Ep 362: You're Ugly and You're Hairy and You're Covered in Shit but You're Mine and I Love You

Welcome, the conversation you're about to listen to now is what I'd describe as a Type 4 conversation. What does Type 4 mean? Well, this is purely my categorization and is based on the kind of conversations I've had as the Seen and the Unseen has evolved. In my early days, I thought people had a short attention span, episodes had to be 15 or 20 minutes and in each episode, I'd aim to dissect one policy or action. For example, why price controls obviously to

scarcity or why tariffs are always bad, etc. Just one small topic. I'd call this a Type 1 conversation. Then, as I realized that people crave depth, I began doing deep dives into subjects and these could often last 3-4 hours. For example, education with Kathik Munil Tharan or Kashmir with Sri Nathraagavan or how Indian society has changed in the last 30 years with Santosh Desai. I'd call these Type 2 conversations. This is subject at the

heart of it. I'm speaking to an expert. We're going deep. Then, my show evolved from deep dives into subjects to deep dives into people. These were like oral histories. I like to think of them almost as assisted autobiographies and these can be much longer. My episodes with Shanta Gokle, Jari Pinto and KP Krishna were all over 8 hours long and I'm so proud of them. These are all classics for me. There are many, many episodes of this kind that

are 5, 6, 7 hours long. I think of these as creating a repository of lived experiences for future listeners to discover and to understand the times better. These require a different kind of craft. I'm more or less the first person to do so many of these deep dives. So, I almost had to invent the grammar and structure of these conversations,

which I call Type 3 conversations. I'll write about it in details some other time, but basically in brief, when I'm doing a life in times oral history kind of episode, I see myself building it around 3 overlapping scaffoldings. One is a life story of my guest, and the second is a work which could be the books I've written or what they're known for. And the third is broad ideas and themes I want to talk about, some of which will arise

spontaneously during the conversation. I like it when I can balance these. I think of episode 301 with Natasha Badwar, for example, as being just a perfect balance of the three. The guest was amazing and I think the craft was just right. But you don't always have to get an equal balance of the three scaffoldings. One may dominate, but that's okay if it fits the guest. Anyway, maybe I'll write a separate essay about that someday. But today's conversation

is a fourth category. It's a type 4 conversation. This is a conversation without any agenda other than to have fun. It's not a deep dive into a subject or a person. It takes an incidental quality of the show, the joy of digressions, and makes that the central feature. The idea is to have a few hours of a fun conversation with interesting people and for all of you to come along for the ride. Past examples of this include the 2022 year in episode 339,

the Adda at the end of the universe with Roshan Abbas and Vikram Satya. Episode 294, dance dance for the Halwawala with Jaya Jonsing and Subruth Mohanti is another example. It's ostensibly about movies, but we have a blast and we go all over the place. Obviously for such a conversation to work, the chemistry has to be good and we all have to find each other interesting. That's what I got when I recorded Episode 343 last August. We are all Amit

from Africa. My guests are here with Krishashoek and Narendra Shanoi and we had such a good time and going by the rapturous feedback, you had a good time too. So what better way to start 2024 than by getting those fine Jents together again? Welcome to the scene and the unseen. Our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host Amit Varma. Welcome to the scene and the unseen. My guests today are Krishashoek and Narendra Shanoi.

I've recorded rocking solo episodes with each of them and also one with both of them a few months ago. I'll link all of those from the show notes. We loved that last conversation so much that we agreed that the next time a show was in Mumbai, we would do one in my home studio and indeed he flew down for just this. This could well be the most fun conversation I have ever recorded. Narendra tells many stories that a show can I draw linked in lessons

from. We discuss the difference between Chutia and Doshit. We speak of how vegetarianism is way more unethical than eating meat. Narendra and a show explain Raghas to me in both of them. Do a lot of singing is quite magical. You gotta get to that part. We speak about how Indians do the best bench pressing about Narendra's forthcoming book, about Van Morrison and Barigula Malikhan and about why a monkey covered in shit is a monkey that must be loved. What a way to begin this year.

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start every Saturday. What's more you get at the scoundrel for whopping 2500 rupees, 2500 if you use the discount code unseen. So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code unseen. Uplive yourself. Ashok and Nareen welcome to the scene in the unseen. Absolutely pleasure. Yeah it's so awesome to be back. And compared to Chennai we are in the relative Arctic environment of Mumbai. The Northern Hemisphere, you know, a few more

latitude degrees north of the steaming tropics. I do have my condition around but I must tell the listeners that when I ask the gentleman what temperature should I keep it at and generally the answer you expect is 22, 23, 18 if you want to REM sleep though why someone should sleep during my recordings is bewildering to me. But Mr. Chennai asked for 26 so we are trying to take it there. I have surreptiously kept it at sort of 25 at a freezing 25 at a

freezing 25. So there is this video by another Narendra I want to ask you about Narendra where the other Narendra is asked in this auditorium full of school kids that what does he feel about climate change and he says no, he adds all in the mind they can most of me but I am a little bit different. So you know has your optimal temperature changed with I would not like to say like what you can say advancing your defense. Yeah, I'm advancing in your dotar, Alec dotar, Alec dotar

would be appropriate but yeah. So this interesting thing is when I was younger and my wife was the same age and she's the free of the free of the wife world. I wanted a much a far lower temperature than she did and as the years have passed, it's reversed and she needs the colder temperature now than I do. So yeah, so bedroom secrets. Those days I she used to sleep with the thick blanket, now I sleep with the

thick blanket. Interesting. Yes. The interesting sort of reversal. And do you have a story for this? So there's a there's actually one bit in in yes prime minister, audience minister one

of things. So Mrs. Hacker is this there's a journalist you know sort of party happening in the house and there's a lot of wine flowing and Mrs. Hacker is a little bit drunk and somebody is basically you know just sort of messing with her and just asking her about prime, yeah, Mr. Hacker and so they they ask her you know is is your you know does your husband's this does a prime minister's know or something like that. So she says yeah, it's knows but and something so it's like you know,

he says do you I think I know this one. Yeah, I don't know why you're struggling should I say? Yeah, okay. Yeah, so they ask her that does the earth shake when does the earth shake when you make love and she says even the bed doesn't shake. So yeah, that's the one I was saying. I mean, the other one which is bang on all of some so I was like sort of trying to figure out. Yeah, so he's a prime minister's like a high fidelity system is like it's very it's so high fidelity but low

frequency. So he says, oh you mean like bang on all of some. Yes. So she says all of some anyway. So yeah, so low frequency sort of sounds based right. So baby co-base percent there. Great reference. Yeah, so I don't know how that continues. So actually, yes, minister sort of reminds me some of these very offhand jokes which incidentally I did not catch when I was watching the series but I caught them and I read that

that the BBC published a transcript. Yeah. And there are some very brilliant small things. One example was he's asked about some inflation going up and all of that and they says that we inflation is hit 10% said that is categorically wrong. It's 9.96%. Right? And then the end of the I say that well, I will go back. I will take this back to 10 Downing Street and so on. He says, you mean 9.96 Downing Street. As Donald Bradman could tell you the difference between 10 and

9.6 is pretty kind of massive. So we have decided a show that in this particular episode, we will let our friend, Mr. Narendra Chenoy do a lot of the talking and this is not frivolous storytelling we are doing today. Yeah. You know, the listener should know that we are very serious

that this is an educational episode. It is a learning opportunity and you know one way of thinking of this episode is as LLM LinkedIn lessons management because what Mr. Chenoy is going to do today is tell us stories with a LinkedIn lesson which he says you and I have to guess. So I think there's a there's this nice little quote from these researchers who work on these large language models that large language models are not factellers. They are story tellers.

So in that spirit, we will let our dear Narendra tell stories and we will then generate LinkedIn posts, business lessons and yeah, so that should be the goal, right? And we will give the audience and listeners the opportunity to take those lessons and post it on their LinkedIn and share it with the world. And I must at this point while I agree with almost everything you say,

almost. I must protest so vehemently that I am right now as you can see lowering the gain on my et6 and my protest is that the way you say that not facts but stories makes it seem as if our friend's stories are made up in some way and I want to tell you the while it is true that whenever he buys a computer, he buys it with the lowest possible RAM because he can manufacture his own memory. Actually, there's no value judgment there at all. In fact, I would actually argue that the best

way to communicate facts is we are stories only. Exactly. That's how you be a wired to appreciate stories. That's how we understand the world. In primitive times, it was noise in bush, maybe lion, run, solid, probabilistic thinking, easy heuristics, etc., etc. But today the world is complex and therefore we need better stories and noise in the bush. There is this fantastic, right, you know,

the overview effect, right? So the first time you go into space, right? You see the blue earth and the idea is that you suddenly get this overwhelming sense of, oh my god, I mean, this is so fragile. The thickness of the atmosphere, the thing that keeps us alive and every astronaut and everyone who's gone to space has that sort of effect. And I think this is beautiful quote by Jim Lovell. Again, so I said, either you can try to convince people about climate change with data,

right? You know, this many inches of, you know, Arctic ice cap melting or what Jim Lovell said is basically that, you know, when people believe that when you die, you go to heaven. They said, that's wrong. Is it the rest of the universe is insanely hostile as an astronaut? You know that, that you literally cannot live when you go to heaven when you're born, because this is the only heaven

in the known universe, which is the earth. So that's why you should protect it, right? So you've got to be able to find ways powerful, metaphorical ways of, that's why I think these spiritual gurus and are able to communicate better with people than scientists. Because they have a story forever. They have a story. But at this point, I just want to say that, you know, as far as climate change

is concerned, there is one place in the world which would welcome climate change. And with this, I want to urge Nareen to tell us a story about something that happened to a show in Winnipeck, Canada. You know, where yes, if climate change ever strikes, Indians will have Indian bodies. They say in journalism that you must always go to your first, you know, they get the story directly from the person who experienced it. But a rare example of this is that this story is best

narrated by Nareen than the person to whom it happened, which is me. Yes, please go ahead, sir. Please go ahead. I show to you this. And it's one of the most awesome stories. So back in the day, when he was like, he had become an expert. So he was a troubleshooting, a troubleshoot. So wherever in the world there was trouble, I show could be sent with a couple of guns and his holsters. One man United Nations. So he would go, he works for, is it okay to say TCS?

Yeah, you can say it. He was working, he's always been working for TCS. So go to wherever the TCS office was, go and figure out what the problem was, do whatever he could to solve them and come back. So he gets to go to this place called Winnipeck, Canada. And when he goes there, there is, so the usual protocol is there is a TCS representative who is almost invariably 90 pounds and you know, thick glasses and absolutely, I mean, was terribly a giant but physically very

diminutive. quintessential IT bro. I think somewhat like you Nareen when you were young except the cerebral part. I have a thing about that as well. I'm noting one down these. So that is Ashok's thing about ODP restaurant for a private. So that's, there's very interesting anecdotes there. There's a LinkedIn story. But yeah, so Winnipeck, Canada and he goes there and he sees no one, no TCS

person who answers to that description. There's just one Indian looking guy, vaguely Indian looking, who has enormous tree trunks of arms like you're just bursting from his, we're all clothes. He looked like he could bench press Arnold. Carry Arnold and bench press Arnold, right? He was bit like that. So Ashok says this definitely not. I don't want to make a fool of myself and go ask

him. definitely not an Indian. It does not fit the description. Eventually everyone left and there were the only two people and so he goes and approaches him and it indeed turns out to be TCS guy and Ashok is completely stunned. He's like speechless. He doesn't know what to make of it. He goes to the TCS office with his, you know, with his colleague and there are another 10 people there all looking the same. All of them with tree trunk arms bursting out of their T-shirts.

Continue the story. Tell us a rest of the story. So this is actually the, like literally all the forearms, the material was like about to rip off the guy like bent his arm, you know, the shirts would rip right and so like in my life I've never seen a larger concentration of IT people with this many muscles. One of those things where these two things don't belong in

the same novel let alone the same paragraph. And so basically these, I really needed to figure out why are all these Indian people working in IT sitting in Winnipeg which is again for those who don't know Winnipeg. Canada has like Toronto Vancouver and there is basically then wilderness right and the Arctic wilderness and Winnipeg is one of those places in the middle of some of the

coldest parts right of where Canadians live. I was just frozen through and through snowing. It was in winter and so on and minus 35, you know, kind of temperature right and then eventually I get to learn that look in winter which is pretty much for eight months of the year. These guys sun rises at like 11 and set set like 2 or 3 pm and there's literally nothing to do right and because if you go outside into the cold unless you're a typical white Canadian your chances of dying are very high

right Indians not used to that kind of temperature right. So these guys have absolutely nothing to do. So the only thing they do is hit the gym and work out two, three hours every day and they've all and again in true Indian fashion they only exercise their chest and arms and nothing else. So they have like you know spinley you know completely thin legs and massive kind of chest and so on. I

think but you should narrate the anecdote about the clothing store though. Yeah so he he finally reconciles you know sort of gets used to the idea and then his colleagues so his wife Shok's wife has asked him to buy something and so he needs to go to a shopping mall so this guy takes him there and he's shopping and all of a sudden he is you know he's looking around his

colleagues he's sort of disappeared. So as he's looking around a helpful shop assistant comes and says oh your partner has just gone on the other side and she thinks that the only universe in which a guy with a physique like a short is if they're in a relationship. Yes yes. Yeah and and the interesting thing is that that guy is while I'm doing my shopping he's trying to he said why don't I get myself a blazer and I go find him and the store clerk who's the sort of lady from

Puerto Rico right into the strong Hispanic accent and she's like completely frustrated at because she spent the last 15 minutes trying to find a suit that fits this strange body shape which is that if it fits his arms I mean it's looking like a tent below right and anything smaller than that is

absolutely not fitting at the risk of damaging the suit right and she's basically telling him that you why are you spending so much time with the gym you need to be eating more food and less protein powder literally berating me said you need to be a little bit more symmetrical so that you can

actually get a suit and so on I said this is the first time that in a place like Canada a Bengali guy who could bench press Arnold Schwarzenegger is struggling to buy a suit being schooled by a Puerto Rican lady asking him to eat less protein powder and eat more food I said this is globalization

yeah I will just thinking that and straight out of a you know this is the link in less this is the link in less yeah the power of globalization power of globalizing Bengali is bench pressing Arnold so friend of mine at a conference a couple of days ago a magnificent gentleman named Shankar Shion

or Shankhi was telling me that you know have you heard of the you've heard of the big bank theory have you heard of the big bang theory at the idea being that there's a Bengali at the root of everything but I have a bodybuilding story to go kind of go with this it's not about my own

bodybuilding alas but I had written a post about it and it has policy lessons right so linked in less and the headline of the post was a day Ryan started masturbating now all of this is a true story right when I was in college I was incredibly thin it might seem hard to believe I was kind of

one third of what I am now and etc etc and this dictated in the morning that or rather this did not dictate but this was a factor in the morning of deciding that when I come out of my hostel or when I finish my college do I go to the college canteen or do I go to the tapri because the

college canteen is on one side the tapri is on the other side and if the wind blows against my shirt my ribs are visible and I am so embarrassed because obviously a dad to age you imagine every woman is looking at you and making fun of you in their heads so I did not want the wind to blow

against me so the wind direction would decide so my friends would say can't on air canteen I'd look at the wind and I'd be like they need up you're using an animal meter figuring out what is your breakfast strategy the heuristic of just facing one direction and seeing if my ribs are

visible you could sort of you know moonwalk like Michael Jackson in whatever direction in those days one did not you know have those sort of skills you do not have YouTube videos to teach you also more exactly as if in those days one did not have those skills as if I do now so now in the hostel

in our hostel in Ferguson College Pune there was a friend of mine called Ryan who had a very similar body he was as spindly as me and he wasn't really concerned about people looking at him and etc etc but he was as spindly and it was like an unspoken sort of club of losers that we were in that he kept we are like the thin guys and it's okay and we are proud of it and fuck it we'll own it and that's a posturing and one day I am passing Ryan's room and the door is open and Ryan is doing

push ups so now this seems deeply unprincipled to me so I ask Ryan a betrayal of our values I mean it's you don't sort of expect this right it's like a pure vegetarian suddenly eating poke belly and we shall discuss vegetarianism later in the show so he sees me come in and he looks up

look of guilt on his face and as you will note the guilt is double-aged as you will find out so I ask him what happened boss what are you doing so he said Amit I masturbated so I said that's okay but what's the connection between that and this loads some act that you are currently engaged in

yeah and he said Amit and now he comes close to me and he says Amit masturbation is a sin I have decided that every time I masturbate I will do 25 push ups so I said okay six months later but is that the official compensatory act before he has decided right he has decided

he has this has not been decided by the free market but he has you know it's a voluntary decision so it is a free market decision six months later I'm the only thin person in the hostel Ryan is like buff he is gripped you know in that very Indian way that the legs might be

splendidly but I unlike you was not in the habit of looking at men's legs and evaluate him so yeah and now when I would walk through college with Ryan you know all the girls would keegle as you always used to but earlier they would giggle at who are these two thin guys now they

would giggle and share nervousness at you know the unlikely event of this aggression god walking in the midst which of course was him and this is not the story the story is that shortly after this incredible transformation happens another gentleman in the hostel who I shall describe as

Varun Kumar Sinha very close to his real name but I don't want to take his real name but everyone in that age will know comes to me one day and he says Amit Bhai ik bad badad so I said what when he grabs me by the shoulder and he takes me to a corner

when I won't hear us and he says Amit Bhai ik badad batad who Ryan and I am your friend so I said yeah so he says yeah he was so thin six months ago now he is his body what is a secret I want to body like that I don't know what to do so I said bro you have to masturbate and the link

there are various LinkedIn and public policy lessons in this story because of course Varun Kumar Sinha was an experienced masturbator by that time and did not buy the theory but you know there are various lessons because there are various fallacies people can fall for and one of

them is post hoc ergo proctor hoc which is that first a happens then b happens and you know therefore a cause b so masturbation caused him to have his body the second one has a really suitable name right can you guess the first word of the suitable name it's called come hoc ergo proctor

right and yes yeah this is that two things happen together and you decide that a cause b right so there are all kinds of fallacies so I have given a story with LinkedIn lesson all through my teenage life and I saw somebody they would they would write in their bio that he was

just summer come lord or whatever I always did not sound like a very calm very complimentary to say about someone yes in fact just these words some are the tikka but come sorry I mean your mouth is just like that like summa summa sound lord it's like like

combination of tamarind Hindi Latin gali your image has been destroyed you're like a dignified knowledgeable polymath person and I have to tell you that his image was like it's very high in my house for one thing so when when I got married I had a pretty handsome moustache as

as I would imagine which the first thing she lumb and we do is shave it off and I protested a lot I was really but you know she said like it was like you know negotiation that's non-negotiable the moustache has to go so after a few days of this thing I I struggle I gave up I

shaved it off then many years later I sort of met Ashok on online and in a moment of reclessness I put it I put my wedding reception photograph you had a moustache and we shared on Twitter when this episode is released and Ashok immediately said that is would be restaurant proprietor

actually was very offended but she laughed so much he says this is one rare friend who's actually sensible who this guy said yes especially the photo that hangs on the wall in would be restaurants yes rare friend who sensible you have other sensible friend so let's move on to the

first actual Narendra Shanoi story with a link in lesson but we are supposed to give you a prompt yes and you're supposed to find a story that fits a prompt so Narendra GPT right Narendra GPT we will start engineer we will prompt engineer and my first prompt will be let me kind of give you a simple

prompt ok here is my prompt and just as after and Ashok is spoiled his image by saying terrible things in Tamil I did not repeat I will also give you a prompt and my prompt is Chutia so I have this really I mean so Chutia is a word that is you know it has a lot of so I mean we use and

bomb it's like it's like when you breathe in and breathe out it's like Pranayama thing yeah punctuation yeah yeah and so I had a friend who was very offended so I thought you were offended by the words you know you use it to flippantly it has gravitas it has meaning really

yeah and he said that so there are many definitions and I could go on like it could be an entire episode in what a Chutia is there a jeep story is that the jeep is different but there is there is that that's another story yes so this is also my friend whom I shall call Mr. Singh yes and so he

he told me that he had an uncle who was a carpenter and that carpenter old man excellent carpenter is to work alone and he was getting on in here so he couldn't do so he got an assistant a fine strapping young lad from Punjab who is like really strong so you know they use very happy you

do you just sort of you want to play in a piece of word you want to do anything and this guy would be a bench press on a bench press yes bench press the Bengali bench press the Bengali guy who could bench press the Bengali guy who could bench press Ryan who could bench press the Bengali guy who

could bench press on this for three stack we actually now have to keep this going through the episode of the continued so yeah strapping lad so situation is it's afternoon close to lunchtime there is one door to be fitted it's fit but it's tight so mamaji is really hungry so he's telling

his you know he said I'll take a break but the strapping young boy he's like rearing to go this is a come girl my khanak had you you know shave this off so he asked him to keep the so he says Karate jhat jitna so jhat is a pubic head so it's a standard thing that it was like the diameter

of a hair so that did like it it almost seems I think the the curse words from that part of the world yeah kind of come from a biology textbook chapter of the reproductive system where all the every label part there is one use of every part of the anatomical part of there is in fact a famous

saying in middle India is in the kjhat is the khanakwale art yeah okay carry on so it's it's very in Bombay it is like you know jhat jitna is a it's it's like a specification so kittakam go to jhat jitna so that's so this guy says that and he goes for lunch and then he finds out that the pretty

thing has been plain off almost three inches so what happened was this guy translating the specifications like you know you you need to find out the standard so he reached out he plucked on hair he measured the length and he reduced it by that and I'm sorry I was you the reference is to thickness and not length yeah there is a fundamental yeah so but this was the thing and

mr. Singh's question was who is the juthya so I said the boy you said no mama jit because mama jit not specify correct exactly so that is the linked in the scene yeah so there is interesting fascinating so that was so I've also been confused by that specific but what is the

linked in listen that specifications are important when you know you cannot blame people for doing something wrong merely because you didn't specify with clarity is there Shakespeare in who sins more the tempter or the tempted I mean in this case I think the it generally the blame should

be on the person giving the requirements wrongly rather than the person very true great story and the remarkable thing is this is not the story I expected I know another great juthya story you have the difference between juthya and dushed so but wait a second or so again despite that he lived

in the one one eternal confusion always had is that is the literal meaning of this is just someone who comes out of that part of the body is that what it is so that is one carpenter so he had told me another carpenter actually so there was carpenter work happening and I was a kid at that time

and he the he's assistant did something wrong and this carpenter was telling him okay so that comes from there or uses that out of his for because the for at least the first one would describe every human on the planet no yeah yeah correct everyone is there from that effect

yeah I've always been confused by why that is considered a curse and the other Mr. Singh story is that difference between juthya and dushed so that was the other thing and juthya was a bit of a you know sort of serious matter with Mr. Singh it's a serious matter yeah so he said that

this is the difference between juthya and dushed this is Joe he says do you know that is also a nicer that is a LinkedIn lesson yeah that's a LinkedIn lesson that's like that yeah that's how you do growth hacking and things like that yeah and so many things

in fact even a public policy lesson there are so many things like Mrs. Gandhi destroyed the Indian textile industry for no benefit to herself or her party just to spite some Marwadi said Jesus for as I can see correct so that makes her a yeah a visual not

but it's yeah so it is also fascinating how one curse words coming largely from sexual references right because of the taboos related to that and in many situations also in both of these are true that sometimes the reference may be actually innocuous but in that culture and

society the usage of that and the tone of that indicates a level of seriousness that you're supposed to take it seriously right as an insult and likewise even if it is deeply sexually graphic and explicit you're supposed to not take the explicit sexual part of it seriously yeah

and the fact that it is merely just a punctuation aimed at sort of signifying annoyance or irritation right so it's weird right the more graphic the word you're supposed to don't take it that seriously but if it's a very lame insult you still are supposed to assume that it is actually an insult

yeah it's quite interesting sort of you know gravitating towards the mean if you will actually when just thinking aloud when language evolves you know all these evolve as well like there are certain you know cuss words which eventually become politically incorrect to use and often with good reason etc etc like I often if I think a little bit about it I think so many of the cuss words like you know are you know demeaning to women and so on and so forth but I wonder what new cuss words

are originated because we need cuss words so yeah absolutely you know but I think right now see there the weird thing about one is that political correctness is a a byproduct of the television and radio era right meaning that before that no one had an audience of the entire world and all

that yeah so you really this you didn't really have that kind of power so you this is a new thing that you have to invent you know sort of come up with a very baudularized banal way of communicating things without offending a maximum number of people which is impossible because humans are very

diverse and all that the internet is in internet is weird because not only does it give people a global voice but it also gives a voice to tiny groups of people who can get offended by you and the platform encourages you to you know try and cancel them and you know quote with them

and things like that and so now there are like multiple small there are like there are words that are used only by the in cell groups right against women and there are words there are other words that are used only by say some specific ethnic group on Twitter and so on and some of these

words you won't even recognize right so they he for example like people who are suss for example right it has a very specific meaning it's suspicious yes but it has a very specific of what they when they refer this is like slightly suss and so on right there are riz for example right what

do suss and riz mean suss is suspicious and riz is no specific meaning use so meaning that suss is not what you use for standard guy staring at at you creepily right suss is used for very common place inner corporate typical environment somebody you're working with etc no visible

suspicious behavior but you believe there is something wrong about that person that is suss okay so this way it's very suss someone wants to do that so that yeah he sent this email that's very suss and things like that it's not for the very obvious visible creepy behavior that you might explain

someone once told me that Amit also riz it feels suss so what could that mean yes here are a bunch of three elderly uncles discussing internet lingo that we probably don't understand to be honest and I'm absolutely certain that some people on twitter are going to correct

all of these definitions once this podcast goes away or riz ness could be a redeeming factor but I have no political correctness of ex ordinary words also which is why I have decided that I will be very sensitive and even regular words which have not yet come under their purview I will correct

myself for example the other day I call someone a loser and then I thought no no that person is not a loser yeah they are merely victory challenged victory challenged yeah that if someone is talking bullshit yeah they're not talking bullshit what a rude word yes they are inside deficient

right so this is so noble sort of you know velocity challenged like I think yesterday when we met at Nareens house for dinner somebody were you there then I don't think you were there then I friends with these son nobodies there and I cracked a joke and he

asked me to jump out of the balcony and I said I can't I'm gravity compliant correct yes as everyone is yes as everyone impact challenge so we will end at the end you gravity compliant but impact challenge yes as Douglas Adams used to say that you know the

the key to learning to how to fly is to jump off an edge and and and forget that you're going to crash I keep telling me I forget to fall yeah I get that idea the idea of flying is to forget to fall that that's brilliant yes and I keep telling my writing students that you know only a lot of writing

will make you a good writer endless iteration and to that I would say if you want to learn to fly only endless jumping of cliffs will yes and forgetting yes and forgetting to fall yeah which okay so next prompt are you going to give this prompt or show let's do it

huh so my prompt so since last we had this brilliant prompt with the other stations of this I'm going to say Chattrapati Shivaji International Airport is the prompt so I've I've I've I've been I mean it's not the new airport I'm talking about is the worst design important my

considered opinion in the world and it's you have to like so I'm I'm I'm I'm how shall I say I'm I prefer to take autos to because the cities yeah because autos are less traffic jam challenge right so they'll find their way yeah and Chattrapati Shivaji terminus does not like autos for some reason

so they all I like what's better yeah they did some somewhere in the wilderness and they have to find you have to walk yeah yeah yeah so the only exception is when she lies around so for some reason she when when she is with me and we we've taken auto she hates to take an auto but we take take auto because we are apparently running short of time and as the only way miraculously people will come and guide us to the place so I don't know whether this is a Sheila effect or a Chattrapati Shivaji

terminus whatever that airport if it is so I don't know what a what LinkedIn lesson there is in this so airports are actually quite like it is again Douglas Adams famously is like one of those places where everyone is miserable including the employees the cabin crew the pilots the passengers

the kids in tow everyone is miserable and amidst all of this misery I think like for example the Mumbai airport has a bunch of these Labrador retrievers aimed at you going and you know hugging them don't have to to de-stress because they're recognizing that being in an airport is inherently

stressful so you can de-stress right you can transfer your stress to that poor animal being non-concentually you know hugged and needlessly harassed by all passengers and so on but airports actually this there was a point of time what would happen is that because there are too many flights

and clearly infrastructure never keeps up with demand and so on right your domestic flight you would board from terminal one but the flight would be tending in the international airport somewhere really really far away right then you would be put in a bus and oftentimes

it would feel as if that the airlines suddenly decided that forget the flight we are taking you by bus from here to Bando it'll it'll take literally like half an hour for you to be standing in that bus and it'll take you to that plane and then where you have to wait for the previous bus

to discharge its load and then for people to sort of get into the plane and there are also terrible people like at least here so once this happened we we went to the airport we were checking in security and Sheila has she's she's put in our handbag and everything and she's the phone she

forgot to put it so she gives it to me and I I put it into my bag we do that and then very unusual for Sheila she must have been really stice you forgot and she goes she realizes the phone and not she goes running back and asked me her phone right here and the lady was observant and she said

no no your daddy got the ass so the worst thing that has happened to me man come on it's happening youth like me and it's also another weird thing again because it's chennay that obviously has to be a you know Hindi reference no but this could lead to some good action

you know you could be telling a lady who's your daddy who's your daddy I can yeah total fun the thing in you know in in chennay again the add-on tension is the fact that that entire CRPF staff is only Hindi speaking and they will scream in Hindi at people who do not understand

Hindi P.J. mode and all of that I mean how's it okay it's supposed to understand right yes so this is again for a flight going from Chennai to Koybatore the CRPF guy the in-flight announcement everything is in Hindi right yeah crazy thing and and all signboards now in I even in

fact noticed that in the in the screen where they show the English then Hindi and then they'll show Tamil right somebody actually pointed out that the Hindi was staying on for longer so started like measured the garden and this is Hindi in position and so but I the other funny

things I've seen is that as I remember this Varun Grover bit about him not being allowed to take Singhaar right is a lovely bit right saying that it has a little bit of a sharp edge and he's like like imagine if I was actually going to get some more of it to some more right with the singhaar

how much of that first word you used that we would all look like so I had a very similar story where clearly somebody who's traveling for the first time in a flight and carried this large handbag not one of those strollers or anything like you know pretty heavy right clearly and it's

like back to the gills and clearly that guy's like they went through the x-ray and this said please open it up what the hell is this right and it turns out to be about eight or nine pineapples okay with that you know with that all the sharp knives and so on right and again you know pineapple

itself is a very remarkable fruit right one is that it takes two and a half years to grow each pineapple takes so on yes each pineapple takes two and a half years to grow it's one of the slowest growing things so if you're growing if you're a pineapple cultivator it's not an easy thing

what do you wait like two and a half years it's a very slow growing thing and clearly there is no other fruit on the planet that is telling you do not eat me in more uncertain terms it has like a sharp armor okay and then it has these insane set of sharp spikes with the needles and if you manage

to get past all of that and like a hardcore animal is like I'll go through all of the bleeding mouth right and a herbivore bites into the fruit it has an enzyme that can digest your flesh which is bromeline right which is why it's a meat tenderizer and so on so when you eat a pineapple the

pineapple is trying to eat you and all of that and so the argument there in the airport was that that it has all of these sharp edges and this gentleman was arguing that no the the sides of the pineapple they look rough but they're not sharp they take but the top part is what a sharp

so he said you give me a knife I will cut off all of the top bits and the CRP of slick to use the first but I can who do you take a smile right yeah so you take it out and cut it and bring it so from this I want to shift the subject to a subject you know well which is you

know you you've spoken often about we know well that the whole purpose of everything a plant does is to stop itself from being consumed right like like the pineapple's great self defense points so a plant is actively trying to stop us from eating it and you could say with domesticated

animals is likely truly the opposite you know the species flourishes if we continue eating them and so on and therefore with this I come up with the only argument for vegetarianism which I think holds which is a egoistic argument that this motherfucker is trying to fight me and I won

right I have eaten pineapples every time I have together instincts yeah that I mean you know I've not been able to go hunt a stack but I can eat a plant that does not want to eat every time I'm trying to eat a pineapple the pineapple is trying to eat meat meat meat yeah one day it may win

we want to eat it because of your evolution yeah produce a better point yeah but you know I'll segue from this and I want you to elaborate on something else in a recent episode of everything because everything I had this throwaway line you know that's my youtube show with Ajay Shah

for those who don't know and everybody must check it out it's amazing it's just my it's so good I've been watching episodes multiple times so yeah because Ajay Shah's density of yeah information per word is remarkable is very high yeah and only one hour episodes so seen on scene listening

few things you know as someone who listens to videos at 3x yeah this is the only one I listen to at 1.5 I will tell Ajay great compliment but anyway at one point I had this throwaway line that if you eat a plate of Fukma you're killing many more animals then if you eat a chicken right yes because

if you eat a chicken you're killing a chicken yeah but if you eat a plate of Fukma there's a whole fucking ecosystem of living beings that are kind of dying absolutely and somebody put this incredulous comment in the thing that what is this nonsense I don't understand this you better explain this

and I thought it is just freaking obvious like if you think about it for 30 seconds the ethical reason for vegetarianism vanishes because a vegetarian is killing animals at a way greater scale than a non vegetarian person is so you know from your from your mouth Ashok this will carry a lot of

weight so yeah so this is one of those things where because of the nature of how people are so attached to the moral superiority of their food choices both ways right hardcore carnivores as well as vegetarians and vegans and and people only eat raw food and every other you know combination

of fat diets out there this fundamentally is coming from the fact that people people urban people don't quite recognize it because we are so far from the farmers and all of that that all agriculture is a brutal act of violence against nature right there is the a field is a huge act of violence

in general any plot of land will be colonized by a huge ecosystem of things right things that feed off each other some will be parasites some will be symbiotic be animals it'll be microbes it'll be fungi it'll be a whole bunch of things of all sizes and entire pyramid of things each one eating

the other and that over time that that's what stabilizes and that's basically what it is right and a field is is literally I wipe all of that out you have to wipe out so many living things so that you can grow rice or wheat or whatever it is right and and then kill everything else and also effectively then consume a tiny fraction of what only the seed is what you consume right and even that you remove the husk because you can't digest that and then basically then

and then you do other things like burning the stock because you need to get in three harvest of rice as a result of poor human policy and agricultural policy and all of that but the interesting thing is that most people sometimes forget the fact that all food is one form of life killing and eating

another form of life right and people just sometimes just simply forget that plants are living things right yes of course I'm not arguing that yes of course as an animal you're going to see another animal it has a it has a face it has ice it has a central nervous system it experiences

pain in the same way that you do but then to therefore say that because I don't eat that I'm morally superior is utterly stupid because you know existing in eating food you are committing violence either you are someone else is committing brutal amount of violence against nature to do that

of course you can then make interesting arguments about carbon footprint and sustainability and all of that right but then again that also has to cut across like economic classes and whether whether someone can afford right I mean I think it is more moral to stay alive than to be carbon

neutral I would imagine that I think is probably far more of a priority to keep people alive like the most insured line it is more moral to stay alive than to be carbon neutral or keep people alive right either way so yes and that that is the part and you know the other

weird thing is that I discovered it the first time when I went to the US and at that point of time I was I was still sort of while I ate a little bit of meat here and there I was still largely vegetarian just culturally and then and for sure I was not used to burgers right I was not used to beef

burgers and so the first time I went to and US you do want to go to McDonald's for the first time right in the early 2000s and so on what is this whole thing about and but clearly at that point of time McDonald's did not have anything remotely other than French fries they did not have a

vegetarian option not only did they not have a vegetarian option nobody in the McDonald's understood what that word meant yeah right so then eventually the people who lived there for a while Indian told me you have to say no meat so you can't see vegetarian they want to understand you have to say

no meat that kind of always got me thinking if you get a Marathi server you won't get salty though yeah continue sorry the interesting thing is that so one is that it got me thinking that okay I assume that the term vegetarian was a globally well understood term and it turns out it's

very uniquely Indian right our definition of vegetarian is uniquely Indian and here's interesting thing it's not even pan Indian our definition of vegetarian comes from the Indogangetic belt definition of what is vegetarian or what what they eat has now become vegetarian right

because milk and dairy is included and ex or not ex or not right I mean if they some if the operating rule is that there is no death of an animal involved then ex or vegetarian as they are in the UK as they are in Europe right but when India they're not because the part of India that

gets to decide all of this it does not eat eggs that much right so therefore eggs are not right and again the morality of eggs versus milk again right the to get milk you have to to non-consensually keep a cow pregnant for decade for a decade like back to back there's no

choice in that matter right and to get eggs you have to prevent a hen from getting pregnant you have to keep the rooster away from the hen right and yeah again let's think about the morality of that I would argue that depriving the hen of that is is probably more moral than keeping a cow pregnant

back to back stressful if you look at the stress you're a mammal right yeah we know what pregnancy is like yeah imagine doing that like back to back it's enormous stress yeah right we know the effect it has on calcium and all of that I'm sure we are absolutely reducing their life spans yeah so if

you care about animals have eggs stop having milk and if you care about animals you want the hen to get some action once in a while again reminds me of a Douglas Adams thing from the restaurant at the end of the universe where there is the scene where there is a they go to the restaurant at the end of the universe which is this amazing place which is not located at the physical end of the universe but it's located at the time end of the universe so you're in a bubble of search where you can see

the end of the universe happening outside right and so on so all classic Douglas Adams references are there they have a they have a giant complex of various kinds of toilets for all the different alien species that come which again is not something that you would have thought of when writing stuff here but Douglas Adams will think of it it would imagine that different species will have different ways of you know going to the loop right and the other thing was that there is a there is a concept

called the dish of the day where the animal that is going to feed you will come sit at the table have a conversation good day gentlemen what would you like to eat which part of my body would you like a filet minyam would you like whatever it is then I'll say I'm quickly go pop off shoot

myself and then you know your dish will be ready in so on so and it the first time these humans go like absolutely aghast is like how can I eat something that is coming and talking to me and and it says that science took 20,000 years to genetically engineer an animal that wants to be

eaten and now you guys don't want to eat meat so that's the remark that it actually says and the one guy says that no I'll just have the salad I said I know some plants that would vehemently disagree with that not to mention that ecosystem of millions and millions of rats

and other underserved creatures which had to kind of suffer through various sad genocides so I have a question I'm thinking aloud you just mentioned how animals and of different kinds do different things differently so for example a snake listens through its stomach right and

you know bats navigate the world through echolocation basically through sound rather than sight what are the interesting differences in shitting that you can think of man I think there's insane amount of variation right there are there are animals in the sea where the mouth and the

the NSR the same thing I can think of plenty of people in politics yeah welcome to you also fascinating how the language we use for some of these verbs that are then predicated on very specific human biology sometimes may not transfer to like when we say a snake here's through its stomach right here is very much a product of basically assuming that there is a very anthropocentric way of looking at the nth I think right so it would be interesting to see how eventually at some point

of time and as in a sci-fi future whether a multiple species that are sentient how what language will feel like and one of the challenges I think the movie is it arrival or one of those other variable then you will know yeah you're brilliant the part that they capture quite brilliantly is the

fact that the hardest thing you're going to find is being able to communicate we simply assume that we'll somehow come into some sort of a conference room and start chatting with each other is that not only the other side may not even communicate using sound yeah it could be chemical

entirely right and and by the way on earth plants communicate via chemicals right I mean so this this is astonishing this I think the secret life of trees I think right so there is this hidden life of tree a little bit of world green yeah the the Akesh tree I think that one is that it has been in

an evolutionary battle with the giraffes so it has started keeping it leaves higher and higher and the giraffes neck is gotten taller and taller over like millions of years right so that it can continue to reach and its current version of its defense mechanism is that Chalo I can't prevent the

giraff from eating me but what I can do is synthesize a molecule that sort of put it into the air that will warn nearby Akesh trees that well giraffes are consuming me etc and those in turn will then produce a molecule that will turn the leaves way more bitter than they are so that it'll

deter the giraffes from eating and likewise there are also trees that produce a particular molecule like a ferromon that attracts a hornet or a wasp that will come and eat the larva the caterpillar or the larva that is eating its leaves wow magnificent and also like one of the revelations in that

book which can completely blew my mind is that trees you think they are solitary individual beings in their stately dignity but actually or in a forest all trees are interconnected through the roots yes and it's like a constant meditative conferences happening you can almost imagine this

hum like a like a raga you know yeah yeah and this is is all done by fungi full of the best powers and by the charge the charge yeah they charge like the next and DHL charges they charge by for by with sugar right and so the plants give them the sugar glucose and they

offer internet services if you will right and actually technically the term for that is wood wide web and I'm sort of reminded of a great code by Douglas Adams and I'm going to read that out since we are mentioning Douglas Adam so much and Douglas Adam says imagine a puddle waking up

one morning and thinking this is an interesting world I find myself in an interesting hole I find myself in fits me rather neatly doesn't it in fact it fits me staggeringly well must have been made to have me in it stop now the you know the puddle stops sinking and this is Douglas Adams

this is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky in the air heats up and gradually as the puddle gets smaller and smaller is still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright because his world was meant to have him in it was built to have him in it

so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for and human hubris is staggering you know if you just shift the lens a little bit one you realize that other ecosystems of trees for example are infinitely more complex

than us in different ways you from one point of view you could save your colonized by bacteria another point of view you could save your colonized by wheat yeah it's mind-blowing it's mind and the other interesting thing is that you know the other common thing is that we we all assume

that plants don't move yeah they just do they move X add an extraordinarily slow rate and we lead very short lives right everything for a plant is in slow motion a tree lives like thousands of years yeah I know there's no it can it can sit through world wars and famines and bad seasons good

seasons and floods and I mean it's it's time scale while while having a rich social life under the ground absolutely and over the ground yeah there is a we I'd gone to this park called Tadoba Tiger thing and those are very interesting guy bit to cycle and he's like a naturalist and he

is a terrific guy I mean I I don't know how the hell I happen to be with him but it it was an education you know he was pointing out how everything in the forest is fighting with everything else yeah and there was one place there's a lake where we actually saw some tigers and there is

grass and there are some trees and he says that grass on the trees are enemies and the tree is trying to spread its canopy and deprive the grass off its off some sites and you know what a grass does it dries so much that it like in the summer it'll be it'll set itself on fire

there's the slightest spark of anything and that'll burn the trees and that's just so the beautiful thing here is that you see we we all learn in school symbiosis if somebody uses the term symbiosis right and in fact there's a like a famous college in Pune as well yeah yeah my brother

went there and they we only have positive connotations about symbiosis is about symbiosis right it's come together let's agree in nature symbiosis is basically two armies a multiple armies at a extraordinarily delicate balance with every site trying to exploit as much as possible it is not a

mutual handshake agreement it is absolutely brutal war right so for example we say that our gut microbiome is in symbiosis with us and you know they digest the stuff that we can't eat and the next change they give us tons of vitamins they maintain the immune system etc etc right the exact same

bacteria if you have a problem in your gut and they get into your blood they will kill you they have they're not like we say friendly bacteria no in context they're friendly and by the way our body has an insane mechanism to prevent those bacteria the mute the actually there's a fantastic

book called I forget the name Ed Wong is the author right so I think is this book about the gut microbiome and he basically describes how that our body the mucus lining has an insane layered defense system to prevent the gut bacteria from sneaking into the blood which they want to because the blood is filled with resources they don't have to sit and do the hard work of breaking down all the beans and the fiber and all the vegetable matter we eat they can just directly get the amino acids

and the sugars directly from the blood right but our body's immune system keeps sniping and killing but not killing too many right big we still don't want to lose them so it's essentially a lot of control yeah yeah there is one thing the head young book by the way has a title which is

practically practically and now you should guess what it is the motto of the show or rather I keep saying it so often what is it unseen no I'll give you another clue world Whitman oh man I I just be reading it just the title completely shame shame how can you forget the title of the book is I contain multitudes I yes now I remember saying that yes this is this is yes basically I'm with one much so many times yeah there's this thing alcoholics have this problem it's called a leaky gut syndrome

and if you have too much alcohol this bacteria finds ways through the defense I think it destroys the mucus and it's it's pretty bad and that's that's a big one and further also weakens your liver's ability to filter out toxins which again it's a circular thing where the whole thing gets

worse over time right but yeah it's also fascinating how people on social media are worried about like a little bit of Maida and one you know yeah microgram of sodium benzoyate but alcohol is far worse far worse so as an informant on all of this show what do you what do you do about your

gut microbiome I eat a lot of vegetables and fruits but fruits nowadays I'm a little bit I mean I try and go easy on the really sweet fruits I try and take like guavas and things like that but again a lot of fiber and dhal rajma channa etc etc they obviously will cause a little bit

of discomfort because it's the bacteria basically going thank you for the buffet and yeah yeah I'm using a lot of carbon dioxide is what's happening there but yeah but it is the discomfort is worth it because it's actually my friends Susan Thomas once revealed to me that fruits are

considered healthy like one fruits are too much of fruits is like deeply unhealthy so much sugar and she pointed out and fructose and she pointed out that fruits today have 30 times as much sugar as a used to in prehistoric times that they have evolved to get sweeter for us so so there is also

this fantastic very viral series of videos by Robert Lustage I think right and a bunch of others who have written about how they're still figuring out the role of fructose right see because unlike glucose which is the energy currency of the body fructose doesn't actually give you energy

although it's very same formula but it's a different molecular structure your body doesn't process fructose the same way and only now are they figuring out what's happening to fructose it goes through this pathway in the liver and that nowhere very they're reasonable amount of consensus

to believe that fructose pretty much directly becomes fat so all your fruit sugar is and half of your white sugar which is fructose again right that is becoming just fat directly glucose on the other hand is really the energy right if you can't use it except but fructose is immediately

directly kind of getting to fat and they're still this is still research under progress right and they're trying to figure out why that is the case and one explanation there is that most of our evolutionary period was in the in the savana where we were just like bipedal A

right I mean a Greek culture and all of that is very recent so we've not had evolutionary changes adapting to that at all right most of our and at that point of time you're largely hunter gatherers you could hunt whenever you can which is not every day not all the time and meat would rot quickly

and so it was right choose you one the cycle was that you really ate as much as you can in one shot right because then you don't know when you're going to eat right so there's no daily eating sort of the thing which is why fasting is good for us the other thing is that carbohydrates sugars were

extraordinarily rare and the only source of sugars of fruits direct sugars right or honey and it's yeah and honey and so on honey not always available but fruits the plants again want you to eat them and these sweet fruits the fructose specifically we eventually kind of adapted to turn the fructose

into fat because you want that as a backup for the winter when you're not going to eat anything yeah right so we believe that that idea of how you know fruits essentially co evolved with the humans and others in general as a way of adding on fat rapidly because you couldn't see otherwise

only where you could get fat as to hunt another animal right and that's very interesting actually so the fact that so it's a feature not a bug that it becomes fat yeah it because it is a feature but in the modern lifestyle it's actually a bug yeah it's it is a bug because it's fructose is too cheap

it's all over right it's insanely cheap and a seasonal thing that you get one week in a year right in the hunter gather a year now you can get these insanely over sweet bananas and all these they're in what a chili sauces yeah chili sauces fructose in it yeah yeah so let me

since you mentioned it's relatively recently we came into agriculture and all that let me share a T.I.L. I learned from an episode that I recorded three days ago it'll release much before yours but nevertheless it was with Rahul Muthan and he's written a couple of books his earlier book is

called Privacy 3.0 and it's really two books combined into one both of them fascinating and worth reading but the first of them the first half of the book is about the history of privacy and he points out that for that there are there is no species which has a concept of privacy

and that human beings did not either because it is against self-interest so when we evolved in prehistoric times everybody's got to look out for everybody else any information that somebody has which doesn't reach you could be potentially dangerous to your life and therefore you know either

you're sleeping in the open and then you gradually evolve to a place where whatever shelters you build or shelters for food everybody's watching each other there's no sense of privacy yeah exactly and the first time that magnificent genius technology which I never thought of in this way called

walls comes about it is for the security of cities you know there are cities which are famous for having walls on the outside perimeter to keep invaders out but inside they are not necessary and then gradually you begin to reach a stage where and early walls are really thin where you can hear

what's happening in the next house and that's a feature not a bug right and then walls happen then privacy happens and different parts of the world there are different incentives for example in Europe, Monks, Graves, Solitude the notion of the confessional you know embeds privacy that

if you are confessing you're confessing because you did something in private and the interesting thing that happens here is Rahul points out is that this for the first time divides ourselves into the private self and the public self because before this you just have one self

and that's who you are and there's no need for segregating something else but here there is a private self and a public self and that brings with it number one the anxiety of maintaining a particular public self and the anxiety of hiding your private self from that public self and all

of art and literature and creativity and science because you have the time to sit in solitude and self reflect because solitude and privacy and creativity all of them go together and this is so incredibly recent and you begin to sort of even look at the dwellings around you like when

privacy first came about as a concept and it is one that by the way both Rahul and I welcome wholeheartedly we care about privacy it's what sets us apart that we have that time to ruminate in private and come up with great creations whether of art or science but it was initially

a luxury of the rich and even today if you look at the way our cities are constructed you go to a slum there's practically no concept of privacy or it's very minor you come to you know an apartment block you have much greater privacy and sometimes whereas you know there is a feature that it gives

you solitude and leisure time it also carries a bug like when I think about the form of our buildings are constructed you know this is why so many slum redevelopments fail you know in a slum everybody is playing around together the elders are sitting outside the houses action all over them the women

are constantly in and out of each other's kitchen etc etc you move them into separate atomized apartments and that social sense is gone and the old are truly alone and everything kind of falls apart and you know and all of this all of these sort of innovations and ways of living are so

incredibly recent so I could not help but share this with you though regular listeners have already no doubt heard that episode yeah no in fact the the whole the the modern additional dilemma on top of that is the fact that while the rich and privileged have the access to privacy humans being

being a social species have always said I need to mix both meaning that I need my private time but I absolutely need my public and social time with the social time is actually more important right but then the internet came and now a lot of people now have this illusion that my private time is whatever I do and this is my my internet logging on to the internet and doom scrolling on Instagram and Twitter is my social time and I think that is where I think there's a problem right that's really

not social time it absolutely is not I think there is something about meeting people in person yeah that you absolutely cannot replicate on a zoom meeting even on video chat let alone reading through you know co-tweets of passive aggressive people dunking on each other right on

social media right so this I think is another key sort of crises that we're going through so the privacy thing also reminded me of this other observation that somebody had made about how Indian languages again there are cultural variations right so Indian languages have no verb

form no verb equivalent of own own as in my own so you can say this is my yeah by how do you say I own this there's no verb none of the Indian languages have that concept of own as a as a verb as a thing that happens across time but I see when you say this is my

is temporarily speaking it's like at that moment you say you're it's the equivalent of metaphorically saying that I'm putting this to use right now you mirror ahead I own this I own this somehow suggest that ownership over a period of time and space right but there are two ways to look at this

I mean one way obviously is if a language hasn't evolved a word it's not evolved it because it hasn't needed it and so the concept doesn't exist but the other part of it is that you know like for example the German word shardon Freud which is basically feeling happy at somebody else's

misery we don't have a word for that either but the feeling is ubiquitous across the human race no but I would actually see again as I said see that's a the other word even the Germans don't have is feeling miserable and other people's happiness that is a word shardon Freud no that is happiness

and other people's misery I mean I'll have to get right feeling miserable and other people's probably yeah it's this reminds me of the a friend of mine now a celebrated novelist who circa 1999 was once walking with me in Tardeo and he he said something that really shocked me to the

core he said I met every time a friend of mine does well a part of me dies I was like with the fuck what kind of and you know an important life lesson I would like to tell everyone is like fucking avoid people like this avoid these negative toxic people just the positive

I think one of the most the status game for example right I mean it's pretty insightful in that I think you know people play these status games all the time and the the interesting thing about this language thing as well right to your point about the German words right that is a specific

compound noun thing where a shardon means something else Freud means something else but when you combine them it takes on a additional layer of meaning beyond just the one plus one right and that is there in Sanskrit like you can actually combine nouns to form it's just that it's not a living breathing language that you don't kind of hear it but you hear the but those these kind of compound nouns absolutely exist right I mean it is just that yeah it's just the spoken Indian languages

now don't have like Hindi doesn't have like compound nouns in the way German does compound nouns yeah so I'm not getting two verbs two two two which has a little bit more so my favorite one is actually elephant and rennan okay so I'll let you guys guess what that German compound noun tell me again

elephant elephant and rennan right elephant and rennan okay so elephant elephant means elephant right rennan means race so it's elephant race what do you think it actually means it's fat Indian uncle's running towards a buffet no okay think highways right so it's very specifically

to describe the frustration of you being a car and two buses or two trucks one is slowly overtaking the other and blocking I have a worst of what I've faced so I mean here like oh man I've gone through oh yeah this is going to be one t-shirt with elephant and rennan like I'm going to overtake the

motherfucker in the bus stop right in front of him and get down and turn around and make sure he eats my t-shirt which says elephant rennan have a question for you which is you spoke quite correctly about how you know you don't think you're being social if you're on the internet right

and I totally agree with that in fact it kind of really bugs me if I go to a cafe and there are four people sitting together and they're all looking into their families families set at tables everyone is looking everyone is atomized you came from a joined family to a nuclear family to

really nuclear family with phones it's a further level of atomization but none of us would have met if not for the internet like where I celebrate the internet and social media is that it allows you to form communities of choice and therefore gets away from communities of circumstance

which is life-changing for me I would have no friends if not same here same here so this is interesting thing a debate I've been having I've been discussing with a few doctors as well and there is this larger debate about as I said sometimes medical code of ethics prevent doctors from

communicating certain things in a public health context because the doctor has to assume that the person listening is likely to be the worst extreme patient as opposed to average healthy person right you can't say things like I think one year a week is okay the doctor's not allowed to say that

okay and and so but the interesting thing is that if you really and I spoke to a doctor and he said that here's the interesting thing right socialization is actively good for your health in a clinical sense there are many things you're literally your heart works better many things improve when you

meet other people you're exchanging gut bacteria your gut diversity improve there are just so many benefits to being around people right in that old people literally just waste away when they're lonely and you just put them around people and they literally live longer and there's like

established data and evidence of this right and basically and so to this point being that it's quite interesting how meeting your friends and having like a beer once a week the benefits of the socialization far outweigh the cons of having that the alcohol the one beer right we have to get

liver doctor to comment on this of course again so to be fair alcohol damages you there is just no every every five years bit of alcohol is that but but you think about living life there is a non zero chance that if you drive today and Mumbai streets that you you are going to get

choose your risks yeah it is it is really about risk prioritization right and it's as I keep saying that it's all about people getting better at estimating denominators that's the bigger problem people very conveniently ignore denominators and so you constantly have to evaluate whether you're

going to isolate yourself in a like a hyperbaric whatever you're completely sterile chamber to stay completely safe versus you know being able to go out into the world take a few risks but you know balance that out yeah I love the thought of how you know being social is good for the health

like there's a Japanese term forest bathing and now I'm thinking we could have a term for people bathing so I will challenge both of you on the spot using whatever languages you know best to come up with a compound word in that language which means people bathing go people bathing is

just like you know ponup category actually yeah people bathing up I think you would just combine what would be a good Hindi Sanskrit route for people Janus Nahn has a nice ring and it sounds really sanskari also it describes multiple things like

binaris Janus Nahn Janus Nahn Janus Nahn sorry yeah got to stop right here yeah that's yeah so the other thing what was I saying where will we last I think this was that we were talking about socializing yeah socializing and that yeah so the interesting thing an interesting additional

point to like the how I think the benefits of socialization sometimes are worth it then the risk of for example driving to that place therefore you could you know you could get run over and having a beer which again is harmful for you right and eating fried food which again is harmful for you like

all of that stuff right likewise I think another interesting corollary of a person I follow who's sort of a food scientist as well right and somebody who by keep chatting with on the various dangers of various problems of people forever being anxious and scared by the kind of content that

people make on social media about food the 90% of the content about food is sick cancer I got is diabetes I got completely right that's because that's the only way to and somehow it seems to go viral and the algorithms help it and so on and this person was basically wondering that when you're

anxious and stressed and you're like oh my god I just had momoos yesterday and there was this video I saw today where I said that momoos will cause diabetes some such nonsense right and then again that's going to increase your stress and that's going to increase your cortisol right and cortisol

and all of that stuff again increases the chances of inflammation and so on and apparently being high on cortisol and and inflammatory responses is linked with longer term increase in risk in cancer so literally forever being afraid of food is a greater risk of cancer than the shit these guys are

warning you that is going to process it so the irony here is if you think too much about diabetes you'll get it because cortisol because and cortisol leads to insulin spines and insulin resistance and then diabetes and cancer also you know which will get you first diabetes or cancer you know I

of course I mean in social media is basically like six like Kevin Bacon how can you take anything and eventually end with cancer yeah yeah and and there was this hover of humans back about and I think liver doctor also joined in about how bone beta is bad for you and the first time I saw

that I was like yeah man that's too many carbs is terrible one must be warned against it and then one of my friends who's been on the show shooti jagir the arousine nutritionist pointed out at what nonsense that you're taking one spoonful of bone beta and putting it in a glass of milk and the

damage that that bone little bit of bone beta can do to you compared with the nutritional benefit of the milk that a lot of kids are eating only because it's tasty also one more thing to see the bone beta thing right one is that fundamentally these are the bone beta came from sort of cat bereem in the uk around the around the 30th of the century when more and more women started working right and they were not sitting at home cooking yeah home cooked balanced meals for kids and so there

was a market for convenience foods that would ensure that kids don't get rickets and berry berry and any vitamin deficiency mineral deficiency calcium deficiency especially right because it's just going to keep it processed food and so there was a market for companies to come and say hey look we

got a bunch of doctors want to package all these minerals you know put it in a drink of course it's going to taste terrible the only way to get kids to drink it is to make it chocolate flavored and chocolate is bitter to so only way to make kids eat it is to add sugar right the goal is it's not

a chocolate the sugar it is basically giving them the mother the comfort that this kids not going to grow up deficient because of you know iodine deficiency or some mineral deficiency or vitamin deficiency the we are probably eating some canned soup and some canned whatever it is because

we're all working in factory for 15 hours but I'm certain that the kids getting all the micro nutrients that it needs that it's tasty so the kids are always forced to so yeah so the the devil's bargain you're making is the with the sugar right because kids will not eat things that are not

sweet possible I mean who are you kidding right so would you rather risk vitamin deficiencies or the fact that we have all grown up eating sugar we can deal with it when we are children it's okay we can we can later become more conscious and healthy when we become teenager and later in life right so

therefore that is the background to this entire thing right and and in India the dealers kids don't often don't like drinking milk yeah this is helping them drink a glass of milk it's great all the soluble by yeah and these things are all fortified yeah so none of your organic

artisanal this herbal nonsense they're not fortified see people who buy all of this Himalayan pink salt and all of that right Indian vegetarians who by the way don't get enough iodine because iodine only comes from animal sources right where are they going to get their iodine that goddamn reason

is why in the 1950s we decided to iodize salt because you have a ton of vegetarians who don't eat animal sources like fish or eggs or not even enough dairy in many places for you to get that iodine so you anyway you're using salt it's that's how we did it right and now people are

like no I will only use Himalayan pink salt because this salt has some point 0 1 grams of some anti-kicking agent that makes the salt poor easily right otherwise you'll then wasted it'll just get clumpy and all of that right and then people eat this stuff and now you're starting to see an

increase in iodine deficiency which is which is pharma cereal that is a cognitive impairment and all that stuff yeah not just thyroid problems and I want to like go back to the subject of vegetarians because I can't help it because firstly it is dap to be vegetarian for ethical reasons and secondly

it is terribly unhealthy and you came up with this great phrase at dinner last night which should be on a t-shirt dead by carbs and you pointed out how you know so many vegetarians who I think you said this in the context of Gujshadis are basically you know giving themselves diabetes and committing

dead by carbs and it came in the context of me visiting Gandhinagar and finding out that there is a part of Gandhinagar where meat and eggs are not allowed to be sold and for the record it's amazingly delicious food I mean absolutely cuisine is just in the

actually has the greatest vegetarian cuisine in the world yes and again I think the point here is that it is really about we have such a fantastic vegetarian cuisine but people are just simply not willing to accept that in many cases by default it's very imbalanced towards carbs

in that people think things are protein like some tiny amount of dal and so can you know the Gandhinagar story huh your Gandhinagar story yeah so Gandhinagar basically is the fact that you can't buy eggs and you know we had a bunch of me right we had a bunch of colleagues who were like from Andhra

which Telagana is Telagana Tamil Nadu are the highest per capita consumption of eggs and also both production and consumption right and these these kids go there and they suddenly can't get they can't buy eggs and they're like no way I send me back to South India right I mean

this is is very weird right and I'm I'm sort of and this is done in the name of honoring Gandhinagar that's the best part right I don't know what Gandhinagar would have thought about depriving somebody of the food they wanted to eat right Gandhinagar was vegetarian yes but I'm

pretty certain I mean consent yeah also Gandhi was famous for changing his mind on things so he was very he would never have changed his mind now I don't know about that but the point here is not vegetarianism the point here is consent did you want to force other people to eat what they

do what to eat I'm sure you know I've done an episode where I spoken at length about Sikhan Abdul Kaphal Khan who knew Gandhi well and also a great man and I'm sure he would not have told him you got to be vegetarian too you know that kind of rubbish would not have happened so consent

is more the point here and I have sort of you know also we asked I went on Twitter and I also asked my writing group I'm recording with these two fine gentlemen you have questions and there are a bunch of questions and we shall look at some of them in the group but what you just said

reminded me about one of those questions and I have a spiel to give because it just makes me so angry and when you join the dots it is crazy so the question was ask Ashok to talk about the political economy of food now I will ask you to talk about it but first the spiel I want to

give and I have an episode of agriculture on everything is everything Ajay and I spoke about this for a long time but here is what I want to point out when we talk of diabetes and carbs in the 1960s the Indian government decided to have minimum support prices or MSPs for cereals right and not for

pulses yeah and the result of this was that because of this minimum support price and because of the market signal being distorted it wasn't that people wanted cereals and not pulses that but it you know the government said Kiha you know gave them that security and that everybody started

growing cereals they were far less pulses having and therefore this eventually led to the diabetes epidemic in India because people were just having carbs carbs carbs and not giving given enough protein and this becomes a particular problem because so many people are vegetarian on top of that

so they can't even eat animals and get their protein from that and even non-veg people really eat too little animal yeah no per capita meat consumption is 10 times less than the US even meat eaters like we don't really get enough enough grams of protein and many people

including meat eaters fundamentally miscalculate and miss miss so they underestimate the amount of protein they need to eat and it's it's sort of like the it is in fact I keep telling old people in the family that that the I'm not asking you to go do exercise right I'm not asking you to

do any of these harder go on these crazy types this simply the most ridiculously simple thing that you can do to improve the quality of your life is to increase your protein intake because one it'll automatically reduce your carb intake because protein signal satiety right I mean

anyone who's had like one of those cups of way protein once you have that you won't feel like eating and that's not a bad thing right and the interesting thing is that and now by the way you get keto way also which I have which doesn't have the added sugar but I added fat in any case they

nowadays even anyway have a tiny amount of one of those sugar substitutes so this is fine right I mean so even the sugar is even not even a problem right I'm not even saying and those you don't even need to add to milk they're add to water exactly right because it's anyway it's come milk

it'll taste of milk anyway right so the people completely underestimate and there are so many studies that show that Indians are protein deficient in everywhere right it's not just in meat eating not the near not less let's take a diversion and double click on this because I think it's an

important subject and I want you to double click on it in two is one please talk about you know what the standard non-vegetarian person eats in a day and why it is severely protein deficient in just in terms of Grammage and two if there are vegetarians listening to this who are saying okay I

get this but I'm vegetarian by habit and acidic reasons and whatever and I'm going to stay that way but I want to increase my protein intake how can I do it so this is a very very the problem is again because I think because there is no one way to eat healthy and there are in India where as

I said we are so many different culinary cultures right you've got to find a way that you still enjoy right because I think the solution is not for everyone to you know sweet way protein right it's not practical either it somehow has to be part of your food right and it also goes down to our

definition of a thali is kind of like she'd be being a carnatic musician and I have this specific distaste for vocalists in general right because they tend to be devas hogging all of that the deep vocalist basically carbohydrates get all the attention do very little of the work but

get all the attention the Indian thali is centered around carbs the Indian thali is eight vocalists and one lonely bass player right it is the thali's center pieces carbs right right at the center the the centerpiece in a European meal is the is the protein which again is a different problem

that's probably way too much protein a piece of steak is way too much protein that's not the point but the point is there is probably a middle ground where like for example I have like so for instance even a even in a place like Tamil Nadu or Kerala the traditional fish fish curry kind of

meals right is fine a fish curry that'll use like some sardines or something how many grams of protein are you exactly the fishes there for the taste for the flavor yeah the flavor yeah not for the protein yeah so the man of the house may perhaps get one fried fish which is fine you get

some amount again people forget that one egg is like six grams of protein right if you're a 70 kg person at the bare minimum you need 50 60 grams of protein in fact people will now tell you you need much more but at least bare minimum right India at least Indian you're nowhere close yeah

but you do wear close but just take a 30 grams of protein more or less 30 40 so when you say it has too much I really don't agree I mean we need 100 to 200 grams of protein a day right no but it breakfast lunch at dinner yeah they eat protein breakfast lunch at dinner they're overall this

thing they're they're I think you know so I've done a lot of I think Europeans probably can do with less protein and we need to eat you know I've done a lot of counting macros when I was in keto along with my CGM and everything and I find that it's really hard to actually meet these levels

eating meat all three meals is pretty much fine you know you it's very hard to reach the level you need to reach it is and to be honest also I think see it is fair that your action first is that even if you're in a vegetarian diet you are getting protein from rice, dal, vegetable you're

getting amino acids in general not in the proportion that an animal needs but what is so just for a moment thought experiment you turn vegetarian right what are you going to eat in a typical day to meet your requirements so I if again because my my mother is vegetarian so I'm again so and

purely even from I'm also during my day today this thing I'm mostly vegetarian in the sense that I don't really look out for plant sources of protein right I quality not either of these plant-based meats and all of that which are getting better and better so the way I would say if you're a

vegetarian unfortunately the plant-based meats are targeted at meat eaters rather than at vegetarians so they taste like meat and so you won't like yeah they try to engineer to mimic that taste yeah so I think there's got to be you've really got to do stuff like a cup of like chana right at in

either a salad form or not just the dal right you need like your salad has to have like Rajma or chana these are some other riches sources of plant protein and so on you if you're vegetarian in India therefore dairy you obviously need a dairy meaning yogurt get two cups of yogurt right ideally

some of those if you can afford it I think the Greek yogurt stuff is high fat high protein much better right don't go for the low fat nonsense right go for the go for that stuff and then on top of that this won't be enough you've got to find some sort of a the soya chapa now there's like 50

60% wheat only and then the soya itself is like again mostly cups right so people think soya chapa is protein yeah but it's mostly cups so I think you what if you can get a little bit of paneer additionally which again is dairy but again paneer is 70% of the calories and paneer a fat

so if you eat a particular form of cups for lunch and then you take a nap you could say palace soya for soya so but so as I said so vegetarian person vegetarian person has to it's not impossible but if they want to get their protein numbers up they have to work much harder

on the other hand the the meat eater can just get two chicken breasts and you're like you're set right it's just or we are three eggs or something like that right two chicken breasts and three eggs are not enough you know I know I've gone hardcore into macros I know I have no matter what you are

but you are going to get a fair amount of protein from all the other things you see I think even in a general vegetarian meal where there's no visible protein you'll get 25-30 grams of protein anyway right from all of the amino acids that are there and all the foods in general

but you do need to add yogurt you do need to add paneer of some kind ideally some sort of a tofu those things are again better some of the tempeh you should try some of these newer and I would actually just say unless you have specific medical conditions kidney issues

and all of that please supplement with the way protein at least 50 grams like that would be an easy fix like twice a day right just do that and please do work out obviously that also helps I have one matter question okay so if you look at like a bullock for example he's only grass

but he's able to build a lot of muscle machinery to turn grass into so there is it is possible to synthesize protein without intake of cow yes if you're a rhinoceros we are not yeah so is there any hack for the no not unless we genetically modify ourselves with crisper yes where we can

actually synthesize the essential right if we can synthesize those nine essential amino acids then then we're good actually we could just completely yeah without those amino acids you cannot be seriously sick right so but it's not like plants don't have those amino acids they don't have them

in the proportion that we need them and so you so in the sense that you've got to take extra care right so a vegetarian meal has to be more carefully thought out to make sure that you're getting all of this compared to someone who eats and the other question is we have so many instances of

vegetarians living fairly well to ripe old ages so where does the protein deficiency really kick in and what aspect of life quality problem here is that because we are like a billion and a half people I am law of large numbers every every rare example you can think of there is a the chance of

that rare example existing is one confirmation by the same right meaning that everyone knows the smoker who lived up to 100 the alcoholic who lived up to 90 the vegetarian who lived up to 100 and all that and everybody also knows the meat eater Jim bro who died at 40 yeah that's the problem

right with the problem is you're not thinking in terms of aggregates overarching I would say that all you have to do is just look at a average 70 year old Chinese grandmother and a Indian grandmother and just see how they walk that's all you have to see and see what what the stuff that they can do

they can go trekking and they can go hiking on average they in no way the Indians just become completely immobile right and on average right again the only difference here protein yeah it is that yes so at this point before we go in for a break it is time for another story and I have

realized that these prompts are failing because mr. Shanoi tried to come up with something random at that airport prompt and it didn't really work out but he has a set of great stories and we don't want to waste them yes so I think how we should proceed so therefore as I said instead of prompting

we will let the Narendra large language model hallucinate we will let him hallucinate and then we will try to come up with the LinkedIn appropriated LinkedIn lessons no but the when when GPD does it hallucination Narendra large language model does it it's hallucination amazing wow you should insert

it's hard it's hard it's hard it's sure it's sure it's sure it's sure it's sure it's right now yes so yeah I have to so one is black tea and I sort of grew to like black tea for mysterious reasons I think it's that's in tolerance no you know back in the day when you should fly Indian Airlines

that lady used to come for some reason with a kettle but not milk so she'll pull you the tea and then the milk will come later come later so I I can give the sachet powder which yeah yeah that's sachet I see where I I I developed a taste for black tea and then I was like you know

it for me the added benefit was it made me look very sophisticated so wherever I go and everyone's ordering for tea and I say black tea and everyone looks at me and you know automatically that's the only way I can look sophisticated if you know what I look like in person and so all that

was happening so one day I happened to go to this place called UDPBHR so UDPBHR you know the the waiter comes and his UDP restaurant is very busy restaurants there the guy will come and say what it's very aggressive so I told him can you do black tea all the black tea will go very

goes in and he comes back up to sometimes is oh cook both poochera and black tea what I said tea but no sugar and sugar need all the milk and all that he goes in and two minutes later he comes back he's like tea cup at the time and all that so the one was that and the second is

the same guy with whom I had gone to UDPBHR he was a friend who had who was a supplier of small fabricated parts in B.R.C so they had some requirement in B.R.C which this guy didn't know how to so he asked me to come with him to see if I could understand what the problem so we went there and

they had some very specific thing they wanted and I said okay I got an idea of how it's to be done and maybe we can fabricate and see what happens then when we're going out there's one scientist type who comes running and you know tells this guy hey hey come here come here and

evidently knows him so this guy goes and he has a white board a black board actually black board chalk and he wants him to fabricate a bed and that bed is for putting people on and taking them into radiation chamber some such I don't know what it was some you know some R&D thing and he had very

like you know very specific specifications for what material to use you to use this plan of stainless steel rest of this that and the other and then he gave us a 15 minute lecture on why all those things and that went even beyond me like I know a reasonable or one of physics but

does gap was into he went into molecular structure and what the nucleus does when it sees an electron that kind of thing and he had quantum physics and I was and my friend was busy nodding his head he like like he understood I was impressed I said like this guy's been going to B.R.C you know so

might he doesn't even have a proper degree but he seems to have imbibed everything so he came out and then I asked him I'm impressed I mean I didn't understand the world so I also didn't understand the world so he says you are nodding your head so I said how you know how you're going to build this

thing so you know that that scientist only will build it from you I'll just take into my factory and get it to be done so my LinkedIn lesson from this is you never say no right so even the old P.V.R. guy he doesn't say no he says yeah I'll get it and then he asks you what it is and the same

with this friend of mine he says I'll get it and then he says okay what do you want so the only counter story I have to this is that they never say no is the one state where this LinkedIn lesson does not apply and again is obviously the only state in the Indian Union which always tends to

stand apart and rarely goes with the rest of India you know you know bangal is completely aligned and we obviously we know I'm still really hungry talking about the other state where people drink smoke and play volleyball which is and football which is scary right obviously anything

India does what see the story is what Bengal does today India will do tomorrow right what India does Kerala will not do that is the that is the Kerala thing right so counter story to this when I was when we were in training right first time in 1999 large bunch of North Indians for the first time

they were all forced to come to South India for the starters and they had to spend three months there right bar obviously basic challenges in 1999 is for North Indian and Intervendoram is to get chapati right because the chapati won't be smeared with the one place that made chapati did not smear it

with ghee it's made it with coconut oil and for them it was like no you cannot you not tolerate the smell and things like that they were like deeply generally depressed as a result of not getting home cooked food and all of that so obviously to drown their sorrows there are many bars right and

this is not not your fine part one of those typical dives in Intervendoram right and at your point about the UDP results these guys being curt and you know gruff and all that these guys take you to the next level right one is that guys wearing this sort of dothi right tied up top where is sort

of optional sometimes he's wearing a bunny and right he has a pencil and a sort of small notebook and he comes to you and he's not even like asking you what do you want right he's like huh that's it right so that basically that conveys all the meaning that you need to and you're

just supposed to quickly answer don't waste his time right and one of my friends a guy from Bombay actually probably some rb brat used to high and blicker and all that he's asking a shady bar in Trivendoram do you have long island iced tea right and that that get just looked at him and just

said and this has to be in Malayalam he said he would have gin and whiskey and rum and that's it and he says just you can pick from one of these three things and he said now do you have bloody Mary said he would have gin and he slowed it down like so from one next he floated down to 0.75

whiskey like at the next thing would have been a punch to the face literally right so through driver oh he could have got a literal sicker that was a classic example of they will absolutely say no on this note let's take a quick break and organize food which we will have in the next break so

confident that we have things to talk about and I show guy ask you one question why are we so confident we are confident because we have no intuition with us yeah I'm feeling the weight of the world expected expectant yeah you've been standing on the shoulders of yeah then my favorite

quote is you standing on the shoulders of the guy who's been pressing Arnold who's sorry who's been pressing who's bench pressing Ryan who's bench pressing the Bengali who's been going Arnold who's been pressing on right and that's on your shoulders so on the renderer shoulders

yes that guy is on your shoulder so in a sense you are bench pressing all these guys yeah a shoulder press this over here over shoulder pressing the guy bench pressing Ryan who's bench pressing the Bengali guy who's been pressing Arnold who's bench pressing Arnold

this legendary MIT professor named Hal Abelson say Hal Abelson famously said if I haven't seen as far as others is because giant for standing on my shoulders and indeed the state of modern academy yeah today on that stupid yeah have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down

to it well I'd love to help you since April 2020 I've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my online course the Art of Clear Writing and an online community has now sprung up before my past students we have workshops and newsletters to showcase the work of students and vibrant community interaction

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if you're interested head on over to register at indiauncott.com slash clear writing that's indiauncott.com slash clear writing being a good writer doesn't require god-given talent just a willingness to work hard in a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills I can help you

welcome back to the scene in the unseen I'm still here with my good friend's christian show Ken Narendt Shinoi and Narendt Shinoi you both so often and I've actually seen you perform this of your memory for poetry you read in your childhood so I will begin this by reading out a couple

of lines and you have to complete it all right is the game on challenge accepted accepted okay the time has come the world has said to talk of many things of ships and shoes and ceiling wax of cabbages and kings and why the sea is boiling hot and weather pigs have wings brilliant oh my god

this is terrible this is was this a pink fly shot of no this is a lesson wonderland it has it has the most amazing yeah one of a few I'm very low memory so I've never memorized anything so I used to have I used to be member of this debating not debating one allocation club and it basically

consists of memorizing something and then saying it so it's remarkable how well and so I must have done it pretty effortlessly so I was you know there in all the competition I find it very difficult to do now yeah to memorize anything I try and it just to vanish is I I read this poem by Emily

Dickinson and I remember it's a small poem yes and I still I let me see if I can gather it yes there is no frigate like a book to take your lines away no something something charger like a prancing charger like poetry or something the the carriage I just it's a lovely little poem it says

that is very frugal yeah so on a like a no before he continues though our first conversation to our comparison to our first conversation he says he was a master debater and as age goes it becomes harder to become a be a master debater so the D goes a bit

is our becoming a no trying to figure out a way to put Adam here or there is no frigate like a book by Emily Dickinson there is no frigate like a book to take a slant away nor any courses like a page of prancing poetry this traverse made the poor mistake without a press of toll how frugal is the

chariot that bears a human soul didn't really understand it but no but it's it's it's it's that you know that little book or a little piece of poetry can carry a soul to great heights and you really need to pay no toll for that but here's the thing about the genius of Emily Dickinson and I wonder

how many you know whether it is possible for modern artists like that to even exist which is that she didn't have an LLM in the sense that she literally didn't read poetry she didn't read too much language yeah so she had to create it all sweet generies so for example if you look at

the ways in which she uses the M dash for example it is unorthodox you know any English teacher today will look at it and fail the student because it is ungrammatical it makes no sense we don't use it like that but she intuitively figures out that as a Dicta hai iske liye hoga and she uses it

and somehow when you read a poetry it makes complete sense though it is suitionary no one uses it like that and mean can you think of any other examples like that in any field like Ramonujan of course had to reinvent all of 19th century math because it existed but he had no access to it but I'm sure

there are instances like that in computer science where people have just taken things apart and created new things with yeah I think so there are many typically if you sort of one of the advantages of software is that actually it makes this process of bringing in a completely

non expert person to borrow ideas from another place and it's very easy to do so most other disciplines the institutional and the cultural barriers to bringing an outsider in very high the other hand it's very easy to bring in a software person who can bring in a completely

new idea from a completely different industry right for example like so there was the technological breakthroughs in the mid 2000s etc around the GPS around accelerometers in general this is pre-smart phone right I mean now we take an accelerometer for granted right the idea of the

gyroscope being small enough to the point where you can now measure acceleration a whole bunch of things on any sort of object wherever you are and it was largely being used in by the military by NASA a bunch of these other places where this was important to do right but it required a software

mindset to then say that if I put a bunch of sensors in a car right and then basically then log the data related to at that point of even cloud wasn't the thing right I mean it's time and then log things like acceleration breaking and also broadly you know where the person is going right

and so on I can give a far better more accurate insurance underwriting or whether this person is a risky driver or not is he accelerating hard like is he and so on so basically the insurance industry by itself never thought of this right so therefore you'll find that even when there are

breakthroughs you almost always need someone to keep coming and telling you that hey there's this new cool tech how can we apply it to your actual problem right it's like a hard it's a design thinking problem and in many cases I think a lot of people who are experts executives etc are generally poor at design yeah right and design requires you to be empathetic this requires you to actually ask what is the real problem right and not the better edges law what is the metric that I

need to solve where they acquire more customers per month or solve a claim in quicker time and so on right and here this actually allows you to more narrowly target insurance at safer drivers and earlier it used to be things like people would have this broad random wisdom like like for

example women I mean women with kids driving a mini van get the lowest premiums in the US with the safest drivers and 18 to 25 year old men driving red colored American sports cars are these most unsafe drivers and get the highest premiums and so on so they just have these very crude

ways of doing this but now you can actually do a lot more the segment not just like you know some of the ways in which creditworthiness is determined for getting sure and some of the factors that go into creditworthiness once they started measuring these things or believe it or not how the charge on

your battery on your mobile phone what is the average charge on your battery on your mobile phone that is how much do you allow it to go down or whether you type in all caps and I don't know which way this affects the needle but I'm assuming people who talk type in all caps must be rather

impetuous and perhaps you know less risk of worse and therefore you know so I'm in the area of the caps lock button existence of the caps or maybe the caps lock button broke and all that caps lock but then I like people in my fan in WhatsApp they'll type only in caps and I ask them

why do you type in caps is it sounds like shortings and no no no it's just that I said it's bad so the caps makes it easier for him to read apparently so the distinguish the letters of wonderfully nuanced reason for an exception which algorithm might not be able to figure out so I'll give you

actually another fascinating interdisciplinary example is this so I was in Japan earlier this before holiday right I've always been fascinated and obviously we had to go through the ship who is it yeah who is it yeah right a completely alien universe right yeah and in the best possible

way right and so the the bullet range apparently when they were introduced and they started hitting 200 kilometers an hour they run into your your sound problem right because air is getting compressed and then as it catches up the new year that sonic boom of some kind you it was supremely noisy

especially when they used to come out of tunnels and things like that when that sonic boom effect used to be with a come out of a tunnel you'll hear that explosion and people were complaining that know this is like this is really terrible right and so they was an engineering challenge and

interestingly enough it took a zoologist who observed that the kingfisher has a similar problem to solve in that when it when it the beak touches water it is evolved to make sure that it creates the least amount of water displacement and noise and turbulence so that the fish don't know it's

coming right so over time the shape that it is evolved basically is like your Olympic diver diving through like like least amount of flash and so now now you go look at the bullet train nose cone it's literally shaped like a kingfisher's beak wow yeah so they learn from that and that is I have

one amusing story about the interdisciplinary things so this way back when we were in Manipal I'm talking about mid mid 80s 84 85 around the days you used to bully satya yeah so fun satya na those who do not know satya na de la was too young yeah I the person who you asked to say you

really need to join good join microsoft yeah I I I distinctly remember advising to time but being the uncharitable curmudgeon that he is he will not acknowledge this in public is about 30 times more badass than you that is my conclusion after the way and then this whole opinion open air

so they we were fascinated me and one friend of mine named the puck we were fascinated by computers so we had one eight-bit computer which was roughly the size of your room and you have to take off your chappel then go and and not now thing and you could program it and so we were he was

and I used to I was like a sidekick I was just hang around and he was really interested in finding on how the damn thing worked and they there was the very few books on computers that time so the library was getting something called computer architecture so it was the librarian had told us

that it has been ordered and we used to keep going to the librarian asked me since even finally one day when we went the librarian said yes it's come and then scurries inside to find out where it and then he finds that is not there and that there's a library called and it's been issued to the

architecture department so somebody in the architecture department has taken this absolutely dense book of of registers and you know thing that accumulator whatever they have in microsoft yeah and he interestingly the principles of physical building architecture and software architecture despite the common use of the word couldn't be yeah they're actually polar the design considerations

even if you take apart even the meta patterns are completely different. Explore it I know neither so so for example you're you're a lot of your building design is fundamentally about multiple layers of redundancy to prevent for for safety related things and the fundamental difficulties of working with physical materials. Fundamental principle of software architectures you

never do anything redundant. Elegans right it's called do not repeat yourself is like a fundamental principle right the only time you design it differently is if you're writing the code for the lunar landing module of the Apollo in which case you need to think about it very differently because the lives are at stake otherwise software is exceedingly highly loosely coupled and so on in a way that a building absolutely is not it cannot be loosely coupled so all the values that make for good

software architecture do not be for good. Yeah it's quite interesting yeah. So I think in our last episode Narendra pointed out why a heart surgeon should sort of design some nice streets so perhaps it's discipline that is kind of different. Let's you know go back to Twitter requests and another Twitter request is to get a show to talk give an oral history of early Twitter. Yeah it's

it's a very weird thing. Yeah this is from supra Nare by the way. Yeah so Twitter essentially began as sort of like how you know people were eating like millets and then Twitter came and started hawking like you know sugary snacks right and basically said all you blongers like why sit and

break your head and write 900 word articles and then wait for people to comment and things like that when you could just reel off a 140 character hot take and not really cared you don't need to research but just put it out there right and just said what I in fact the first generation of

that was the prompt was actually what are you doing if you remember right the early days of Twitter right this it used to be called a status right and the box used to say what are you doing so early tweets used to be having lunch just stepping out just had my shower it used to be just

had a biryani it used to be stuff like that and then slowly layer by layer you then people invented hashtags people invented dimensions and a bunch of these other things and so on and again just like with blogging the early adopters of Twitter were again a narrowly selected bunch of

people who who kind of took to the medium as a just a de-stressing way of just hanging around with cool friends right and very rarely did it get into politics and also more importantly people kind of knew that you are expected to say silly things and that it was okay to say

utterly ridiculous things it was okay to say things that were factually incorrect but then you would just say did let us say I was just joking you should have looked at Narendra saying right exactly and and so on it was it was a very that was that first generation of Twitter and then obviously

the platform dynamics changed as time went by and I think by 2012 2013 I think is when it started to kind of become a public square and so therefore political topics became a lot more sort of prominent across the world it's not just in India right and then it changed the incentive structures

for the nature of hot takes that people could give and then I think as time passed as we kind of got into this this sort of you know everyone into their own I am getting offended I'm getting triggered by this you know and so on that started policing speech and then the introduction of the quake

code tweet is basically the like the you know the the neuro burning room moment if you will right which incidentally your old all of you are all old enough to remember that one of the most important pieces of software all of us used to used to pirate things back in the day was

neuro burning wrong amazing I didn't know right this I was mind blowing yeah I thought the problem was Neero was fiddling while Rome was burning he wasn't burning Rome was apparently he's apocryphal and all that and apparently apparently records say that he did a fair bit to help people

and all of that and give them help them out set up shelters and all that but of course that's you know the part this is what people will remember right and that's what now Twitter is full of the picture so in a sense that I think you know the code tweet in my opinion in fact I had a

I still have a policy of not replying to anyone who code tweets especially if it if it is meant as a reply to me but they just decided to quote me the early equivalent of this used to be putting a dot in front of the yeah yeah it's it's that it's the same attitude of people wanting to

perform to their audience as opposed to really yeah I try to have a open public conversation where everybody accepts that you can make mistakes it's okay to make mistakes it's okay to be ignorant it's okay to learn as you go along and you don't have to explain your tweets from 10 years ago

so here's my thinking about the quote to quote tweet and there's an ironic story at the end of this as well which is that I think the quote tweet is reflective of all that is wrong with Twitter because essentially what is it imagine the three of us are in a room yeah you uh show say something

to me and while you're here I turn to Nareen and I pointed you while you're here in your presence and I said this moron just said this and then I kind of uh repeat it it is incredibly rude we would never do it in real life and it is incredibly performative yeah if someone wants to reply to

something I have said they don't well better reply the moment you quote tweet it is it is a problem now to me there is one acceptable use of the quote tweet which is if you want to broadcast to the world how good someone is so if you're doing it for something and I think I still context that

comes from your expression yeah that's also fine yes but if you're just doing it to shit on someone because knock is really the worst form of discourse you have nothing to add to the argument you're just making fun of the other person so since we were discussing the you know the master debater

but the ironic story yes yes yes yes so the ironic story is that I actually wrote exactly this what I told you in a newsletter piece right and then among my tweets besides tweeting that piece out I also just screenshot it this bit yes and then suddenly people jumped on me and within one

hour I had like 3000 quotes from people calling me names got ratioed and you see yeah I got ratioed badly for that eventually it was for disturbing because it was like between six and seven in the morning after I woke up some 3000 quotes from all kinds of people because they interpreted that as

a pro Elon Musk tweet somehow because he had just taken over Twitter and I was complaining about Twitter about what it was before they're by helping Elon Musk yeah whatever it was interpreted weirdly because he literally decides to spend fifty four billion dollars after reading and Amit

Varma tweet about why yeah but the point being that I made a tweet about the toxicity I mean I made a statement about the toxicity of the quote tweet which was then toxically quoted by 3000 people doing exactly what I said you know is the problem with it I deleted it anyway because who wants

to take a punga and people are you know to be again do if I had to sort of do a sort of devil's advocate against myself it's right as much as I dislike the quote to eat right I wonder maybe in all humility that having the privilege of having built an audience and being able to say whatever

you want and you know have a bunch of people listen to it etc is not a power that most people had yeah but you know quote tweeting someone doesn't get you a larger audience that I'm just saying that I'm just wondering whether we have any historical lessons to be able to

even criticize it meaning that is it perhaps and again I may not disagree is is it perhaps people might feel rightfully that it's a way of keeping powerful or influential people accountable getting ratio etc it's just it's just it's just the tools that people have in the modern day

to challenge someone it's one of the tools that people you know it's not great but it's a tool they know frankly the thing you see I've done a lot of quote tweeting in my time as well you know Nassim Talayev has blocked me in fact along with Suhail Seat and Subramaniam Swamy I think these are

the only three prominent people who blocked me otherwise I'm blocking people all the time but you know the the point is that most of the time it's just used for posturing performative because what happens when you're snarking on someone or your quote tweeting someone you are basically saying

that I am more virtuous slash knowledgeable than this person this is such a toxic attitude my whole seniors if I disagree with someone then I will argue on the basis of ideas and I will do treat about those ideas and I quote tweeting is just so rude and I also think it gets a little bit

complicated now that you're getting paid for engagement so as with any sort of incentive structures now the if you're getting paid for it then you're going to you're going to play to the system you're going to game the system who's getting paid for so people are getting paid for if you get

more than 5 million views over a three month period you're getting paid that's very few people what are my point is that it is also the incentive is therefore to now do like hot takes that you know will outreach people and you will get ratioed but it doesn't matter that's engagement right

so in a in a weird sense you're also encouraging people to say utterly silly one-dimensional things without any nuance it's it's different from a from a world where like for example since superia asked about early twitter I genuinely used to believe in 2011 that I could share a

half-baked thought and my goal is to spend the rest of that one hour as I'm on just spending time on twitter learning from everyone else because as they said the best way to learn on the internet is to say something wrong and then you will be corrected but it worked in the best possible way

on early twitter because people would then reply to you and engage with you and do engage with you yeah they would generally that's not quite true this is why it is and and then you could actually learn from that and nobody was then judging you for the half-baked take that you did

which is just a prompt if you will right to get people to to the right experts to come and so on and eventually as you said the whole thing became toxic because now people are posting that are may not be posting it in good faith either they're actually posting it to gain it's it's just like

how your big influencers on youtube will interview someone and then edit out just the most zero context controversial bits and turn it into a real which will get huge engagement on instagram and bring people to watch the larger interview then people be surprised that that's not quite what this guy

said yeah it is just edited in such a way to make it look like the controversial thing that you want you did give me a recent example of this exactly the whole dr pal and beer biceps that entire thing just taken by itself of course it's edited to make the entire thing look like a patently

ridiculous statement that all the meet consumption is bad as I read it's unfortunate yes Pratabhanumata in his episode with me at 300 called Twitter the great de contextualization machine and you know that's kind of exactly where it is. You mentioned the rest of that royal doll story and there was a great dramatizer.

I have a question for you going back to the early days of twitter and when it changed from this to this was it simply a function of scale or were there specific design changes that cause it like Jonathan hate will quite often and quite correctly in my opinion talk about how the Facebook like in the twitter you to read weed buttons.

Yeah just made everything so incredibly toxic because then you were fighting for validation and then you were driven in extreme directions and even though the purpose was to increase engagement it amplified our tribalism and so I at least in my opinion I think it's a little bit of both

because I think scale clearly changes on like behavior because I think we're all largely designed to kind of be constrained by the Dunbar number in the sense of even the old twitter the chances that you're probably engaging with not more than 150 people in that Dunbar number range right

very rarely are you suddenly engaging with even if you if you have an audience of 10,000 people you're not actually engaging with 10,000 people you get the illusion that you are right so scale clearly changes the game in terms of in the sense that you never had that scenario where you know Kanye West or someone else could just say something at the semitake and that entire thing is news for the next the ecosystem late night comedians dunking on him news papers mainstream media

talking about it and then people people reshowing him and doing this entire circus around one celebrity saying some stupid thing is a the thing that didn't exist it does not exist at that scale of early twitter right everything is localized and small right if you remember I don't know if you remember right the big thing in 2010 was that Chetan Bhagat blocked people who criticized him right so there was a meme Chetan Bhagat blocks people was a hashtag and people made youtube videos

making fun of using the Hitler meme and everything else in fact what are those videos was made by me right dunking on Chetan Bhagat for blocking people if you asked me now I would say that's a perfectly perfectly fine thing for anyone to do right it's your channel you get to shut the

door on anyone you want to right but at that point of time we all felt that it's a small group shutting your ears until you're writing on while there's some kind of violation of the accuracy right you you're blocking people for saying something that was valid or something that is etc

right now my ideas of that on that have completely changed I think he has perfectly within his rights to block anyone and so on right so scale absolutely changes the nature of this because that that kind of media circus didn't exist the second thing is that your design changes absolutely

but the design changes often come in reaction in reaction to scale as well right at any given point of time the platform wants to keep increasing engagement and as scaling proves they're going to have to the machine learning algorithms will find different ways you're going to a bit test

many things you're going to try the different color of a like button you're going to try a different kind of a new engagement feature calling it bookmark versus favorite you're going to try many things and then eventually stick with what gives you more engagement right so here's another question

and that is this is again a question about design yeah that we've ended up with a particular kind of design and a particular kind of equilibrium but it could have been different now everybody listening to this is encountered at some point if they're old enough the 404 error message now they used to

be and I learned this from Rahul Muthan only they used to be a 403 error message and you know what the 403 error message was that you are forbidden right no no the 403 error message was payment not found because when the first protocols were designed the intention was that everyone who

visited a page would pay for it except that micro payments really exist for another 25 years so it quickly went out of the window but my sense is in where I'm coming from is that my sense is that I wish the way the world worked is that the social media sites weren't free and we had to pay to be on because the problem right now is that because the revenue source is advertising we are the product they have to hack our attention and monetize our attention and therefore in optimizing for

higher engagement from us they have inadvertently hacked our brain in such ways that they've amplified all these terrible instincts of tribalism and seeking validation and all that and the equilibrium that could have come about is an equilibrium where everybody we are used to paying for things on

the internet where we are not the product we are the customer and the product is exactly the kind of experience that we want and the incentives and are very different and another way of looking at this is that another possible model which your friend of mine Sunil Meghrajani and shared with me

in 2000 when the internet was pretty new but already normalized it was already normalized of free here and all that and Sunil and I had started a startup back then which was a disaster and Sunil pointed out that here's a deal think about this we pay ISPs for internet access we only

access the internet to go to certain sites right so it is logical therefore for the ISPs to shared at revenue with the sites that we are visiting which again takes care of the monetization problem which of course you know creates incentives for sites to be sticky etc etc but that's a

different matter no so the other point is that so fundamentally I'm also increasingly becoming slightly skeptical and pessimistic about whether or not they can actually be a functioning universally positive social media design at scale meaning that I think by now it's

like I mean in the sense that I think in the last 15 years or so we've had the larger companies have enough data enough behavior data enough a b testing to have tried enough things given all the criticism that they've you know of course they've been laughing their way to the bank but surely

in the sense that it is I would sort of I'm inclined towards the your Tristan Harris and Gerald Lanier and others one out critiques of social media to say that maybe for 250 million people hanging out in a public square is not a human thing is that I don't think it's practical at all

150 people hanging out yeah it's a town square right I really at some the number we can figure out whether it could be 2000 in some context it would be 10,000 in some context surely it is not a billion surely it is not one person saying something antisemitic this thing then becoming

turning it into a media sir that is not something that you can really design against so it's almost as if I think we are not designed for knowing what a million people are up to so let me let me add sort of a different layer to that yeah which is that when I'm on Facebook and when you're

on Facebook and when the rain is on Facebook we are not actually in the same place we are in a universe that is in a sense created by the algorithm that is a limited universe and we are all in different limited universes right if the first video I ever watch on YouTube is one thing and you

watch something drastically opposite we are in completely different worlds and even completely different echo chambers and especially bailful on the young like when I brought this point up with Acastin Ratho recently he came up with this beautiful phrase that when two people meet each other

for the first time it's actually two algorithms meeting each other and but it is actually to be honest it is an algorithm picking the worst kind of sugar for you to consume and keep you hooked right so that's the thought I want to complete that what I'm wondering is like number one I believe

we can't really shift from one equilibrium to another because we're already in and there is a part dependence there and network effects have come into play and the tech giants are what they are because of that so that model isn't going to change we are where we are question one inner

thought experiment could it have worked out differently if we happen to take another model and that got taken and question to the reason it is a problem and I don't buy that thing because there aren't 25 million people on any social media where I am it's just I'm in a bubble you're in a

bubble or bubbles interact in certain in serious ways and sometimes the world opens up and you know but to be honest I'll correct you on that see the bubble you refer to is again algorithmically created by something that has access to 25 million people let's remember that sure you it would not have been able to create that bubble for you unless it had access to the net sum of every what everyone was doing if it was only if the algorithm was restricted to saying that I can only show you

content from the 20 or 30 people you are genuinely friends with and interested in you you wouldn't have that which was what the design of social media was in its first generation before Facebook went to the algorithmic sort of model now Twitter X and everything else is now algorithm right Instagram

and every one of them is now following the algorithmic model right so therefore so it is you might be in a bubble but that bubble is possible only because the algorithm is literally then sourcing stuff from people you have no clue no I buy it is my point is my point is different my point is

that the binding constraint towards social media being you know all these negative effects not existing the binding constraint is not the Dunbar number or not that we can't deal with so many people etc etc I think the binding constraint is a design that optimizes for engagement and

increased engagement because of the way our reptile brains are wired necessarily means more performative behavior more tribalism more polarizes course right and I am just wondering if there are ways there are profitable ways to you know change the design so you minimize this damage like I would

say Reddit is less toxic than Twitter right it can be there are XC extremely toxic subreddits meaning that the problem the more localized and I think so Reddit is sort of more like your Neil Stephenson's no crash you read that books are basically in that future dystopian future

everybody lives in their own private version of everything right so that's what it is so again again broadly again the problem is that it depends on if you are part of the if you are say a democrat stuck on say the the Donald Trump subreddit not going to have a great time

right and but then again you still have the choice to leave you can be kicked what Amit what Amit saying is here in subreddits you have a choice yes you have a choice in most of the social media your locked in a locked out right purely by chance purely by what you happen to see it is too

so but to be fair even Reddit how do you discover subreddits it's not entirely all voluntary again there is an algorithm at play which pushes you again as I said you are going to the homepage it showing you the most interesting post what do you think are the most interesting posts the ones that are

most sensational and the ones that are most but I think it is it is less of a decontextualizing machine and it is less enabling towards mobs absolutely absolutely you know and and those are two of the key problems because on Twitter you not only have a polar discourse you also have a chilling

effect on the silent majority which is like saying fuck it I don't want to get cancelled no so but I have seen say for example there there for example I might have said something on Instagram to the effect of maybe critique something about Ayurveda right and that video will be

deconstructed and criticized in multiple subreddits so it can also have that amplifying effect again it's possible for me that I may not use Reddit that frequently etc but chances are if I login you can bet they are at mentioning you can at mention the since I do have a user

ready on Reddit of course people do at mentioned so if I go there it's going to be a tough time if you're going to have to deal with all of that random your anti-national stuff and so in the sense that every one of these platforms ultimately I think there is a it's almost as if they've tapped into

a weakness in the way our brains are wired with regard to large scale collaboration right you know it's an insane I don't know right so it is almost as if religion so far has historically been the one way to get large groups of people to mobilize and coordinate and then the nation state you had

all of these kinds of ideas but they're still lose coordination the social media creates these identity bubbles where people get so obsessed when very angry when their identity is questioned or when they suddenly their ideas are questioned and so on so to really if you ask me I honestly I don't

think there is a model for social media to be both profitable and good for society and unless you scale it down and you make people pay which again I will I will say that if you make people pay then you're creating a class system where only some people will have access you have to figure out a

way by which somehow it you can still give people access and still create small groups some of the best of Reddit the best of 2010 Twitter if you will the answer to it is or could in my opinion on a light of note but anyway please there is another answer to it which is how can the individual

deal with this and for this we must turn for guidance to Ashok's hero who has been introduced in in the last session to us by Ashok in this particular court sums up I think Ashok's social media policy so we shall now play it for our listeners this is Nithyananda himself of course

you know which one right so I'll just play it and I don't know if you can hear it or this will divert the sound into that but let me just play it and then I'll kind of I am too busy in loving the people who love me so I don't have time to hate people who hate me and you know in addition

to this I am reminded of something the great Ashish Naira one said where he was in the news for something on the other and reporters landed up and they asked him key are you disturbed by all the sort of the way you're getting mobbed and he showed them his phone and it was one of those old

Nokia phones so the idea being that if you're not on the net what are they going to do they're going to come outside your house and throw hashtags and like yeah exactly yeah so my as I said I think my policy for the last 10 years has been if I get more than 10 retweets on a on a tweet of mine

I mute notifications on that post that's one of the best features Twitter has ever introduced from a mental health standpoint that I I don't have to mute everything but I can just mute notifications on that one tweet because I might still want to engage on something else where

something constructive is going on so I can completely ignore the one where somebody's ratioing and dunking and doing all of that stuff right so that way I do you get dunked on yeah do you get dunked on everybody does if you live long enough on the internet everybody does get

dunked on right yeah so I interesting recent example actually is so one of the ever long-standing conflict areas between science and science communication is one that scientists are actually generally terrible at science communication because scientists have been trained to communicate

with other scientists they have to use a language that is dense non-ambiguous but again completely not understandable to the people for others but it's necessary because that's how you communicate science clearly you are fellow scientists peer reviewers peer reviews more important than audience

understanding right because that's what moves science forward so there's always been the tension between people who do science and people who do science communication like actual scientists versus Neil deGrasse Tyson or whoever it is who's communicating science and

everyone from Carl Sagan to Neil deGrasse Tyson to everyone else at some point of time has been criticized by actual scientists for oversimplifying stuff now the problem with that criticism is that one science communication is extraordinarily hard because you're actually figuring out how do I

take facts and turn it into a story and using metaphors that the the person understands and scientists again hate metaphors because metaphors have a life of their own right and metaphors break down and the science scientist job is to forever say caveats under this conditionally it works but the

the person communicating doesn't people don't think in caveats and conditions and perfect sphere in a vacuum no right I need to be able to tell a story and so the recently one of the things that happened was that I kind of posted this sort of famous example of this how a chlorophyll molecule

right and if you take a hemoglobin yeah right and they're remarkably alike except for the the fact that this has magnesium and that has iron and so on right and I know for a fact that look for starters hemoglobin is heavy and then the rest protein part which is actually quite large

the what you're actually seeing is being similar is only the heavy part of it right and not the entire hemoglobin yes I'm aware right but if I'm communicating to an audience that's largely science illiterate I will they recognize hemoglobin or hemi nobody would have heard of hemi they

would have all heard of hemoglobin because we all studied biology and scope so as a science communicator I make a choice to say look at the similarity between chlorophyll and hemoglobin rather than say look at the similarity between chlorophyll and hemi which again will I will lose my

audience if I say hemi right so I make that you know sort of you know I really make that thing it's I'm just going to say hemoglobin because my goal is to get you to be curious about the fact that these complex molecular structures tend to be conserved via evolution so there's a common ancestor

who'd have worked out this molecule who'd have done something and that structure ended up getting conserved over time although the function of this is entirely different from the function of this right so so that curiosity is the only thing that I'm interested in I'm not interested in peer

reviewing a paper right but then you have people who are in science who get very upset by the fact that you oversimplified and this is like a WhatsApp forward you should not be doing this etc. Boss you you're you're fundamentally getting it wrong I'm not a scientist I'm a science storyteller

right and I'm yes you will absolutely disagree and it's and it's good of you to call me out to make sure that I don't oversimplify beyond a point where it can result in misunderstanding right and then I can end up creating WhatsApp forwards which people then misunderstand entirely they

take something entirely the opposite of what it was originally met right but there's no misunderstanding here purely to primarily encourage this thing so this is often the problem in a sense overarching is social media then it just makes it worse that there is no context there is no nuance and yeah

and you have a population that is not going to understand correlation and all of these other the final science metaphor in my view is the self-ilgin you know which is so powerful say so much you know there's so many biologists who will criticize you know gene does not have motivations

like I said boss if I have to explain to a human being I have to explain it in those terms and it's clearly a metaphor you're not talking about the intentionality of a gene and what it wants but it is such a useful metaphor exactly such a useful metaphor so one final question before we

go in for a narrated story and then we go in for a break you know see I planned it all out the digressions will happen and the final question to both of you is that back in the day when we would a blog or as early tweeters it would be based on what is happening in the news and what is

happening in the world and all of that that would be the source and we would be reacting today the news seems to be based on what people are tweeting it's like you know people being famous for being famous so it's kind of like now you tweet and then that that becomes a news whether

an entire news articles will be like Narendra Shanoi tweeted this and then there's a co-tweet and Krishasho Kripli like this and then there's a co-tweet and Amit Verma has died of exasperation has a picture of his body and that is indexed by Google and now that now becomes

the official and that becomes the official source on it and it's almost like a retreat from reality you know and at you know I don't know at which level to ask you to comment on it declining journalistic standards etc etc. Yavi all know but you know what is what is your kind of feeling about this because it just changes the world we learn about the world the way we consume knowledge

and information. The favorite example of this is basically now so you know over the years like for example Kora has like historically has done a good job of search engine optimizing so Google tends to show Kora answers for people who type questions right you know they tend to show one of the things

will be a Kora answer now it's quite funny for many of the answers the index answer is as of my training data in September 2022 or whatever so basically people are now using bots to generate Kora answers using chat GPT wow yeah and sometimes the answer is as of my training data I don't know the

answer and because the question is actually something related to something recently in the news and the guy has used that bot to post one of those typical copy paste I don't know the answer because it's after my training data cut off that has been indexed now by Google so for many questions

now you're getting that as the answer wow weird sort of you know weird sort of circular things I am I'm still waiting for what will happen when the GPT 6 or something is has to get trained on internet data that has been generated by GPT 4 and 5 which will be quite and by the way LinkedIn Gyan

LinkedIn Gyan so now time for a LinkedIn story for the challenge for Ashok and me don't give the Gyan give the story give the story we'll we'll write the LinkedIn right and I got to say that you know when I when I landed up at Nareen's house for dinner yesterday before you flew in you know

for we are recording this in Bombay so Ashok flew in and is staying with Nareen so before you flew in I went in there and you offered me this whiskey and he said this is named after you and the whiskey is called Gyan Chand so a superbly sarcastic comment that's how I'm interpreting it

and I had a little bit of that and then I said okay I'm driving I can't have more of this but I do want some water so in the same glass I had some water which I claimed was Humeopathic Gyan Chand and you corrected me and said hey it's not Humeopathic Gyan Chand so kindly give your explanation

was quite lucky what Humeopathic Gyan Chand Humeopathic Gyan Chand whiskey is that you pour yourself a whiskey and then you you drink it or you give it to someone else etc and then if the empty glass will have some molecules of whiskey stuck to the bottom right we can't drink everything right

and then you wash that whiskey in the Arabian Sea right the glass yeah the glass right and the those few molecules of whiskey will now be will enter the Arabian Sea the entirety of the volume now there are some molecules of whiskey in the Arabian Sea and now you take a fresh glass

and take that sea water from the Arabian Sea that is your Humeopathic Gyan Chand that's the level of dilution you need for the highest impact the Humeopathic logic is now you will get truly high because there is the strongest whiskey yeah which is why breathalyzer's are useless because the guy

who's really really drunk is basically drunk water with a few molecules in it over to your story misficionate so speaking of Humeopathic when I was in college MIT we I was we were staying in hostel we also had some days callers so one of the days callers his grandfather was a Humeopathic

doctor and his father was a regular doctor and the grandfather passed away and the father who was a you know proper doctor he said that all this is rubbish he told his son to throw everything into the nearest gutter and the son thought that you know he should my he could monetize it because

he knew that Humeopathic medicines were made with a little bit of alcohol so he figured that you know grandfather had literally thousands of bottles if he decanted everything there'll be enough alcohol to have a party absolutely so he was yeah so he was I actually need to think is if

you're thrown into the gutter then the contents of the gutter now become stronger Humeopathic medicine by Humeopathic logic so you can never actually get out of the gutter because you're progressively as the I was there's a govinda song a gutter a gutter no goodter goodter thank you for your

time to be like me I know I'm breathing the same molecules from Humeopathic from Humeopathic so he was selling seats at the buffet table so some princely some of 20 or 25 rupees three or four of us paid and we collected all of Grandpas medicines we poured it and there was a little bit of

alcohol but most of it was sugar and then we had everything and most of us got sick because the sugar is horrible and we didn't get high at all so there was just not and we tried our level best to get our money back from the guy because and he was like you know very

resolutely he said no good ones sold will not be returned and he told us adding insert to the injury that he we should actually pay more because now we are immune to every disease known to man yeah and also I think I would also make this other observation that like a true whiskey fan

that the real problem here is mixing all of those medicines then you're drinking blended it would be single source right that is so I'm not now sure of a link to in lesson but I can come up with an economic funder which is that this is basically the fallacy of composition the

fallacy of composition is a fallacy that occurs when and I'm now I'm reading out from Google when someone assume something is true of the whole based on the fact that it is true of some part of the whole so just because alcohol can give you pleasure and make you high doesn't mean that whom you

pick pills that contain alcohol will do that but in general in case Abby Phillips is listening and gets mad at me later we shall add in the statutory warning that alcohol is dangerous for your health absolutely I will also say this you know my one of my grandad's very smart lady and you know her

philosophy in life was that the best way to improve your mental health as a woman in India is to after your husband turns 60 is to stop listening to him usually men decline in their cognitive faculties sooner than women do and they in generally become empty headed and very dilute in general

or as we all call it homeopathy really and this reminds me of this stand up act I just saw yesterday with this guy is talking about how he speaks to someone who's just a husband who celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary and he asked him keep boss 50th wedding anniversary how

did you get so far so the guy said just one piece of advice say the third thing that comes into your head she says like why the third thing so he says if you say the first thing that comes into your head sooner or later you're getting divorced if you spend say the second thing you're spending

the night in the couch you say the third thing it's cool yeah I actually for the benefit of the readers I have to add my little hacks I was just discussing this on house of my and I am seeing this very confidently because Sheila doesn't listen to podcasts or please don't tip her off that

I'm saying a clip of this will be sent to her on what's sad will be no no it'd be created as a real and then shared on what's happened yeah so she thinks that I'm the soundest sort of you know judge of sari's and shopping and the truth is I don't have a clue and the thing is you know there

used to be this horse which was which could tap so the owner would say what is four plus four and the horse would tap eight times and things like the horse which could do mathematics and it turned out that all the horse was doing was tapping and he was observing his master so the moment of master

give any sort of physical cue he would stop this is actually smarter than a horse which would actually know the math yeah so this is clever hands yeah name of the horse was clever and he was picking up on

body language cues when people gave the answer their body language is different and the horse was picking up on that yeah and because I'm a very clever and I'm like roughly the intelligence of a horse and you listen to hunts Raj hunts yeah I figured never hands Raj clever never hands yeah who is

who is bench pressing on who shoulder is a guy bench pressing Ryan on who who bench pressing Ryan bench pressing Bengali guy bench pressing on so I my visual cues are so I know when she lies shopping from her eyes and from a body language she lies something you're on oh yes yeah

so it's trivial for me to say whether I like it and so it's she's just absolutely convinced that I have the most sublime taste in because every sorry she has ever liked you have also like amazing but this is a tip for little that you know that you do not have a sorry sense but a sorry sense

but have you ever bought a sorry for her without no surprise of course you were way the whole thing right what do you give to I generally I know I wait little so I once in my dreamy and romantic youth when I was far more gullible than I am now I still have a factory in Vasebundak place right so

there's a wandering salesman who's come with a lot of watches and like he opens the thing and I'm fascinated about glittering some our gold some our silver what have you and then there is a omega watch and I I picked that up and he says oh my god I'm sorry and 500 rupees an astronomical

so I happen to have it in my pocket I give it I bought it and so he wrapped it in one like a Muslim cloth kind of thing with a great deal of gravitas he gave it to me I put it into my bag I brought it home and I got a big wet kiss for it because wow you know and oh my god watch and then

it was much later that she'll ask me you know I didn't know you had so much money how do you buy it so I had that day it's 500 rupees and it's just 500 rupees you've been had you eat it so yes when it comes to be yes yes you do not know the alpha omega watches

you know so yeah when you're buying things like that you either pay a lot or you pay very very very interesting in in Hong Kong's Monkock market right I mean there'll be guys on the street who will have these Radho Rolex watches and that's for the average consumers and if they sense that you're a little bit more a serious buyer of fake watches then they will take you inside and show you the really good fakes yeah that are much harder to make out that original fakes basically

it's very fake yeah they're like pretty good yeah on that note let's have some real biryani not a fake one yes hey the music started and this sounds like a commercial but it isn't it's a plea from me to check

out my latest labor of love a youtube show I am co-hosting with my good friend the brilliant Ajay Shah we've called it everything is everything every week we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about from the profound to the profane from the exalted to the every day we range widely across

subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand the world please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our youtube channel at youtube.com slash amitwarma amitv arame the show is called everything is everything please to check it out

welcome back to the scene on the on scene I'm still with you'll never guess it you cannot guess it they are still here gracious show can nareen shinoa and being stuck in Mumbai traffic wave it's like being stuck in Mumbai traffic this is I have to tell you about this amazing door mat I'd seen

it's it's a brown color door mat with you again question mark written on it so I'm not going to have it for you on me yeah no no not you again indicates that the people are not welcome you guys are always kind of welcome and we began the last segment with you know asking you nareen shinoa a modern day poetry lllm to autocomplete a piece of poem so I'll give you another couple of lines I wondered lonely as a cloud that floats on high or whale in hill when all at once I saw a

crowd a host of golden daffodils beside the lake beneath the trees fluttering and dancing in the breeze 10th no continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way this trest in never ending line along the margin of the bay 10,000 soya at a glance tossing their heads in sprightly dance

the waves beside them dance but they outdid the sparkling waves and a poet could not but be in such a jokin company often on my actually this is one of the most evocative things I was often on my couch ally in vacant or in pensive mode the flash upon that inward eye which is the

bliss of solitude there are this this happens right so you have this wonderful memory and it comes back to you when you're not doing anything and it just enriches that moment for you for me because I'm like pushing you know in a rather sort of to on a completely unromantic note right that fact

that we have these flashes of recollections are all really indicative of a evolutionary optimization of computation cost of a neural network right we now know how expensive neural nets right yeah we now know how expensive neural networks are computationally and clearly I don't

the I have a bad our brains do this on like 2000 calories a day and a fraction of that is what is used to run your brain and so it obviously has to optimize it's got to strategically forget right and choose to keep stuff that you need to remember for survival and so on and so therefore

in the moments when you suddenly are able to recall something it seems like a very special moment is quite you know it's it's it's interesting when firstly we sort of recall things and snapshots and not as in a movie real kind of thing that is one thing and the other thing of course

as I keep talking about and it keeps blowing my mind whenever I think about it is that memory is like a relay race in the sense of when an event happens the first time I remember it I remember it but the next time I am not remembering the event I am remembering the remembering the memories

and in this game of Chinese whispers when you discuss something that happened 20 years ago with someone who shared that experience you might be remembering totally different things that's kind of like how memorization works like meaning that what happens is that you have created enough

chains that the failure rate is going to be low meaning that somewhere or the other by the copy of that is going to be there right I mean in that sense so some remembering you're going to remember right so yeah I have this thing so such so apparently this is what happened my friend Deepak told me we once so we study in Manipal and the sister institution in the same university

was KREC which is now MIT Surat Kalat. So we there was some company which was interviewing for electrical engineers I'm not an electrical engineer Deepak was but I just tagged along because he wanted to and they wanted to interview in that college so we went there

and they had a written test and I they didn't know I was from mechanical so I wrote the test and apparently I have no recollection of this I cleared and then when so they they shot listed me along with the others for the interview and then that guy started hurling question

at me and I didn't know and then he asked me how can you call yourself an electrical engineer and not know this so this is who called himself and I am a mechanical engineer and then he very angrily thought I have no recollection apparently but he says as a true this is what happened

yeah so I got the story from him it's it's just a blanket my mind mechanical engineers tend to believe that they are the OG engineers actually yeah so engineers technically how would be the OG engineers but yeah and what is the earliest form of engineering I mean philosophy is proto science

so what is proto engineering before I forget to civil engineering is the earliest form of engineering I guess I guess building small contraptions around your house and tooling you could if you could call it mechanical in that sense yes but we always understood mechanical engineering only in the

context of machines whereas civil engineering I mean the pyramids were a civil engineering project so if a mechanical engineer is very polite would you call him a civil mechanical engineer and if a civil engineer is very robotic in his movements and is sinking

mechanical civil engineering these are the deep sort of questions that you also should know everyone listening to this podcast should know the principles of mechanical engineering so the main there are two principles the first principle is if it moves and it shouldn't

use lock-dight and the second one is if it's not moving and it should use WD40 so it's like the two principles although although the hardcore engineers will say do not use WD40 that will permanently wreck the machine on the long run no fucking idea what is WD40 it is the one's greatest problem

fixer lubricant it's like some kind of the Scotch tape of yeah it's a spray something that's not moving yeah and you need it to move you pray WD40 it will move hinges or things you name it yeah yeah yeah funnily enough also if you've bought pots and pants right the most

annoying thing is to remove those goddam stickers they stick on them and you they never come on properly yeah WD40 is an excellent way to remove them oh I didn't know this you get consumer great WD40 can I buy it or Amazon all wait it is consumer great you should not consume the

WD40 it's one tossing it's warning but you're washed the pan after that but it's an easy way to know being an Instagram alarmist don't have WD40 he's just okay in moderation absolutely not liver doctor is now as we speak looking for strategies of effects of WD40 on the liver no he'll be

like so far you guys are only messing up the liver but right now you've gone to like you're going to mess up the entire system yeah yeah all right time for a story Mr. Aishanay what do you have for us yeah so or other time for a link have I told you know I haven't tried the oxygen cylinder story

no I'm not so a bunch of four friends so this is actually a long story so I should start with number the first part of this story four of us from the industrial area my factory is we went we decided to go to sick him and the reason look at him so the reason we went to sick him was that

one of one of us had been there before and like the place now two of these guys I'm actually all of us we're not really you know in the league where we would we would just take a flight to first choice was train I'm talking about very very early 2000s so we get into a

Kirtajili express one of those trains yeah we have to order to Calcutta and the moment we get in the in true Bombay style so we get an at VT station at in Bombay and by the time Dathar as a ride which is literally 10 minutes away one of us has we so we've got four different birds in

the same compartment and he's busy reorganizing so he's saying number 32 will you share with number 57 because the number 57 will go to 14 and 14 will go to three so that we can take number four and five and something like that and so all that chest puzzle from he started doing it at the other and

the next stop is a thane and by thane everything is completed we've all settled into our uh thing and a new bunch of people come into thane and then the number that's lashing so ticket collector comes in and he looks at our tickets and he says this is number B2 bogey number B2 you are

in B1 so we quietly go and this reorganization has a rick havoc on the on everywhere because multiple relocations have happened right yes so we reached Calcutta and at Calcutta we realize that some people from B2 are still looking for the guy because from bombay to Calcutta they were

not able to sort out that yeah yeah classic and then cascading damage cascading damage so the reason uh so the other thing was we were to go to this place called Guru Dung Marle so Guru Dung Marle was at 17,000 feet or so the flyer told us apparently it's not but that's that's what people

were saying we don't much lower yeah and one of our guys was very paranoid that we'll get altitude signal altitude signals in which time so my dad or the doctor so he says ask your dad to give you on oxygen cylinder we'll carry it there so I went and told my dad I want an oxygen cylinder I want

to carry it to sick him my dad said don't be fool it's like this big and heavy you go there and find out it will be something so I we go there yeah and by this time this guy has talked me two of those guys are not really they don't they're not paranoid but this guy has talked me into it I

also have no clue what altitude mountain sickness was yeah but I knew that people could die from it so we are going around sick him trying to find out where to buy an oxygen cylinder and it's you know it's used only by mountain years as well this is it's not here you have to go to that

conscientium on this mountain mountain and eventually we land up at we can't find oxygen cylinder we eventually land up at Guru Dhongmar Lake and nothing you know we absolutely find and then I really thanking my stars we didn't find an oxygen cylinder because there there's a bus load of

uncles and aunties merely walking around like we we must have been in our early 40s or late 30s at that time and these guys are well into their 60s no sign of oxygen cylinder and what a stupid side we would have been carrying too big oxygen cylinder and walking around so there's a link to

less so interestingly enough I have a so last December I every year you know sort of I keep pushing the you know on well upon what crazy place can we go in India right and with my wife and kid they said let's do Ladakh in winter right so this is a December 25th through December 30th

so let's go to Ladakh it's nice my 9 minus minus 22 minus 20 and and so sick him is not so much of a altitude sickness place the height is not but Ladakh very much is yeah lay is already above like 13,000 feet and so on it already above 8,000 9,000 feet there is the risk of altitude sickness right

and so I like as I tend to do I did a little bit of research and I said cheers how we prevent it and you know etc etc I prepared properly and and my wife did our own research right and after all the research I done I had come to the conclusion that we'll be fine right I think unless we are

going to Khardungla and all of that should not be a problem I think we'll be able to manage and we have we are flying into so from Delhi so we'll be fine etc etc and I land up there my wife has done our own preparations and everybody had warned us that by the way altitude sickness tend to

affect tends to affect young children and we reach the hotel and then my wife is also like okay right we've checked in now let's go walk around let's go somewhere I am lying down unable to lift my head up from the bed wall right and I basically sleep for the next 24 hours literally

so yeah so I had altitude sickness for all the right and my wife coolly had taken some advice apparently there's a anti-ASMA tablet called die mox which instead of opens up your lungs so you're able to take in more oxygen from a thin oxygen atmosphere so you'll be okay and I wasn't and my

my son was also okay and then I was basically so what happens is that your body your brain then says I'm not getting enough oxygen so I am going to prevent you from sleeping because when you sleep your breathing rate goes down so you want to get even less oxygen so brain is like no

sleeping so it but you'll be just be flying flat while you're slowly your lungs and everything else are acclimatized to get more oxygen it takes some time right so you'll be just completely flat and everybody told me that you've go everybody would told us about Ladakh said that don't plan

anything on day one you might have altitude sickness day two only he said no no we'll go I was just literally flat so yeah exactly I'm not able to get up for 24 hours and then eventually it was okay the locals they were like it's not you please smell this camphor it will that is like the the

local cure for altitude sickness it doesn't work but yeah so that's the yeah so interesting thing but once you get acclimatized you are actually quite fine yeah then you can go to you can go to like 70,000 feet and the other interesting story there was that my younger brother does mountain climbing

but in the US right he Alaska and in in in Washington state in Seattle he climbs these mountains and all of that and crazy hardcore mountaineering all that gear and all of that and he's some scaled mount rainier which is the mountain use waltenosey near Seattle right on the skyline at 13,000 feet

and all of that right so my wife was like wait wait I need to take a photo at Khardungla there's a signboard that says 17,000 feet says that your brother does hardcore work scaling mountains and all of that I'm the laziest person around I am now officially I have scaled 4000 feet higher

than your brother has by just traveling in Inova and going up to Khardungla that satisfaction is deep that satisfaction is deep saying that I'm at 17,000 feet glorious moment I'm waiting for the LinkedIn lessons and I read LinkedIn lesson by LinkedIn lesson the train story first story story

first is that when you reorganize organizations exactly yeah it is like let the people who been reorganized not not find out who did it yeah that is the lesson yeah okay yeah I was thinking you were going to say that that if you're going to reorganize the finance department don't reorganize

the supply chain department that would have been the right philosophical lesson in that which is that perhaps you only die once but you can have multiple births wow this is profound at a different level now this this is the kind of LinkedIn post that needs to be accompanied by a photo of you

in a thinking post you know that trick right a lot of LinkedIn posts will include a photo of someone in a thinking and it's because all of these people who are like LinkedIn influencers are not really natively social media influencers they have their idea of social media is really LinkedIn

right and so they have somehow internalizes idea that post with picture does better than post without picture and they're not really creative enough to find an appropriate picture Jeff know the photo of themselves so people just write a post and then put a photo of themselves and

I'm not even on LinkedIn but as our friends with these are what was saying yesterday and he's very irritated by this red many women are becoming prominent influencers by posting mid-shot of themselves looking well upshifts and that is now the next big thing in on LinkedIn LinkedIn yeah getting a

little other weird thing is that first interesting things happen historically interesting crazy things used happen on fortune then they make it to Reddit and then they make it to Twitter and then to Facebook then to WhatsApp and finally LinkedIn so copy paste comes finally LinkedIn right yeah so

I think that's same thing LinkedIn is now turning into the new Facebook and it's on Facebook like our the guy Ryan carrying the Bengali guy carrying the wherever we lost Nareen carrying the no no no Nareen was also on someone we got someone below him right Nareen carrying on his shoulder

no no there was someone who was carrying Nareen and Nareen had on his shoulder some guy who was bench pressing bench pressing Ryan was pressing the Bengali guy bench pressing on and so on and so on yeah same thing LinkedIn is like basically right now somewhere is like getting really high without

taking drugs yes correct just like one of those a circuitous solilo type or Anand Shiva Ji Nagar as we would call him back in our Pune days Anand Shiva Shankar as we used to call him that there is a guy by that name I know a quiz yeah all right so what about the LinkedIn lesson from

your oxygen cylinder story yeah so oxygen cylinder story LinkedIn lesson was that don't over prepare for things that because you probably look ridiculous so it's cooler to fail than to succeed fast faster faster than be over prepared and look ready on the other hand Ashok story had the

opposite lesson he under prepared or he prepared run over confident yeah advised everyone but fail to prepare myself right so do more do more coding less consulting so I have a question for you that is the reason you can relate the cylinder story with such joy he's that you ended

up not making a fool of yourself tell me about a time and question for both of you when you did make a fool of yourself oh so did make a fool that's like literally thousands of what are some I've I've done things like that so I've been we've had a big argument about something and I've

gone out of house or the house wearing very similar but different footwear so they're like almost the same color but they're not quite and they're two different shoes and oh yes and that just dissolve the tension okay so she's not able to be angry at me and not laugh at the same time so

she's like so sometimes yeah so I have driven to a destination on scooter and then come back by public transport because I forgot I went by scooter and then I have also I think the the the weird one is actually when I was I'm terrible at remembering faces barely pay attention faces

and names and I was in a restaurant right and the the staff in the restaurant all had a their dress code was white t-shirt and some sort of a jeans right and some guy in a white t-shirt and jeans came and said was wanting to say hi something and said I assumed he was the the white stuff and said

you know we ordered for this non-adjacent come and he said I'm your neighbor so yeah I did not I had I had forgotten entirely his face I barely see him always you know in my own head then all that so yeah so I got I was at a conference just yesterday so it was like a two day conference so

on day one of the conference I see this gentleman and he looks really familiar and he kind of looks at me as if expecting some kind of thing so I nod and I smile because it's a kind of conference where you'll run into people at conferences I'm assuming it's a casual acquaintance like that

but then he keeps looking at me as if he's expecting more and I'm wondering what's going on so I see the name on his sort of chest and I Google him and when I Google him I come across another person with the same name it's obviously not him then later on I figure out the full form of his name

and then I Google dad and then I realize this is a person that has been mentioned in multiple podcasts of mine by other people so he is sort of someone who is known to people who've been guests of mine and has been mentioned and therefore is aware of it and if I vaguely remember he had

even tweeted something but I have no memory of actually meeting him but I'm assuming he knows because you know you you kind of know who the person is so then later on we are at a tea coffee counter and he's again walking up from a long distance looking at me very intently and I say hello sir

kya loghe chai coffee and then I help him get his tea coffee senior gentleman and then he goes off in that sit I don't make more conversation like that because he I don't know the guy right and thankfully I didn't do the faux pas of introducing myself and then later on at dinner with a bunch

of economists one of them says oh you should do an episode with so and so and I said yeah he's been mentioned by all these guys maybe I showed yeah he's an interest interesting life right maybe I showed where does he stay and then they tell me the name of the sitting year Delhi at which point

of flood of memories come back that I was staying at a friend's farm in Kharjat for a few weeks earlier this year and this gentleman had come there and stayed there for two days and we had hung out and we had been extremely warm exchange personal stories exchange life stories said we'd stay in

touch forever I had invited him on the show he said you know when you come to Delhi I am in this town nearby let me know I will come over and I had completely forgotten the full freaking thing the two days I spent with him until the name of that town was mentioned and this is so embarrassing so if he is listening to this like I'm really sorry and we will hook up at some point but I I'm just such a and this is not even a memory with faces just like this entire episode which happened three

months ago just vanish from my head until I suppose maybe I think we're all maybe wired differently where some people just simply don't have this as a skill even if they try right I think it is just if you will say that no no you need to be mindful you need to remember no I mean I'm like maybe not

I mean maybe that's not what my skill is maybe I'm better at other things that by of being nice to people than just the bare act of remembering their faces and saying hi hello and remembering their name

right so yeah I mean it's it's interesting yeah it's it's disconcerting actually whenever you break norms with existing social tradition and you oftentimes you just have to suffer the consequences and yeah yeah and one and kind of unseen consequences because like I'm so bad at applying to email for

example just horrible I'm sure I've lost many friends with the point is if I've lost many friends I don't even know I've lost him yeah or if I've inadvertently hosted someone which is entirely possible I have I have another story from college days so when I was in Manipul I had a small

side business going so back in the day it like only means of communication especially with parents were letters so they have no phone nothing yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so most most people would hate writing to their parents and most parents so every month they had

to send money to come as a person and think you know usually that would be the form of a demand draft and many parents had made it a condition that unless you write a letter at least once a month you're not going to get that check so there was just like a good customer base there you know

customer need so I said all right so and people used to pay me in cigarettes I should smoke back then so I will cigarette was astronomical sum of 40 pesos of a row will so one letter was basically one will cigarette and everything was going on well till some parents started getting

suspicious so one guy he said that first of all your English has improved as I said the Chanjeevity F.A. you know the Chanjeevity F.A. you know who is zero that's the LinkedIn lesson here yeah you're handwriting is improved that's a mom said and the dad was even more suspicious

so and my customer my client was basically someone who had discovered the joys of weed and was consuming it in industrial quantity so he was like completely spaced out all the time so this guy comes okay a man and my client is there we're in the same way hanging around outside

the hostel and this old man comes and my client says hello uncle you look very familiar and that's his dad yeah so that was when I decided to mothball my business today oh yes yeah so I remember this since you mentioned writing letters right I was this my my grandmother had

a habit of writing one letter every week to some everyone she stayed in touch with her letters right till she was like in her 80s and all of that right tell her eyesight this is eventually sort of stopped her from doing so and once in a while she would have to write to someone who

did not read Tamil right and then so she would then write it on a piece of paper in Tamil and she would ask me to translate right and there was one funny moment where so she would begin all her letters particularly two people who are she considered to be elder to her etc with the expression

server codey namaskar angle which is basically just you know right this is and I translate that to multi-chrore prostrations right and and one I think one person wrote when they visited some wedding saying that we were speaking to my grandmother and saying that what is this multi-chrore prostration

she was like I don't know but you must be asked my grandson he translates so that is yeah so that's multi-chrore prostrations this reminds me of something the multi-chrore prostrations like firstly I used to do what a narend kind of date where for a couple of people in college I wrote a cross-strict poems for the beloved so an acrostic poem is where the first line of every sentence reads out a message right so for example if someone was writing to you you'd look at the first

letter of every line the first letter of every line would spell out something like I love you Narend you know and then I imperfect I am big pentameter I would kind of deliver those but where I remembered this multi-chrore prostrations was when I was in college we had a new bunch of hostelite

join us in first year after you know I went from 12th to f i and I was in the hostel so one day if you remember back in the days and all of you will remember both of you will remember I don't know how many of our gentle listeners will know this but there used to be this thing called an STD booth

this was not where you went to this was not where you went to procure a vendorial disease but these were like a physical phones because they were no mobile phones at the time and you would place a call to your hometown or wherever and you would speak to them so once I am at an STD booth

trying to put a cross a call to my parents and this another guy who just come from Bihar who's on the next booth and he gets through before me and I hear his booming voice shout Pranamate that is like you know if you could make a meme of that this would be such a great meme

for every time someone is like completely outlandish or mad or whatever should be used to interrupt people yeah do not get everybody everybody like what the hell is this guy I should be play on loudspeakers I should do it at conferences you know so like I went to this conference which was

all on finance and all that organized by friends I went to hang out with interesting people but the subjects were like really to say the least like boring so there was one session on bank recapitalization and after that I was introduced to an academic from Sweden I think who was part

of that panel on bank recapitalization so she said how did you find the session so I told her with the debt pan face that I have been deeply fascinated by bank recapitalization since I was seven years old and she said oh me too more sincerely the conversation bank recapitalization

so I'm writing BA and again like capital so I'll let me throw up a tangential thought because I was in this conference and everybody's really serious and they're saying things I can't possibly understand so you can't even fault my attention for wandering I have come there with

full seriousness of attitude but we have reached stages where half the words I don't know so what does one do so I take out my phone and there's this book of poems by Mary Oliver on dogs so I'm reading out those dog poems and sharing them with the person next to me and we're both reading dog

poems by Mary Oliver and then at one point this thought struck me and I will ask for your responses on it and the thought is that we are all cats pretending to be dogs now let me explain what I mean by this a dog gives you unconditional love and constant affection right and we kind of love that

cats on the other hand are coldly blatantly and explicitly instrumental they come to you for a cuddle when they want a cuddle and if you want a cuddle and they're not in the mood like fagof right that's a way it is and many of us love dogs because that's how we see ourselves and want to

be many of us fear cats because we know that's who we really are so my theory is that maybe deep down inside we know that all relationships are really instrumental but we want to pretend that love in friendship and etc etc are somehow sacred things and standing by themselves so this this

is just a playful theory I came up with that we all cats pretending to be dogs I wonder if there is a neuroscience aspect of maybe there is a part of the brain that is being tactical and selfish about it and maybe a part of the brain that genuinely is able to think of the more of the more selfless

long long term value which which again as I said it's it's hard to sort of say because I think sometimes like for example sometimes things like being philanthropic right you could be doing philanthropy because you like seeing your name in the news right I mean yeah or that people could

be doing philanthropy because they might have a longer term kind of goal meaning that yeah the good might come a little bit later delayed gratification could also be there right so in that sense yeah I think it's probably more of a way of seeing the world maybe a little bit of both the

truth meaning that we are if you take a very hapsi and view of the world we're probably all only instrumental meaning that we are we have one one saying so this I read this somewhere that well the one is a theory so I don't know if there's any you know evidence for it but one of the

explanations for evolution of the human mind of speech is that and the brain itself right the size of the brain increasing is because it allowed us to be you know to function in societies and the thing about being in society is there's a lot of dynamics involved and especially by

human the concept speech and signaling and things like that which needed very large brains to process and by some sort of mutation because a larger brain is a huge yeah you're very expensive this thing so the two things coincided and so the all the primates

with the larger brains they evolved into us and that's yeah so the other interesting corollary to that is also the fact that size of our brains is also correlated with the invention of cooking yeah that's because yeah yeah I mean that stuff you all your energy goes into

extracting nutrition from that right I mean I vaguely remember Matt Ridley once speculating that what happened with the Neanderthals maybe we ate them and the Neanderthals were vegetarian and the reason the human brain kind of exploded in science in size you clearly needed that kind

of nutrition which could not come from vegetables alone so another argument against vegetables yeah but I'm sure we were obviously omnivorous for the longest life monkeys are and we're so the thing about sociological social thing is that social interaction and being

social dynamics there's always a sort of dichotomy right so on one reason cooperation and altruism is rewarded because it's it adds value to the group so all the individuals who display altruistic and cooperative traits survive and those who don't are cast away from the group

and they die so eventually the genes are selected for that right but at the same time anyone who manages to get their own agenda so everything is scarce mates food everything right on the slide they will do evolutionarily better so somehow we've come with both these traits embedded

and we are forced to like or respect altruism and cooperation but we know inside that we want to sneakily go and you know grab that last or fruit or you know so there's actually a danger there in mixing up metaphors like back to the metaphor of the self-ilge in like there's a great

book I'd recommend I read many many years ago a couple of decades ago called the evolution of cooperation by David Axelrod who also I think they've built a lot in game theory and to kind of figure something so political scientist guy the political Axelrod or Robert Axelrod yeah no I

think that's an excellent David Axelrod is yeah yeah this is Robert Axelrod I'm sorry yeah and and it is entirely possible that our genes want and I mean this in a metaphorical sense because obviously genes don't want anything that are genes for the greatest chance of procreation in a

particular circumstance want us to cooperate with others so we are simultaneously hardwired for both cooperation and competition and violence and peace and everything else and like as you know whatever works as David Axelrod said we have a lot of knobs you know so nature gives us knobs

nurture turns and both genetic and epigenetic both correct yeah yeah and the other you know the to this point about collaboration and brain size and things like that right yes interesting counter thought experiment you gave the example of the cat in the talk right if you look at the history of

humans domesticating animals both for food as well as protection for labor like horse and so on the pattern to that is that we don't pick wild predators so in general we would have selected the weak and the unspourly sighted and the vulnerable right kidnapped them as pups or young ones and then

bred out any kind of risky behavior of any kind which is how it which is well how you get a dog from a wolf right a wolf I mean if it's hungry it will rip you apart no matter how well you take care of it right like recently I think there's a bear who was bought up by a guy for many years and

one day it was hungry it ate the guy right and if he was Marathi and it shot him out what would be the result a bear hug apologies right so basically the so in a sense a dog is in a pure natural sense is like an extraordinary poor quality genetic version of the wolf right and in a sense I think the

anthropocentric version of looking at this is to say that they're loving unconditionally and so on but the other way of looking at it is that animal actually has no no choice any of its ancestors exhibited anything other than unconditional love would have been brutally murdered or thrown out

so you've bred that entire thing out so whether that is truly unconditional or not I'm not really certain right so these are absolute so dogs are absolutely dependent on your cats are not so they're actually being themselves I think the thing with dogs is you are right that given their

genes if you look at the motives of the genes quote unquote at the ultimate level they are not unconditional but at the approximate level of the little bit of a furry creature itself it is giving unconditional love that would go back to the same thing we spoke about humans itself right

whether our relationships and love and and unconditional love and all of that is it transactional versus is it we don't have to as far back as the genes like have I told you guys about Michael Gazzaniga spread brain epilepsy experiments I must have I keep repeating it you every

member sharing about it yes okay so just for my listeners I'll give a quick cap to ask him Michael Gazzaniga was his great neuroscientist who was once looking at patients of spread brain epilepsy and a common way of curing spritz brain epilepsy was you split the two

halves of the brain so the copus chalicem which has a left hemisphere right hemisphere you split it up and the left is in charge of the right part side of the body and vice versa forget that for a moment but the right brain is considered the more creative and intuitive and whatever the left

brain is considered a more analytical and I'm simplifying a bit so if you're a scientist please consider me a science storyteller here like Chris Shok and don't get on my back I'm I'm sure there will be a bunch of guys will say that this whole right brain left brain theory has

been disproved I said yes but we're just trying to explain the logic and in case of the Gazzaniga thing I mean these are he wrote a great book called human also but the experiments themselves are complete classic so they showed that i which was controlled by the right side of the brain

they showed it in instruction like ask for a glass of water or scratch your elbow and then they would ask him why did you scratch your elbow and he would concoct the reason right the reason actually as he saw the instruction but he would concoct the reason and really believe in the reason

and so why did you ask for water or whatever so far everything and the term used for this now I don't remember with the Gazzaniga I gave it this term or Stephen Pinker in the blank slate where I first read about this experiment use this term with the term for this is a interpreter so the left

brain is a interpreter of what the right brain is doing and I think Pinker referred to it as the press officer this is your PR guy of the brain but the interesting thing is the PR guy of the brain believes a cool it completely believes a cool it and where I come at from this is further experiments

have seen shown that we actually make the movement to do something a fraction of a second before we think about doing something which means we are the most of the things that we do we are not doing them for the reasons we think we are doing them for it's involuntary it's involuntary

there is something deeper going on inside and therefore we rationalize everything right so we are all the time you know rationalizing shit that we have no control over and giving like fancy reasons and being the press officer to our earlier point about I think one part of our brain being

a fact teller and the other being a storyteller yeah so I think the instrumentality part comes here that you might see someone really pretty and be attracted in a reptile brain kind of way but then you rationalize and put a vineyard of love when this and that on top of that and so a lot of

stuff that seems genuine is actually instrumental and even even if at one level I think this is true at another level I'm making the conscious decision to not believe it because then how do we yeah have relationships at all so you go to behave as if your relation as if your feelings are

genuine in all cases and you have to put in that intentionality in the world but it's a very strongly held thing right that lust and love are two different things it is not actually not I mean yeah it's one level yeah it is because you you know I mean all of us have felt love

for our spouses significant others whatever and there's really no it's just that you know you're yeah you know I mean let me put it another way a typical way of looking at love and lust is that lust is often in most societies look down upon as something base and immoral and love is idealized

to me it should be the other way around because lust is a pure genuine emotion if you feel love your issue feel lust you feel lust if it is what it is your straightforward you're elaborately rationalized all those multi-line things exactly so it's it's it's a very complicated thing I've been yeah to some degree also it is you know part of what makes the ideas and minority report fascinating right is the if you think about the fundamental concept of a thought crime right the scary part is

not the fact that they're reading your mind and you know and they're punishing you for stuff that you might do etc etc is basically it breaks that entire illusion of the fact that you're probably thinking of committing crimes but you may not commit that crime and that ultimately in society

you must be judged by that actions and not for the how you arrived at it right so you got everyone's not a saint that you're only thinking pure thoughts and you're like only a love etc right I'm sure our brains are just like all kinds of stuff floating around we literally have

zero control over our thoughts yes you don't have as much control as you do it's a great sobering it's a great sobering you're you're probably you're probably thinking of running over people who overtake you all the time but you don't right and it is just that I ultimately the fact that

you don't is what matters look you've got to understand one thing at this point I know you didn't mean me when you said you but nobody overtakes me I only overtake people let me tell you something krisishok yes I have been in many competitions with pineapples where I've tried to eat them and

they've tried to eat me yeah I'm still here yes those pineapples are yes you're the winner in the some of them began and some of them became pair hugs you know there's a thing what's the difference between maniacs and idiots and so the idiots are the guys in front of you won't let you overtake them

and the maniacs and the guys behind you want to overtake you so that's basically as we contain multitudes we are both maniacs or one and idiots for the other you guys believe in free will or have you not thought about it I don't know what you know I used to think that I did

I was like you know that evidently there is free will right so I I want to hear there's a pair of headphones I it's my choice I can pick it up or not that's what you think I choose not to pick it up and then it's a rationalization rather than yeah I'm you have no choice but you

choose not to do that that is sort of like stealing the question paper and then and then cracking they're saying I cracked the exam right because you have you've designed experiment yourself right yeah the problem with free will in general is that one is you don't have as much of it as you think

you do and and there are variations across like you're for example your the way your ability to to make certain decisions varies based on whether you've eaten or not how long ago have you eaten how much your blood sugar how stressed are you how much how much cortisol level do you have whether

you're rich or poor so there's just so many things that kind of determine your ability to actually exercise that will and so on I think you know I know there being experiments where they give kids candy right and and they say that you can either wait like a certain amount of time you'll get to

and but if you want it right now you can take one right and the original conclusion was that kids who are willing to wait end up becoming more successful later because they have they've sort of somehow built a discipline to control will power and all of that and if it's subsequently

it's sort of being debunked and said that it's just simply ridiculously oversimplified that we're far far more complicated and so on but I think the whole a lot of this free will stuff is in illusion I think all of it is like the books I'd recommend on this is Sam Harris is a

nice slim book on it but there's a book I'm waiting to read I haven't read it yet by Robert Sapolsky who wrote behave so his latest book argues there is no free will and in behave itself he looks at human behavior and then he breaks down the many different layers that lead to that decision

making so like you said Ashok what you ate that morning could be a factor how much sleep you have had could be a factor like there are now studies with show and this is in the context of whether how much AI should be involved in sentencing and you actually looked at a human sentencing and you

found that a judge who had lost a golf game on Sunday was more likely to give in 11 year judgment than a four year judgment on a Monday than somebody who had won a golf game and similar ridiculous things like this with a variance was incredible I think Daniel Connemon was a thing right so

bail applications before lunch and after lunch yeah the significant yeah Danny Connemon talks about this and the point I think the very existence of psychotropic substances and brain altering substances I think should effectively prove that you have no free will basically meaning that if

one molecule can fundamentally alter what you think and do and choose how can you say you have free will and the fact that one of these things is basically something as simple as a pan right I mean the Araka nut right there's a molecule called Aracholine which interestingly enough to

do doctor Abbey's point if you really wanted to get high you have to digest it and the Aracholine has to go through your small intestine and then it has to pass through the liver and the liver will say sorry boss you're you're a foreigner I'm I'm neutralizing you right that's what will happen

so what do pan eaters do they add tuna which is alkali and they also add a bunch of these other things that basically make micro cuts in your mouth so the Aracholine gets straight into the blood stream so it bypasses the liver so only way for you to get high used to bypass the liver

otherwise you'll get high right only alcohol can overwhelm the liver to the point where it can then eventually your liver stops functioning then it gets into the blood and then you get high is an alcohol high all other psychotropic does have to bypass the liver otherwise they're not you're

not getting high right so and then it it absolutely changes your state of mind that's what all your all the stuff is fundamentally about subdural have you done mushrooms no you plan to I don't know I do wait I'm hearing reading a lot of interesting things about it like one of my friends just

went to this workshop in Portugal where he I would take his name he's been on the show but I haven't asked him so I won't but he went to this workshop in Portugal seven day workshop where he took where they gave him in a controlled environment what he calls heroic doses I believe

that's your official term so not micro dosing but heroic doses of mushroom and the way he described it was kind of absolutely mind-blowing ending with what he said like essentially what people do 20 years of meditation for you know you kind of you can get that same state and a few doses where

you have a the solution of the ego so I mean I'll just actually and you know brave your world and masculine and and and the that original this is the interesting thing here is that you think about the fact that the mushroom again is a fungus right and fungus are they are some of the most

astonishing producers of mind altering substances right and it's not just for humans right and they if you look at nature they do some are astonishing things right so the every 17 years the the cricket what is that that insect that a cicada cicada comes right in the US you have that

thing right we say all of them come at the same time so there's an entire ecosystem of other living things that I've co evolved to take advantage of the fact that for the next two days there's insane amounts of free food right and one of them is a fungus and it has and this astonishing

ability is like a straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster which sort of like if you look at last of us in all of that it's very similar zombie it's a what it does is that this is a fungus that infects the the cicadas brain and what it does is that if it infects a female brain okay

then it will first convince the cicada to think that it is a male and go and have sex with a bunch of female cicadas so that it can spread as much of the itself as possible right and so it's been it's taken over the brain it's convinced the cicada it is actually male well it might be female

because the goal is to go spread it doesn't care actually about the cicada having sex it's really about spreading its pores right and so on so just when you really think about that right the fact that one a bunch of molecules if you inject into yourself yeah can effectively do this then I don't

I don't think the we are all a bunch of chemicals boss I don't think all of this is a free well and all is a illusion it's an abstraction that we create in the limited context of what we do like you know it's like you know prepared question paper stuff right that's really all there is yeah

I was shared this one before that we book recommendation which is cicada by shantan brilliant book where the star of the book is a cicada and then I went into a rabbit hole after reading the book and now I know everything about cicadas except this but you need to read that about that fungus

it's astonishing fungus I'm totally going to kind of go for it and the other thing is I once written a column about exactly what you're talking about chemicals happen to Chris Connell where Chris Connell was on some medication for something or the other but a side effect of the medication will try

to change his or chemical imbalance and see you side will kill himself so you know this hubris that we have did I am who I am I am in control you're really sobering thought it's like if you cannot if you can clinically take drugs to alter your even for like depression anxiety and

so on how can you say you have free will so there's an episode of everything is everything just on this I'll link that also from the show notes in the rain what you were telling us a story I just remembered an old joke it's a song so I the lyrics go like this a clone a clone of my

own with a white chromosome change to X and since my clone would have a mind like my own we would think of nothing but sex randomly remembered yeah really and I thought it'll end when something like fucking myself because you know but anyway didn't kind of end up going or whatever little poem

also he didn't do it for he didn't do it for something he didn't do it for belt he told he did because someone told him to go fuck himself yeah beautiful sort of words let's now talk about let's turn to the sort of the reader questions that we have from across twitter and from my writing

group as well and here's one of them and this is a lovely question favorite classical raagas and why so in my case I was a sway so one I've spoken about before I hear byrov it's very touching evocative raagas there's another one called bihaag so bihaag I've heard a

Badegolam Ali Khan sing it is very romantic and the words of that song also let uljay sula jaa baalama that is yeah yeah I'm missing it oh yes please do that ah so what he's saying is what she's saying is my hair is sort of this thing can you please

tuck it back into place there is me in the on my hands so can you put my bindi back on nice it's a lovely way romantic and when Badegolam sings it is beautiful oh yeah there's a story about how Mahatma Gandhi went to a Badegolam Ali Khan concert and then at one point when the concert is over

everybody gives a standing ovation and Gandhi ji goes to Badegolam Ali Khan and he says he Pandey ji you were a man when you were a man but then the words of the taaliyo were gone and then he basically and expressing this sort of very purest view that you know that art exists in of

itself beyond the thing which I think is also a slightly naive view I think everything Badegolam Ali Khan at some date at some some subconscious level must have been also geared to what people really wanted to sort of enjoy and I have to be viral for it to survive no I mean yeah yeah yeah

I only the viral art survives to be honest right I mean it has to be viral to survive I mean here's the thing we think of art as something pure and it's in a different realm of its own but we're talking instrumental art is instrumental why does a piece of music make us want to cry because

certain combinations of notes move certain neurons in our brains in a particular way and that's a reaction we have and is that a reaction that you can then replicate of course you can you know and we don't have the knowledge of what combination of notes and what are the effects in the brain

so we give it this mystical aura and call it art but it's basically craft and it's basically instrumental and it's also art is is fundamentally also in the remembering meaning that it has to move you then you have to remember it so that you're able to tell someone else or influence

someone else to experience it right I mean it is so therefore that virality is baked into the definition right so people sort of sometimes derisively look upon say popular music simply because it has a wider reach it is just simply a more viral pathogen as opposed to a less effective pathogen

which is what classical music is yeah yeah yeah you're hitting different buttons but continue down your agar road and feel free to feel free to sing yeah it's pretty jelly one so with there is a meme stop it in a ring and that came because I one day I remembered this song now

I know how it got out but I was singing that singing that over and over on a loop and then she and exasperations stop it and and somehow it got recorded I was trying to record the song and I posted on one of my whatsapp groups and she loves said stop it and that got recorded

too so literally the only thing everyone remembers the stop it and the history will remember the stop it and the singing that will be auto tuned and then you know so I have an interesting anecdotan auto tune not an anecdote something that something thought provoking I heard recently and I'll

link to this video on youtube where a rigid sing is talking about auto tune and he says that listen is fashionable for you to make fun of auto tune and all that let me tell you all serious musicians you auto tune like how the magic takes it out where I take over which the emotion is absolutely

perfect a good note here so to fix a good note without making it obvious or whatever it's fine then the whole thing sounds beautiful so often you'll hear a rendition and you'll be like wow mind blowing it's so good and all that and he said actually there is a little bit of auto tune

in everyone you know the thing is when a bad singer does auto tune it's kind of obvious and you kind of philosophically you revolt at it but everybody uses auto tune and actually there is a there is a even more basic step before the auto tune which is that an aridji sing when he sings a

verse the music director will ask him to sing it 20 times that one verse he will ask it to sing 20 times and that guy will listen to each of the 20 takes and then mentally sort of actually mark out and say this specific phrase of this word is flawless on these takes want to skip all of this

this particular thing is flawless in these takes and then he will first copy paste and then stitch together all the best parts of every take and stitch together final take that you listen to in the final mix right it was not sung in one shot yes sometimes it turns out like that in

in the pre the thing is that sometimes you know with the technology didn't exist you only took one take right but now if you listen to everyone sounding perfectly flawless it's because they are taking the best single part of multi small one second elements from multiple takes

even before you auto tune even after doing all of that then there what they're going to do is that they'll find that everything is flawless but this one note is about a few hurts a little bit up or down that they will auto tune see the most egregious use of auto tune is where you turn on the

so there's basically so it's like a it's a filter it's a what happens is that it is basically it is measuring the frequency and then after that you can either immediately as a hard cliff change it to the correct frequency or you can gradually break it on right when you turn the knob

to bring it hard cliff is when you get the T-Pain effect yeah so this is sort of when you get the T-Pain effect that's what people associate as auto tune but 99% of all auto tune use is just the small gradual fixes that you won't even realize there is this masterpiece of a book the best book

I have ever read on music called how music works by David burn and in that there are fascinating chapters about how recorded music evolved so there was a time where if you were recording music you would have just one mic and that mic would be kept in the middle and you would have all the

musicians gathered around at various distances and some instruments are naturally louder than others so depending on what the music arranger wanted to have prominence there would be people called I think pushers or whatever they some banal term their job would be to stand behind the musician

like stand behind the guitarist when the guitar part comes he pushes him in front of the mic when the guitar part is over he pulls him back and the drumbone guy is pushed forward or whatever and that is literally what recording technology was so all the kind of music you were making

was even optimized for that because of course the form changed the content like it's a fascinating look at form and content because your early music is happening outdoors right yeah it drives an all that so it's percussive because that works the best but also reaches the distance

reaches the distances but when you have the concert halls of Europe percussive music would be sound like a disaster and equally in those kinds of open halls a music that is too intricate would sound like a disaster so you have your western classical sounding the way it does yeah

20 violins you know 10 cellos yeah but then when you have the rock bands and the jazz bands performing in clubs where there are tables chairs things all around and the sound is bouncing of all of those a separation of sound is phenomenal and you can play far more intricate and intimate

patterns and then that creates a kind of incentive right so you're not worried about see the biggest problem with electrification was amplification yeah so that's why they invented brass instruments were invented to basically amplify and do way louder as axiophone is so much more

louder than a violin right yeah like an Indian Indian another swaram is a example of an insanely loud instrument right yeah let's keep going down the Raga's root instrument right my other favorite Raga is this my Sheila's favorite Raga that's why it's my favorite Raga is Yamann so Yamann is the

first Raga they teach you what do you mean Sheila's favorite Raga that's why it's my favorite Raga no I mean she she loves this so she doesn't she cannot identify Raga but if she likes a song more often than not it is based on this Raga yeah very ubiquitous of famous songs being

that's one or the one from that movie Saraswati Chandran Chandan Sabadan Chanchal Chitvan or the Faridah Khanum things I have a question for those of my listeners who have no idea of Indusani classical music in Raga's explain what is a Raga and breakdown Yamann for me

Raga's are just melodies right so they're just the name a fancy name for a tune so if it's a tune it's a Raga and it should be a distant like Raga you should be distinguishable from Raga B what were the ancients found out that there were certain patterns of notes which so you could

have the same notes in two Raga's yet have two different Raga's because the way those notes were used were different so patterns and that sort of characterizes the tune the melody so like what is a Yamann which are the notes what is the order so I'll give you a second if you take a no

matter which part of the world you are there are only 12 notes of music and you know we've discussed this before these are pure accidents of physics right you take a string or this thing and you divide the length by two it becomes octave enough three is to five ratio it becomes

the third and so on right all the notes you get by simply dividing a string or a or place a hole in a bamboo and you get the flute while others thing right ultimately these same frequencies and the the gaps between the frequencies is what makes music it's not actual frequencies

because you can start anywhere everything else is relative to that right no matter where you go these are these 12 notes right and these 12 notes furthermore they've been categorized into seven primary ones with some having variations meaning that there is a Sarigama Pada Ni right and then

Sapa don't have variations but the other notes have flat and sharp and that's the basic sort of concept that's how you get the all the white and black notes are the 12 notes of the piano from the one C to another C right a Raga is basically a

you pick a sequence of notes while you're ascending and a sequence of notes while you're descending and say these are the notes in your Raga but a Raga definition goes more than just the sequence of notes and the notes you pick so if you say like in so I probably take a kinetic example of

same Yamann Kanatic as like say Yamann Kaliani right and so Kaliani is very close so Sarigama Pada Ni Sapa right so Sani Dapa Magarri Sapa so that would be your Yam or Kaliani equivalent right so the furthermore is that there are certain catch phrases combinations of notes that can

immediately indicate to a listener that this is that Raga so sometimes Raga's can share the same notes but they can be there may be variations in the order in which you can sing them the phrases can vary a little bit and so on that will so basically largely that is what a Raga is and in this

the Western classical sense just the selection of notes up and down they call the modes that's the jazz term for it right so Dorian mode Ionian mode Frigian mode and so on so the Dorian mode would correspond to the the Kanatic Shankarabana or Bilaval right in your in Hindustani and so on

right and likewise another one so basically on the piano if you start with that C key and you just play all the white keys you'll get Dorian mode that's Bilaval or Shankarabana right and so on and if you start on the fourth note which is F you will get your Yamann or your Kaliani in in this

case right so it is just the Western style is far more absolute pitch but relative because they're about harmony in India it doesn't matter based on wherever your voice can start you start and everything else is relative to that and meaning that I don't have to obey the fact that I have

to sing at one pitch there I can just start wherever I'm comfortable with so can you illustrate one of these Raga's say Yamann for me through distinction like sing that what would essentially be a typical thing of the Raga and then sing something else which is another Raga ideally with the same

notes just just to get the distinction across right this is what characterizes yeah Yamann and this is what characterizes the other thing just let's say Yamann Kaliani and Kaliani both have same notes but they're sung in completely different modes right in in Kanatic so there's a famous

song a Kannada song called Krishna Nee Begane Baro right which I think is probably as Tamil people are the worst at pronouncing all the other South Indian languages so yeah so Kannada listeners please excuse but it's basically the Yashoda calling Krishna because he's like up to all kinds of

not in us please come back right I mean yeah so she's trying to entice him to come back right and Krishna Nee Begane Baro that's the so that's the usual way of singing it and the interesting story there is that my my granddad who used to sort of used to work with Balasaras with the famous

dancer and so on right and so she used to dance and sing oh my god and she was the last of the dancers who could sing and dance right and so she would say that the way you guys sing it you're missing the point because in the dance it's more evocative right you're acting as Yashoda trying

to call the the Krishna and so on so she would say that if you're trying to call a kid and ask him to come you don't start with impatience Baro is impatience right Krishna Nee Begane Baro that should be your first phrase Krishna Nee Begane Baro so that's the second one and then

eventually like Krishna Nee Begane Baro that's more impleeding right so so the whole idea is that you can sort of see those sequence of notes mapping to specific modes so the same thing if you in Kalyani the mood will be entirely different you could so you would not pick this specific mode for

they would be others it's a little bit more formal more of a it is not suited for that sort of you know mother calling a baby sort of thing is more suited for Yaman Kalyani and so on so in fact that's why I think you know so for example in in so there is a Raga called Chharukesi which is one

of my favorites in in Karnahti right the reason it's favorite because the first four notes on ascension are the major key like the equivalent of the western major key and major keys associated with happy positive minor keys associated with more plaintive sadness and so on right and this

Raga is first half is major key second half is minor key so so when you're actually in the lower part you want to sound all positive and then as you kind of get higher it starts sounding sadder and the same Hindustani is also the same Chharukesi must be the same thing I don't know where it

originally came from either yeah so it's quite a yeah it's so this Yaman goes the characteristic with so me like a sa and ray don't go together it's always me ray and then so yeah and that's characteristic of Yaman Kalyani where Kalyani is I mean I'm mixing up I'm like

like yeah but it will be yeah correct so the other element is also tension relief also is there right so for example every time you're stopping at knee your brain is like get to get to the sa get to the side it'll just happen even if you're not musical you will feel that attention so and

it's often used very widely to take a completely sort of random example Jimmy Hendrix purple haze the opening chords of purple haze use the sa and the Thievera Madhima together and those the combination of sa and that F sharp is considered to be the most dissonant interval right so much so

that the church used to call it the devil's interval so church music was not allowed to use that chord my god and purple haze is basically that's it just starts with that it's basically rock music you know sort of F you to the either to the establishment and the church and everything is that

ta ta ta ta it's the devil's interval's again so that's how amazing so to continue we'll because we'll come to your raga's finish of your raga's but firstly a digression like how did you get into raga's how did you like did you have any kind of classical training or is it it's just I'm just

listening when I was a kid and so we used to have these couple of programs happening in the morning there'd be small one five minute ten minute programs which would they they would they would give a ballipan song with that based on that raga then there's a little explanation of what notes

going and then there'll be a small piece by a master either instrumental or vocal and that after some time you get a sense of the melodies and then you start seeing those melodies everywhere like Yemen is ubiquitous there are all these other rags there is another popular raga

ahir bairavi is very yeah bairavi ahir bairavi is a very common ryanom milay surme rata mara that is the and then alibela sahja alibela sahja is ahir bairavi so you keep and then after some time it it just grows and for some reason I never transitioned to the polyphonic

ah yeah I just I just didn't get it so for you does everything have to be in one raga every song or is it like is this an if you're just shifting around and you know where there are a lot of raga which are there is one lot called basant basanti ke dar which malikarjun mansoor is song

there are there are very two distinct raga basant and ke dar and they you know he transitions if there is one popular song which is in the one of these movies I think bhaji rao or one of those so it's based on huriakalian okay and the song goes like this Muhairahang install and then they keep transitioning from one day. Yeah, our Raghaz, and I'm thinking aloud here, but our Raghaz really a technology for mobilizing vibes and modes to make you feel a particular way.

To an extent, yes, but I will also say that it is, it's cultural shared, cultural understanding also. Like for example, the the Karnatic system may not recognize that these Raghaz are morning Raghaz or these are afternoon, this is rain and so on. But do you have the concept of Raghaz in Nira Ragh, or a pranayana? You can take Nira Ragh and make it, make it sound that way. And like for instance, like the Karnatic Raghamritha Varshani for rain, sounds nothing like your Meg Malhar.

So in the sense that I think it is, so these are purely just shared cultural understanding, the familiarity of just, of people listening to it again and again, and those patterns, right? Becoming common shared. You just only make a big deal of it. That's the, that's that thing. It's not a thing in, in Karnatic sort of. And can you listen to like Western music in Ceredo, this is Raghaga and et cetera, et cetera? Like what, what rock songs would be in Yemen?

Rock, you won't find rock songs in Yemen primarily because rock songs will pick the equivalent of Raghaz or the notes equivalent of Raghaz, where you can make clean chords. They won't pick the random ones, right? So you will have a lot in your Bilaval and your Ahir Baravi and Baravi and all of that, but you won't have it in like some of these rare or like Western Baravi. It's a hard man, I'm trying to sort of remember, at least for certain.

Like if you pick Raghaga and give me your Karnatic version of that or your classical version of that and your rock song in that. So that'd be fun. So Al-Bela Sajan, right? Ahir Baravi. Al-Bela Sajan Ayuri, like that. I don't know what that last one is. That's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that is very much Ahir Baravi in that sense, right? And then there is this, there are a couple of these classic rock kind of songs where, there is a, this song by, don't fear the Reaper, right?

The melody of the song is very regular Western stuff. Then there is a guitar solo inside, that is, is Hemavati, which is a Raghaga, right? And it is, and clearly you listen to that guitar solo, that guy probably was inspired by Ravishankara, someone he heard. There was a time in the 60s when these guys were all inspired by many of these.

They were listening to these melodies and incorporating them into the guitar solos as opposed to the main song itself, because main song is subject to you being having a rhythm guitar and others, which is very hard to then fit some sort of random. And there is some structural reason also why Western music and Indian music don't correlate very well. I think it's a transition between notes is more linear in Indian music and Don linear in the Western

music. That's a question, because we are creatures of what we consume, does someone who listens to nothing but rock, is he going to be a fundamentally different person than someone who listens to nothing but in the sunny classical? I'm not sure. Like other ways. See, I think listening to music and experiencing music is more than just you sitting alone and listening to it on tape, in which case it's different, right?

It comes with its own concert tradition, it comes with its own social obligations of how you enjoy that music. And you can't disentangle whether it comes with... And enjoying a Hindustani music comes with its setting and a certain formality and a certain eliteness of how that is done, versus the general sort of more slightly more democratic nature of a rock concert and its audience and so on. So it's really you really can't entangle this at all.

So, yeah, I mean Western classical music probably is more analogous to this than anything else. Any more Raga's you want to share, Nareen? All, like literally, doesn't it? And we could go on all evening. Let's do a couple more data really close to you and they make you feel a particular way to Alice Y. Then we'll go over to a show. Then you can cancel this flight and we can do this little tomorrow. There is this Raga called Bibhas, which I've heard Malikajan Mansur Singh.

And it's very it's a morning Raga. It's very solemn, very meditative. And it goes something like this. Nareen. Nareen. I'm just forget. Nareen. Nareen. Gopal. I'm making a terrible note. So this particular category of Raga's, right? Are both in the North and South. They tend to be commonly used in the Bhakti devotion. A kind of songs that don't have need an elite setting. People can gather together in a religious setting and sing. There's a lot of those Raga's that are suitable for.

So, Ravathi and sort of in Karnatic, right? And it's something similar. Sreemanarayan. Sreemanarayan. Sreemanarayan. Sreepadav. Sharanam. So these Raga's, if you notice, so you'll find that the anchor notes, the saapar, all of these saa, the anchor notes. The next notes are very close to them. Sreepadav. And then, so for people who don't have great singing skills, who can't capture that right note, which has a longer gap. But it's easy for you to say, Sreepadav.

So which is when you teach music to kids, you choose the Raga's where the notes are very close to each other. Wow. So in these and the Bhakti, the Bhajan kind of songs tend to be in Raga's where the notes are not discrete things apart where you need training to hit them. Because you want everybody to be able to do those.

And not. Right. Other Raga's, you go to when you're in a particular mood, like say, you're feeling melancholy or say, you're feeling in a celebratory mood or whatever, you're feeling calm. I'm not really, I mean, I just randomly listen to. There are some favorites. There is, so I listen a lot to Malikaj on Mansur Kesar by Kerkar, those kind of things. So I'm familiar with all the published, whatever recordings there are.

And then you feel in a mood, there is one Raga called Alalita Gauri, which is sung in the evening, which is both Kesar by Malikaj on Mansur of Sangha. So it's a beautiful evening melody. I've just grown to associate it as an evening. And you just listen to it. It immerses out. I get a very personal relationship, right?

In the sense that, like, for example, I think I've said this before that people will often seek out music that resonates with them as a response to a personal tragedy or a situation and help that sort of give sucker. And sometimes it is often a film song whose lyrics just touch you in that way.

And I think my most poignant example of how people use music as a crutch is that, many years ago when a family in the 90s, a family member who had lost a child in the sense of, some congenital complications and eventually the child died after being born and all of that, right? And so that person as a crutch would listen to Ace of Basis all that she wants is another baby. You mentioned it in our last episode.

And it's in any other context, you know, it's just sort of cheesy Euro pop song with little or no depth in meaning. And the baby there absolutely does not refer to an actual baby, right? And but yeah, but you never know the people can perform an emotional crutch with anything, right? And that's what the power that music has is that pop music then allows you to replicate that melody and sing it easily in your head, right? Without training and without and all of that, right?

And allows you to identify as well, right? So that's why your favorite August. So, in the four cases I already spoke about, Yaman again is a universal favorite actually because it's so easy, you can naturally just wear it in doubt when you're singing it naturally sort of ends up being Yaman in that and almost like a crutch, right? And then I think let me pick some. So one of the Braga's particularly, I think it's there in both Hindustani as well as Sivaranjani.

Very melodramatic, et cetera, but has resulted in some of these very beautiful songs across. You will sort of see why I'm an instrumentalist because I suck it remembering the lyrics. Because when I hear music, I only hear notes. So I only memorize notes. I never memorize like words. Nana, nana, nana, nana. There are so many songs. Nana, nana, nana, nana, nana, nana, nana, nana. I have Kamal Hassan, you know, that's very rich.

So this has a, so Sivaranjani again is not meant for your very serious, efficient outdoors, but it really really really moves the audience. Yeah, they can see the tragedy in and almost always use for tragedy. And also explain to me the distinction between serious and non-serious, like you said, this is more popular.

So this is a very weird, at least I know it's probably different in Hindustani, but in Karnaatik, there is this sort of distinction between the first half of a concert is where you sing the serious raga and the serious songs. The last part of the concert is where you sing the popular songs. So these are songs that everyone knows. Everyone understands the lyrics are not hardcore poetry, devotional.

They're probably more common poems written by Bharati, Bharati or you know, other more common poets and some occasionally sometimes, you know, popular film songs and things like that. Right. So so there is this sort of class distinction between this and light music. So it's still the use the same raga's and sort of like the distinction between Ilayaraja writing a song using a raga and Tiagaraja having written a song using that raga.

We've just declared that Ilayaraja song is light music and that song is somehow heavy, right? It all it really indicates is that the person performing it is probably being trained for many years and is using patterns that only a trained listener will appreciate. It's basically a way of excluding people. Is it fetishization of complexity? Yeah, it is. And that's it. There's no exactly what team Krishna says. It is a bunch of rich people have gathered and said, this is classical.

That's all there is to it. There is no music theoretical superiority to the serious versus the light one. So I have a long story which kind of illustrates this in the context of Western music. And it's about two albums I'm deeply passionate about and perhaps my favorite musician of all time. So indulge me while I go through the story and there is a point to this. It speaks to this exact point of popular and serious music. So this is a guy called Van Morrison.

Van Morrison mid sixties used to play with a band called Them. One of the opening acts for the Them was a band called the Doors which had a guy called Jim Morrison. So in fact, the song Gloria is written by Van Morrison for them and Jim Morrison heard it in concert and picked it up, etc, etc. Now there was a big record producer called Bird Burns and he took Van Morrison and he got a hit out of him called Brown Night Girl iconic song but really a pop song.

A great pop song today is considered but it's a pop song. Right. And that became a hit. Now it's a complicated story and I'll link to a wonderful podcast episode on the making of the album. I think it's about the story, the telling the history of rock and roll through 500 songs. It's a fantastic podcast which tells this full story in detail. But what essentially happened was that Van signed up with Bird Burns and was contracted to do a certain number of songs for him and an album.

Now at some point Van Morrison decided that he doesn't want to do the Brown Night Girl kind of commercial music. Quote and quote commercial music. Today we recorded it as one of the great R&B songs but whatever. It's pop for him. So he wants to go in a more serious direction and Bird Burns is getting like fully frustrated and all that and she doesn't working out and bird burns is also in with the mafia.

So another of his artists is Neil Diamond and at one point he sets a mafia after Neil Diamond and says I'll make sure you never perform anywhere. Lot of shady stuff going on Bird Burns runs a record called bank records. Then one day Van Morrison and Bird Burns have a huge argument over the phone where Bird Burns is saying listen, I signed you up. You got a deliver and Van Morrison is saying no, I'm a pure artist.

Fuck off. And Bird Burns after the phone conversation has a heart attack and dies and his wife who inherits a contract with Van Morrison blames it on Van Morrison. So she tries to fuck him over and she says, okay, you have to give me 64 songs or whatever contractually, et cetera, et cetera. But they are not defined. So Van Morrison goes in there and he just sings 64 1 minute songs and he's just doodling away and he's talking nonsense and is basically shit.

And although he's got the kind of voice that he could sing a phone book and all that, but this is basically shit. Then he signs on to I think Warner Brothers who are buying up everyone and he goes into record this album which is later known as Astral Weeks, like my favorite album of all time. Now, when I first heard Astral Weeks as a young man, I thought my god Van Morrison is such a great artist and he's got such great musicians, but here's what actually happened.

The album was produced by a guy called Lewis Merinstein and Lewis Merinstein told Van Morrison that hey, I don't trust your musicians, which is basically a bassist and a flotist at the time. I will get my own musicians and he did the radical thing of getting a bunch of jazz musicians. So a great bass guitarist called Richard Davis, a great proper guitarist called J. Berliner and then eventually Van's own flotist guy called something pain. I forget the name. I'm sorry. Takes over on flute.

Now the album is like nothing you ever heard. And the way it was recorded was not that there was one artistic vision. Van Morrison came in. He went into a recording booth solo, sat by himself, performed this song and got the fuck out of there. And the musicians are filling in the other bits and there's no collaboration. Richard Davis is laying down this bass line. The others are playing around Richard Davis and you're in Italy recorded. Yeah. No, the Davis and the band are playing together.

I forget where the Morrison put his tracks down first, but Morrison isn't a booth. He can't hear the others. He doesn't give a shit. He doesn't talk to them because he is pissed off that he can't you know, do this his way. Now the album is a masterpiece. It is sui generi also because it is a bunch of jazz musicians playing with someone who is essentially a soul R&B guy. It is like nothing you ever heard. It's called Astral Weeks. You gotta listen to it.

And what Maranstein also does a producer is he puts in strings and all in places, but beautifully. And Van Morrison is like what the fuck is strings? You know, you're offending my purity and etc. etc. So the album is out. Van Morrison doesn't really want much to do with it. And then he decided that he wants to kind of go commercial.

And he go and all the things that he used to say he doesn't want to do with bird burns like you know, a particular bunch of female singers in the chorus doing do be do when she shall allow and whatever that shit is. He brings it all back. Does an album called Moon Dance. Moon dance is also one of the greatest albums of all time. It's a masterpiece, right? He's gone in another direction.

And this is more quintessential Van and what you think of as his sound and people would generally like if you, whenever you have these iconic lists of the top 10 films or top like you have the top 10 films of all time in citizen can will be somewhere there. Astral Weeks is like that. And Moon Dance will be somewhere in the top 20. These are two absolutely epic albums and much later in life. Van Morrison puts together a group to perform Astral Weeks live. And he calls over basis Richard Davis.

Who he then fires. Guess why he fires Richard Davis. He fires Richard Davis because by now Van likes the originals the album sound so much that he wants Davis to play exactly like he played on the album. And Davis is fuck off. I'm a jazz guy. Yeah. I don't want to fuck around and play the same thing. Same thing. Yeah. Same thing. They improvise. Yeah. So that's what happens.

And so here's the thing Van Morrison turns his back on a particular kind of sound but then goes back to it Moon Dance Masterpiece. And Van Morrison has no relationship with the players who are playing on this album. There's a unified artistic vision. It's just a bunch of, it's just a lot of improvisation and Astral Weeks. And it's again another sort of masterpiece. And this also calls into question, you know, that notion of authorship.

Yeah. Did we think, oh, it's a Van Morrison album, but is it or is it a Lewis Maranstein album or is it a Richard Davis album or is it a beautiful accident contrary to all that we are told about musicians having chemistry together and, you know, I mean, you know, in the day, literally, usually just see each other for the first time at live at the concert. Mostly, right? I mean, they just know there are some standard rules to follow and they just go there and do that.

That's that's both guys as well as even sometimes even classical Indian classical as well. And the other thing is that also people also assume a lot of stuff in Indian classical is improvised live on stage. It's not. Yeah. Your practice is so many times that they're absolutely not doing anything new on stage. At best, they're just sort of putting one pattern before another. So one phrase that brings us to mind. Gaurav Chintamani was on the show sitting in this very room.

He's of course, Erhi added to show dear friend of mine and also an accidental cousin as we later found out through a complicated chain of events. So Gaurav plays a bass for a band called Adweta and he's produced an ease produced Raman Nege's new album. But back in the early 2000s, he played briefly with Luma Jau. So he was asked to fill in as Luma Jau's guitar is Luma Jau is this legendary musician from the Northeast. And so Luma Jau shows up in Delhi three days before the concert.

Gaurav goes to him and says, right here, you know, can you tell me the songs? How do you want me to play them? And they're like, I'll chill. We discuss it tomorrow. He comes next to it. They all have a drink. I'll chill. We'll talk about it later. He gets all the way to the concert on stage and they haven't told him anything. So he'll just got to kind of make it out. He goes to the to figure out what's going on on this fly.

He goes to the bassist and the bassist says, I just look at what I'm playing and just go accordingly, right? So Gaurav is doing that. And then at one point in the first song, there comes this moment where it's clearly time for the guitar solo. And Gaurav is like kind of petrified by the moment. And he's not playing the guitar solo, right?

And at this point, Luma Jav goes to him and whispers in his ears, something to the effect of a forgotten word, but colorful words, but something to the effect of, are you going to fucking play or not at which point Gaurav launches into in his words, every solo I had ever played before then. Yeah. Yeah. And that tells you really what is happening that what is a musician, a musician is like a chess player. Essentially, it is patterns.

And you put those patterns together and you're kind of doing shit with it. Yeah. Pretty finite. If you really listen to all the guitar solos, they all go for the same because it has to be largely tends to be pentatonic scales because they're easy to play. And the other thing is that it also has to be the relative muscle movement optimization as well. So you can only play certain certain patterns. Yeah, that at that speed reliably live.

So some of the best solo sometimes may happen like in a studio because we can make as many mistakes as you want, but play something that the same guitar is will never be able to replicate life. Right. But of course, there will be these genius guitar is richy blackboard and all that who used to play the deeper for high speed those solo things live as well. But most guitar is even including even our blood Zeppelin guy. Right. You listen to the live version of the stairway to heaven.

Yeah. It are solo. It will have flaws, but those flaws are part of the live experience. You actually it's meant to be that because the audience respects the fact that you're playing this live. Right. It's not meant to be pitch perfect. Rock is not actually meant to be pitch perfect. There's leasingers not meant to be in pitch. Right. So it's about the emotion. It's about all of those people getting their teenage acts on all the rest of that stuff to identify with whatever those guys are saying.

That's the amazing thing about music. Right. So music as literature is a thing. Right. So if you talk about literature as sharing the human experience, music to a great extent also does the same thing. Yes. Yes. I mean, so it is. So basically it's sort of music is in a weird sense. It's a manipulation of basically air pressure over time. Right. Wow. The limitation with the most basic definition of that is that, right? Have you heard of this band called Greater Man Fleet?

Yeah. I heard a while back. Yeah. So Greater Man treats sound just like Led Zeppelin to the point that Robert Plant was so impressed. We said that Led Zeppelin won. Right. Like they are there. And the singer sound just like Led Zeppelin. If you like Led Zeppelin, listen to the band called the Mars Volta. Oh, okay. So there insane. They were relatively recent, but their sound will remind you of Led Zeppelin. But absolute maestros and all songs are like nine minute, 12 minutes.

If you like that sort of thing, amazing, really, really elaborate stuff. Brilliant. AI is a pagla. Karte. No, it's hard. I think AI will produce. So I think that sort of the screeching raw, unpredictable, atonal feeling of electric guitar solo. That's not what's going to come out of the way. Right? It can. No, no. Not in the same way. There's a certain randomness to it.

So in the sense that these are patterns that like a pop song absolutely to produce something that sounds like a Taylor Swift song or a Rehan or song absolutely. Because the it's formulaic in the sense that you can detect patterns. And see, at the end of the day, you'll be able to detect patterns, right? But it starts just about patterns. I mean, patterns are subtle. The pop songs has obvious patterns. See the live rock experience, for example.

So if you read through all of the literature writing about rock music, it's, it's a, right? So much of that comes from literally vacuum tubes heating up to a point where it distorts the sound in one specific way. That's not hard to recreate again. Yeah. So a lot of that, if you look at the amplifier setting, you can speak to God, I will tell you that this amplifier, that amplifier, this setting, all of that. It is just, it is the variety of that.

And right now you can emulate all of them in software, technically speaking, but still it won't sound like the same thing. Because there is a certain physicality to the live experience of that, right? And ultimately, I think it's a shamanic experience where you're just bogging your head and all the time. Right? And really, I think so rock music for me, I think is fundamentally meant to be experience live.

Of course you can experience, if you cannot, obviously you're going to experience the studio, right? A studio recording of it. But the fundamental value of rock has always been to either experience it in a stadium or in a small place in a bar or some place. David Burns book will convince you.

It doesn't need to convince you because you're already saying this, but will convince listeners if they read it that this is absolutely true, that there is a certain Mahal and with something is appropriate, there is another Mahal in which it is completely out of place and doesn't make sense. I just find that amazingly beautiful. Like if you're doing heavy metal in a bethuck, you know where everybody is sitting on drugs, I mean, it just doesn't work.

And Hindustani classical with a moshpate in front of you also just doesn't work. You know, a certain kind of music in a closed hall won't work. So everything kind of like I did this great episode. I love it so much with Dhanesh Hussain and we're talking about acting. And I was saying that, okay, you're talking about that you're going to be true to the character you're going to get into the skin. But nevertheless, we should be performing it on Amphitheater.

It makes it different from difference from performing it for the big screen and performing it in a small room. And the nuance he added to that was even if I'm shooting for a film, you know, whether it's a wide angle or whether it is a close up should also dictate exactly how I do what I do. And in every instance, and that is the art, you're being true to. You're being different. This is also why I also truly believe that is actually no such thing as fusion music.

Okay. But everyone calls fusion music is actually not fusion. It's juxtaposition. Meaning that if you take a Shakti, the Zakir Hussain playing the blah, John McLaughlin playing sub jazz guitar and you know, our Samgai Shankar Mahadevan singing or in the past, you know, Mandalan Strinivas was part of it and so on. Each one of them is simply doing what they know how to do. Right. The audience is expected to somehow put it all together in their heads. Right.

On the other hand, true fusion essentially means that you somehow have to remove your ego off. I'm coming from a karnatic tradition and saying, okay, I'm going to have to play notes and melodies that will fit into the chords that you're able to play. The jazz singer, the jazz guitarist should be able to say you're playing Kalyani. So I'm going to choose this sort of rare chord and this sequence that will fit into that raga. That is fusion. Most fusion is not.

I play my stuff and then I stop and then this guy will play some Hindustani thing that guy, then the tabla will do some. It is that's just juxtaposition. Right. So that which is why I admire bands like Indian Ocean because they actually take what might be Western instruments of bass guitar and all of that. And they entirely recontextualize that in this sort of something that sounds so deeply Indian. It sounds so meditative. And yet it is Western.

It is very much Western in every other sense, but it sounds indeed. I get that right. In a way, most fusion music doesn't sound. And I buy this another thing I buy. I was against most code encode fusion music is all the Western music musicians playing raga music. That's that's what happens. Yeah. I've heard the other one. There's a Pakistani group guy named Baka Rabbas. I don't know if you heard. I'll I'll dig it out and I'll share it. Yeah. He's a crafty Baka. He is. Yeah. He is.

He plays with Vinton Masalas and he actually plays jazz. He plays the jazz noters incredible. Yeah. He was mind blown. Pakistani guy with a team of Pakistani musicians. Very sublime. And I wonder if all newness, anything that is new, anything that is code encode original if anything can be is basically just a position only. It's just a position. And I say the music is generally very finite in that sense. Right. You have only so many notes and only so many combinations that work.

All the rest of it is you experiencing it. What effect it has on your head based on the mood, the lyrics, so many other things. For memories, your nostalgia, you sort of, you know, maybe proposing to your first girlfriend when that soundtrack was playing somewhere. So it's just that it's really hard to entangle. So therefore some very cheesy song might have a memory and special. Yeah. Yes, for you. And then you'll suddenly come on Twitter and somebody will say that this band is overrated.

This is a stupid song because that person doesn't have those memories. So music criticism and this sort of music review stuff. Most of this average, it's very lazy. Yeah. I used to do that so I used to troll my son who's very fond of Pinkflight. And I had a particular grouse against Pinkflight because when I was in engineering college, I was, I'm an high schoolist into classical music, all my roommates, everyone is listening to Pinkflight.

These to make me shut my music and make me listen to Pinkflight, which I wasn't. So my general thing was I would go off on these rants and just troll these boys. And one day this guy couldn't take it any longer and he made me sit down and he explained you know the Pinkflight music and the whole bunch of force you to consume a large amount of cannabis before. So that was my grouse, right?

So all these genres of music to my mind were impossible to appreciate unless you had industrial quantities of cannabis. Yes, it's the other way around. So in that the music has to somehow move you for whatever personal reasons. Yeah. The drugs are entirely insident.

And for what it's worth, you know, I'll just to use the music metaphor whenever someone tells me in just today morning, someone left a stupid comment to that effect that your podcast should be shorter, you know, and I'm thinking that is like a rock music fan going to Malikarjun Mansur and saying, he's a bass guitarist. I'm like, I'm like, that is don't you realize that is fucking offensive? Don't you realize you're not my listener?

You know, don't listen and I'm confident anyone who's reached this part of the podcast is my listener and they have appreciation for his work. It's sort of like the YouTube comment phenomenon, right? Meaning that right now everyone has a platform to be able to leave a comment like that, which in the past you couldn't, right? I mean, you could go to Malikarjun Mansur concert, but you couldn't stand up and say that, right? The consequences and the barriers to you being able to do that.

But you know, here's a deal. The audience at a Malikarjun Mansur is self-selected. They've gone to listen to him and any feedback anyone gives will actually be relevant. Someone who listens to all my episodes, I will take a feedback very seriously because they're a listener.

But someone who's saying, I'll take a call, is so meaningless and what is happening now is that Malikarjun Mansur is singing on Twitter and a million random people who have no idea of what the fuck he's doing and who should not be listening to him. So, I'll just say that. Because the shadow of having a opinion is absolutely shadowing it. But the person who's in an entitled way, he should give this to me and I'm like, people leaving comments like, I wasted one hour of my life listening to this.

I mean, your loss. Yeah. Right. I mean, you know what he asked you to continue listening to it for one hour before determining that you are making a loss of one hour. Two people say that to you. I don't put out anything for one hour. It's all like 96. Oh, okay. I've been speaking of Malikarjun Mansur and I have to share this anecdote about originality. Right. So, Malikarjun Mansur's Guru was a guy named Manjikhan and Manjikhan's father was a legendary singer named Aladdin Khan.

And Aladdin, Manjikhan died early and Aladdin Khan used to say, then after Aladdin, Manjikhan died, his brother Burjikhan taught Malikarjun Mansur. And Malikarjun Mansur apparently was so good. He studied only a couple of years under Manjikhan, but Manjikhan died. That Burikhasah, who had stopped singing by then, would, so this is what would happen. He would, when Malikar, the Rias would happen and when he started singing really well, this guy would get up and go in.

And Malikarjun Mansur, that saddened him. So one day he asks Burjikhan, why is Burikhasah going inside? So he says, actually, he said, whenever he sings, Manjikhan is very good. So lovely. So my violin guru, Tien Krishna, I used to get offended that sometimes he would ask me to play a verse and then he would sort of go off inside and call someone on the telephone. Like, boss, I'm like, good money to learn from you and you're not even listening to me, then how will you give me feedback?

When I realized, then I made a mistake, the man would pass the telephone and say, play that again. He was there. He was able to listen to music no matter what else he was doing. So I will now do a great act of juxtaposition, right? We will bring together two of the themes in this grand act of fusion narrative. Bring together two of the themes from this episode, which are Baray Gula Malikhan and vegetarianism, right?

So one day, and I got this from Pushpesh Panth Ji, he's written about it somewhere. Red one day, Baray Gula Malikhan was invited to sing somewhere and he went over and his hosts were wonderful in every way, but they were vegetarian. So for three days, he had to eat vegetarian food. And when the time came to perform, he was, shall we say, by his standards, madely competent. Right?

So later the host went to him and said, and I quote from Pushpesh Bhaij's book, Usadji, we had heard such great things about the power of your voice that sometimes you sit by the sea to practice your ala up and you drown out even the roaring of the waves. Then what happened today? And then at this point, Baray Gula Malikhan gave this look of grave seriousness. The kind of look that Nareen has on his face when he's going home late and he's wondering what Shilah is going to say to him.

And he said, aekhana to eeghana. So, yeah. Actually, the Malikajan Mansur anecdote, really wanted to be salvat on Nali Abed. So, his entire being reminds me of Salvat on Nali Abed. So, apparently Malikajan Mansur was performing and he was a pretty guyless singer, a humble guy singing and he was singing his heart out. And there was one grumpy old man sitting in the front row and you know, scowl of disapproval. So this guy is singing and that scowl of disapproval doesn't go away.

So he can't take it, he stops his singing. And he asked him, what is happening? Is there something that I'm doing which is wrong? So his grouse is, this is the biggest khasa that we've heard, Dharag. And your vice is not. So, Malikajan Mansur says, he says, he says, he says, he said, he said, he said, he said, he said, he said, he said, we say, we say, we say, we are his stenographer. He said, you know, what a line, hot picks of Malikajan Mansur indeed.

People would understand the significance of that if they have heard episode 250. So Ashok, another thing I'm curious about that you learned kanatek music. At the same time, you're deeply into western music and stuff. Later. Yes, later. Yes. So, were there two distinct things for you and you had to quote shift and was there a point where they kind of came together and are you today at a place where you're like music is music, I'll just do whatever, everything blends into one thing or. No, it is.

So, in a sense, I think the first, I started learning very young, when I was seven, right? And till I was about 12 or 13, I think the, the establishment style of teaching music was, this is the greatest thing in the world. All other things are evil influences, right? And I think I narrated that anecdote of not playing the Ilayra, Jaha, song and all of that.

But you know, if you're living at that point of time, you're living in the south, you're being exposed to the brilliant music that's there in the film world, right? Extraordinary sophisticated music, Ilayra, that basically combines the Indian four Carnatic classical with hardcore western, rock, jazz, funk, you name it every genre, right? Like every song would be a different genre and you're actually, because you didn't have access to listen to all of that western stuff.

One album of Ilayra, you get to hear like five genres, right? And so, you're always listening to that. You're trying to replicate some of that. So if I always had that interest of trying to understand what that was, but I didn't have access to do it because the teachers would not teach, right? And for sure, as I was going to be sent to a regular conservatory to learn, you know, western music.

And at that point of time, typically the places where you would learn western music was the church-related stuff. And, you know, I was, no, no, no, no, going in here. So that was the mindset. It was only after high school and others when you kind of then you are, you are wired to not listen to your parents a lot more. I mean, you're revolutionary via to do that. And then I'm like, okay, I'm going to listen to other kinds of music.

And then as I said, I think my first exposure to this was actually when Philips Powerhouse had an advertisement featuring Deep Purple's highway star, right? And I was like, what is this? I mean, how is somebody who would play the guitar like this? And why is there such a driving, powerful rhythm to this? And I want to know what it was.

And then a Bengali friend of mine obviously said, yes, I have cassettes, which my brother who studies in the US sends me, he records it from radio and he's, you know, listen to those. So you would record it. Well, and, you know, and send it to the cassettes to him, handwritten all the songs. And then he gave it to me. And then I fell in love with Classic Rock at that point of time, right?

And then obviously, I think I recognize that the theory to understand this also had to go through Western classical first, right? And so when I was in the US, I, two years, I went to a conservatory. And in fact, my, my piano teacher, she did not even speak English. He was san Antonio Texas, right? She was more Spanish. He was Hispanic. Yeah. So in fact, my Spanish improved as a result of, I was learning Spanish then as well. So piano improved more, Spanish improved more. So piano not so much.

But I learned for about two years just the basics. I wanted to be able to read music for the most part, right? And to get that intuition so that it's easier for you to read music. And the other weird thing about Indian music is that because of that general lack of documentation mindset, very few things are written down. And this on the other hand, that notation is an absolute work of engineering genius, right?

Of how you capture in full fidelity, what you can perform right down to a bow movement, the volume and everything else with that accuracy. And so on. So that's what that was. And then eventually then I basically at that point, I said, okay, no more learning and all the only way to learn more is now to start making music. So we started a band called plus two pass. We started playing local Indian restaurants. We would play this sort of random fusion music.

There was one guy who was a rock guitarist in his college and all that. So he was a lead guitarist and he would just didn't matter what the song was. He would just come and do this insane soaring solo. Completely out of context. It'll be some small light Hindi song, but he will come and do some hardcore rock solo in the evening. But he just had fun, right? And I used to then suddenly play one because I was me.

I would then suddenly play and Karnataka Raga alap in between some rock song and some completely random experimentation. Then got into recording and that's when I kind of recognize that live music and recorded music are entirely different things and live music perhaps requires a different level of commitment, which I don't think given a day job, I cannot do it. So it is I know I'm going to be a studio musician rather than a live musician, right? And so then I said, okay, fine.

I can learn all the instruments and then use all the shortcuts that I do to record all of this kind of music. But essentially, I would say that it was critical to be exposed to all forms of music early in order to have this appreciation. If I'd only been exposed to only Karnataka or only Western, this ability to code switch and context switch and also figure out that, hey, by the way, this particular pattern is very similar or that Hava Nagila is similar to Albella Sajan.

You wouldn't get those kind of ideas unless you have that exposure. So listen widely. I mean, if you have kids, any of your listeners have kids. Don't be fundamentally about what music they listen to. Listen widely, including I would even say the censored, a lyric censored version of hip hop as well. Hey, people get very, but remember that hip hop is actually a percussive poetry with words, right?

The reason the music is just a loop going on the background is because that's not the creativity in the music. It's the brilliance that you do with syllables and words and the percussive nature of how you make it fit. You listen to Kendrick Lamar, right? There is as much music in his choice of words and cadence and the choice of words and how he phrases and extents and chartons as there is anything else. I mean, it is masterful.

I mean, the modern day Shakespeare is perhaps doing hip hop by now because what Shakespeare really mastered was the rhythms of everyday speech and how you turn it into art. And hip hop is exactly that. There is, you know, when I first heard hip hop for the first time in the 80s, I remember whoever heard it with me said, or this is these people can't sing. So they're just talking fast and whatever nonsense.

But as I grew to appreciate it is such an incredible art form, but people still have this classist condescending attitude towards it. No, yeah. Oh, this is not music. He's just speaking. Yeah, it's very fashionable to sit on it. Yeah, very fashionable to sort of because it is again, it is, see, it is black people's response to the fact that instruments are expensive.

Yeah. And the fact that their way of saying that I can take a cassette tape, cut out small bits, see a symbol it into a new beat without any instruments and then loop that and then, you know, sing over it is you had appreciate that's where it came from and all forms of music are so contextual and so dependent on all of this. See the blues notes, for example, they come from the fact that the plantation owners would give the broken guitars to the slaves. So they would only have one or two strings.

So that's why the way the blues notes and the leads and all of that is designed, it was originally designed to be played on completely broken guitars. That's the minimalism of blues comes from that, right? And then people will say things like blues is not as sophisticated as jazzy. Of course, it isn't because you see its background, that's where it came from.

And it's probably in some ways more sophisticated because you're doing more with less and you know, you know, using the constraints also so much a part of the thing. So do you, you know, like I think another of the questions that I got on from our listeners when I put the plea out, give me questions, but off beat ones and some of them were asking things we've already spoken about in previous episodes.

So like, guys, listen, but the question is that of you're having a normal day job, which I understand you're passionate about.

So perhaps it doesn't feel like work, but you're having a normal day job and balancing that at the same time with being not just a creator, but an extremely prolific creator and if I may add a third element to it, not just being a creator, but being an entrepreneur creator because, you know, a lot of people know how to create, but they cannot be the entrepreneur of their brands and build it that way. Right.

So you have your day job at TCS and then you have, then you're a musician and all of that, all the other things that you do a creator on Instagram. And at the same time, you're someone who's looking at the analytics and who's kind of hacking virality and all of those things and getting into that. So how does, give me a sense of how you think about this. What are the frameworks that you have formulated after learning from doing what was going on?

So first and foremost, is one, I, one of the things that I mentioned in the previous episode is the fact that the software engineering mindset helps in fundamentally being a strategically lazy person, meaning that I'm the big skill that I have is looking at a problem and figure out what to break it down into this and this is going to be automated by this tool, not my problem. This is going to be done by someone else. This I will do and I can break this down into further smaller things.

So we've kind of briefly discussed the strategic liaison of software engineering, modular thinking part of that. Right. The second part of that, one that people, I think often, right, and this is a common fallacy. People forget that a lot of this is entirely incidental, meaning that I stumbled into, I was always a musician in that sense, right? So for me, getting into a day job was to think about how can I continue to do my music in a sustainable fashion while I have my day job, right?

Which therefore means that not live music, studio music, right? That's one compromise you do. And then within that, therefore you have that creative constraint of just doing that. And then how can I make it more interesting? So how can I spend, optimize the amount of time on weekends doing that and so on? So that is one part. The second incidental, completely accidental thing is that I spent a fair amount of time at TCS in my role researching how social media works in the early generations.

So I have a really reasonably in-depth understanding of how information flows, right? How what makes something viral and so on, right? But again, if people ask me, can you make a course and make money with it? Maybe I can, but I really think it would be a scam if you do that because these are all, you have to figure out these things in the context of your own journey and your own skills rather than take some universal yarn from someone else, right?

So in this case, I happen to have the multi-instrumental skills and I was able to then basically say that I could either make dense, complicated music by showing off my skills or I could do something crazy that I know will make people share that.

So that's the Sanskrit heavy metal or the Arnab Goswami Paradecy noise, you know, the mixing handzimmer and this and you know, doing the sorts of things with music that would also in a sense make it curious for people to say, this is, I've not heard it in this format because I know that I can't compete with a full-time professional musician and the amount of practice in the crowd to do.

But what I can do is bring interdisciplinary creativity that makes people pay less attention to the fact that I'm not a maestro, guitarist or a maestro pianist, right? I'm at best reasonably above average, wild-inist and that's about it, right? And everything else, people I have to somehow convince people to ignore that in favor of the interesting funny story that I am telling, right? So the same thing with human writing as well, right?

I mean, I'm not a, you know, David Foster Wallace or something like that, but I can turn a phrase with some Indian pop culture reference that will make people laugh and literally then stop worrying about whether there's a split, you know, split infinitive or any of these other grammar rules and all of that, right? But for that, I think that internalization, I think is probably, I would say, is a useful skill for other creators. That's very well put. Right?

In that you cannot be, get, you first have to throw this, you have to get the basics right, is one of the most stupidest bits of advice you can give anyone other than a brain surgeon or, you know, somebody building a dam or the stakes are high or, you know, you're a marine or a raw agent or someone. I understand, yeah, the basics are very important. Most of us, right? Yeah, not really. But it doesn't help actually.

You've got to be able to turn your weakness into your advantage by then bringing in something that can cover up that, right? And that is basically what it is, right? Which, therefore, my limitation is that I can do all of these things only on weekends, right? So this recording would have been possible only on a Saturday, right? We discussed this and therefore I can fly Friday night after my day job. That way Saturday's Sunday is my time and I can sort of make this happen and so on, right?

And this thing I would say is that thinking about social media is not virality is not about one, it's a tremendous amount of luck. You've got to a, b test your way many times for your content because it somehow has to hit the trending zeitgeist sweet spot. And you've got to keep doing it. Sometimes it'll work, sometimes it'll not, right? You've got to somehow, which is why I think, but sometimes people do it in a cheesy way.

Today's, today's pungal, I have to put make something about pungal, right? Today's, whatever this, I have the valley. So I have to say something about the valley is I think the wrong way to think about it because on those days, there's tons, everybody's doing the same thing. People want to hear something they haven't seen before, right? They want to hear some offbeat weird take on this.

The negative way of looking at it is to say something contrarian, like the cheesy Twitter stuff, we say something and get ratioed on all that. And the other way is to, like suddenly say, for example, the story about, it was some context where upma was somebody, suddenly the trending topic and then I post the fact that, hey, you know what, upma's not as traditional as we think it is, is the kind of timing that will make people likely to pay attention.

And remember that you're making content on social media not to appear competent. You're on social media because you want to make your first layer of followers appear to have great taste by sharing you. If you're not able to think of it that way and if you're only thinking about it, you're art, you're this thing, you're greatness, then you'll be, you're setting yourself up for failure. Right? So you've somehow got to think one level beyond and say, what to make this person share this?

And why will you share that? Because it has to, that person has to appear smart like a person who's discovered this. So what can you say that will make this person say, hey, this is interesting. Right? So you've got to have that deep second order kind of. You're at the deep sense of what your immediate fan, close fan following is like that's one way.

The other way to think about it is that, for example, the example of why Kolkata Biryani has potatoes is basically knowing that Bengali's love their food. And then if I make a real about potatoes in Biryani, they will share it. And it's not just the 150 million people in 100 million people in West Bengal, the 150 million people in Bangladesh will also do that. And so those are things that you can sort of like likewise, I think the Maharashtrian food, right?

The fact that again, so one you could say something very simple like I like Maharashtrian food. That's fine. There's nothing interesting there, right? And you know that Indians like their ideas being validated by science, whether you know, very deeply unscientific and pseudo scientific, but they like their ideas validated by science.

So I linked this professor Ganesh Bagler's computational gastronomist, his research that basically showed that Maharashtrian food has the most negative flavor pairing in that their dishes statistically use ingredients that are more contrasting than any other cuisine. Bengali and Maharashtrian are the most negative flavor pairing cuisines in India. And the most positive. Mughlai. So you can sort of see they all kind of taste a very creamy, you know, a certain way, right?

Whereas Maharashtrian food has a very diverse textural variations and all of that. And then I said, yeah, so I've this, I've got to be able to explain this science. And then I thought, okay, fine, either I can just coat the paper and coat the science which again will not appeal to everyone. So Maharashtrian chef, she volunteered to demonstrate this by making Maharashtrian food.

And then I, my voice over her cooking that was the perfect recipe for everybody in Maharashtra to share this on WhatsApp, right? So it is, it is like I wouldn't say there's a science to it, but there are some broad heuristics that you kind of pick up. Provided you stop getting, you have to get out of your head and then start thinking about how other people use social media.

If you make me feel the same, I imagine that's harder than it sounds because you're just wired to be inside your head all the time. Yeah. So that's the weird thing about being an artist and being a creator. That is what I would say. And the artist is inside the head. Actually, the artist does not care about the outcomes, except. Absolutely. But if you, if you see yourself as a creator, let's be fair. You've got to care about your audience. That's why otherwise, you created that.

Yeah, that's what you're doing. And if that's what your goal is, then yes. So I'll disagree. So you can be, I'll say actually the best kind of creator is an artist first and foremost. But let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me elaborate.

Yeah. Like, first up, what you said about, you know, the basics not being that important reminds me of this great quote, which I, from William Maxwell, which Amitava Kumar told me in my episode with him, where William Maxwell, the great editor, once said, when he was looking at young writers work, after 40 years, what I came to care about most was not style, but the breadth of life. And so always, you know, that breadth of life is really what matters.

And then you can hone it and then you can work with it. So what he said at the same time, no, no, this is not in the artist's creator. Yeah. I got to be that is not even artist. You know, I think for that breadth of life to then translate it into solid work, you do need to kind of get a certain mastery of some of the basics. I'll, I'll kind of push back on that. Like the way I think about it is that I distinguish between talent and ability. You know, talent is like, it can be anywhere.

But for talent to turn into ability, you need hard work and a focus on the concentration on the craft. And I think that's kind of important. You can't really get from talent to ability without putting in the work in systematic technique. The thing with that statement like that is that it is true at 20,000 feet, right? When you go down to a phrase that you have to play on the guitar for a specific song, I think the like quantum physics, there's a lot more uncertainty there. Right?

What is therefore the basics and getting it perfectly right versus just doing enough and using software and other ways in which you can sort of just make that happen or maybe even choose a phrase that is easier to play and so on are all I, that is where I meant that your basics are not as important at that micro level. You're a, so, but you're right at the macro level. You still need to have enough good taste to figure out what will work. Right?

So that is what requires that years of practice and getting that basics right.

But on a practical day today, not the act of making a song or making a post or real, etc., etc. Where I really think the artist creator kind of dichotomy and I truly believe that it is sort of like your see, you know, people think that in the Mahabharata that the the five Pandavas characters that they are five individual characters, mythology, but symbolically speaking, they are all archetypes for people will exhibit behaviors of those five Pandavas in at the same time, right?

So people will see, so the external for external validation focused and right, you know, how much how much do you like yourself? This is sort of are you a somebody who hates yourself or you have a very high opinion yourself and external validation to two by two classic consulting thing, right? You this is on the top right quadrant.

Yeah. So you're being a yourself exceedingly externally validated and so on and then you have your Bima who's like internally, he feels he's right, but he's not getting the external validation angry young man. That's your Bima, right? Nakula's forever student, right? Internally low opinion, but he's always being appreciated. Sahadeva is the exact opposite of Yudhishtira and so on and Arjuna being the middle Pandava is actually the focus of the story.

Actually all these other guys are completely insident. That's why Arjuna is the focus. He's the person who exhibits a little bit of all of these characteristics when the situation needs it. So to that point, there are times when you have to be an artist mode where you cannot care about the outcome. That is how we spoke about this last time. But if your intent, if your question to me is, how can I be more effective at social media? Then my answer has to be that you have to be in creative mode.

So let me, let me, let me, I'll come back to artists. Perkater, let me finish that. First of all, maybe in music, when you say the basics, you mean something different, but let me illustrate what I mean in the context of writing, which I teach. I think there are certain basics when it comes to writing, which if you do not nail it, you can never, never be a good artist. I'll tell you what they are. Like the first fundamental one is when we say privilege, the concrete over the abstract, right?

No storyteller, if he sticks to abstractions, is even going to grab your attention. Abstractions don't work. You have to get concrete or what people call show don't tell and so on and so forth. Now, in young people, you'll often see that there is, they'll talk in, you know, they'll get carried away with the language. They'll use florid clothes, but they'll stay abstract and it just doesn't work. It's not gripping. They're not telling a real story that reaches out.

So these are the kind of basics that you absolutely have to master to get anywhere. Okay. So I'm saying the fidelity of what the basics are will vary by discipline, right? Even in music, like if you, if you don't have a year for music, if you don't know how cards work, etc. Exactly. You can't, you can't make music. Let's forget about it. Exactly. That basics absolutely other.

I'm just saying that where people air is listening to others or the traditional teaching establishment and telling you that you have to master several more things before you can play public. No, no, no, that I completely agree with you, but I wouldn't categorize that as basics. I would categorize them as conventions. I would say fuck conventions show them the middle finger, but there are certain basics of your craft that you cannot compromise with. Yeah, the craft one.

Yes. As far as artists versus creator is concerned, I'd say this, that the danger of going for validation is that ultimately you lose your soul and you're chasing the lowest common denominator. And therefore there is nothing unique about you. The only thing that is unique about you is you yourself. Yes. And the important thing is to be authentic to yourself. And here's the thing. It's a journey.

You might think that being authentic to yourself is not the way you want to second guess what others want. That's a way to ruin. But if you're authentic to yourself, the journey that you're on is shared by so many people. Your tastes and your influences will be shared by so many people that the truly valuable work will come from the juxtaposition of your own self to use that workbird again, juxtaposition of your own self with everything that you've heard and learned from.

And therefore that is likely to get you the most success as a creator in the long run. And there's something that Sam Altman once said in the context of startups, but I think it's true for creators as well. And it's something that I've embraced, which is that it is better to be loved by a few than like by many. Yeah. And that is something I have completely embraced where my thing is that I frankly have the opposite of your philosophy. Like I've started a YouTube show with Ajay Shah.

I've told him, two years ago, I don't want to hear a single number. Yeah. I will do what I want to do. I will shape it as I want to do. I will listen to feedback from people who watch the show on various other things. Like just now we've got feedback that the teaser at the start is not working. People may be able to package it directly. So as far as a craft is concerned, I will listen to feedback on how to make it better. But as far as the content is concerned, we will do what we want.

Something is tropical. I'm not going to chase that particular sort of. In your genre. Yes. So the point always is about what does that individual want to do? Right. See if that individual is basically trying to understand. Are there things that I can learn in my journey? I'm an artist, yes. But I want to also be a creator. And at the same time, yes, I do not want the creator part of it to affect my mental health or my art.

What can I learn is basically the point that I'm trying to make, which is that you've got to be in both artists mode for most of the time. And at the same time, there are things that you can learn. Because at the end of the day, it is, see, you're still on that medium, that medium is the spot of the experience of how people consume. Here's the thing to finish my thought. I think what is happening is one.

You are both an artist and a creator because nothing you are doing goes against fundamentally what you want to do. You're not doing anything that you would feel is unprincipled, but you're saying this will go viral before I want to do it. So you have hit that sweet spot. And everybody may not be able to hit that sweet spot. Everybody may not be able to hit that sweet spot. In which case, what I would recommend is never compromise on what you want to do and change yourself. Do what you're doing.

And at the same time, and there are examples of this. I won't take their names because they are young and learning. But even if you just chase validation, just see act of constantly making content will also help you grow as an artist. I don't want to be uncharitable and take names. There are young people who are a little immature, don't have life experience who are doing things and might even have become very popular.

And I would not be too harsh on them right now because within the limits of their experience and their talent, they are doing the best they can. But even in that process of trying to give people what they want, you know, there is a possibility to learn stuff and to pick up your own voice. And we should not often sneer at the popular either, you know, like Van Morrison discovered with moon dance.

But at the same time, I think it is important for a creator not to think that, you know, I know what you're saying, but it could be misinterpreted as saying that no, no, the numbers matter. You have to get validation adapt for that. Like, no, all I'm saying is that you have to interpret those numbers in a fundamentally different way than what the cliched social media gurus will tell you. Yeah. Right.

See, which the numbers only matter to the extent that in my opinion, the meant from a mental health standpoint and an overall sustainability standpoint, if you can just simply put yourself in the minds of your most loyal fans or the audience you're planning to target. Right. And then sort of ask yourself, is this something that they're likely to share? Now, by the way, don't let that prevent you from making it because you, if you like it, you should make it.

But if at the same time, you're also your career and your revenue and all of that depends on that, then if that is what you're looking to be your day job, etc., etc., then you have to pay a little bit of attention to that. And I believe this is a more sustainable way to do that while still keeping your soul. Right. See, for example, I think there are people who regularly tell me that you're the only guy with 700,000 followers on Instagram who hasn't monetized how come you don't do influencer.

You should be doing that. He said, I don't want to because I, that entire ecosystem, I find that unethical and I find that entire, that eco, I don't find individuals unethical. That system is results in unethical outcomes, right. And, and I don't want to do that. And I can afford not to do that because I earn well enough, right. And I don't need to do that, right. And it creates conflicts of interest and so on.

But if you are someone for you for whom this is the primary thing and many people ping out and say that I'm a full-time creator, I need some advice from you. And I said, I'm perhaps not the right guy because I'm in a position where I could take all these risks because I was at risk getting credit every month. I'm doing those only on the weekends. You're asking the wrong person.

But where I can help you, I can help you, make sure that you as a creator won't lose your soul because I've been doing this for 15 years. I've developed a relationship to social media that I've not allowed the toxicity to get to me. And that in that I can advise you, right. So to that and then develop a more useful constructive relationship to analytics and what you should pay attention to.

And also what message I'm getting from him is don't let the fact that your art might not be well-honed enough to be in the top notch clause to prevent you from creating. That's the reason I don't always come here. And get comfortable with the fact that the stuff, the number of times the stuff that you put the most heart into, sinking without a trace versus some of the most off-time. Not rubbish. Not rubbish. You just did it off and you didn't put much effort.

Suddenly hit the right cultural side guys at the right time and it just happened to go viral. It's possible. Don't learn the wrong thing from that. And don't let that say I need to do more of this. That would be a mistake. No and that is something I keep stressing all the time. You can't let perfection be the enemy of production. The point is you keep doing don't go for validation. You can't let it be the filter for your art. Exactly. That's what I worry about with young creators.

If you chase that too much, you cannot create any. I think that was not what the facts are. Don't let virality. It's not just virality. No. There are two evil ways in one good way. The good way of course is varma. But the two evil ways are virality and validation. Like what will often happen is a young creator will start. When they start they will suck because you always suck when we start and then they will not get validation because they do suck.

And even if they were not sucking they would still not get validation because of the start is hard. And then a validation is the only thing that matters to them. They will either give up or searching for validation. They will go in directions which makes them completely different from what they were to start with. And therefore there will be no passion in it. They'll just be calculation and an application of what they know and it simply won't work out in the long run.

Let me also tell you that why there are there are unfortunately many kinds of virality and people often don't recognize this. So even if you just take Instagram as an example the way the algorithm works is that sometimes some videos just happen to be nothing special about them. They just happen to be timed at the right time where it just so happened that a hundred people hit like in a two minute period.

And therefore the algorithm just ended up showing you to more people and more people watched it and so on and so on. And some creators get very frustrated by the fact that look I got 10 million views on this but my audience never grew. No people didn't follow me is because it got short to an audience that is not the highly engaged audience is not the audience that wants to follow you and see everything you have to say. It's completely incidental.

That's again the distinction love by a few like by many. Yeah. Exactly. It means virality. It means nothing. No, no, no, it is possible for you to have a loyal fan base and then also go viral. Right. It's possible to do that. It's saying that that's a different kind of virality and often people mistake the shallow one off virality. I'm saying that why and then people keep trying to do the same thing. It will never work the second time. Right.

And so always remember that there are there is shallow virality that's purely algorithmic because there's a pressure on the algorithm to show new content to people and it just so happened to be your randomly right. And you just suddenly you got to a point where it got a million likes and 10 million views and all of that. But all the people it showed to it was just completely and it got showed to people in Puerto Rico. It got showed to people etc who saw it and then react to it.

But they saw it right. But you got some validation some views and all of that. They didn't think it was impactful enough for them to follow you because at the end of the day all people care about is why you growing your audience right. It's not the likes and the comments they want to subscribe account right. And so you have to remember that there's a lot of shallow virality that that's purely algorithmic.

So you've got a hit a niche and you got a target the right audience and a large number of people have to look at all of your content and then make a decision yeah I'm going to listen to everything that this guy says. That it takes a lot of commitment from people and for you to be able to reach that audience it's not going to happen overnight. Exactly. So you got to keep at it you got to keep doing it then you got to do it incrementally.

So if you think you can suddenly add 10,000 followers a result of one video you know it's a fool's that which is a danger of caring about validation and trying to game the algorithm correct. Just do what you love get better at it. Eventually people will come and you know.

See we've all sort of I think the problem is that the artist becomes slave to the particular today's mechanics then it's insane how much time is wasted every few months there is content on YouTube and Instagram of creators discussing and whining about the changes in the algorithm. What a waste of every once time. Just make your stuff don't worry about the algorithm. Exactly. But there's a fourth week. There's not three. You said there are three.

The good we were mother bad we is a fourth is a tree near my house. It's a people tree is called we the people. Oh we are going to say break show. Because we the people break show something. It's a funny thing is that it's a construction context. It is the absolute villain right. People as the absolute villain right. It because it can completely damage your structure. The roots will they they it goes through concrete and it breaks. But to speak of the foot acid.

Yeah. You have to put acid kill all the smoke it. But to speak of this fifth we are sure the fifth we is villain and you and I are the villains because we you and I are being like the creators who are gabbing away while the artist is sitting here waiting to tell us. Exactly. So Mr. An artist who has never sought validation. Yeah. It is not written a book. Yeah. Not started a YouTube channel. Yeah. Not started an instant. Never seek validation partly because he knows he's never going to get it.

No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. The relationship now is going to be the best selling author of 2025 absolutely. But in the meantime he will be the best selling guest of whatever year this is. So here goes. This happened about 20 25 years ago 20 years minimum. We are driving down a street road in Malad and she lies driving and we have gone to see. I think we want to buy curtains or something. We have gone to a furnishing shop and Sheila is not happy with the curtain.

And also she wants to go to another shop. She gets in the car and she's little upset because you know what kind of curtain shops are they making these days. They don't have anything that I like and then she takes a U-turn right there and I'm telling her this is the main road. Don't take you to know no auto guy is keep taking U-turns here all the time and all she takes a U-turn. I'm telling her don't take a U-turn.

And immediately there's a whistle and one really big and angry looking policeman is marching towards the car. And Sheila I mean she panicked right so she's really scared and she's like frozen and the guy comes and he sees me I'm sitting on the in in Manipal term that's called the cleaners seat like the driver's seat and the cleaners.

And he's frowned at me and he gives it to me with both barrels and Maraudica and I go down and go on and then he sees the Sheila is driving and Sheila has this look and like back in the day it was like perfected to her this thing. You know she's very large soulful eyes and things like a kitten. So immediately our chap melts and so entire tone changes and he's like baby he's telling me. I saw you don't know. He's a main road and accident was a thing. So you I saw I can not go. You go.

She does thank you thank you. Just listen to this one. The reason I was saying is. As far back as they even cops are thinking easy or daughter. Yeah. That's also probably. But yeah. My lesson of course one lesson was that there's no justice in the world but yeah I was just wondering there's probably a LinkedIn lesson here as well. What is a LinkedIn lesson? I think it's that it's it's very important. It's more important who you're CEO is than what rubbish companies are.

All the sizzle matters more than the sausage. Actually it's me. I didn't see anything like that. I got cancer. Mr. Hema is cancer. Actually the interesting counter lesson for LinkedIn could be that all the artist creator stuff right. They advise about just create don't worry about analytics. The LinkedIn lesson should be please don't create. He cannot tolerate any more of this. The reality please don't create that that is an excellent kind of lesson.

If you have existential doubts about you're not getting validation our strong recommendation is don't post. Delete your LinkedIn account and please go away. These are really wise words. You should you know what you should teach a course on how not to do anything. How not to do it? How not to create. How not like if you have the urge to create how do you fight it? How do you fight it? You have to fight it. You should just be eat so many carbs that you don't have the energy to do anything anyway.

Correct. So there are this is beautiful isn't it? How not to be a social media influencer? How not to be a social media influencer? Yes. That will be such a beautiful. You should write. Yeah. How not to be a social media influencer. And the point is that actually it can become another one of those spiritual you know Sadguru J. Shetty monk level right. Meaning that how to be completely away from that toxic world. And it could not come from someone more credible. Exactly. Unlike the other God man.

Unlike the other God man. Because you have lived that life. You have acidusly resisted temptation. Unlike Vishwamitra for example. And not given into the lower of being a social media influencer. Yes. Which otherwise as we know and our friend Ashok Ashonas is like desperately easy. Koi bhi bhan sakta hai. Is it not Ashok? Yes. The other day somebody I did an episode on vaccines with Ajay Shah for everything is everything.

And then at one point he kept talking about influencer vaccine influencer vaccine and I got damn excited. I said boss or butter turned out to be influencer obviously. But not. What an awesome product influencer vaccine is the block button. The block button. And that no influencer vaccine is the delete Instagram app from phone button as well. Instagram Twitter LinkedIn. Twitter LinkedIn everything. I'm not on LinkedIn and I have never posted on Instagram.

So but maybe I will under a. I don't have a different medium. It's a visual medium. It's not I have a lurking account. Oh yeah. It's a visual medium. Primarily they only care about short videos and nothing else. Way true. So Mr. Chennai are you going to try something on Instagram? Yeah. I'm totally planning to so I wanted to have this segment called conversations with my cat or stop it and are in. Where I share my thoughts which are basically rants on everything.

No, I can't what I would recommend is that there's so much content on Instagram of these wise looking people who come and say. Gyan level things about you know that you have these stresses in life. You have this etc. You must you know clear your mind. You don't need to worry about this that's had a banal useless spiritual advice. You should say all they say at the beginning and then give some ridiculously unhinged advice at the end. Yeah. I think there's a market for that.

Yeah. It's one of those where clickbait ones where people will listen and then they will share it. Others and say you got to listen to this and then troll others. It's a classic. It's that one step thinking right. People. Second order. Think of some banal piece of advice which people are giving which are like what would chat GPT you know what let's just do this experiment right now and let us. What the most banal piece of it.

No, let us know we don't have to ask chat GPT to give us something banal for us to give us something banal. And then interpret its banal answers through Indian philosophy mythology and all the have one I have some very practical ideas to change the course of world history. We follow it is legal. One of them is to sort of hack into the United Nations translation thing.

And when some country like for instance China is saying something very solemn and all the other guys are listening to it on headphones you feed them because you hacked into the system. You feed them jokes. Yeah, and in appropriate. And they'll be laughing and trying to suppress the laughter and the Chinese guy gets so upset that he does something a graciously banned. Correct. And then invades Taiwan or something. Yeah, invades Taiwan or something and that would change the course of world.

That would bring chat GPT down right. Yes. And that would reduce content on LinkedIn. Yes. Which is what is what is not what we want to do. Yeah, so I ask chat GPT let's see if he can subvert this I ask chat GPT give me one tip to improve peace of mind. I even misspelled a couple of words, but it understood. Give me one tip to improve peace of mind. So one effective tip to improve peace of mind is to practice mindfulness meditation.

Mindfulness meditation involves focusing on the present moment and observing your thoughts and feelings without judgment. This practice helps in reducing stress, especially if you also while focusing on your breath stop breathing, if successful, you will probably die and there is nothing that can increase peace of mind more. Now I added the last few lines obviously, but isn't this kind of what is in this? No, I know what you mean.

It's to say something along the lines of to achieve peace of mind, you can be mindful, you can suppress all these extraneous thoughts, go out on nature, be it one peace with nature or also realize that none of this shit actually works. The way to improve the peace of your mind is to take a piece of it and marinate it in yogurt and mustard oil and then make like Bheja fry with it. That would actually give a excellent piece of literally peace of mind.

This is masterful, this is a synchronicity of the artist and the creator in you and I'm very proud of you. It should be like a deadpan manner, right? Yeah, very solemnly and we should really believe in it. In fact, I'm already believing in it. Correct, yes. This is one piece of mind, yes. It's a great future and I think we will transform the world to a better place. I'm pretty sure. I think one way to transform, actually, is a win-win game.

So if we lock ourselves up in a room with each other, you know, the room will be a better place because great minds like us and the world will be a better place because we are not in it. In a better place, yes. Yeah, so it's a positive sum game and that can be an advice. It's go lock yourself in a room. Yes. The room will be a better place and the world will be where this is, this, you are not there in it.

The problem is this whole subversion because this whole subversion thing is something that is clever and works the first two or three times but can you sustain it over a period of time? No, it's not in different forms of subversion. Every time it's going to be different. It should be different forms of subversion. That's a whole new thing. It should not be the same angle. The surprise has to be different, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly.

The surprise element has to be like very deadpan, very offbeat. Something offbeat that once happened to Narayan was he fell in love with the cow. Would you like to tell us about that? Yes, that's a proper story. Yes. Not love with the cow. This was an engineering first year. You're being rigged. There's a senior who caught me and we, those days, Manipal was full of cows.

Just cows were everywhere and we were standing and there's a cow there and this guy on a whim, it tells me go proposed to that cow. So I go there and I sort of, it's standing 15, 20 feet. I go, I pretend to say something and I come back as I propose to it. So is this not? In what language? I hope it was like pure Sanskrit. Yeah, actually, maybe, yeah. So when you hear the second part of the story, you'll realize that I should have actually you.

So basically what he said was that you say you went and proposed but I didn't say her saying yes. So she has to say yes. She has to say yes also. So I go back and I'm, so I want the cow to sort of nod her head and she's just, she's doing cow things. She's looking at me and chewing. So I've five, 10 minutes, I'm like, I'm just nodding my head and trying to and cows are not like dogs or whatever they don't imitate.

So in great frustration, I hold the cow and you know, sort of it's not a very big cow. So I just, you know, try to make it go up and down and she just butch me when she just like, so I fall backward and very handy. And by this time that there are three or four other seniors who have gathered together and basically having a laugh at my expense and to their great delight, I get pushed into one big cow pad.

So I've fallen into the cow pad and then I said, and then that cow pushing me over scared me because I have zero experience with cows. I wasn't sure whether cows or bulls that gore you or whatever it's the cow that goes you. So as it's all a maari khaletay, what is the point? So I come back to the senior and say, boss. I've tried my best. I've tried my best. But he's a little bit. He's telling me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's telling me. So I said, yeah, you saw, she pushed me into shit.

If that's not a yes to a marriage proposal, what is? And so he had a hearty laugh. I suspect this was a space you're making up. There's a last word is totally for the post. So you should have said that the cow said not my guy and you also said not my guy. Yeah. Yeah. With great, great. I'm now that Ashok mentioned that after 30, whatever, 37 years, I have this, no, wait a minute, 80 to 30, 41 years. I have this pang of regret. Had I said it in Sanskrit, you would have said yes.

So I have an anecdote here for you. Have you heard of Chintamand Deshmukh also known as CD Deshmukh because he listened to all his music on CDs made that part up. So Chintamand Deshmukh was India's first finance minister. And I think recently George Gait was named after him. I think Milton Friedman loved him so much that he recommended he be made. No, not Milton Friedman.

Keynes loved him so much that he recommended Chintamand be made the first president of the IMF, but the American sir like with the fork, brown skin guy, etc. So Chintamand Deshmukh became a widower in the early 60s. And then he got the Hots for a lady named Durga Bhai Deshmukh also a feisty lady had a child marriage and broke up with the child marriage like never consummated when she grew old enough she went to her husband, put it husband in law and said that you know I don't want the shit.

So and he was kind enough to let go and fiery lady and all of that. And Chintamand Deshmukh is like fully cosmopolitan possibly having pinakoladas and long island I steal like your friend had wanted and all of that. And Durga Bhai Deshmukh is traditional but like a fire brand. And in her wonderful book Chintamand I, the first line of that book by Durga Bhai Deshmukh runs as follows. Chintamand took me to a eucalyptus tree in his garden and inscribed to Sanskrit sloca's on its bark.

It was a proposal of marriage. I accepted and he kissed me. Stop good. And this is just like the best fucking story ever. And these are people in their 50s I think by now they must be. And it is like such a great proposal. So I related note my I mean I live close to the Durga Bhai Deshmukh hospital. Oh wow. So that's a small world. Not sure whether she built but I think it's yeah. I mean it's named after. I mean it should be very. So Cheney has a bunch of these.

So the other main road near my house is the doctor B Mutlakshmi Road. She was the first I think you, you had interviewed that person written that book about women doctors right? Oh, Kavita. So she was the first ever woman to graduate as a doctor right. And Metra's medical college did not have a washrooms for women. Right in the college and all that. So she had to go to someone's house nearby. Yeah. All right.

Let me I'm quickly looking at Twitter and do you know anything about Bihari sci-fi any of you? Bihari sci-fi. Yeah. Arjun Bali wants me to ask you about Bihari sci-fi. Bihari sci-fi. Yeah. Nithin Sundar wants me to ask you about life in the era of peacocking. Life in the era of peacocking. I guess this must mean posturing and virtue signaling and we've already talked about you, Kavita. Yeah, we did kind of talk about that. So we are kind of done.

Okay. So Mahesh, you're talking remind me I have to tell you the story of the peacock enormous. So this is one of those spontaneous things that happen like flash mob than all. So there is one one of our classmates who's like, you know, been hitting cannabis really hard and also I'll call and with anything that he can get some hands on and everybody has been trying to reform this guy and talk to him and you know, tell him that he's all doing it and he's just inviterate. He keeps going.

He has his sober times as well and he's really nice guy. He's just like, so all this is happening and seven in the morning, we are in the mess and it's a very early time and this guy for some reason has woken up super early and he's come to the mess as well. And behind our mess, Manipal, those days is to be a proper on the, you know, edge of a forest. So there used to be all kinds of wild animals common wildlife was peacock.

So there was one peacock whom probably the mess, you know, waiters is to feed. So he used to be there that morning because there was literally no one other than two or three of us and this guy that peacock walks in and this guy, you know, he's seeing the peacock. And without really, you know, having discussed it or whatever, very spontaneously, everyone there, four or five of us, we decide to pretend that there's no peacock. And this guy is seeing the peacock.

He's trying to look at us and he doesn't know whether he's hallucinating or what. So he's very broad-hinsied, you know, there are animals here, there's that everything is saying and people are watching. He's trying to figure out man. And we actually managed to shock him out of his habits. I think he, I don't know if he reformed totally, but yeah, for a long time, he was not imbibing. Because one of those sorts of, you know, it's the, it's the one bird.

If you spend 30 seconds around it, you will immediately feel like earning money, running, standing in an election, becoming a member of parliament and voting it to be removed as the national bird of India. Because one of the worst, you know, behaved terrible birds, you can generally be around. The worst, the male is just the absolute worst. So like all good-looking Indian men. In this sense, all Indian men are badly behaved. They're looking ones or peacocks.

It finds we have this, I think poor guy, I think, who posted a women's day message at a wild bag, some senior executive and posted a women's day message and said that today on the occasion of women's day, I encountered a beautiful female and it was basically a male peacock. Everybody is like waiting to jump on him and say that who's going to tell him? And that's what I mean. Is everybody's ready? Okay, today's cup, my posturing virus tweet, okay, because I'm going to dunk on this guy.

Redwood guy. Yeah. Okay, next question. Yes. This is from Mahesh Ayer. He says, dear sirs, a question to you all. If you could go back in time and change a decision that you took slash made, what would it be and why would you change it? I know this one. Okay, tell me. So I decided to study engineering and I'd probably go back and change that to medicine.

That's because I've read a few great books on, so my dad was a doctor and the reason I didn't want to be a doctor myself was that I've only seen the negative side of bad personal life and you were 24 by 7 busy. You always see miserable people and everyone is unwell and things like that. But I think somehow for some reason with a car and a car that would have been an awesome thing that I love to be in.

In my case, it's a very weird answer actually because I have entirely built a set of habits predicated around not looking back and not having regrets or not saying what they've said. I've never really paid attention to, I've always said that the past is not about mistakes you make, but can I take this situation and then adapt to that and do something else rather than then try and see if I can go back and do something.

There's this recent interview where I think the Lex Friedman interview where somebody speaks about the two way doors and the one way doors. That two way doors are basically decisions you make that you can undo and come back. One way doors are decisions you cannot undo. I've almost always been a one way door person, meaning that I've never really taken small incremental things. I've committed to it and then adapt to that and then move on.

But if you really push me, I would probably say, I would say maybe better financial planning in my 20s would have been a probably the thing that I would go back and do. Other than that, I think no, I know right that's it. What about you? What about me? I don't think it is a particular thing because I think looking at going to factual is like really hard. I'm happy where I am and I'm not sure I'm happy with who I am, but I'm better than where I was.

So there's nothing particular, but I would definitely be far more disciplined and work harder. I think that is a big life lesson for me that I should have written 10, 12 books by now. It is incredibly frustrating to not have done that. So it is just I think really about getting those habits right. But then the point is you are who you are. You learn lessons by living life. You know, I was I was who I was when I was 20 and that and also there is no free will we discuss this. So it is.

And all of these are the cascading each each of what you are right now is dependent on your previous state and it's all linked list right. I mean, in the sense that you go back and change something, there are parts that you could have never taken. It is hard to so that counterfactual is completely. And I don't want to ask any like personal questions, but if you had followed Ryan's example, would you have been more buff than Ryan just like?

You mean bench press, the Bengali guy who bench press, the one who bench press, me who bench press boss. If I did 25 push ups every time I masturbated, so I would have bench press the guy who was bench pressing you while you had on your shoulders a guy who was bench pressing Ryan who was bench pressing the Bengali who was bench pressing Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was governor of California and carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. So yeah.

That is. Yeah. Yeah. We have a pretty good idea of what I was doing. There is. But also, I think in a sense, the better metric almost always is that I you, as you mentioned, are you a better person now than you were like a couple of years ago? And I think that's a reasonable metric to go by rather than try to say can I go back and undo something and be something. That's a great metric. It's a great metric. I mean, have I improved what those metric may vary individually? Are you?

Yeah, I would like to think so. Yeah. Are you not in? Yeah. That's what you strive for, right? That's what that's what you just continuously. So I like, for example, I'm I'm I'm purely it will vary the individual metric might vary like for in my case, I'm a more patient than I was. Yes. I mean, am I spending more time with family than I was five years ago? Yes. And those kinds of things, right? Can I?

So in the sense that the if you're hard work and all of that stuff is not aimed at, for example, creating more free time with your family and all of that, then what's the point of all of that? So sadly, my answer would have been yes, every year for the last 10 years, but I think it is no this year because I feel I understand myself much better. And I don't like what I see. So that's not an answer. I'll elaborate on it. No, but the more you want to understand this, it's.

The moment, see, this is I think this happens to all of us. You are, you are we all have blind parts, blind spots about ourselves. And there are circumstances which reveal some of them to us in due cause of time. And that has to change. It changes you because blind spot by definition, something you didn't know about us. And the moment you know that, your behavior changes. So awareness is improvement. Our knowledge meant an awareness and being self-aware. It's I think it's a, yeah. All right.

A very specific question for our good friend Ashok, which is, let me find it. Or should I just do control F and look for the word piousam? Your hair it is. It's from Vinod. And a question for Ashok while making piousam, how do you add hot jaggery to hot milk? I see that the natural salt in jaggery curdles a milk. So you've got to, you've got to kind of do the, if you're cooking rice, etc. Then you have to melt the jaggery first. You go to mix the rice and do that first.

And then add the milk slowly to prevent it from preventing it from curdling. And the curdling thing is also a function of temperature. So you also it shouldn't be like searing hot and so on, right? And then once you kind of mix the jaggery with the rice and slowly add it, then the chances that you're letting the jaggery curdle your milk and also a little bit more thing. The the cheaper process jaggery you get is less likely to curdle milk than the pure shudd organic.

That's actually quite acidic. So most jaggery you buy is actually super processed. Great fallacy people believe is jaggery is unprocessed, sugar is ultra processed. Jaggery is just unprocessed in an unregulated way. On the other hand, sugar is processed by chemical engineers and FSA, breathing down your neck and checking and machines and all of these things.

Whereas jaggery is like random guy taking a sack of sodium hypochloride and dumping it into the sugar can juice that's being melted down to reduce the color from dark brown, right? To the light color that people will buy, right? So that's the point. So use lighter colored jaggery and that'll probably not. And I didn't know jaggery was generally acidic, which is why it is I guess it's curdling in the back. Actually almost everything you eat is slightly acidic.

Very few things are alkaline, like egg whites are alkaline, that's really about it. Sugar is poison, jaggery is sugar. I don't know why there's a singed o jaggery is a healthy alternative for sugar. You have a video on it. That's a whole idea. I think people, the harder thing to do is the, it's a zombie value, you know, the harder thing to do is to eat less food. The easier thing to do is to say I will not eat my thumb, right? So people are for the easier thing.

It's the same mindset that says that the harder thing to do is actually fast. The easier thing to do is to say, well, the scriptures didn't say potato, because potatoes came later to India. So I will eat potatoes during fast. I call it bread food or poor or sabudana or whatever it is. So almost always I think when it comes to food and I'm not blaming people, we all love food, right? Any silly religious rule that says you will not eat food or get in the way people will find a way around it.

That's the point. And so that behavior signs part of, you know, hacking your environment is a more sustainable approach than trying to fix your willpower. The press officer of the brain just getting us all into unhealthy habits. One question that is for the true of you and I can't possibly answer, which is about parenting. It's just one word suggestion parenting, but if one is to expand, how has, how did parenting change you and etc. In my case, it gave me immense joy.

I wasn't like, I was in a tough time in my life running around trying to make ends meet business wise and the other. But I was lucky to have enough time with the kids. It's a great, great, great, great joy to see kids growing. It's amazing. That said, you and I, we agree that it's immoral to have children. So I still, I still feel that way. So listeners who may not know, I want to give them background on this controversial thing Nareena said.

That Nareena and I were at his house one day and we were having this discussion where it turned out we were on the same page and I ended up writing a column on it. So though, you know, Nareena had as much in a sense authorship of the idea of forming in my mind. I'm really proud of you discussing it. Yeah, it's a question of either great mind sinking a laik or full seldom differing.

And I have never been trolled for anything I have written, the political pieces, the anti SRK pieces, the anti-suchin pieces. I've never been trolled for anything more than this because the headline was it is immoral to have children and the argument was simple. The argument was that I think all of us would agree on three things that we should not do anything to anyone without their consent that pain is bad, that killing someone is bad. Right.

And when you give birth to children, you have because obviously you can't take consent of the unborn, you have done something to them without their consent. They are going to feel pain and suffer. They are going to die. And therefore it is prima facie just wrong there. Right. Period. And it's not even a consequentialist argument. It's not the kind of anti-nitalist argument that talks about, you know, utility terions and life is sad and full of pain. Don't care about that.

Life could be fully happy. It is not also one of these crappy environmental arguments you're making such a shit world for our children and save the planet. And that's all BS. It is just a pure moral argument that consent is important. You are inflicting pain and death on people who haven't consented because obviously they couldn't consent and therefore don't do it at all. It is a provocative argument, I know.

And my whole sense is that there are a lot of things that we say that by way of rationality, this is wrong, but it doesn't mean we don't do them. Like all of us would agree lying is wrong, but there are certain situations in which of course we will lie. Right. Especially. And we will do that, especially with children, actually. Yeah. We are really tired, we'll just might even go to sleep, just lie and go to sleep.

No, but I think the only, I think the counter view of looking at that is that the argument is absolutely flawless, but it's also like the argument that all food is violence. Right. Yeah, you can't argue against that. The fact of the matter is that for you to eat food, a lot of death has to happen for you to eat food. That's just the nature of it. So if you need it to be moral in that context, you've got to starve in time. Right.

And while the only additional element here is that unlike with food, you do have the choice to not reproduce. Right. Unlike food, you do have you do have you don't have the choice. No, there's a, but I will say that at a macro level, I think life is, reproducing is an element is a fundamental element and feature of life and the macro sense.

Individual living things can make a choice, especially cognitively advanced beings like us can make that choice based on the context we are in climate change, resources of the planet, all that I think is fine. But at a macro level, if everyone was to be moral about that specific logic, then you wouldn't have human civilization in the sense that you would need a labor force. You would, right.

In that sense, I'm just saying that it's the way to think about it is to therefore not judge people who choose to have children. While appreciating the logic and the choice of people to not have children. Couple of things to respond to that. One is that yes and no on the first one that all food is violence, of course, all food is violence, but the morality of it depends on how you define morality. And I think most people would keep, would restrict their moral consideration to human beings.

And you know, when you're eating animals, it doesn't involve human beings. And it's a different argument whether that's right or wrong, whether we should also include animals in our moral consideration, which is frankly impossible. No, there is tremendous amount of human suffering required to grow rice as well. Yeah, yeah. Point is that yes, but there is suffering for sure. Sure, sure.

But I mean, then you can argue using a suffering and eat food that doesn't cause that suffering, such as you know, just kill animals and eat them and stop eating rice. But you know, whereas with the case of kids, they're actual human beings, they're causing pain to in killing. And the other argument, I think, commits a naturalistic philosophy.

Of course, we are wired to have children, but that is a description and not a prescription to convert an east to an art, you know, which is known as a naturalistic fallacy, that just because things are this way, you say that things should be this way. And no, why? There's a lot in nature that is absolutely terrible and we are rational thinking creatures. You just give up something. However, so we are rational creatures that have the, that can, you know, go past this.

And therefore, that is not an argument at all. The description of nature is not a justification for it or a prescription of that particular course of action. But having said that, I would also not judge anyone who has kids, purely because of this, because we are all human, we are frail, we are weak. No one can be perfect. So I just think the, see, for example, for whatever the motivations, while obviously you can argue that I think doing it because there's social pressure to do it.

I think it's obviously the worst of the reasons, right? But it is only fair to say that people, it is okay to accept that people may have better reasons for, for having children than just simply going to social pressure, right?

In the sense that, see, I'm not a little too much on board the argument that you're eventually causing the death of the being by bringing it to life, which is sort of like, I think a very, very abstract in the sense that I would actually argue that your responsibility is to see, if you look at all across nature, the, the parent has varying responsibilities from one extreme of a reptile laying in again, forgetting about it. Turtle lays egg gone.

Then the turtles job to bloody crawl through the beach, get eaten by all crows and everything else. And then a few, they lay thousands of eggs a few of them survive.

And that's the nature of how like fish eggs like, they lay millions of eggs and like, you know, a small fraction of them survive to the other extreme of human beings where you have to take care of a child till they're, their teenage years or some definitely 18 or 19 years old, till they at some point of time, we have sort of decided that they now become an independent human being at that point. Morally speaking, they're untethered.

The parents are untethered from a responsibility standpoint, right? You might feel, you might feel some sentiment of I have to help all of that, but at that point, then the journey that the person takes from there to their own death is their own. I don't think the fact that you are born is, I think it's too far away for you to make this argument that you are responsible for that person's death. No, you are responsible for everything bad that happens in the life.

And even if you're responsible for everything good that happens in the life, the point is they didn't choose any of it. So and therefore it is, it is not a utilitarian thing. Right. When you talk of, you know, the turtle leaving eggs and whatever, you know, they might be different sort of protocols and different species. See, this is like you're standing at a signal. And then it is just amber, but you chose to stop because you didn't want to take the risk or whatever it is, right?

But as a result of which the person sitting in your car missed an entrance exam and lost a job or something like that. Would you blame that person for? So in a sense that I think it is not that. It's not that it was that person was in the car by their own fee well unless you could nap them. It's a quick case of volition. Like my whole point is you forget the consequential arguments. If you agree with me on these three points that consent is all important.

You cannot do anything to them without their consent. Can children consent exit? It is not consent, but that is the concern. But I show that is my point. That is why the argument is so powerful because it cannot consent. You should not do it. You should not have them. And by the way, Nareen has convinced his elder son of this. Yes. So he is actually, I know I absolutely agree to the current human context. Absolutely right. Obviously, few people should have children.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. By the way, that is wrong. I totally disagree with that vehemently. I am arriving in a sense. This is a personal thing that if you start with these deontological first principles of consent, pain, death, I'm saying it is wrong. However, while I will not have children myself because I consider it immoral and also because I don't want to. Yes, but I would want all of you to have kids because children are a positive externality.

In fact, one of my everything is everything. Episode was about how population is a good thing, not a bad thing that cannot, that is spread that. No, I want to put the idea that it is immoral and it is also necessary. That's perfectly necessary for whom? Necessary to macro level, as it is in the utilitarian level, not at an individual level. So I agree. Also at a personal level, right? So it was maybe also it's satisfying. It was satisfying. I mean, we were talking about your experience.

Yeah, so what?

So in the sense that I think, you know, see, one is that it clearly, I think in my case, it is a broader sense that there is, is that sort of switch from you, proceeding with life as a series of milestones and things that you want to get for yourself and things you want to hone, the target you want to meet, money you want to make, etc. To suddenly realizing that, no, you've got to pivot away to being entirely focused on something that is deeply vulnerable and it completely changes you.

It also makes you actually deeply appreciate far better the insanely tough role that women play in society as a result of biologically just being the people who can give birth, right? And the insane, I mean, just sitting through that entire process of giving birth from admission to labor pain to hospital, etc. Right? It is just a, it is insane. You just, you're just jaw dropped about how women go through this in the first place, right? And they go through it willingly multiple times.

Yeah. Now, how do you do it the second time, right? I mean, my case of my mother, the third time is one, right? I mean, so it is, yeah, so that you get to develop perhaps a deeper appreciation. It changes you for the better in terms of appreciating all of that.

You tend to, you hopefully have more nuance and more better views about women's issues in general when they speak about the impact that it has on their carriers and how to change the system in such a way that, you know, if they are taking a break to give birth, why should they be penalized in their carriers and so on?

So I mean, in the sense that you, I'm not saying that you need suddenly have a different policy prescription to that, but at least you're now a little bit more aware of the fact that this is a complicated thing that you cannot just go about your world in this typical masculine mindset of, yeah, I need to do this X and I'm just going to go from there. You know, God, deal with something that for the next few years is going to poop.

It's going to be completely, like completely behave in completely unpredictable ways. It's going to prevent you from moving around to crazy places and suddenly planning vacations wherever you want. And all of that, I think in that sense, it puts you in a new frame of constraints, which changes you potentially. You can hope it changes you for the good, right? And at the same time, as you said, you can opt not to go for it at all, right? It's perfectly fine.

Yeah, it's, it has tremendous potential to change you for the good. Right? At least men. No, no, I'm not saying it. I'm not saying it does. In many cases, I think at least Indian men, I think just, you know, don't change the topic. Most Indian, most Indian parents become parents when they're not ready for it. They don't understand what the hell it implies.

I also see what I also see is the is what is also fascinating to me is how parents become grandparents at equally a second order transformation, right? I mean, the way my parents behave to me and the way they behave to my son, very different enjoyment without the responsibility and stress, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. It's a very completely different sort of this thing. And especially if it's like multicultural, right?

If it's like people who in laws from different languages and all of that, then there's another dimension to that entire mixing and how the child gets influenced by hearing multiple languages, eating different kinds of food, right? And asking very odd questions, like, you know, we asked my mother, why do you, why do, why don't you like chicken? You know, so delicious and so on. And my mother now sort of learning that telling my son that eating chicken is bad is not the right thing to say, right?

But when I was young, she would absolutely say eating non-vegetarian's bad, right? I hope your son listens to this episode and the next time your mom says something about chicken, he says, you are having opema. It's an act of genocide and multiple levels. Hello. We're both my both my mom and my son both like Uppam. It's a violent family.

Yes. So yeah, so I guess I said, I think it's a, on the one hand, it's still hard for me to separate out the fact that I'm not, it's not an argument by nature, but it's a fundamental feature of nature, whether you like it or not, right? Oh, I'm not arguing. So the point is that I think and a cell doesn't exist just as a cell. It will divide at some point in its life, even a single cell will undergo mitosis, me or says at some point.

I mean, that philosophical level, that's description, not prescription. And I'm not even being normative. Yes. It will just like as an aside that I said that is calling my rodent, whatever. So if I have to extend that, do you say that a cell dividing is being immoral? No, I mean, it's creating another cell that's going to die, but a cell, it didn't have to divide.

A cell could just choose to say, yeah, but a cell may not consider another cell to be of its moral consideration, and it is not even capable of moral considerations. And other cell is morality, if all of you have seen, right? I mean, see, in the sense we are macro manifestations of essentially what is a microscopic cellular level evolutionary phenomenon? Yeah, we are fractals in that sense, right?

But before you ask me that question, you have to explain to me why morality should apply to anything outside of humanity. And then we can, you know, and that is too complex and difficult to do. And I mean, I get your point. I mean, we may not care about the monsoon process. The short question doesn't apply at all to that world. You know, there is nothing normative there, things are what they are.

So my next question is this like one of the fascinating sort of T Isles I learned about the modern world was when Gaurav Shintamani's son Nishan learned to read through Spotify lyrics. So you would listen to music and through the lyrics on Spotify, he learned to read and that completely blew my mind. And I want to ask you about, you know, seeing your own child, being a father yourself, you obviously are not that old that you don't have memory of how you grew up.

So you remember how you grew up and how you formed the influences and all of that. And at the same time, you can see your kid living a completely different world with completely different sort of ecosystem of influences and information around. And what do you think are the pros and cons in that? I mean, both of them are kind of obvious if you think hard enough, but in your particular instance, what have you thought about as pros and cons? What has made you go that shit?

I wish I had that in my time. And what has made you go that shit? I really worry about this. Now, I don't think I by particularly, I mean, I would have loved to I guess have access to the internet and all when I was growing up, obviously. But but at the same time, I do know that I I definitely spent far more time playing around with kids and outside and and definitely getting infected by a wider range of diseases, getting immunity, got bacteria and all of that.

I'm sure is helping out now, right? And in that sense, I am worried that the amount of time that this generation of kids is spending with others, given of one, the I think ours, as we get well there, we get more possessive and protective of our kids as well, right? I mean, I it's crazy. I mean, my mother used to send me to school on public transport when I was in class four. Right. I she and me couldn't imagine doing that with with my son. No way, right?

Going out road, going getting on a bus and then going like 10 kilometers to school in your class at nine, nine years old, no way, right? And so in that sense, I think we live in a different world. I'm okay in a sense that I think we we now have the privilege of taking more precautions, right? Things go on wrong, right? In that sense, I'm not saying that that's a great way. Please let your kids run out onto the street is not what I would say now.

We have the option of being more careful and we are able to do that. I think that's fine. But to be like that. Yeah, I would I would say, but I think the amount of physical play time that they spend with other kids is something that I worry about in that I think the devices have hacked kids brains at a far greater rate than they are hacking adult brains. Far more susceptible in my, you know, obviously my son plays roblox.

And so on, I'm obviously checking to see there's like no chatting and that stuff going on. But at the same time, I'm also I can also see the fact that playing video games and creating your own environments and roblox, etc is building a set of skills at his age that I did not have at my age, right? Optimization problem solving in a in an enjoyable fashion as opposed to the boring questions and answers you get in like school.

Right. And now I love the fact that I can now do things like a read him teacher, my chapter in the in the textbook, right? And then open chat GPT and say, yeah, there's a nine year old or 10 year old, ask him questions on this subject. And then and then be encouraging even if he says wrong answers and all that. And you can do those kinds of amazing things, which I think, you know, those are just the creative ways in which you can use AI now to augment how you teach and learn.

I think are all fantastic things that these kids have access to provided you kind of use it the right way. And so on. But yeah, for sure, I think screen time and I hope as he becomes a teenager, I think social media, obviously going to be worried about the equivalent of Instagrams and reddits and other things at some point. He's not there yet.

But yeah, so that is, but I think I also feel that in another one year or two years, the world is going to be so different in terms of what AI is going to make possible that it's hard for us to even imagine all the new experiences that they are going to end up having, right? In terms of virtual reality and immersion and the things that they could experience, having like not just chatting in text, but pretty soon you're going to have a virtual world.

He plays around one of the things we do is on the Oculus. One of the things we do is he likes travel. And so whenever like we travel once or twice a year, but then he uses the Oculus and he'll search for Switzerland 360 degrees or whatever it is. And there's a eight minute fly through. You're just flying over Switzerland on the Oculus in 4K resolution, right? I mean. So that's those are really, really enriching experiences that kids can get with modern data technology.

But it is at the same time, the fact that they are not spending enough time with other kids in actual physical settings is I think is a concern. So it is making them socially awkward. And the pandemic and the lockdowns didn't help, right? I was quite terrible for them. Yeah. That's worrisome. Yeah. I was reading somewhere that kids though, though, there's these kids videos and kids software for really small kids.

Yeah. How they test them is they have like proper home settings where the adults are, there are adults in the room and then the kid who's been given the app or the video or whatever it is. And the other people are asked to do different things, things people might do in the house. And the child is observed. If the child's attention goes to what that adult is doing, that means the video is not riveting. And you know, very, very interesting things about how these guys, AB test these things.

One is that they don't just need to test in physical settings. They'd like to literally do it virtually. How? Right. Because there are, they can choose tens of thousands of sample people where they opt in to have eyeball tracking. Oh, so they're tracking the gaze. So you don't need to be in a physical setting. So even better than this. So much, much more sample you can get, right? And you can do it at scale. And you're doing it with consent. They're probably paying them all.

The second thing is that the amazing thing most people don't realize is that vast majority of these kids YouTube channels, right? Almost all of them are produced in a small few five kilometer by five kilometer part of the channel because in the 1990s, dream works, desire and Pixar, decided to start scaling up and cutting production caused by outsourcing to India.

And just it just so turned up, a bunch of companies in Chennai, one that contract and as a result of it got tons of money and they were also insightful enough to they knew that they need to hire lots of people. So they set up training centers for animation all over Tamil Nadu. So Tamil Nadu has a large number of people with animation skills, right? And so all of them now, the easiest way in the monetizing the new world if they're not making Pixar films is to make kids videos on YouTube.

So Chuchu TV, you name it. And the other thing you'll notice, those channels will physically hurt your eyes. Have you noticed the coloring? Yeah. They are right. They are aimed at just keeping kids glued to it because kids like those ultra bright colors because the eyesight doesn't great at that age. So they need this ultra sensory maximization to keep them glued. So Chuchu TV and all, it'll hurt your eyes if you watch it for like a few minutes and so they do color testing.

They'll try one video with one shade of blue and then try that others and based on eyeball tracking, which had more engagement, then they will standardize. It's all data driven now. And you have seen the number of views on these billions, billions, billions. Yeah. Because it's just basically completely has it. It's just with no help, just hears the iPad, just a second take a breather. Yeah. Yeah. So it's so yeah.

So I mean, another form of the function of the school performs of being a daycare center. That's one kind of daycare. This is another kind of daycare, except that it's kind of, yeah, it's not involving human beings and that I think is a yeah. So time for another story by Narayan and there is a particular request I would like to make and I will lead on to something from there. So you will see why I am requesting this particular story. So there is this story I heard recently about.

So three guys who were running the marathon, the guy who stood first was Elliott Kipchoghen, two other guys who names are forgotten. And one of the two, so this is what happens in the Olympics. After your event is over, the winners, the medallists are, you know, put in a waiting room. And the middle award ceremony, which is a big thing, you go stand on your podium, national anthem is played. You get a medal is scheduled for some later time when people are available and everything is organized.

So for an ended, in the time and a amount of time, you have to sit in the room. So these three guys, they so they don't lose you somewhere and can't find you. Yeah. So they're supposed to wait in the room. So they stuck there. And one of the others were he wrote, he said about this. He said two of us, the number two and number three.

So a lot of, you know, they said both of us pulled out of home, you were looking at it and trying to wild time and Kipchoghen was just sitting and staring into nothingness, not moving. And he sat there for several hours without watching. These two guys said he's not human. And it's just, we were just talking about this yesterday. And I don't know, I've, I have, I someone told me that, you know, you should be able to do this for an hour and then that means you can grow a beard and become Sadguru.

But the furthest I've got is around 10 minutes. So here's why I like this story and an exercise I'm proposing for us now, which is this, right? We were shooting for everything is everything. Ajay and I have been incredibly fortunate to get this new crew of two wonderful young people called Vashna when Namsita who work with us now, 22 and 19 respectively, but wise beyond the years, both school dropouts.

I think Namsita dropped out in the age standard to teach herself in making so phenomenal people. And they made a suggestion which we said, let's try it out. They said that before we begin the episode, like we will roll the cameras and then for five minutes, we will do nothing, we will just be silent, we can think about whatever we want and the cameras are rolling and we gather, we gather our thoughts, meditate whatever, five minutes of complete silence.

And then at the end of it, we begin and we did that for three episodes and I just found that so good and no embarrassment about doing it because all four of us were sincere and we did it and I found it really kind of made a difference to me.

So what I'm going to recommend now is that the three of us stay silent for three minutes, I will keep the time, these three minutes of silence will be edited out by a young gaurav who will note out anyway, have to listen to them at double speed in case we said something, but they'll be edited out so the listeners don't have to go through it. And during these three minutes, I want you to ponder the following question. This episode is airing at least. That is a plan now on January 1, 2024.

And the question I want you to ponder is, you know, what have I learnt either in the year gone by or in the last few years gone by and how will I live differently? So very seriously, I'd like you to ponder this and give me your questions if you can and I haven't thought of an answer yet. But in the next three minutes, in shall or something will come to me. So literally we are really doing this three minutes of silence. Right. One more time, who wants to go first?

Yes, Narayan. So I've always thought that I wasn't control of my life any what I want to do and things like that. And not just the last year, last couple of years, I've had a sense that I really don't know the purpose, the terminal goal of whatever you have, a lot of instrumental goals, I want to make money, I want to have, you know, acquire fame, I want to be liked by people, I want to see whatever things.

But are any of these even close to what I really want to do or what I really want to achieve in life? What my true purpose is. And how this has changed me or is changing me is I want to pay closer attention to what it is that I might be wanting to. Very difficult. It's, it's very confusing. It's and I have no clue how to go about it. But yeah, at least I think I know that I don't know my what I really want in life. That's my two bits.

So essentially one of the things I've come to kind of realize at least this year is that it, it kind of feels and I could be wrong. I feel it feels like this year. And sometimes when you live life, it feels like every year is an inflection point. You remember how everybody used to say 2016 was the worst year because Trump got elected that happened, this happened and all that and then 2017 people said 2017 is the worst year and so on.

I guess it always that distortion, that proximity distortion is there proximity bias. But I it feels that we are on the cusp of a technological change that will have far, far reaching consequences at every level from education to society to democracy to to jobs and everything, right?

And in a deep sense, I am one of the things I've kind of therefore realized is that the what I assume to be some sort of innate basic expertise at something is that you really have to deeply question that that it's going to be very, very hard to actually predict what's going to get automated and what's not. So don't make any bold crazy predictions that no, no, no, this will never be automated. Famous last words, every prediction, tech prediction in the last decade has been wrong, right?

And see, it feels almost that I'm going to have to think very hard about, especially I think there's going to be a flux of change. A lot of people will lose their jobs. There will be many industries that will be in flux. People coming into their careers and now as I'm sort of, you know, 46 years old, I kind of realizing that 20 year olds are coming up to me and asking for career advice.

I've never, people have never asked me for career advice before and now I've suddenly the uncle's you has to give career advice, right? And I, I find myself having to say honestly, I have no clue. Yeah. It's such a hard thing to say honestly.

That's one. Right. And then I think to, to that end, I think it's almost as if I really have to reset my idea of saying I have 23 years of experience in an industry to say I have zero years of experience in whatever this industry is going to be starting today. That if all that baggage is actually completely useless, sure, you can pick up some meta skills, you can pick up some M skills of empathy and design and paying attention to people and those things.

But honestly speaking, I mean, more qualified to predict than a flux. I would actually say somebody just using these technologies ground up as a kid and joining the workforce today is probably better placed to think about where the future is going.

And any executive ideas and experience, yeah, I agree with you, but I think that's excessively self-effacing in the sense that nevertheless, your experience of frameworks that you've got the first principle thinking that you do count, do count, they will count, but I, it is all this. It's like it's an example of being in the technology industry. Has a tendency to go through massive disruption every few years and it's the time the fame has been crunching, right?

We went through the original sort of PC era, then we went through the internet era and internet felt like groundbreaking and then we went through the mobile smartphone, digital big data, that era. And now the AI era actually kind of feels like each of these actually is sort of like a log scale, right? It's not. Right. So it is, I think we're kind of reaching that singularity point of not being able to predict what if downstream effects and all these other things that it is.

Yeah. I haven't so many things, right? Make sure that I don't value experience as much as I'm wired to expect, right? And therefore, even in how I think about building a team or hiring people and so on and thinking fundamentally, differently about do I need an engineer for this? Should I just get our arts graduate to get a completely different perspective? I mean, I mean, an industry that famously only hires engineers, right? And saying that I don't think any of these things.

Now an arts graduate can use chat GPT to write Python code to generate artwork with as much capability as an IT guy, right? See, the it's it feels like the like the so the democratization of computing, which PC did and the democratization of scale, which cloud and internet, meaning that it allowed a small company to sell on the internet and compete with a large retail store, right? With democratization scale.

But I somehow feel that we are uniquely ill prepared for what this is, which is the democratization of skill. Because skill is always being our human. Infraredecent is how caste system worked, how everything worked, everywhere in every artisans that, you know, gills, it has always been about skill. And somehow this is going to break that, right?

And so it sort of feels like that moment where you really have to be wary of how these things are going to affect and how a lot of stuff is actually going to happen in terms of how you think about where, you know, 10 years from now, what should my son think about university? Will there even be universities, will those degrees even be meaningful and so on?

I think the second thing I also feel is that it has also been a weird year where one year ago, roughly October 2022, I had 20,000 Instagram followers. Okay. December 2023, it's 700,000. And it's it has been so and somehow it is, it is a, the dynamic is entirely changed. I get about 500 messages daily, a large number of them, people saying, I have this illness, can you suggest what I should eat? And again, I do have to tell them, sorry, I cannot, right?

And so therefore it is, it is almost as if now I have to think about this entire, the weird level of trust in Indians will place on individuals as opposed to no matter what I tell them about the scientific method. Don't trust me, right? You should be skeptical of me. You should fact check me. We are all just wired to say I trust you blindly, right? So that's a very weird responsibility, right? And I, to be honest, I don't know how I'm going to deal with that, right?

So it doesn't mean I, and I'm suddenly get a nutrition degree and start answering those questions either, right? But, but at the end of the day, I still have to figure out maybe there are some AI solutions to the problem, etc. And that's me just thinking about it as an engineering problem if I can respond to more people.

So instead of right flagging it out, you have to be like an order of magnitude more careful of what you put at the side of the, and also it's a very, very, very, very, very, very important. And also it's a very, very, very important thing. Most of my, most of the people who are in my position operate as a team. Yeah. They have a team.

They were guy who does camera, they were guy who does scripting, they were guy who does research, they were guy who does responding to comments and doing engagement stuff. That's how everybody sets up this thing. I'm, no, I have no such thing. It's just one person, right? Because I don't want it to kind of get to that because then I'm running a separate operation that is a big distraction on what I do.

And it also, and the other feeling is that I, I get the sense that people get surprised when they get a reply from me. I did not expect you to reply. Half of my messages and when I reply to someone on Instagram is I did not expect you to reply to me. Right? I did not expect somebody with 700,000 followers would reply. Right? And so therefore I'm still sort of thinking of how do I think about this community in a different way and the honest answer is I don't know.

That's something for me to think about because a huge responsibility, that not that I signed up for it, but I can't make sure that I'm away from it because it's not a responsibility in the capacity of responsibility since then no one's going to hold you liable. Correct. Yeah, it's not that sense, but it is a model responsibility. Yeah, it's suddenly people who have consumed hunched, binge-watch your videos and it's weird, right?

It's basically people have watched effectively two hours and 30 minutes of me. It's the net total of what people have watched me on Instagram. And this somehow has given them the sense that I can ask this person anything about food, anything about diet, anything about stuff, etc. And they're like, I don't care. I don't trust my doctor. I trust you. This is like a very uniquely Indian problem. So I have two sort of aspects to double click on here. And one is that community is so important.

Like earlier, you know, outside the recording, we were talking about how, you know, one of the things I've come to learn that is not what I'm going to talk about, but one of the things that I've come to learn is that for creators, what is really important is community

that creators will make most of their money if you're concerned about that from monetizing the community and not from advertising sponsorship, etc., etc. And that building a community is a really big deal and there is a responsibility there and you realize that you are, you know, you can play a positive role in the lives of so many people. And the second thing is that I feel that the great need of the modern world in an age of information, surf, heat and so on is for sense makers.

I have realized from my India Uncut days without being able to verbalize it in this way. That many people are looking at me as a sense maker. I remember getting an email in 2006 from someone, an Indian in New Zealand saying that I don't read any of the Indian newspapers and their websites or whatever. Every morning I come to India Uncut, I would do 5 post a day at that time, 518 post a day was my maximum. You would say, I make sense of what is going on through what you write.

Now, obviously, you know, you could say that he sort of overrated my insight or whatever irrelevant. But what is important to note is that need for sense makers, which is why complete strangers who have not consumed so much of your content will nevertheless be writing to you for advice on things that it is obvious that you have no expertise on.

And the big question for us to ask is that those of us who can be sense makers in limited domains, I think rather than stay away from it or be self facing about it, it is important to number one, go out and do our best with intellectual honesty and in good faith while acknowledging our limitations to try and fulfill that role and also to refuse to fulfill that role when we are not competent.

Like when the violence in Gaza erupted, so many people left comments on other people and I had just done an episode on Ukraine, which Ajay has been studying for 20-30 years. He's given speeches to generals on military strategy and they said, why don't you do one on this? And we refused. We left a comment saying that both of us have our personal private opinions and values and all of that, but we simply don't feel we know enough about this to give you an opinion. Right.

So that humility judge based on what you left out. Yeah. It's just not worth that humility is also important. At the same time, there is that responsibility that wherever you can, if you can say that okay, I'm also figuring it out, but let me share my journey in figuring it out with the caveat that I'm not an expert. And I feel that, you know, often I will say things in the scene and the unseen that I feel I've said so many times before is completely banal. It is obvious to me.

And then someone will send a mail or put out a tweet saying it is such a great TIL. It has changed my life. But the face for saying I'm figuring it out, I believe it's shrinking to be fair. No, I disagree. It is shrinking on maybe on Twitter and social media and on. Absolutely. That you're regular platforms. It is shrinking. Absolutely. I think if you have your own podcast, we have your own newsletter. You absolutely can. Yeah. Yeah. Create your own private community. I think is a theme.

I think is worth thinking hard about. Yeah. And I think the whole theme of the scene and the unseen is figuring it out. You know, talking about stuff, changing your mind. My listeners who've been with me on this journey have seen me change my mind on a bunch of stuff for add no hands and whatever. So anyway, so what I thought about in terms of what I would like to change and one of the things is there is a code that I keep asking my guests about, which I take very seriously.

It's my favorite code of all time. And it's my Annie Dillard, which she says, how we live our days is how we live our lives. Right. And too often we ignore the immediate fabric of our day, the present day that we're living in. And we think in grandiose terms in our heads. And I think too much of my life, I've lived in a grandiose way, thinking of macro ideas, with you, looking at you, you're doing it, you're doing it, you're doing it.

So what I want to do going forward, which is very difficult to do, it takes discipline and focus and stuff that you have to work on and also character where also one can be deficient. But it is too sort of live in the micro. Right. I have realized that the things that I do, like, you know, you might think, okay, three sixty one episodes or whatever of the scene in the unseen. It's a marathon. It's not a marathon. It's a series of man experience.

Where each manic sprint will begin by just saying that, fuck, I have 24 hours, I have to read three books, which by the way, I'm completely capable of reading deeply. And that's my superpower. So I have 24 hours, I have to do all of this research, no sleep, bang it out, do a sprint, and then completely collapse at the end of the recording. Like, perhaps, will tonight do this required no research at all because you guys are such great.

The contours and banners, if one might use the word banners in that sense. And it is that micro that's the sense of sitting down and doing something. And so I want to do micro things, but on the basis of macro principles and macro ideas. So you want to bring all of that to bear, but do micro things and just do the basic stuff.

Don't think about the book you're going to write, write the paragraph, write the next paragraph, spend the next hour doing whatever, doodling you're doing and etc. At which point, both Ashok and I are totally turning to you, Mr. Chennai, and asking the question, and you will pardon the parliamentary language, but where the fish is your book? Yeah, so it's being aggressively, acidiously, audiously written. So I wrote the damn thing, like half of it, and it sounded very banal to me.

It was just like strung all my silly WhatsApp anecdotes, some of which I've just told on this show as well. I just strung them together randomly. Then I thought I should make it a sort of chronicle of my life with Sheila and sort of just weave these things into it. So I've been trying to do that. And this is the last final iteration, so whatever it is, whatever comes out at the end of it.

It's like that famous organ grinder story about Mathis' guy who's done everything in his life, he's had all his experience with everything. The only thing he hasn't is childbirth, right? So he hasn't experienced childbirth. So he goes to a doctor and says, I have to, you know, I want to experience childbirth. And the guy says, dude, it's not biologically possible.

But he's an insistent guy, he's a wealthy guy, and he keeps bagging the doctor and finally his doctor, the assistant, gives him an idea. It says, you know, here's what he do. You give him a good five tablespoons of caster oil and you put a butt plug, like put a cork up his butt and tape it shut and send him home. So he'll experience the pain of, so this guy says, they do that work. He goes to his room and he's sort of in his bed for a while.

The thing happens and slowly the caster oil is doing his work and the pressure is building up and it's agonizing, right? And the plug is holding it in and he's just, he's just groaning and moaning in pain and he doesn't know what to do. And just then, you know, so there's an organ grinder with a monkey down in the street. And the monkey here, all these funny sounds coming, so he jumps up and enters the window just to a curious monkey. He wants to see what is happening.

So he enters in and just then the plug gives way, okay? And the monkey is plattered with his pooped. And this guy, like, it's like relief. So he picks up the monkey and he says, you're ugly and you're hairy and you're covered in shit, but you're mine and I love you. So my attitude to or whatever comes out of this book is going to be like monkey and so wow. This is such an awesome story. This is totally the high point of this conversation of Shokhi, finally. Absolutely. Yeah. Monkey, baton.

Yeah. Yeah. The organ grinders monkey. It's such a beautiful sort of metaphor. Do you have any stories left you haven't told? Oh, there are a few. There is my, the one, you know, which I, there's a lesson in it. So I had this friend, Mr. Singh, right? So Mr. Singh had a factory way close to mine and he used to have this, a minor, two, seven ninety commander Jeep. So he used to drive back and I used to travel by train. So in the evening, if our times coincided, Mr. Singh would ask me to join him.

And as was his want, he would first make a small pit stop by a bottle, quarter bottle of alcohol, buy a bistley re bottle, make me drink about half of it pour the alcohol into the bistley re bottle, have drink and he was like a recontor to surpass all the people he just have story after story, it kept telling me. And he had one disconnecting habit is that when he was talking to you, he had to look at you. So he's also driving, he's also looking at you.

I don't know how we survived this, but we did. I'm here and Mr. Singh passed away, but out of natural causes, he is nothing related to that. Anyway. We are going and a particularly animated story, Mr. Singh is telling me, looking at me and all of a sudden, there's a road crossing and there's another vehicle that's coming and he doesn't and Mr. Singh is like driving without any full speed.

And then somebody's in the back of the car's coax and then he realizes and he presses the brake and there's like one screech of tires and everything. And the car stops in just in time. So there's no collision. Almost hit the guy. Yeah, but that guy shat, right. So he is, he's, you know, he just gets on, he doesn't know what to do, he's just cared out of his wits. So he starts shouting and Mr. Singh. And he says, you see, I don't see. I was not seeing it.

I wouldn't have all this would have happened. I was talking to this guy. And he said, I'm sorry. So sorry, but what if he had banged into me, but reason I didn't bang into you, he said, what if he had, this is, but I did not. And this guy's, you know, he's angry. He was born. This is what if he had, so he said, okay, he went into the car. He sort of reversed it a little bit to give a little sort of run up and then banged into the guy's car.

So, I'll be like, yeah, now, I was so, I was so, now you can be, now you can be less stress about it, right. He just took off. So for some reason, I was letting him so hard. It has happened. Now it has happened. Now what is a lesson? So the lesson is, if you accused of something, just fucking do it. No, yeah, just do it. Just do it as they are. Just do it as a lesson. I really don't know. This is not a good lesson. There are lessons. Yeah. There is Shakespeare quote, right?

I think King Lear or something. There are sermons and stones. There are books and running books. And there are lessons, LinkedIn lessons in Narendra Shanai stories. Sounds exactly like the kind of thing. Shinsur Shakespeare would write. All right. So on that note, I have taken so much of your time and it is time for Ashok to also think of heading for the airport. But any final recommendations in terms of, I mean, we met recently and we gave recommendations.

But anything good you've read recently that you like to share, read, listen to, heard or something you haven't recommended before. I was thinking about. So I did kind of enjoy this. And a recent sci-fi series on Netflix's British series. I will, I can't forget its name, but it's a think of it as a more comprehensive flexible version of dark. It's a it's a time twist thing involving time machines and it's very, very nicely done.

I think people can just Google for these description or ask chat GPT if you will. But it is, it's really entertaining. It was on Netflix and it's a very nice little time paradox loop that was far more easier to understand than dark. So the funny thing about dark was I had seen season one and then it took them a while to make season two and all that right and then I then season three came. I said, I forgot on what season one and two were.

So let me see a YouTube summary of what happened in season one and two so that I can watch season three. And I didn't understand YouTube summary of season two. It was wondering whether there's an explanation of the YouTube summary of dark that I could understand. Yeah. And so that in that sense, I think it was, I think it was called bodies. Yeah. That's the name of the series bodies. It's very nicely done. It was enjoyable. So I, I'm not a land for the movies, but you're not a land.

Yeah. But Gautam forces me to watch movies one way can get hold of me. So he made me watch this movie called the darkest hour. It's about Winston Churchill. Him getting appointed as Prime Minister in the middle of the war like just when the war was starting in the face of opposition from Chamberlain and Wisconsin. I count wherever I have the facts, wherever that guy is. And it paints, it gives a very good snapshot or idea of what, because we like to judge people and hindsight.

And it shows how hard decisions are when you take them in real time. So Churchill is saying that we should wage war against the maniac Hitler. And Chamberlain is saying that we should actually sue for peace. And Churchill knows that it will be a mistake. He says we are negotiating from a place. But they have an equally valid point. They're saying the war will kill like hundreds and thousands of innocent people from our side. And so people out today.

And then he takes, Churchill finally takes his, you know, his own decision. It's a beautiful, beautiful idea like that. And ultimately only going to be judged by the outcome of the war. Yes. And it definitely so. Right. Now all the debts you passed on your side will be forgiven because now you won the war. Otherwise it's always. Oh, it's all our heads.

My recommendation to connect with this would be Andrew Roberts's biography of Churchill, which is about a million words, a major serial, masterful. You actually get the sense that at that particular moment in time, Churchill was driven by this, it was a moral force. He recognized what Hitler was. He recognized a threat to Western civilization and light and mint values. And it's just an incredible book. And I think Churchill gets a lot of like a man who contains great multitudes.

And he's often, it's almost become dogmatic among a certain section of people that he causes the death of so many Bengalis in the Bengal famine. It's now complicated. It's not only more complicated than that. It is actually completely false. Like at one point, I thought I'll do an episode and invite the writer of the book where these allegations were fleshed out. But first I thought the British cabinet papers and whatever, some of the sources in the public domain, let them look it up.

And I realized she'd completely cherry-picked everything based on that agenda that on net net, you know, Churchill had actually probably saved more Bengali lives than it cost. You know, Robert's book has great details of all the deliberations and the details that kind of went in and cherry, you cherry-picked details that can look anywhere. Yeah, and the story you want to get. And the problem with political leaders, especially at very high levels of position is that they do so many things.

One is that we probably overestimate the impact they have on very day-to-day decisions that get made at a, you know, at a micro level. The second thing we often do is that we then cherry pick also the things that we disagree with and then ignore all the good stuff. They may have done for others and so on. And I think it's always complicated. And on that note, I do want to make, give one AI recommendation because obviously we're in the area.

But for an quickly complete, I'll link in the article to, in the show notes, to Amarthya Sense Kritik, Zareed Masani Kritik of the book in question. So it's worth reading all of that is become a dogma among the certain section of people that oh, Churchill did this and committed walk-in. Like he personally, like he freaking didn't. Yes, he told me. That's not how it works. I mean, it's one thing to say colonial policies over a 200-year period resulted in certain issues.

I know all the certain issues. I think that was racist. But then you have well. Right. But then putting individuals and then comparing that to the output of an entire colonial regime. Exactly. No, and the thing is, A, he was racist. He said racist things about Gandhi. But B, he, his principles also came into play like when Jalianwala Bagh happened. He was furious. He wanted General Dyer hauled up and prosecuted and he was furious and he thought it was a crime on humanity.

So extremely complex man and sort of worth reading. But again, I see the, the, the, which is why I wanted to sort of make a in this era, right? Given that now people, you can now go to chat GPT and say, explain why Churchill caused the deaths of millions of Bengalis. It will happily serve you and give you reasons why he did that. And if you frame the question with Vaughnian's, explain why Churchill is not the single musk, important reason for this and it will give you reasons for that, right?

And this is off to go to be a problem as we can go forward because it can confirm to whatever bias. Yes. The LLMs are storytellers, not factellers. See, so along these lines, right? I think a related thing I wanted, I recommend to people is to start looking at and I want to promote just one tool, but right now I've been using this tool called Poplexity, which is a AI tool built on top of, you know, GPT and other large language models.

Their selling point, their sort of USB is the fact that they add a layer of curation where they look at what they call verified sources, the science papers, published papers and so on, right? And so what they do is they take your query with all its biases and bad phrasing and everything else.

And because they add these verified sources, the AI is actually able to more confidently push back against you and say, no, you got that wrong, which is something that GPT never does because it always wants to make you happy, right? And so it was interesting because I asked Poplexity, when I asked, chat GPT, explain how Churchill caused the deaths of people, it happily gave me five points, how Churchill caused the death of where you can go real off, make a LinkedIn post about it, right?

And give me five reasons why Churchill did not cause and give you five points. Poplexity, when I said explain how Churchill caused the deaths, etc. It basically said that that's a very common misconception. This is a, it's widely held in some beliefs, but it's not borne out by the facts. And here are some excellent reasons and the recommend recommendations of scholarly articles and so on that you can check out. So I was like very pleasant. So you asked this very question.

Yes. Poplexity actually gave me this answer that I gave. What I said. I'm so impressed. So I was very impressed and I said, yeah, now I'm going to use that as a assistant to fact check my own biases. Yeah. Because actually, unfortunately, GPT will not fact check your biases. It is confirmed. It was the AI had another revelation. But you just said about GPT that it always wants to please you. Yeah. GPT is like a fucking, demented dog. Remember the dog cat, the GPT is a dog. Poplexity is like cat.

Poplexity is like cat. It's a cat. It's a mix of cat. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's. Yeah, I don't want to help you actually. Yeah. And of course, Kora is the organ grinders monkey, ugly, hairy and full of shit. Yeah. Yeah. On that. But please sort of be. Yeah. And I would argue people to sort of be wary of these biases. And always sing for themselves. Don't adopt a belief because a tribe has it. Yeah. Do not be tribal. And I also understand this is hard. It is hard to read widely.

So just with the size. And without will. And don't take a hard position on something you know, and entirely understand. Yeah. One of the things that Kahneman says that even he knows, he studied all these biases to kingdom come and he still falls for them. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I heard you saying that his subsequent books on focusing on how to design systems that can account for this is actually very insightful. Like noise. Yeah. Like noise. Excellent. Guys, thank you so much.

You know, a few months ago we discussed we were recording in Chennai. And I will let my listeners know that Ashok kindly said that, hey, I keep coming to Bombay and we'll let's do another episode and both Nareena and I obviously, you know, who can say who can say no to such an offer. And you actually came down just for this. I'm like really delighted. Yes. Happy. This was so much fun. And we must keep doing it at least once a year. Yeah, we must. Yeah. We must do it. So thank you so much.

It's been such a great honor for me and the wonderful way to end the year and for the next. A wonderful way to begin the year. Yes. So thank you. So there are thanks. It was great fun. Super. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, share it with everyone to whom you want to bring joy. And check out the show notes. Enter rabbit holes at will. You can follow Ashok on Twitter at Chris Ashok. You can follow Nareena on Twitter at Shanoi and you can follow me at Amitwarmaa. My TVA RME.

You can browse past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene unseen.in. Have a great year. Have a great life. Did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the unseen? If so, would you like to support the production of the show? You can go over to seen unseen.in.in.slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.