Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

Reading the Anthropic S-1, with Zvi Mowshowitz

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by returning guest Zvi Mowshowitz, AI watcher extraordinaire, to read Anthropic’s S-1 and what it shows about the AI industry. They c

Why SoftBank paid me 17 yen to skip the air conditioning

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his 2022 Bits about Money essay “Markets in power,” prompted by a SoftBank push notification asking him to cut his air conditioner use be

The charity that is also a time machine

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his 2022 Bits about Money essay on the infrastructure behind American charitable giving, prompted by the wave of AI-generated wealth expe

⁠⁠The $900 million wire that wasn't final

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his 2022 Bits about Money essay "Finality does not exist in payments." It argues that how final a payment is depends on the rails, the pa

Why banks pay you to use their credit cards

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his Bits about Money essay on how credit cards make money. The prompt was a listener who wondered how a card can include free travel insu

Stranded? Who pays when air travel breaks

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) got stranded overnight after a backhoe severed a single fiber optic cable, knocking out air traffic control across much of the eastern US. His

Forced vacations are a fraud control

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his Bits About Money essay "Financial systems take a holiday" (originally published February 2024), prompted by a conversation with a pri

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