Host [Host Name] interviews Rohit Krishnan, CPO at Bodo.AI, exploring AI agents' practical applications, scientific acceleration, and the future of professional expertise.
19 Jan 2026
Chinese Trade, Housing, and the Auckland Mayoralty - Hon Phil Goff
Hon Phil Goff is a former New Zealand Minister of Trade, Foreign Affairs, Defence, Education, Housing, and Justice. In 2016 he was elected mayor of the Auckland 'Supercity'. We discuss that experience, contrasting central and local government, as well as his role negotiating the first Western Free Trade Agreement with China in 2008.
Full transcript, with inline notes and links is available at alethios.substack.com (http://alethios.substack.com)
Auckland Skyline image from Ssiyamalan. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auckland_Skyline_383495.jpg)
22 Dec 2025
Smart Cities & Digital Governance, with Sean Audain
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 (https://ourauckland.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/news/2024/03/auckland-upzoning-sparks-more-homes-and-improved-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.
20 Oct 2025
Patrick McKenzie - VaccinateCA and Institutional Dysfunction
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 (https://alethios.substack.com/p/patrick-mckenzie-vaccinateca)
14 Aug 2025
Anish Tondwalkar - The Societal Implications of Reasoning Models
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 (https://alethios.substack.com/p/anish-tondwalkar-the-societal-implications)
5 Aug 2025
Samo Burja - Live Players and Institutional Reform
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 (https://alethios.substack.com/p/samo-burja-live-players-and-institutional)
1 Aug 2025
Steve Hsu - In No.10 with Boris and Cummings
Steve Hsu completed his PhD in theoretical physics at age 24. He’s since made numerous contributions as a scientist, tech startup founder, professor, and institutional advisor. Little is known about the role he played during Boris Johnson’s ill-fated tenure as Prime Minister of the UK. In Steve’s first interview on the subject, he shares that hidden history, and what lessons can be drawn from it.
Later, we discuss the rapidly changing power dynamics of the Western Pacific, as China continues to flex its growing might.
Full transcript with links is available here:
https://alethios.substack.com/p/with-steve-hsu-in-no10-with-boris (https://alethios.substack.com/p/with-steve-hsu-in-no10-with-boris)
1 Aug 2025
TracingWoodgrains - Journalism, Education Policy, and Political Change
Jack Despain Zhou, aka ‘TracingWoodgrains’, is an independent investigative journalist, education campaigner, online community expert, and internet commentator. We discussed evolving cultural dynamics, leadership, and how to reform everything from dog control laws, to education, to the Democratic Party.
Full transcript available here:
https://alethios.substack.com/p/with-tracingwoodgrains-journalism (https://alethios.substack.com/p/with-tracingwoodgrains-journalism)
1 Aug 2025
Nuño Sempere - Superforecasting and Global Risk
Nuño Sempere (https://nunosempere.com/) is a founding member of the legendary forecasting group ‘Samotsvety’. His track record puts him at the top of the world’s most accurate predictors of the future. I sat down with him last month to discuss forecasting, global risk, and his new non-profit ‘Sentinel (https://blog.sentinel-team.org/)’, a free early-warning system for large-scale catastrophes like pandemics, wars, and financial turmoil.
Read the full transcript and more at (http://alethios.substack.com)alethios.substack.com (http://alethios.substack.com)
Inside a recent episode
Rohit Krishnan - Managing AI Agents
Published 1 Jun 2026 · Transcript excerpt
[…] If you're talking about maybe building some app, for example, a model will deliver that for you. But unless you've got some kind of what's in the Bay Area, sometimes called taste around or broader system understanding of like, you know, resource allocation, for example. And, you know, it's going to be that app will be built, but it'll be terrible. And like lag, you know, have like a really long response time or some, you know, have these kinds of issues. So there's like a higher level understanding required in order to really deliver on some of these things. Is that sort of a fair summary of the kind of the gamut of what we're looking at? […]
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