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: credit cards, electronic mone...
25 Jun 35min
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 between a bank and a customer....
18 Jun 26min
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 between brokerages, then updat...
4 Jun 43min
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. They trace the pattern from ...
14 Mai 55min
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. election.This piece includes or...
8 Mai 1h 5min
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 surveillance regime is designed to fo...
1 Mai 51min
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 standard US bank account is, tech...
23 Apr 29min
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 financial reporters think. The...
16 Apr 33min
