The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Ezra Clancho.

My guest this week is Patrick Carlson, CEO of the payments company Stripe,

his payment company, which only five years old, but last year served 40% of people who bought

something online. So it is it has become an absolutely integral part of the internet's plumbing,

and particularly its payment plumbing. He is also just a fascinating brilliant polymathic guy.

This is a conversation that goes everywhere from how he built Stripe to the enlightenment,

to the online community of rationalists, to whether or not we should be optimistic or pessimistic

about the long term future, to how does one learn or create culture inside of a company.

You'll hear this. He's able to footnote his own speech in a way that I find completely

amazing. His recall is really something to behold. I enjoyed talking to him tremendously.

I always do. I think you will like it as well. As always, please share the show on Facebook,

on Twitter, wherever sharing is done. Please check out my other podcasts of the weeds where I go deep

into policy with Matt the Glacier and Sarah Cliff. And continue to suggest guests and give me feedback

at Ezra Clancho at Vox.com. So here is Patrick Carlson for a very very interesting, very unusual,

very fun conversation about everything that I could think of. Patrick Carlson, thank you for being

here. Thank you so much for having me. So where did the idea for Stripe come from? What was the

problem you were trying to solve? Well, I think there were two slightly different ideas in Stripe.

It was the narrow thought and impetus that made us build the first prototype. And then there was

a thing that made us take it seriously and continue to work on it. And so the thing that made us

build the prototype was the simple observation that it's really freaking difficult to go into simply

accept credit card payments to accept money from customers through the internet. And this is

...