Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

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 hood to explain how AI detection actually works.

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 fintechs to global investment banks, to discuss what the back office actually does all day. They cover the life cycle of a trade: execution, clearing, settlement, and the constant reconciliation between counterparties who don't quite agree on what happened.

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 why UVC, a wavelength of light that inactivates airborne pathogens but is absorbed harmlessly by the dead outer layer of human skin, remains almost entirely undeployed.

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 You Getting Paid In?"  They cover how a Jane Street manager staffed the firm's least lucrative corner by paying people in culture, why Ken Griffin is worth roughly fifty Taylor Swifts, and how a longtime Google product manager quietly ends up with Grammy-winner money.

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 walks through the machinery behind his recent SPLC reporting, including "parallel construction" with LLMs: when sources can't go on the record, models can surface public confirmation of the same facts in unguarded podcast interviews, press releases, and prepared remarks.

In this video 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 of Proof Positive, to discuss the microeconomics of YouTube. They break down how creators actually get paid — from $3–$20 CPMs and the leaky funnel where a million views yields perhaps 50,000 actual ad views, to sponsor reads, Super Chats, and MrBeast selling chocolate bars as his own advertiser of last resort.

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. Presenting Sponsors: Mercury & Granola Complex Systems is presented by Mercury—radically better banking for founders. Mercury offers the best wire experience anywhere: fast, reliable, and free for domestic U.S. wires, so you can stay focused on growing your business. Apply online in minutes at mercury.com.

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 original public interest reporting, following on the previous episode on how the Southern Poverty Law Center became financial infrastructure.

The Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against a well-respected civil rights non-profit on April 21st. Here I tell the improbable story of how the private intelligence agency it ran published a data product, then drove wide adoption of it in the financial industry as a screening tool for accounts and transactions. Jeff Bezos couldn't do better than it. The private intelligence agency also ran covert assets. Those covert assets needed a paycheck.

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 into a wider discussion about payroll providers and their role as software, payment rails, and a sink for an enduring controversy in political economy. We want robust state capacity and hate income taxes.