Introducing Aspiring Intellectuals
Hey everyone. This is your host Tiger speaking. Happy new year! I hope you’ve all had a very restful holidays season with your loved ones.
I’ve been doing Policy Punchline for two years now and what a journey we’ve come along. We released our 100th episode last November, and in 2020, we built two special coverages – one on the Covid-19 crisis and another on the recent elections season. We’ve really taken some deep dives into issues in policy, media, economics, political discourse… Our team and I have been extremely fortunate to have interviewed people from the highest level of policymaking to the world’s most renowned academics and business executives. Thank you for all your support in 2020.
Even though we’ve come so far, part of me is still craving for more challenges. I want to have harder and longer conversations on more foundational topics – whether it’s quantum computing or bioengineering, whether it’s environmental ethics or human psychology. Rather than asking about policy and current events, I would love to further deepen the content we can present you.
I still have 5 months before I graduate from Princeton and leave Policy Punchline, and I want to use this time to build something new. I want to seek out crazily smart people from orthodox and unorthodox backgrounds who can speak to the fundamental nature of the fields they’ve been studying. They may be professors, or PhD students, or YouTube historians, or blockchain innovators who are also part-time venture capitalists…
I am therefore proud to announce this new segment, which can hopefully gradually evolve into a new podcast, titled “Aspiring Intellectuals.” This is a very pretentious phrase – I understand – but it’s something that’s been on my mind since my sophomore year. I remember talking to my friend Arjun about what kind of people we hope to grow up become and what kind of friends we’d like to surround ourselves with, and he coined this phrase “aspiring intellectuals.”
It’s hard to be an intellectual. One has to love learning, stay curious, be constantly willing to engage in debates about the world and knowledge. One also has to stay open-minded, dispassionate, receptive, and not hold a grudge against those who disagree. That’s a wonderful person if one can fulfill those standards.
I’m not pretentious enough yet to consider myself enlightened already or an intellectual myself, so I added the word “aspiring” in front of it – to show that I’m still in the process of striving to reach that state. I really hope to get there one day, and I want to interview people who are also on this journey of pursuing knowledge and truth.
This will still be a long-form podcast, except even longer and more far-reaching than the current Policy Punchline interviews that my team and I will continue to conduct. I will try to hold conversations that last more than 90 minutes or two hours. You may think of this podcast as a product of inspiration by some of the more famous long-form podcasts focused on science and society such as Eric Weinstein’s The Portal or The Lex Fridman Podcast, and even some of Joe Rogan’s conversations with academics.
To give you a sneak peak – some of our upcoming guests include:
Robert Langer - who is the most cited engineer in history and heads MIT’s Langer lab, the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world
Regina Barzilay - an MIT professor who won the MacArthur genius Fellowship for her pioneering research in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology.
Rob Henderson, a Gates-Cambridge Scholar pursuing a PhD in social psychology at Cambridge University who studies human nature and luxury beliefs
Hunt Allcott, a brilliant applied micro-economist studying behavioral public economics and industrial organization
Ewan Kingston, a philosopher at Princeton who investigates the design of institutions which interact with business to respond to global change.
Mathias Risse, a Harvard Professor of Philosophy and Human Rights Policy whose work primarily addresses questions of global justice, inequality, taxation, and the future of technology.
George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard and MIT who is a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Human Genome Project.
As you can see, we have a lineup that is quite different from the current policy guests we have every day. We’re very fortunate to have received support from these wonderful intellectuals to be the keystone guests for our new segment.
These are just some of the conversations we hope to present you in the coming weeks and months. I don’t know where this is headed, but I am extremely excited and grateful for all your support so far. I hope I can present you as many far-reaching conversations as possible before I graduate from Princeton in 5 months.
We will continue to update the interviews here on policypunchline.com. In the meantime, you may follow my daily email at tigergao.substack.com. We’ll see you at our next episode. Thank you again for all your support.