Podcast Episodes
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How the SPLC became financial infrastructure
Episode 89
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 …
11 hours ago
The honey badger of payments
Episode 88
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his classic Bits about Money essay on how checks shaped the entire American payments infrastructure, from the origin…
1 week, 1 day ago
Cash received is not revenue earned
Episode 87
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his classic Bits about Money essay explaining why revenue recognition in software is more complicated than most engi…
2 weeks, 1 day ago
Your bank balance isn’t in the bank, and other alchemy
Episode 86
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 sta…
3 weeks, 1 day ago
Payroll, pins, and punch cards
Episode 85
In this episode of Complex Systems, Patrick McKenzie riffs on why public sector payroll modernization is even more likely to fail than the typical pu…
4 weeks, 1 day ago
Delve into compliance theatre
Episode 84
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) explains how compliance regimes designed to be viral brought many more firms into the scope of frameworks like SOC 2. This…
1 month ago
Understanding consumer debt collections: the underbelly of finance
Episode 83
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) reads his classic Bits about Money essay explaining why the debt collection industry earns its “river of effluvia” metapho…
1 month, 1 week ago
Inference engineering and the real-world deployment of LLMs, with Philip Kiely
Episode 82
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) and Philip Kiely, early employee at Baseten, discuss the inference stack: the critical layer of software and hardware that…
1 month, 2 weeks ago
Secrets designed to be divulged and other payment oddities
Episode 81
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) deconstructs the "original sin" of payments: building a global financial substrate on shared secrets that were distributed…
1 month, 3 weeks ago
Understanding government procurement, with Luke Farrell
Episode 80
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) and Luke Farrell examine the structural "technical imagination" gap that prevents the US government from delivering high-f…
2 months ago