Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

Patrick McKenzie

Booking Overview

Interview show focused on how technology, incentives, institutions, and operational decisions shape finance, government, and other complex systems, typically featuring expert practitioners, founders, researchers, and journalists. Strong pitch candidates include senior technical operators, fintech and financial-services leaders, cybersecurity experts, policy specialists, researchers, and authors with firsthand expertise; booking difficulty is medium because guests need substantial domain credibility but are not generally required to be celebrities.

Metrics

Episodes: 104

Frequency: Weekly

Rating: 4.9/5.0

Estimated listeners: 1k-10k

Gender skew: Male

Location: USA

Contact Information

Publicly listed emails

patrick@kalzumeus.com

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Host

Patrick McKenzie - Software entrepreneur and writer who analyzes technology, finance, incentives, and institutional systems.

Booking Intelligence

Booking Requirements

medium

Typical Credentials:

Senior practitioners, founders, technical experts, researchers, journalists, and authors with deep firsthand knowledge of a consequential system or specialized subject.

Required Achievements:

Founded or led a company, Held senior roles at notable technology or financial institutions, Published substantive research or essays, Written a relevant book, Contributed to major technical or public-interest initiatives

Recent Guest Discussions

Alex Elliott - Trade Processing, Financial-market Operations, Reconciliation, Settlement, And Operational Risk.

Manish Goregaokar - Llm-enabled Scams, Identity Security, Fraud Economics, Money Laundering, And Internet Crime.

Vivian Belenky - Far-uvc Physics And Safety, Tuberculosis Transmission, Clinical Evidence, Building Codes, And Deployment Economics.

Misha Gurevich - Far-uvc Technology, Airborne Pathogens, Building Deployment, Safety, Public Health, And Commercialization.

Garrison Lovely - AI Risks, Surveillance, Fraud, Practical Obscurity, Institutional Capacity, And AI Regulation.

Recent Topics

Complex Systems, Finance, Technology, Government, Economics

Episodes

Here's the recent few episodes on

Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

Everyone wants to be your wallet

September 03, 2026

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 why PayPal so badly wants to be in the middle of that transaction. He walks through the economics that make wallets irresistible to anyone already moving money for users: funds enter the ecosystem at card interchange rates, move inside it at the cost of a database transaction, and get topped up over ACH pulls that cost about f...

How AI detection actually works, with Pangram’s Max Spero

August 27, 2026

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. They also discuss the institutions that quietly assumed writing was expensive: credit bureaus that negotiated the right to shred templated dispute letters, grant committees where reading the application is five percent of the work, and unemployment offices staffed for a world w...

Two banks can't agree on fourth-grade math | Alex Elliott

August 20, 2026

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. Alex recounts the Friday afternoon when twenty million shares went out to ...

Publicly listed emails

patrick@kalzumeus.com

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