title: 2025 in review, with Sammy Cottrell
author: Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
contenttype: podcast
publication: Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
published: 2026-01-03T08:03:21
sourceurl: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/prfx.byspotify.com/e/media.transistor.fm/62ed5253/6f463065.mp3
word_count: 8791
Welcome to Complex Systems, where we discuss the technical, organizational, and human factors underpinning why the world works the way it does. Hi to you, everybody. My name is Patrick Kenzie, better known as patio 11 on the Internet, and I'm here with that Sammy Quattrell, who's the sometimes producer of this podcast. Hey Patrick, good to be back. Good to have you back, Sammy. So it's been our tradition for the last couple of years to do a bit of your own review episode, talk about things that we've talked about other times in the years, subjective impressions on what episodes, guests, topics we liked, and maybe think a little bit about the coming year. But before that, I want to give you the floor. One of the reasons I think this is important is every media property and similar has people who work behind the scenes and often don't get the appropriate amount of recognition for their efforts. So I'd like to recognize that this podcast likely wouldn't exist without you, but tell people a little bit about what you do. Yeah, I like to brand myself as a fixer, which often just looks like going out and solving complicated problems in the world, especially the types of problems that require meeting people that the client has not met. For this podcast, that typically looks like finding guests. A lot of the people I'm really happy that we've had on are people that I was like, wow, this person would be so great on complex systems. And yeah, the other main projects that I did for this podcast this year was building a podcast to eat at Lighthaven, which I'm really proud of, and we can talk about a little bit more later. Well, that's as good as anything to transition into the topic on the joys and terror of doing video podcasts. For those of you who are listening to this verbally, we do have a, well, this podcast on YouTube and occasional video episodes, which I pull my hair out for all the reasons. The tool chain is completely different, even though thankfully I'm not the person operating at most of the time. They are a pain in the keyster to schedule for people. We do them exclusively in person, and so that limits full of guests and typically limits it to times of the year where I have flown out to the San Francisco Bay area. But either as it may, there are some people who only watch things rather than listening to them, which to each their own. I'm more of a reader than a listener or a watcher, but also my YouTube stats for this year might not agree with them. So it is an additional bite at the audience apple, and also I do think there are some topics where some amount of seeing that the person is empathetic and similar adds to the experience of talking about it, versus simply hearing their words. I think that came across most frequently in some of our episodes about AI where we were philosophizing, we had the image-shear episode where talking largely about ex-risk and the ethical status of AI. But a number of the recurring themes about were very clearly in the early stages of industrial revolution, the great majority of the world, including people in corridors of power, do not understand that yet. And those of us who do understand it, one, I think we have a responsibility to communicate that understanding to the rest of the world, to think we're also sorting through our own feelings on it. And feelings that are obviously different than podcasts, that's the reason for having conversations, but it's useful to be able to look someone in the eye and see when they're very clearly disturbed on the present trajectory of the technology versus that watching and worried or other things that you could describe your own opinion as. Yeah, I think the video episodes help showcase personality in a way that sometimes audio doesn't get across in the same way. Oh, speaking of light haven. So light haven is run by like cone infrastructure, which is a nonprofit. They also run less long. The website that I'm sure many listeners are familiar with. FYI, someone who has previously been a CEO of a nonprofit. Non-profit fundraising is a pain in the keyster. And a particular thing that happens with many nonprofits is they do an annual fundraising drive. And every year it is like literally down to the last few minutes on whether we will be able to keep open our doors for the next year. So anyhow, light haven, slash light cone infrastructure is currently in the middle of its annual fundraising drive. I will drop the link in the show notes. And I've donated small amount of money to them. I think they are relevant to the interest of many people who are listening to this. If you agree that the internet is better with less wrong amount, you might consider it a donated gas ball. Or that Berkeley, California is better with light haven in it, which I strongly believe. Light haven, let's say they were written up in the New York Times again this year. Not using the exact same language as the Guardian's right up above you. Well, I'll surveilled compound. But I think the New York Times right up was focusing on it being a religious commune, which has someone who actually is religious. The times I've been to light haven events. I have attended numerous religious services, Catholic masses, and a Jewish dinner party on two occasions. But can I confirm the presence of a religious organization within the conference venue itself? Oh, the New York Times. Was that the article that said they don't always allow outsiders in? When we requested to tour, they said no. Yeah. That was indeed the article. Commercial establishments sometimes have requirements for entering them, like paying. Anyhow, I'm free associating on topics here. But one of the reasons I was over there was for Ricky Haiglin, past podcast guest on numerous occasions, ran a conference over there, which we had a neat, interesting episode about. And as preparation for doing that conference, I threw myself for most of the month of August into a vibe coding. It's not the correct word, burn that word with fire. We had an episode on that as well with your emotions, who the guest was for the five coding episode. I believe you'll love. Yes, you'll love. Yeah, that was great. He has a business which is teaching people who are largely not programmers to learn to code via the cloud code, and the cursor and the other OpenAI codecs and the other new tools for programming. And I'm someone who has an engineering degree. I found the experience of using the cloud code and cursor in particular to develop the Isekai game, the game that had developed for Ricky's conference and other reasons. But the conference was the experience of using AI-assisted coding was revolutionary. I feel immense frustration when I read on Twitter and similar that people think that there is no there there. It is very clearly the next evolution of computer programming and people who haven't experienced it, but our computer programmers, I implore you, like, take some time over the holiday break, spend even an hour on even a toy project. And you will see that there is very clearly there there. And a recurring theme for many of our conversations about AI is the wonderful and terrible thing is that tools that exist today are the worst AI I will ever use for the rest of our lives. Yeah, I think this year is where image generation I don't necessarily want to say passes the turing test, but it passes the turing test in a lot of cases. Oh, ridiculously so. We are in a new age. I've been meaning to do a write-out ban for people who don't know I'm something of a geek. One of my geeky hobbies is painting miniatures in a fantasy style just for the love of the art I do, 3 printing as well, thermoplastic resin. And that's fun in the same way that baking is fun. And often collapses and you have no idea what you did draw in the same way that like a souffle can collapse, but that's neither here nor there. You can show a, you know, with the multi-modal models take a photo on your phone of a black primed model which has, as you have unpainted and say, okay, this is a drood. I want to take glasses like muted summer color scheme for a drood. What will this look like once painted? Give me a painting reference so I can distinguish between the greens for dress and the greens of, you know, a tree under direct sunlight versus the branches that are included by either the model or the other branches. And it will immediately give a photoreal stick visualization of exactly that. And variable amounts of fidelity to the sculpt, but if you yell at the AI and say, hey, you have, you know, misrepresented the clothes to you, exactly right? Please pay more attention to the sculpt in particular the fact that for whatever reason the artist has decided that this drood has very enviable habs. It will then, you know, render as advertised. Now, I'll put links to this. I find it extremely useful for producing art, the thing that I just do for the fun of it as some of my nights and weekends. And I've also found it useful for among other things cooking Christmas dinner where I am an amateur cook, but have not cooked that much since that getting married 12 plus years ago. And I found myself cooking Christmas dinner, including some things that I had not cooked before. And, you know, can ask you to look at recipes and then do things like, okay, you've told me to try for this consistency on this thing. Here's a photo shooting for this. No, add more flour. Okay, adding more flour. Thank you, Claude. Part of LLM's being useful in my life is it's just having a competent experience friend that you can call at any point for help. When I feel like in my life, if I could press a button and have actual competent friends be there all the time, I would press that button. But because I have a limited amount of social capital in this world, I just talked to Claude through Web Dev and everything else. It's so great. I definitely feel like there is a substitution effect for a social capital going on where, you know, there are people I could call up at 2 a.m. in the morning with a problem. But the typical thing that has me awake at 2 a.m. is like, it's something that has me awake at 2 a.m. But it's not a thing that I want to burn cycles if someone else on at 2 a.m. I feel intensely adverse to that. Whereas Claude has nothing but a free cycles at 2 a.m. That's probably one of their least utilized times. And so I'm very happy to throw it on either the thing that is keeping me up or even, you know, a passing fancy. It was randomly promoted on YouTube a video from, unfortunately, there exists a supply chain which does not to put to find a point on it, IP theft from taking videos from Chinese social media and and reposting them to American and other social media and attempting to monetize that. Be that as it may. One of the videos was interesting. It depicted a traditional process for carving jade. And that involved two workers who were using something which looked something like a band saw except the saw blade was twine. And prior to using the saw blade, they had drizzled a purplish liquid and that they had showed being produced from purplish rocks that were ground in pestle. I thought, okay, not that I have any burning need for this. But, LLM on my phone, what is happening here? What is this purplish liquid? Is it an abrasive? Yeah, it's an abrasive. And here's my guess for what gemstone they're using for the purpose of that abrasive, which is what it tested to and by, you know, scholarly work on traditional jade manufacturer. I'm like, oh great. Can you explain to me, like, what is the physical mechanism for this? Happily, you know, chats through, oh, you know, it's deposited in the current, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the mechanical action of the, the crystal particles against the jade is what causes the cutting rather than the rope causing the cutting. I said, what's the current? Oh, sorry. I thought you knew that already. The current is the contact point of a saw or other cutting device in wood carvings, stone carving, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, today I learned. And you can just go to the laboratory really deep on any industrial process at any time, and at least for the ones that I actually understand, and it seems to be, like, reasonably decent to those. So, our tradition is you pull up the most popular episodes and we step through some thoughts about them, what were the popular episodes for the year? Yeah. Our most popular episode was your reading of the seller negotiation essay. I think it was how to negotiate your salary package, which, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and you know, you know, I think that you can negotiate your salary package. Yeah, so I think you suggested, multiple times. You should probably, like, go through your back catalog essays and read the ones that I continued to have during utility. Also, Dave Kastin suggested this, also, many people suggested, like, I should make a tick talk about seller and negotiation just to help generation Z about this tick You know, the existing audience and a new audience every year, as people send it to their friends loved ones and similar. And so immediately after recording it, the email started coming in. Thanks so much for that. I have never received a negotiation advice before, but I successfully used that to get money out of capitalism. So internet fist bump to you all. And it will continue existing on the internet for the benefit of people who want to choose slightly renegotiate the balance power between capitalism and themselves. The main other thing I did this year, or the main other public thing I did this year was writing essay on freelancing that started life as a list of Patrick McKenzie essays to read, which was mostly, you should read salary negotiation, no, really. The blessing and the curse of this essay is, I know it's the most distributed thing I've ever read. And periodically, I think, well, okay, achieving massive distribution is not necessarily the entirety of my objective function, but that is occasionally useful. What other things in this genre should I write? And we did have one conversation this year with them on equity, Billy Gallagher. Billy Gallagher, thanks very much. So doing some backfilling of the catalogs that should exist if I'm falling backwards into being a labor organizer late in life. And so that was the most popular episode. What was the number two? Number two was, I believe, the Gary Laugh episode on airplane rewards programs. I love talking about airplane rewards programs, even though I am not an inventor, an optimizer of them myself, but it's a fun intersection of, there is this economic organization. There is the instrumentally useful part that some people will actually do enjoy the sobby of points hacking and similar and getting better at the points hacking is useful. It happens to be extremely professionally relevant to me to the extent that I write about financial infrastructure because people who are involved in this know, the dominant way to get points for people who are serious about it is using the airlines, linked to reward cards, which are some of the largest contracts written in capitalism, fun fact. And also frustratingly, when the mainstream press writes about they frequently like they love this lens that is airline loses money, but the flying airplanes, but they make the money back on writing the credit cards, which you can now listen to the episode or other places that have educated this thought, but that is not the correct way to think about the world. These are two halves of linked business and the seniorage income from the credit card program would not exist but for the fact of the route network and the product that people actually want to get from the airline. Go figure, a lot of journalists are economically illiterate and they can allocate all of the revenue of the company to one division and all of the cost to another division and think that that pencils, but what can we do? Complain about it on the internet. Complain about it on the internet. Oh, speaking of complaining about things on the internet, Atlantic magazine, which? Oh, no, not again. Did publish an article saying that poor people are playing for your credit card rewards, which is false? They published it in their opinion section, which is a section of Atlantic magazine, which is allowed to lie. So Sam, you just had a look of just approval on his face. It's just not true. They even say in the piece like there are people in banks that say that this isn't true, but what do they know about banking? So here's another geek on the internet saying, it's not true. And if you want to get that in arbitrary length, you can listen to that episode. Yeah, one episode that isn't in our most popular for the year based on at least the metric that we're using, but that should be is the talk to the Bank of England. That was really good. And this is one of the reasons that my objective function is not optimizing purely for reach. The reason part of my brain, which still remembers being like the small software entrepreneur on the internet, writing in a corner of an apartment building next to a Japanese rice paddy. And I'm cognizant of the fact that I've evolved a little bit since then, but my brain still definitely remembers it. But occasionally people in corridors of power do listen to what I have to say about things. And sometimes more than just listening to what I have to say, they seek me out and say, hey, will you come in and have a chat with us? And so did have a chat with the Bank of England at the request. And then I did what I always do and say, if I'm having a private chat, I would love to have a public chat to the extent that it's possible and practical. And indeed, it was possible and practical. And so the episode discusses what I told them and comments not endorsed by the Bank of England, what I told them with regards to stable coins, systemic risk to the banking system coming from software development practices specifically, and the industrial organization of software, even more than software development practices. But listen to the episode for more on that. And also a bit of AI, that their particular ones they were interested in hearing about was would the use of AI and trading firms, such as hedge funds, cause correlated risks to the banking system. And I said, well, interesting topic. Talk to some people at some labs. And the thing that we really want to say to you senior decision makers for the government of the United Kingdom is that's really not where we should have your local sub concern for AI in the coming years. This is much, much bigger than that somewhat quotidian worry. So part of my job is laundering less brown into corridors of power. Yeah, I mean, there's so much value in doing that right there. There are so few people in the world who can speak multiple languages in that way. Like you can see that some of the murray folk are learning to do this specifically as they like publicize their new book. But the majority of people at the major labs do not know how to speak a DC in any way that matters. I think the acknowledgement up in the head reads sounds cooler in Japanese. I have an engineering degree and code my own websites. It's probably the most irrational choice I make in business. Low leverage, a spiky maintenance burden that always comes with the worst times, and they don't even look good. Don't get advice about design for me. Instead, take it from Framer, a sponsor of today's episode. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production-ready websites and it's now redefining how we design for the web. With the recent launch of design pages, a free canvas-based design tool, Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all-in-one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals, to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. Ready to design, iterate, and publish all-in-one tool? Start creating for free at framer.com slash design and use code complex systems, all one word, all capital letters. For a free month of framer pro, framer.com slash design, promo code complex systems, rules and restrictions may apply. This is true of tech companies broadly, by the way, which is why tech companies have government relations departments. Yeah, but most tech companies are not going to like, I don't want to say deed government intervention, but most tech companies have smaller effects than the world than these ones. The history of the last 10 years has been Silicon Valley in related spaces has been partially that has Silicon Valley has accumulated an enormous amount of power. Partly, as a conservative, I'm intended effective at doing the thing. Partly as an unintended impact of just making things that people really want to use and making a lot of money doing that. But whether intended or unintended, descriptively Silicon Valley accumulated a lot of power and other actors in society said, oh, there is this massive amount of power controlled by people who are a bad at wielding it. I would like that, please. Not always saying the word please when asking for it. And so I think one of the under-discussed under-currents of many of the like local issues, both AI regulation, misinformation regulation, et cetera, et cetera, has been this move by some people to turn tech companies into a fifth hour of the government essentially in the same way that the financial sector is a de facto arm of the government, which has been a recurring theme in bits about money and in complex systems episodes. I would also say that I think 2024 and 2025 are probably the years where tech companies and specifically like locuses of power in tech are trying to influence the government directly in various ways the most. I think that has always been a thing, well, always is a strong word, that government relations teams have actually existed for more than just the last two years. But there is a level of intentionality about it and level of like willingness to throw elbows, which did not exist for a few years. As one of many data points, one can point to, and prior to the 2024 presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his own name a letter to Congress, saying that he felt that in hindsight, Facebook had agreed to request from the administration, which it should not have agreed to with regards to censorship, and that it pre-committed to fight requests like that from whichever administration was coming next, or we come in the future. And I thought that is, that's a line in the stand that we really haven't seen before from tech and also a, I mentioned on Twitter. I would like to contrast this with three other examples of CEOs writing a letter to Congress, pre-committing to fight an incoming administration without knowing who it would be, except that there do not exist three letters. Not yet, growth mindset. Yeah, anyhow, either it doesn't. Shall we return to the list of top episodes? Sounds good to me. We have the episode on Stripe AI. So making my usual disclaimer before I discuss Stripe, I worked there for a number of years, have left their full-time employee, but I'm still an advisor there. But Emily Sands, who is deeply involved with their AI practice, came on the program to discuss some of that AI practice. How Stripe is trading its own foundation models with regards to financial transactions, and why the business of doing transactions at scale just gives you a ridiculous data advantage for both collecting data to be allowed to train models, but also the particular physics of money involved in credit card transactions, means you have interesting decisions to make, which are both directly to the benefit of the business to the businesses that are the customers of the project, and also to the broader financial ecosystem at large, and one of the things we discuss and not the sole use of AI in that business or any other, but a major one is in fighting fraud. And the particular topology of credit card fraud, which I've discussed in a number of places, is that any infrastructure provider can be used as an oracle to determine whether a credit card is valid or not, and what's called a card testing attack, but the actual damage caused by card testing will not be at the site of the card testing, but it will be after the fraudster takes their like pile of credit cards that they know are active back and resells it or hands it off to the other department in charge of extracting value from them. And so defending your own platform against the card testing attack minimizes the damage that is dealt to the rest of the legitimate economy and businesses that might not directly be your users and have customers who might have no direct relationship to you. So I think it is nice to see AI and machine learning being deployed for pro-social ends like that with obvious positive business ramifications. Yeah, in the wonders of scale. So what was the next episode on the list? The next episode is the AI data centers and power economics with AZN. We did a few episodes over the course of the last two years and I hope to do more on power economics specifically. I conceptualize complex systems as basically a infrastructure podcast with a broad enough brief that we can look at basically anything under the sun that is even arguably infrastructure. But power infrastructure, obviously, extremely infrastructure and might be the rate limiting step for some of the build out of AI and the economy over in the course of the next call it 10 years. I think different people who have looked into the economics of it to have different opinions on exactly what the shape of that curve looks like exactly where the limiting factors will bite, et cetera, et cetera. But I think there is a lot of smart money from or promised on no way to bring gigwatt scale power online is actually potentially like the hardest part. And so talking about what does that actually look like in the data center? What does it look like with behind the meter power generation? We talked, I recall, a little bit about stranded energy assets which are an interesting thing to understand exists in the world during the essentially stranded energy asset is a small power plant and typically a small power plant often a gas boiler fired plant which was previously co-located with an industrial user. If the industrial user closes and there is no grid hookup or transmission capacity out to that power asset it becomes quote-unquote stranded. And I think that crypto didn't quite pioneer but made industrial scale use of was putting Bitcoin miners mostly directly next to stranded power assets with the idea that the current owner of the asset is getting nothing for it and they might tell you power at better than otherwise achievable market rates if you could allow them to turn their expensive CapEx investment back out mine. And after that trail was placed by crypto it's being followed by some of the data center hyperscalers which means Amazon, Google Microsoft essentially to bring AI data centers online not the entirety of their power strategy but more on that to take a look at the episode. Yeah and it's also interesting to see a lot of the companies that these hyperscalers are partnering with are themselves the same firms that we're doing the crypto build out. I don't necessarily know that I will regret things that I said about crypto if they end up being like key to the energy transformation because it will not be the most efficient way to have gotten to an energy transformation. I will say one line I think I said on complex systems which is a bit of a bond mod is that if the only thing we get out of the AI boom is infinite clean power, shocks will have been worth it at the price but I strongly think that it's not the only thing we will get out of the AI boom. I am inclined to agree. Do you want to go on a brief tangent to talk about the logistics of recording at Lighthaven? I think this is the maximally tension friendly episode of the Maximally Tension Friendly Podcast. Wow yeah okay we're going to put that on the website. So previously when Patrick was in town to record local episodes with guests in the Bay Area there was a lot of not just scrambling to find guests and make the scheduling Tetris work but also just logistics. And on top of that when we needed to find a venue to actually record in by the way purespace.com is a godsend for this but we had to find a venue we needed to get the equipment online to record and then we needed to get the guests and Patrick to the venue itself and all of that just took time and energy and money in a way that was just not conducive to filming as many episodes as we might want to film or record as it were and so what was called festival season at Lighthaven this year which was three eventually four conferences all around the same time. I went to the people running those conferences and said hey I think these conferences would be better with a podcast video at the venue. I am willing to mostly pay for this with the client that I'm working with who this will just clearly be in that positive for if they pay for the entire thing and then we can just keep it set up as a public good for other people who might want to record there and we managed to make that work for all the people involved. And we had a videographer friend of mine set up some video cameras because we were like okay well we might as well do the more ambitious version of this and potentially turn complex systems into a video podcast and I got to say some parts of that were really fun and interesting and rewarding and some parts of that were not. Don't do what I did which was to say okay I want this to be running mostly autonomously and I don't want people to be messing around with cameras or having to hit any buttons so I'm just going to leave all five 4k cameras just constantly recording and then put all of the footage into a hard drive at the end of every day which really was painful because when people wanted their footage I had to manually cut down footage on a slow laptop from five camera feeds and then send it to them. It turns out Dropbox does not handle large video files very well which is not a fact I knew going into that project but other than that like everything else was great. I think the several podcasts started from being able to record there. I think Adam Jarvis' public service podcast is downstream of those like Haven Episodes, Parker Conriner, Conley also recorded some stuff and a lot of people recorded like episodes of podcasts that they already had and I'm also really happy with the episodes that we had at complex systems that we recorded at like Haven then. Yep, Adam Jarvis who also appeared on this podcast that interviewed me for his own and it was a really good focused episode on the vaccinated experience people want to listen to that. I'll leave a link in the show notes. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of creating public goods this one operates a business. The classic way to do it in software is throwing out open source but particularly given that we had a high-trust environment available you can't simply leave five 4k cameras on the streets of Berkeley and have that work out well for you. But given that the majority of people coming to light haven't or extremely unlikely to strip a room clean of camera gear it was relatively easy to make available within a particular social maloo I think it's a thing that a combination one speaking of someone who previously worked in a marketing communications department if you're at the point of having a software company that actually has a marketing communications department you almost certainly want to have an on-site recording room available you'll get so much bandwidth out of it. It's 2025 you're doing social media marketing videos perform very well you will get something out of it for every launch in the future it also makes it trivial to arrange an internal podcast which is something that almost every company should be doing particularly if you're large enough where the CEO doesn't literally have this time with every employee of the company every month it's like an easy way to arrange that. Given that you have your on-site camera room which you should have making it available to your own customers or to people's side projects or a 17-year-old in the community who has an interesting thing to record is like relatively low lift and very you know romps to zero marginal cost and so strongly consider doing it. Yeah one of the great things about podcasting as a medium especially for if you're doing like a company podcast or something is from both a time and like mental energy perspective it is so much easier to get knowledge out of people than trying to get essays out of them like frankly I prefer reading things in written form and carefully edited assays to listening to podcasts but it is so much easier to make a lot of podcasts than it is to make a lot of essays for the majority of people and so like if the thing that you want is for the CEO to get FaceTime with people at the company and to like explain how they see the world having them show up for an hour to record a podcast is so much simpler on their end as a way to like put that knowledge out. There are intelligent people who don't show to their advantage in interview settings or podcast settings they're similar acknowledging that off the top I do think that it is vastly more common that people show to advantage in an interview setting are able to speak off the cuff about you know the topic that is their life's work versus being able to write to the standard of the best writers of the internet about their life's work yeah there's definitely a time efficiency reason there and I think there's also a it is under-discussed but there is something about the like mark zero human monkey brain which is still running simian OS where sings a face and hearing a voice particularly the hearing of the voice causes you to really believe in your heart of parts that someone is your tribe in a way that's reading their words on the page does not cause I consider myself more of a writer than a you know multimedia personality but when I meet people the ones who most obviously feel some sense of their deep personal affection for me beyond just you are one of many smart people on the internet and I've read your words for 20 years they are almost invariably podcast listeners despite the fact that my writing is I think subjectively better and it is certainly better distributed than the podcast although far less regular thank you Sammy we successfully did what almost 50 episodes last year yeah and I think a similar amount this year oh I was saying 2025 it's not what it's not last year yet we're recording this on December 30th yeah but closing the loop on thought yeah definitely to run an internal podcast for the purpose of getting people to meet their co-workers and have a sense of you know regarding affection for them uh or if you prefer your your employees who you are worried about leaving for other firms in a vibrant economy I will have a sense of love and affection for the people who do put a podcast yep one last note on that is one of my favorite books that I've read in the last year or so is a diary of a very bad year which is just a collection of interviews with a hedge fund manager about the financial crisis as it was unfolding and there's no way for that to have existed if it wasn't for this guy who edits for a literary magazine being introduced to this hedge fund manager and doing a couple interviews like it's not like the guy was going to be writing essays about it but he's so good at explaining like how society misallocated capital and does now paying for that consequence that it's just I'm very glad that those interviews exist and it wouldn't exist if it wasn't for interviews the world is fractal in detail one of the things I love about complex systems this we have the you know organized excuse to go out and uh talk with people who understand some of the details in arbitrary and only nished down topics I can't remember if it was last year or this year that I interviewed my father about them thanks citing another fun real estate stories but uh I think last year yeah there is almost nobody who has had a long and interesting career who doesn't have you know fun stories about that and that the things that civilians don't understand about our industry and I will never get tired of you writing them should have my dad on at some point again but neither here nor there so did we have another in the top five I think we're good on that for now can you can you believe that the bits about money on the banking adventures came out this year in 2025 yeah oh it feels like forever ago so that was a uh a capital P project for both of us and for people who don't remember the timeline there was a writer victimized by a scam in October of 2023 who wrote an article in New York magazine slash the cut which was published in February of 2024 kicking off an investigative journalism project from yours truly slash bits about money slash Sammy about some of the facts underlying a key element of that scam slash article and due to ultimately uh foot dragging by various public institutions in New York it uh took us forever to get it out but we um we published what January I believe of this year 2025 and then uh did a complex system subset about it that was fun very much so I'm glad I'm not a journalist and don't intend to be breaking news that I frequently but when something so squarely lands in my beats and uh exercises um the the number of people who called me autistic with regards to banking procedure and comments about that episode I you know bracketing the like internet's use of that term versus like the medicalized use of that term and bracketing my own medical history I don't like banking procedure and so was that happy to be able to chase it for as many months this require to satisfy intellectual curiosity about it while we're at year-end review we may as well do the year-end review greatest patio 11 tweet which was not written by patio 11 it's a I think paraphrasing Patrick McKenzie's life includes encountering a lot of problems that only Patrick McKenzie is equipped to solve I do like the funny Twitter bond modism of this I also think that like everyone's life is designed to it like expose them to problems that they are the perfect person to solve because you know it's a self-reinforcing cycle you tend to do the things that you are best at and you will tend to situate yourself in social mullus which bring you the kinds of problems that you have been dealing with before at the same time I do occasionally find myself in a bank where like thanks guys you're giving me more tweetable content regional wire transfer compliance influencer yep I got that a lot that was the thing that brought me to the bank of England originally when my pound notes got demonetized years ago although I didn't actually I have to go into the bank because I'm good at being a banking compliance influencer and was able to sweet talk a high street bank in London to give this unbanked American access to the new non-demonetized notes oh boy do you remember what I said to you when you're proposing to send me to New York in what was effectively the second-ever task I would be doing for you back in March of 2024 I don't remember specifically what you said there it was something along the lines of look I would be more than happy to go to New York to do this for you are you sure that you are not making a financial decision that you're about to regret I do recall this conversation and uh you know it's a business yeah I have a much better understanding now I'm glad I'm not an investigative journalist it's that the business model for investigative journalism is just so rough and because the you know not that we heard the benchmark for investigative journalism but if you are writing an ambitious piece which will require having a reporter and research staff run after something four months and you monetize in the typical way journalism is monetized some combination of subscriptions and advertising revenue investigative journalism really does not pull the clicks as much as things that are one much more efficient to create and two a vastly lower social value such as clickbait ragebait top 10 articles lists year-end review articles etc etc and considered narrowly from how many subscriptions of bits about money did it sell to do follow-up reporting on a you know an article which appeared once in New York magazine not that many but it's an expenditure of rent and also a sort of like position piece that this is a professional journal we are we are allowed to do ambitious things occasionally and can chase after the ambitious things and do you know marginally less ambitious things in other issues as the spirit moves us yeah that was like that yours vaccine TA I don't know okay so there's a gliding scale of ambition and running like core public health infrastructure for your nation is somewhat larger on the scale of ambition than maybe you know writing it an investigative journalist and piece that might be true but be that as it may anything else that you want to make sure we get into the episode did you want to talk a little bit more about the process of making that game yeah let's chat about the game for a few minutes so for those of you who didn't see it it's still up on the internet and I'll be writing about it in more formal detail later but esekai game is a fantasy rogue-like sort of that you cannot play which was heavily featured AI both as an element within the game and as a technology for creating the game itself it's similar in character to the intellectual heritage of computer opening games CRPGs so like Baldur's Gate or similar where you have a few dialogue options and some of your dialogue options can have a skill role and results in successor failure unlike more recent centuries in Baldur's Gate there was no you know a hundred million dollar investment in assets thankfully I couldn't quite afford that but did buy a lot of tokens and the tokens were both paying for cloud code and cursor to write things and also for a few runtime decisions made by the game and one of them which we debuted to people at the Ricky's conference Metagame what a wonderful name for a conference was it would slurp in their Metagame attendee profile and allow them to represent themselves within the game which is the thing that every role playing game that has ever had a character creator has had a lot of people like make themselves in the video game that's like part of the core fantasy but given that the esekai genre is about transporting from someone from the real world into a heavily gamified fantasy world I thought oh that's both like a feature that is uniquely possible now that we have LLMs that can you know look at without loss of generality your conference profile and write a character sheet for you based on that and even do a portrait of you based on you know your conference portrait whatever you choose that to be that was a fun exploration and what is that possible and novel with modern LLMs available as an element within the games I'm looking forward to both finishing the game at some point in the next couple of months I thought I would finish it in November but I didn't get around to it it's still the game has a three-act structure as many games do and it has a satisfying final encounter for act one and no satisfying encounter for act two and act three so I want to finish that and then do a bit of polishing and also do some other enhancements but more on that as it develops the game should still be playable at esecagame.com and if you enjoy that sort of thing you might enjoy it people tell me that the satisfying final encounter which is a bit of I don't want to spoil it I will say it's a pandemic-themed murder mystery oh no oh so it's pathologic it's fun it's intellectually interesting it's more like challenging and during developing it I got most there's a term of art in our community feeling the agi and I was chatting with I want to say it was an earlier version of clawed opus so 3.x probably back at the time and said okay and no spoilers here but I want this encounter slash mini adventure within the game to use a you know fictional fantasy world plausible illness I want that illness to have a plausible biological mechanism to it and want that biological mechanism to be something that would be understandable and plausible in the real world but it can't exactly be typhoid and it can't exactly be a respiratory illness because I think players will be too generous to everybody about those help someone who is not epidemiologist out and clawed came back immediately with like oh okay so here are five ways that epidemics can spread and I immediately said oh number four is great and I suggested a thing to to which would be a super spoiler for the event and it was like oh you absolutely have to do number four that meant like I absolutely have to do number four and at the end of that chat this is the wild thing I said great recap this chat in the form of a design document for this encounter because I'm going to pass it off to clawed code immediately and that did not successfully one shot the entire encounter but had something play it like minimally playable within call it hours of that you know like distill this essentially brainstorming chat between two two co-collaborators into a production ready design document and then hand that immediately off to the implementer and we had the the first playable version of that in hours and again the entire game's development cycle was one month long so that I think was the final week or so sprint of the game and so enormously enormously interesting was there's a level of power in these things which I am still plumbing the depth of and I think I will be plumbing the depth of for a while there was a considered it more of an art project there's no price tag on the game and likely will never be but it was a fun intellectually engaging art project there is a story particularly embedded in that plague encounter but throughout the rest of the game that I feel even though I was not the sole author of it a lot of it was the sentence level pros was written by an AI was the overall creative director of a lot of it and felt that that I was getting my money swear at this the creative director for the tokens I was spending and people who who played it say that there's like very definitely a a feel like I have my thumb on the scales of that universe which was desirable while still making it fun for other people so your mileage may vary but if that sounds like your thing you suck at game.com and I guess that leaves us in a pretty good place for this year and review Sammy for people who don't follow you generally where can they find you on the internet? yeah head to the guy from this.com which redirects to my highly page and also if you go there and click freelancing 101 the public work I am most proud of this year is an essay there on how to get good at freelancing. Nice and thank you very much to everyone for listening to a complex systems obviously we are here at complex systems however you found it we'll be back here next week also patio 11 all over the internet before I sign off I'm always trying to up level the ambition of this podcast and other things I do and I know something about the guest pipeline looks for the next few weeks slash months and obviously we have some episodes of it recorded already hope that you will enjoy some of those episodes but more about that when they hit the internet all right thanks very much everybody and see you next week. Thanks for having thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of complex systems if you have comments drop me an email or hit me up at patio 11 on Twitter ratings and reviews are the light blood of new podcasts for SEO reasons and also because they let me know what you like