I spoke to Pramit Bhattacharya an independent data journalist about India's statistical system. We talked about

• How did Indian statisticians adapt their statistical methods to account for India's informal sector?
• How are India's GDP numbers constructed?
• Why it's so hard to outright manipulate GDP numbers
• The case for optimism

I talked with Harry Law of the University of Cambridge and Google DeepMind about AI regulation

We talked about

• Me vs Harry on open source AI regulation
• Being humble when regulating AI
• Why a "Manhattan Project for X" is overrated

I spoke with Derek Wong about the adaptive markets hypothesis, macro investing and investing in cryptocurrency markets

We talk about

• Why investors should consider the financial markets as a complex adaptive system
• How investing in China is very different from investing in the West
• How he invests in crypto without fundamental anchors

I spoke with Devashish Dhar, the author of the excellent book India's Blind Spot which talks about India's urbanisation crisis and solutions to it. We talk about

• Why does India have a much lower reported rate of urbanisation than the rest of the world?
• Explaining the global bias against cities
• “Extremely high levels of traffic is caused by poor land policy”
• Why are there so many floods in Indian cities?
• How to climate-proof Indian cities
• “India’s biggest unfulfilled promise is local government”

and much more!

I interviewed one of the most interesting thinkers today, Tyler Cowen.

We talked about

• Why there are such few Singaporean famous people
• What Singapore can do to get more weird
• Why he's sceptical of an AI-driven singularity
• What happens to kids in a post-GPT world
• What happens to public intellectuals in a post-GPT world
• Why he's optimistic on Kenyan economic growth

And so much more!

I spoke to Rohit Krishnan the author of the blog Strange Loop Canon about why he is sceptical about the idea that AI will kill us all

We talked about

• Why he’s sceptical of AI regulation proposals

• Why AI “timelines” are not as meaningful as you think

• AI deployment is harder than you think!

• The value of incrementalism in AI policy

• Why he thinks instrumental convergence is unlikely to happen

I spoke to Soham Sankaran who runs PopVax, an Indian mRNA vaccine company. Their goal is to build low-cost broadly-protective vaccines to protect against the entire sarbecovirus species. Read Soham's experience here (https://chronicles.popvax.com/p/three-meetings-and-six-million-funerals) as a complement to this episode. Also check out their jobs page (https://jobs.popvax.com/) for opportunities.

This episode includes

• How he started PopVax and (went bankrupt in the process)
• Why there hasn't been a successful Indian mRNA vaccine yet
• Why developing countries can't afford drugs for rare diseases
• What they're doing to fix it
• Their biggest constraints

I talked to Dwarkesh Patel of the Lunar Society Podcast about many topics. We talked about:

• Why do AI researchers and rationalists disagree about existential risk?

• What would happen if Robert Moses ran San Francisco?

• Is localism overrated?

• What does Effective Altruism get right and wrong?

• Which politicians would he like to interview