Shaswot Lamichhane

Shaswot Lamichhane — better known online as Shalmalo — is an analyst of crowds based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He grew up treating science less like a school subject and more like a toolbox: a habit of taking things apart to see how they work that never really wore off. That same restlessness is what pulled him toward the study of crowds — how people who are hesitant and inconsistent alone somehow move in near-perfect coordination once they're part of something larger.

He is Special Project Lead at Tools for Humanity, where he works on World, a proof-of-human network built for an internet where distinguishing a person from an AI is getting harder by the year. In September 2025, that interest in crowds stopped being theoretical: he found himself one of the moderators of a 145,000-member Discord server — nicknamed "the Parliament of Nepal" — that used structured polls and fact-checking to help steer the country's Gen Z movement toward an interim government, a process he later described as a kind of mini-election. He's spoken about the experience at the Oxford Union, and his account of it has been covered by outlets including the New York Times, India Today, Reuters, and the Green European Journal.

Outside of any one chapter, he's someone who tends to say yes to whatever's next — a new field, an inconvenient question, a country's worth of strangers organizing overnight — and would rather actually live through it than just get past it. He writes essays on Medium about where disciplines quietly borrow from each other, most recently on why breakthroughs tend to happen at the edges between fields rather than in the middle of any one of them.