Patrick McKenzie on Navigating Complex Systems
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 January 2024
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
Few can measure the impact of a blog post they wrote, in the millions of dollars a year, but Patrick McKenzie has the receipts. His 2012 post on salary negotiation is read hundreds of thousands of times each year, and he has a Gmail folder brimming with success stories. This achievement is just of his many contributions, which include starting several businesses, advising Stripe and other software companies, and spearheading the launch of VaccinateCA. Lately he's been writing Bits about Money, a biweekly newsletter on the intersection of tech and finance.
Tyler sat down with Patrick to discuss signature fields on the back of credit cards, whether bank tellers or waitstaff are more trustworthy, the gremlins behind spurious credit card declines, how debt collection and maple syrup heists should change your model of the world, Twitter’s continued success as the message bus for government and civil society, crypto vs traditional money transfers, the intended desolation of bank parking lots, why he moved to Japan and how it affected his ambition, why Tether hasn't collapsed, the internet as a Great Work, how he's experiencing reverse culture shock after returning to the US, what he'll learn about next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded October 26th, 2023.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercadus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:09.0 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. |
| 0:13.0 | Learn more at Mercadis.org. |
| 0:16.0 | For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, |
| 0:20.0 | visit Conversations with Tyler.com. |
| 0:26.0 | Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. |
| 0:30.0 | Today I'm honored to be talking with Patrick McKinsey. |
| 0:33.2 | Here is Patrick's own description of himself and I quote |
| 0:37.2 | the broad through line of my work is systems thinking applied to businesses. |
| 0:41.6 | I think the social organization of the internet and its impact on the world |
| 0:46.3 | are underestimated by almost everyone, including Silicon Valley. Everything important to you in the world sits atop several infrastructure layers. |
| 0:55.8 | I am a storyteller for some of those layers and the people who build them. |
| 1:00.4 | An alternative description of Patrick that I might give you is he's a guy who moved to Japan for no legible reason at all and became famous by writing on the internet and now everyone looks to him as a person who knows a lot about |
| 1:14.0 | everything. His sub-stack is called Bits About Money and on Twitter you can |
| 1:19.3 | find him at patio 11. Many people in fact call him Patio 11. Patrick, welcome. |
| 1:26.0 | Thanks very much for having me. |
| 1:28.0 | Why is it you still have to sign the back of your credit card? |
| 1:32.0 | So like many answers, the true thing is that that is a bit of a misconception. |
| 1:37.0 | You actually don't have to sign the bit of your credit card in the legal realism sense, |
| 1:41.0 | in that you can fail to sign the back of your credit card |
| 1:44.2 | and go throughout your life untroubled by that fact and most people who do that will be |
| 1:48.9 | untroubled. The original reason for signing the back of the credit card was rather than authentication or authorization, |
... |
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