With Patrick McKenzie on the 'Complex Systems Podcast'
Discussing our awe at the legacy bequeathed us, and modern public sector challenges with political capital constraints, funding misalignments, and accumulated regulatory and process "scar tissue".
Patrick McKenzie (aka patio11) is a strategic advisor at Stripe, writes the fortnightly newsletter ‘Bits About Money’ about financial infrastructure, and was CEO of the extraordinary VaccinateCA effort in 2021 - his account of which I cannot recommend strongly enough for anybody interested in public policy and delivery1.
We recently sat down to swap notes on public sector glories and failures, outlining the contours of some of the challenges our society faces for the ongoing maintenance of the state:
A full transcript of our discussion is available here.
This is the first of a series of discussions about the future of our institutions recorded during my recent ‘Emergent Ventures’ trip to San Francisco. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be publishing these talks with guests from a variety of backgrounds - public campaigners, forecasters, scientists, institutional theorists, and cutting-edge AI researchers. I’m very excited to share these, and looking forward to hearing what you think.
I have a follow-up scheduled with Patrick about lessons from the US Vaccination programme, so definitely add this one to your reading list in order to get the most out of that future discussion. It’s long, but absolutely staggering.