Public Service Podcast

Presenting a discussion with Sean Audain, the former City Innovation Lead and now Strategic Planning Manager at Wellington City Council. We covered a wide array of topics, from how Wellington is using sensors at scale to improve earthquake resilience, to the implications of narrowing information asymmetries thanks to AI combined with data collection at unprecedented scale. This recording is from the 2025 Sustainable Development Goals Summit at Massey University and is published here with the permission of the organising committee.

Ludo is one of the most interesting and successful public servants of the 21st Century, leading a radical transformation of Auckland’s urban design over his 13 years as the city’s ‘Design Champion’. YIMBY’s rightly celebrate the city’s upzoning successes and improving affordability, but it’s easy to forget how strong public opposition to ‘ugly’ tower blocks almost unraveled the movement before it started. Delivering change is always challenging, particularly in the public sector. Ludo’s extraordinary efforts required building and managing a world-class team, maintaining political support, leading a relentless and incisive comms strategy, and coordinating the efforts of numerous public organisations all to deliver quality public spaces at such scale that it came to be expected, and therefore easy and unremarkable.

Patrick McKenzie (aka patio11) is a strategic advisor at Stripe, an angel investor, writes the fortnightly newsletter ‘Bits About Money’ about financial infrastructure, and was CEO of the extraordinary VaccinateCA effort in 2021. Patrick and I previously spoke on his show ‘Complex Systems’ about system dynamics, local government challenges, and organisational scar tissue. Here we follow up on what the insane VaccinateCA saga tells us about modern institutional dysfunction, and how we might avoid repeating the terrible mistakes of 2021.Read the full transcript with inline notes here:https://alethios.substack.com/p/patrick-mckenzie-vaccinateca

Anish Tondwalkar is a former employee of OpenAI and Google Brain, now the co-founder of Y-Combinator backed AI interpretability startup ‘dmodel.ai’. We sat down in June to discuss the underappreciated capabilities of the latest generation of AI models, and how individuals, institutions, and society is likely to respond, even if no further progress were made.Full transcript with links and inline notes available here:https://alethios.substack.com/p/anish-tondwalkar-the-societal-implications

Samo is an institutional theorist, the founder of Bismarck Analysis, and the editor of Palladium Magazine. We discuss why our political agreements are 80 years out of date, and how Estonia provides the same standard of public services at half the cost.Full transcript with reference links and notes available here:https://alethios.substack.com/p/samo-burja-live-players-and-institutional