Where to find me over the next few months. If any of it lines up with where you are, come say hello.
- Ashoka University · 9 September · interviewing professors for the podcast
- Decoded × HERizon · 14 September · a student session on sustainable finance and climate action with Cary S. Krosinsky (Yale, Brown, NYU) · register
- Hack Nation Global AI Hackathon · 3–5 October · I have an organiser's referral code for people worth backing, message me if you want it
- Andaman & Nicobar Islands · 5–15 October · travelling
- NYAS 208th Annual Meeting · 18 November · as a Member and Fellow
Wherever you are, come meet me.
I am about halfway through a study on how financial misinformation spreads across Indian social media, under Professor Hemant Kakkar at the Indian School of Business, aiming for around three hundred respondents and a mixed-effects model in R.
The content is multilingual and code-mixed, Hindi and English inside the same sentence, which is what most off-the-shelf models fall over on. So it runs through MuRIL, pretrained on Indian languages, and XLM-RoBERTa, to see whether the India-specific training earns its keep.
The other half is psychological. Using the BFI-2-XS personality inventory and the Fear of Missing Out scale, I am working out which traits predict whether someone forwards a claim they never checked. The interesting question was never what the false posts look like. It is who passes them on.
Back to running the Edunomix India Chapter day to day, the 501(c)(3) chapter I founded to teach economics to students who are never offered it. I had stepped back for a while under other commitments, and it is good to be in it properly again.
Right now that mostly means the second edition of our nationwide essay competition, which is live and open for submissions. It is open to students in Classes 6 to 12, along with first-year university and gap-year students, with five prompts on questions that actually matter for India, and the strongest essays are read by economics scholars from Harvard, UC Berkeley, Cornell, and the University of Warwick. Entries close on 30 September, a few dozen are already in, and the top entries walk straight onto the Edunomix India research team.
We have also partnered again with Learn and Teach UA for this season's Ukraine Speaks English seminars, free financial education for students across Ukraine whose schooling has been disrupted. More than forty turned up for the first class of the cycle, which is the whole reason the programme exists.
Just started as the Founding Technical and Recruitment Lead at DocsDocs Technologies, an Apple-backed startup, helping build the team and product as the company grows. This week alone I ran three candidate interviews as we scale the team up. If you are curious about it, or think you would be a fit, email me at akshat.bhaskar@docs-docs.com.
Most of my writing now goes into the study above, which is a different craft from an essay. Fewer adjectives, more error bars, and a much longer wait before you are allowed to claim anything.
Shorter pieces land on the articles page when they are ready. The Two Faces of Progress is done and published, and I have stopped picking at it.
Decoded is the podcast Amaira and I started in December 2024 to drag good conversations in economics, technology, and policy out of the papers and conference halls they usually die in. It has since passed three hundred listening hours on Spotify and picked up three Spotify for Creators awards this year.
The conversation I chased for weeks, with M. Ram Murty at Queen's University, one of the sharpest minds in number theory and its philosophy, is now live: forty-four minutes on prime numbers, the Gita, Star Trek, and why he still guards three uninterrupted hours a day just to think. It may be the best thing we have recorded, with more genuinely interesting people lined up behind him. To learn what changes as a show scales, I also cold-messaged Akshay Datt of the Founder Thesis podcast and spent a call picking apart the jump from a first dozen episodes to a few hundred.
I also coded a new home for the show at decodedpodcast.vercel.app. It started as just the two of us researching, recording, editing, and shipping every episode, so we have been building a team: our first ten-plus hires across research, social media, and outreach, and, after dozens of interviews, a new Head of the Decoded Newsletter (more on who soon). A few newsletter roles are still open, so if you would like to join, email akshat@thedecodedpodcast.com, or just say hello.
- Development as Freedom Amartya Sen · the one quietly rearranging how I judge my own work
- A Song of Ice and Fire George R. R. Martin · for when policy gets heavy
Halfway through Sen's Development as Freedom now, and it is quietly rearranging how I judge my own work. His claim, that development is the real freedoms people have rather than income alone, reframes what I am actually doing: the misinformation study is about one such freedom, the capability to tell a true claim from a false one, and Edunomix is about another, treating economic literacy as something owed to a student rather than optional. Before it I finished Ray Dalio's Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. The whole shelf lives here.
Whether the most conscientious people spread financial misinformation fastest, forwarding a warning out of duty rather than carelessness. Whether AI governance can ever be written faster than the thing it regulates. And why economics is taught as a subject to be examined rather than a lens for seeing the world.
To be technical. I came to this from economics, where it is easy to treat the modelling as somebody else's department. That stops being an option the moment your research question is a fine-tune. So: Python, the transformers stack, and enough statistics to know when I am fooling myself.
Number theory, still, slowly. The apprenticeship ended but the habit did not.
Claude Code. I hand it the parts of the job that are syntax and keep the parts that are intent. This site was rebuilt with it from scratch, and I still cannot tell whether it has made me faster or just braver.
I ran my first half marathon. Twenty-one kilometres is a long stretch to spend alone with your own thoughts, which, it turns out, is most of the point.
Deliberately talking to more people, founders, researchers, writers, anyone building something they care about. The most useful hour in my week is usually a conversation I did not strictly have to have. Building something? Talk to me!
Most things. It took me a while to learn that a calendar with no gaps in it is not a sign of ambition, it is a sign of poor editing.