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 deposits appear riskless while fundin...
9 Apr 48min
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 procurement project. He then goes int...
2 Apr 47min
Delve into compliance theatre
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) explains how compliance regimes designed to be viral brought many more firms into the scope of frameworks like SOC 2. This created a market demand for compliance-on-the-chea...
26 Mar 56min
Understanding consumer debt collections: the underbelly of finance
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his classic Bits about Money essay explaining why the debt collection industry earns its “river of effluvia” metaphor. From the accounting standards that force banks t...
19 Mar 44min
Inference engineering and the real-world deployment of LLMs, with Philip Kiely
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) and Philip Kiely, early employee at Baseten, discuss the inference stack: the critical layer of software and hardware that sits between a model’s weights and a user’s prompt...
12 Mar 1h 23min
Secrets designed to be divulged and other payment oddities
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) deconstructs the "original sin" of payments: building a global financial substrate on shared secrets that were distributed promiscuously to function. He examines the multi-d...
5 Mar 25min
Understanding government procurement, with Luke Farrell
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) and Luke Farrell examine the structural "technical imagination" gap that prevents the US government from delivering high-fidelity digital services. They discuss why states r...
26 Feb 1h 20min
APIs of evil: studying fraud as infrastructure
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads an essay about "industrial-scale" fraud and why it should be treated as a professional business process rather than a series of isolated accidents. He explains how fra...
12 Feb 51min
