“My elevator pitch for why anyone should care about finance: it is in the business of teleporting value through time and space, no more and no less.”

Welcome to Complex Systems, where we discuss the technical, organizational, and human factors underpinning why the world works the way it does. Hideo, everyone. My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as Patty 11 on the internet. When I still worked at Stripe, I worked with Nan Ronzahoff, who did Stripe Climate and has done some other things as well. This year, she wrote an essay called The Third Wave of American Philanthropy, which focuses on the AI-generated tidal wave of charitable giving, which is coming down the pike. And as that gets increasingly metabolized by the rest of society, one word that you're going to hear a lot is DAF for donor-advised fund. As it happens, I wrote about donor-advised funds as both a user of them on the donor side and on the charity fundraising side a few years ago, and I think understanding this a little bit is going to be very useful for people. So I thought I would read a classic essay from Bits…