of sort of global happiness surveys. Actually, Max Roser has this, he does a lot of kind of data visualization around development economics, and he has this wonderful visualization, this kind of scatter plot of happiness against kind of per capita income. And sure enough, what you see is it's certainly not a perfect correlation. There are all these other factors maybe kind of cultural effects or these, again, comparative questions and so on. But broadly speaking, the correlation really is.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think happiness is certainly kind of a tricky measure, right? And as you say, there's kind of this sort of sociological and kind of comparative version of it. And the phenomenon is seen where kind of, to some degree, I guess this is another way of saying what you just alluded to, which is the kind of happiness you have with your level of wealth is kind of a function of the wealth of those around you. And so if you find out about more people who are above you and some income table, that might actually kind of depress your happiness slightly. However, it's also kind of pretty robustly the case that there are some things that are just kind of absolute inputs into happiness and that your health or chronic pain or whether your kids die or not or whatever these really do.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their lives are far less comfortable. And so I think there's a real moral question. What can we do to put them on an equal footing with us? And indeed, how can we raise the waterline for all of us such that while our lives are amazing compared to the people who lived before us, there's still tons of terrible things that happen. People die of cancer and people die of death caused by pollution. And while some people in society today get fantastic educations and have the good fortune to have great colleagues and meaningful work, a lot of people don't, et cetera, et cetera. And so I see kind of economics and economic history as being really a kind of moral anthropology. Of cultural analysis and structural analysis of well, how do we solve this centrally, foundationally question that really takes primacy?”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A more complete picture of the kind of variety and complexity and fascination or fascinating material of the world. I don't need to obviously enumerate all of this, but just it's astounding compared to all humans who ever lived just how amazingly lucky we are. And again, that luck is we are born into a wealthy society. And so I think kind of one of the most urgent and important moral questions is why doesn't everyone get to do that and how can we change the world such that more people do. Last week I was in Africa. I was in countries including Senegal and Ethiopia and Rwanda. And those countries are obviously far less wealthy than the US and the people there have far less opportunity.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To Erasmus Because it's so important in that arguably the single most important thing kind of about our lives compared to other lives that have been lived in human history is that we have the immense good fortune to have been born in wealthy societies. And that has had so many consequences in our lives, right? I mean, it means that our parents are way more likely to be alive, our siblings are far more likely to be alive. We get to work on things we find sort of way more interesting.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also have a Twitter list called Reading, which is basically the same list, but it's an easy to follow format. And so anyone can go follow that list. And I think actually a reasonable number of people now do.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, he's awesome. I made a list of some people I follow at Patrick Collison.com slash people. I wouldn't say that all of them are excellent at this not taking offense and at sort of trying to find the best in some particular idea or trying to find whatever truth is in it. But I would say as a general matter they are.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An idea and scrutinize it and inspect it and kind of follow its consequences without it kind of bleeding out into kind of the rest of your brain and sort of infecting your whole worldview. I think the ability to do that without kind of getting angry or taking offense is really super powerful because if you can do that, you can then afford to kind of, in a way, you can be less careful about what ideas you inspect and scrutinize. And so you can just kind of be much more sort of far-reaching and kind of broadly ranging. And then...”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For whatever reason, the kind of the ability to not take offense and to kind of inspect and to try to understand and even try to kind of really extrapolate from an idea or a set of ideas or a worldview without taking offense at it, that's not something that for whatever reason is kind of really valued in our culture, but I think is actually super important. Can you as has been said, can you run an idea in emulation in your head? In computers, people talk about running VMs, right? I mean, AWS, you upload your software, your code, they run it on their servers, but they run it in emulation, and they kind of in a little sandbox to make sure that it can't kind of break out and affect other users' applications. And so similarly, can you run”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Heuristic or habit here, or something is just to not get mad and to not get offended in that outrage and offense and anger are sometimes useful, of course, but I think they're sort of useful. They're less useful than well, they're overutilized. They're not as useful as often as they are invoked. And I think...”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We could also bookmark and come back to it if it's hard to come up with. Yeah, I mean, let me see if I can think of a few. Let me think about that and come back. No problem. But it's a good question. And maybe the other one is the kind of general...”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think we can't just kind of dismiss people who oppose immigration as kind of nativist bigots. I think we kind of have to ask the questions and just try to understand, well, what could or would cause somebody to harbor concerns there, right? So that's when sort of trying to figure out what worldview helps have a view make sense. Second one is, and we kind of touched on this at the beginning of the conversation, just exposing yourself to more worldviews, because I think a lot of people, well, everyone finds it more comfortable to be around kind of views that accord with your own and models that accord with your own. And so there's a kind of deliberate seeking out of discomfort. And I do some of this myself, who I follow on Twitter and what I read, and even who I spend time with, were sort of trying to make sure that I expose myself to people who have”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Holding a point of view, and especially strongly holding a point of view, there's kind of difference to your own rather than trying to figure out how they're wrong, trying to, I mean, that's valuable, but you'll inevitably do that. Your emotional brain will ensure you do, trying to figure out how they're right. What is a sensible worldview in which what they believe or what they're saying actually kind of does make sense? And that doesn't mean they're right, but sort of trying to figure out like if they're not stupid, why would they believe this? And so, you know, I'm personally very in favor of kind of openness to immigration.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this is kind of this is the big question, right? And yeah, maybe there were kind of two halves. What are heuristics you should have and use for kind of who and what to listen to? And then, yeah, secondly, separately, how do you think for yourself? And I think, okay, I'll start enumerating some particular heuristics or tricks. I'm not sure this is a complete answer, but the first is when you see a smart person”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there were enough changes of scenery and environment that you sort of just got to take a whole lot of different things in. I mean, honestly, the other thing that was great about them is even though being in Ireland, there wasn't kind of a whole lot of distraction. We were able to just kind of read a lot or kind of focus on our own things on these trips. focus and read even more. And so honestly, the most kind of vivid memories I have mostly of these trips, it's not sort of going to see the such and such or so-and-so. It's like particular books that I read. And I mean, I remember we'd kind of load up the car and the caravan with just like heaps and heaps of books. And you'd have these long drives eight hours, ten hours, and just kind of reading in the car the whole way.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we went almost every summer camping in Europe. And so we'd take the ferry to Europe, which from Ireland obviously isn't that far, and we'd bring some tents or a little caravan. And we'd just go kind of driving around the continent, staying at all these different campgrounds. And Europe turns out to kind of have all these really great, nice campgrounds. Almost every town has one. And so we stay a few days here, maybe a week there, and so on, and it would be France and Germany and Austria and Hungary and Italy and whatever. And I have these kind of incredibly fond memories of those trips. And I mean, they'd be like a month long. And they were great, I guess, because they were kind of long enough that you didn't feel kind of pressed for time or like, okay, today we got to go see this, that, and the other. You kind of shifted into just kind of camping mode.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Corporate quality management training. And so you've probably heard these acronyms like ISO 9000, these kind of certification programs that have, yeah, yeah. And so, kind of there are all these American multinationals setting up shop in Ireland, and there's kind of a lot of appetite for sort of making sure they were kind of doing things properly and well and so on. And so she started this business, again, providing this training. And so basically all through my childhood, she was running this business.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So both of them worked. Our dad for most of our childhood ran a small kind of lakeside hotel in a 24 bedrooms. And so he was kind of, it was a few miles from our house, and he spent a lot of time there. And of course, for us as kids, I mean, it was super exciting. I mean, this hotel was like this giant playground as far as we were concerned. I think the staff didn't always appreciate that, but we loved roaming around it and going and sliding around the polished function room floor and all the rest. And our mom started a corporate training company back right around the time I was born. I think she had left her previous job and then I was born. And I think after a couple of weeks, she decided, oh, I don't know, this kid isn't that interesting. And so from the house, she decided to start this company that I would kind of provide.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While we were, yeah, exactly while we were roaming, but that kind of all the, yeah, exactly. I think that they were playing a supporting role rather than having us be kind of with these friends in college, it felt like they were kind of at the front of a locomotive. And the locomotive is speeding along down the tracks and they're just kind of hanging on for dear life being pushed along by the little cattle protector.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They kind of really took hold in a deeper way. And so I don't have kids today, but I do kind of reflect a lot on the kind of childhood we had because it was pretty different in multiple regards to sort of the childhoods of the people around us. And especially when I got to college in the US, it was sort of so foreign for me, the idea that people were so laden with extracurriculars and sort of burnishing their college resumes from age 12 or earlier and the kind of the period of sort of teenagerhood and adolescence was kind of so intense. Whereas for myself and John, it really felt kind of exploratory and that we were, that our parents were kind of life coaches or”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT