Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

Everyone wants to be your wallet

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his Bits About Money essay on the business of wallets, with new commentary, prompted by paying his barber $100 over Venmo and wondering w

How AI detection actually works, with Pangram’s Max Spero

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Max Spero, co-founder and CEO of Pangram Labs, which builds models that identify AI-generated text and images. Max goes under the

Two banks can't agree on fourth-grade math | Alex Elliott

Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) is joined by Alex Elliott (@alexpotato), who has spent his career in SRE and operations roles at financial firms ranging from ten-person finte

LLMs and the economics of Evil, Inc., with Manish Goregaokar

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Manish Goregaokar, a senior software engineer and member of the Rust security response team, to discuss what LLMs do to the cost s

The economics of putting germicidal light in every room, with Misha Gurevich and Vivian Belenky of Aerolamp

In this episode, Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Misha Gurevich, CEO of Aerolamp, and Vivian Belenky, its chief scientist and a researcher at Columbia, to discuss

Cheap cognition, supercharged surveillance, and AI risks, with Garrison Lovely

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Garrison Lovely, journalist and author of Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us and How to Stop It, to ma

What you're actually getting paid in, with Leila Clark

In this episode, Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Leila Clark, founder of Stardrift and formerly a software engineer at Jane Street, to discuss her essay "What Are

What LLMs can and can't do for writers, with Clara Collier of Asterisk Magazine

Patrick McKenzie is joined by returning guest Clara Collier, editor-in-chief of Asterisk Magazine, to discuss how working writers and reporters actually use LLMs. Patrick

YouTube economics now, with Justin Kuiper

In this episode of Complex Systems, Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Justin Kuiper, a longtime writer for MatPat's Game Theory family of channels and now creator o

The structural footprint of a bank run

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his 2023 essay "Deposit Franchises as Natural Hedges," written seven weeks into that year's banking crisis, making the case that deposit

Forty ways to pay for coffee in Japan

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his 2021 essay "Payments in Japan," tracing how Japanese consumers navigate a landscape with dozens of competing payment methods at once:

The factory behind your home loan

Patrick McKenzie reads from his 2022 Bits About Money essay on mortgages, making the case that a mortgage is best understood as a manufactured product, not a simple loan

How brokerage transfers actually work

Patrick McKenzie reads from his 2024 Bits About Money essay on ACATS, the Automated Customer Account Transfer Service that governs how Americans move investment accounts

Wrong numbers and why they survive, with Aaron Brown

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Aaron Brown, author of Wrong Number, to examine why institutions that produce bad statistics face so few consequences for doing so

Defendant, Censor, Politico, Spy

The improbable but true story of how non-profits operating a private intelligence agency to combat terrorism decided to interfere with campaign infrastructure in a U.S. e

How the SPLC became financial infrastructure

Patrick McKenzie reads from his latest Bits About Money essay, walking through why bank fraud charges are a prosecutor's favorite tool, how the Bank Secrecy Act's surveil

The honey badger of payments

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his classic Bits about Money essay on how checks shaped the entire American payments infrastructure, from the origins of ACH to why a sta

Cash received is not revenue earned

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his classic Bits about Money essay explaining why revenue recognition in software is more complicated than most engineers, founders, and

Your bank balance isn’t in the bank, and other alchemy

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his classic Bits About Money essay on why your bank deposit is not what you think it is. He explains the capital stack that makes deposit

Payroll, pins, and punch cards

In this episode of Complex Systems, Patrick McKenzie riffs on why public sector payroll modernization is even more likely to fail than the typical public software procure