Inside the Mysterious World of Credit Cards (with Patrick McKenzie)
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.
We'd love to hear from you. Today is April 24th, 2025, and my guest is Patrick Mackenzie. He writes about tech, finance, and, as he describes it, the wonky geekery that underlies the modern world. He does that at his website, bits about money. He's also an advisor at Stripe.
Our topic for today is credit cards, the economics of credit cards and various aspects of credit cards. Patrick, welcome to Econ Talk. Thanks very much for having me. And I'll give the obligatory disclaimer when talking about all things credit cards. I used to work at Stripe for six years.
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (75 minutes, 12,626 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.