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When I started The Scene and The Unseen four years ago, I could not have imagined what
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the show would become. At that time, I thought I will do 20-minute episodes on the unintended
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consequences of public policy. Today, this is a show that features long-form conversations,
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sometimes longer than three hours, on subjects that range from politics to history to economics
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to society and culture. And along the way, I discovered truths about the nature of audio
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and the power of podcasting that ran contrary to what I had earlier believed. Also, I built
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a listenership that was far more engaged and that cared more about what I was putting out
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than any readership I could have imagined as a writer. We are 200 episodes old today.
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What a journey it's been. Maybe it's time to sit back for a moment and take stock.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen. In fact, welcome to episode 200 of The Scene and The
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Unseen. This is a special episode for me for a number of reasons. One, 200 is a nice round
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number and it feels appropriate to celebrate it in a way that one won't celebrate, say,
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episode 196 or episode 203. But still, it's nice to have these milestones that allow you
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to celebrate or to take stock. Two, I'm using this episode to launch The Scene
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and The Unseen books. Along with the publishers, Westland, I'm bringing out a four-volume anthology
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of The Scene and The Unseen with curated excerpts from the 200 episodes of The Scene and The
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Unseen so far. These four volumes, which will be out early next year, will be divided across
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the themes of politics, history, economics and society and culture. Three, I'm also launching
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The Scene and The Unseen merchandise, beginning with designer mugs that you can browse at
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sceneunseen.in slash stuff. And four, my good friend and frequent guest,
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the economist Shruti Rajgopalan, has put together a special episode in which she got 22 guests
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and fans of the show to ask me questions. So the tables have turned and I'm in the firing
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line. We ended up recording a five-hour conversation and I consider splitting it up into two episodes.
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But then I figured that me talking about myself felt a little bit self-indulgent. So it was
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best to just release it as one bumper episode. So this is therefore the longest episode ever
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on The Scene and The Unseen and regular programming resumes next week. Before we get to the conversation,
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I need to express my gratitude to those who made the show possible. Four years ago, I
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didn't listen to podcasts and therefore didn't understand why this was such a special medium.
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When a friend of mine called Amit Doshi approached me, Amit ran the podcast network IVM Podcasts
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and he asked if I'd be interested in doing something with them. I met up with Amit and
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his then creative director May Thomas at a restaurant in Juhu called Fable and decided
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to take a shot at this show. May soon went her own way and my partnership with IVM ended
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last year as I went solo. But without Amit Doshi's initiative, you would not be listening
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to this. Almost all of my 200 episodes have had one editor, Vijay Doifode. Vijay's been
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a silent partner in crime, often fighting a valiant battle to salvage shaky audio and
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I continue to feel so reassured that he remains by my side as I go down this path. The artwork
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of this show is done by the brilliant artist Alika Gupta whose wonderful work adds to the
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character of The Scene and The Unseen. While Vijay and Alika are the two people I work
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with every week, I also want to thank those who have played a part in this show in the
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past. Josh Thomas, Swati Bakshi, Abbas Mohdman and Jude Weston helped produce it back in
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the IVM days. Madhu Menon built the website sceneunseen.in and took the podcast of photographs
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which are actually pretty good photographs if you take the podcaster out of them. And
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May Thomas and Sean Fantham helped me with advice and support at crucial times. I also
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want to thank the many many guests I have had over these 200 episodes who have trusted
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me and have been generous with their time and insights. It takes two people to have
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a good conversation and I am blessed to have been able to learn so much from so many wonderful
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people. And I also want to thank you the listener for making me feel that someone is listening
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and that this matters. I have often had lonely moments where I have wondered if this was
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worth it and your constant validation and support has meant a lot to me. Also since
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I opened the show up for support in April this year many of you have made generous financial
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contributions to keep the show going. I feel guilty that I haven't been able to write to
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each of you personally to thank you for this. But it's been heartwarming and even moving
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for me. The show remains independent because of you. More than that it remains meaningful
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to me because of you. So thank you for that. Over to the conversation now. Vishruti unleashes
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one surprise after another. But you know the drill. Before we get there let's take a quick
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commercial break. If you enjoy listening to The Scene and the Unseen you can play a part
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in keeping the show alive. The Scene and the Unseen has been a labor of love for me. I
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have enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe
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and hopefully yours as well. But while the work has been its own reward I don't actually
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make much money off the show. Although The Scene and the Unseen has great numbers advertisers
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haven't really woken up to the insane engagement level of podcasts and I do many many hours
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of deep research for each episode besides all the logistics of producing the show myself.
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Scheduling guests, booking studios, paying technicians, the travel and so on. So well
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I am trying a new way of keeping this thing going and that involves you. My proposition
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for you is this. For every episode of The Scene and the Unseen that you enjoy buy me
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a cup of coffee or even a lavish lunch whatever you feel is worth. You can do this by heading
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over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contributing an amount of your choice. This is not a subscription.
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The Scene and the Unseen will continue to be free on all podcast apps and at sceneunseen.in.
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This is just a gesture of appreciation. Help keep this thing going. sceneunseen.in slash
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support. Hi everyone. Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. I am not Amit Verma. I am
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Shruti Rajagopalan and I have temporarily taken over as guest host for the 200th episode of
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The Scene and the Unseen because there are some reasons for it but the main reason is
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anytime I meet someone who knows me from Amit's show they immediately ask me lots and lots
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of questions about him and I am frankly a little bit tired of being the conduit to fangirls
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and fanboys and listeners everywhere and I thought it might also be a little bit of fun
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to turn the tables on Amit and ask him to be the guest for three and a half hours so
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that he knows how the rest of us feel. Just FYI for this episode I am prepared with energy
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bars, caffeine and water. I have only not come with like a pack for like survivorship
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or survivorhood but other than that I am fully prepared. So this is why I have taken over
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the show and Amit welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on my show. It's a great
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honor. Yeah the other reason I sort of took over is I have known Amit long enough that
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I can be pushy and obnoxious and do things like invite myself over for the 200th episode
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at the 100th episode. So we did you know like a sort of big reflections episode a 100 episodes
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ago and that was a little bit more fun because we got to have lunch at Oak Alkata just before
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we recorded that. So this time all the yummy food is missing and it's the pandemic and
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we are not in the studio together but other than that it feels really really nice to celebrate
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this big sort of you know milestone. Yeah I mean I don't know how we reached episode
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200 dude. For what it's worth I live and record in Mumbai and Shruti is in NYC and we record
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most of our episodes remotely but you happen to be down in Mumbai that time so we had lunch
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at Oak Alkata and then recorded the 100th and here we are at the 200th and I don't think
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you invited yourself in the sense that it feels perfectly natural to you know do a milestone
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episode with you because you know I don't know if you remember but you know before the
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show started you know we did a bunch of sort of pilot episodes and you were my guinea
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pig for those and listeners may not be aware of this but before we launched the show when
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I was partnering with IVM the way we conceptualized the show was something of a produced show
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where I go on a theme and then we have soundbites from various people coming in and all of that
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and later on at some point we realized that's too much of a pain and what the hell and let's
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just do a straight interview show because much easier to kickstart it and I had a good
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sense of it and the show of course went on to evolve massively from there but Shruti
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was a guinea pig for many of those. Yeah not only was I a guinea pig I must fess
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up here to all your listeners I was also someone who didn't think this was a great idea I was
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like why will people listen to us what is the point of recording this conversation really
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the two of us are going to talk about minimum wage or something like that you know one of
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the guinea pig episodes was I think on minimum wage and I was like who the hell is going
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to care about what we have to say about this so I was a big time naysayer I'm really glad
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Amit did not take my advice and he went with this otherwise there would be no 200th show
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so that's my mini confession but I became a big cheerleader for the show soon enough
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this was just in the very very initial period. Yeah I mean initially like right now for example
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if you speak to me I have a very good sense of what I'm doing and great conviction and
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what I'm doing and why I'm doing it but at the start it was just an experiment it was
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like let's do it the show was nothing like what it is now and you know from there it's
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kind of evolved and I mean really one of the sort of the turning points in my thinking
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about the medium was episode 26 which we did together on the right to property which was
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you know more than an hour and you know early on in the show my conception of podcasting
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my conception of media in general because I didn't listen to podcasting my conception
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of this kind of media in general was that people have short attention spans and you
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have to hook them in the first 15 seconds and no matter how long you make it it should
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not be longer than 20 minutes which was all rubbish and I'll you know maybe get a chance
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to elaborate later in the episode why I feel that way but as we sort of when we did episode
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26 which was more than an hour I thought okay this is my best episode so far and it happens
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to be my longest so what is going on here and I really enjoyed this and listeners seem
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to enjoy it and it took a new life and now of course one hour is like a ridiculous miniature
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I would never do something so hopelessly shallow but what I'll do on social media by the way
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is release sort of without the numbers I'll show you a list of my top 25 episodes in popularity
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because so many people discover the show and they're like what should I listen to first
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so I'll share the top 25 and you'll see that I think more or less all of them are more
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than two hours and there's a very good correlation between sort of length and popularity.
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I don't think it's a correlation between length and popularity I think it's between quality
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and popularity you tend to engage more with guests who are very I mean I don't mean some
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of your guests are not high quality but you know sometimes when the conversation is going
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really well you tend to go longer and that is why the listener is hooked longer because
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it is that good so you know it's this funny thing Jerry Seinfeld in one of his shows he
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talked about how length and quality are just substitutes for each other and I think this
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was with Patton Oswald he said you know there are three second cat and ad videos on YouTube
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that he can't tolerate two seconds off but there are other things which you know you're
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willing to watch for hours people are willing to watch the the directors cut a lot of rings
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back to back and things like that so I really think it's not that people enjoy the length
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per se but it is the amount of quality packed in per minute which you have managed to sustain
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for three hours I just cannot imagine how no no and also what happens is and I'm sure
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you'll you know I don't know what questions you have lined up for me with you know it's
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going to be a wonderful surprise as we go along and we'll probably talk about interviewing
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but one of the things that I do during an episode is always calibrate how long it should
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be according to a number of factors such as if I'm really enjoying it and if it is a stimulating
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conversation and there's enough dope to talk about and the other person is willing which
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is key then I go on as long as I feel like but sometimes the conversation may be great
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but maybe the other and the other person also feels as great but they just don't have the
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time they've given me three hours so we have to end before that that's fine and sometimes
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there aren't you know enough things to talk about and they kind of wind down and sometimes
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I just feel that they're getting tired they want to talk they want to be kind but they
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are just getting tired they haven't sort of stacked up with energy bars and caffeine as
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you have so at that point I just you know I have to make the call that I have to be
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kind to this person and let them go so they live to see another day and maybe another
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episode someday I have been told by my husband that I get hangry I mean he didn't have to
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tell me I know this about myself I didn't want to unleash the the crazy demon version
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of me on you and hence the snacks and the caffeine so if I can begin right after this
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long prelude I mean let me tell you the plan for the show since you don't know what's going
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on you have a rough vague idea so we did something we went behind your back and we asked a group
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of guests and fans and this is not you know it's just a random ordering of people I know
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you have enjoyed having on your show and some of the fans I have interacted with on Twitter
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and I know that you know they're huge fans of yours so those who are not on this list
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this is entirely my fault it had nothing to do with it right so this is just like a group
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of people who thought it would be great to ask you some questions so what we did was
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I just asked them to record a question in their voice and send it to us so Vijay who
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is your sound guy and amazing and my life savior and who I have traumatized over the
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last say two to three weeks has been very helpful in putting this together making sure
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we get all the recordings they're of good quality so I'm going to play the question
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and you have to answer the question so for the listeners this is pretty spontaneous because
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Amit doesn't know what's coming right and I have a whole bunch of questions in the middle
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that that you know I will have I'm sure and you know just as there is always with your
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episodes no fixed plan no fixed script we just take this where the conversation goes
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well I'm really scared and excited but a little scared because normally I'm at the other end
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I mean this is very relaxing to be a guest because I don't have to prepare and I don't
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have to rack my brain about what do I ask next and where do I take the conversation
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and you're constantly on sort of focusing hard when you're the host being a guest is
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much easier however I don't know what's coming at me so this is interesting where are we
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acting okay so we are going to start with Manu Pillai who has been definitely one of
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your most popular guests right he also I think packs in the most number of words per minute
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and he is really one of my favorite authors one of my favorite historians I love reading
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his books so thank you Manu for your question and here goes hi Amit you know my question
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for you is quite simple because I've been on your show three times and I've heard you
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discuss various things with various experts and writers and others you know ever since
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and one of the things I've noticed is that you always spend a good amount of time right
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at the start trying to get them to open up about themselves their past their childhood
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years the kind of you know intellectual inspirations they've had where they studied you know what
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brought them to the to these junctures where they currently are and I've always thought
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you know what about you you know where did you grow up what were the books you read what
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made you this complete podcast guru you know this this figure who's able to sort of woo
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other people and get them to talk about things that they may not necessarily otherwise relate
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to a public audience but you managed to extract that kind of information and I wonder if you
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let us extract a little bit of information about you as well about your background and
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the things that make you who you are and I hope you know Shruti will ask you and prod
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you in this direction and get you to open up a little bit wow that's such a lovely question
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so you know before I get down to answering it like first of all of course we link all
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these episodes from the show notes I must say that I've done three episodes with Manu and
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they were all a super hit and he's been doing this lovely thing just be a guest yeah yeah no
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but I have to I have to say these things about these very kind guests of mine who have asked
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these questions that you know Manu's been on Twitter recently reading out from Hindi and
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Marathi translations of his books and just absolutely lovely it shows you why he's like
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the resident chick magnet of Twitter and he's got a great voice he should totally get into
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podcasting though as I often keep saying that this is not radio so voice does not matter
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and I can elaborate on that separately if you want but to sort of um before I get to answer
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this question because I am a guest I can ramble as much as I want and the host cannot interrupt
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that's the rule of the show so I'd also like to talk about why I get people to open up it's a
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conscious decision it's not a decision that oh I have to reach three hours how do I do it spend
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one hour talking about them but it's a conscious decision but you know not the intended reason but
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part of why it works the tactical thing is that it gets a guest to relax and then they're more
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likely to trust you and open up and all of that but the real reason I do it is for the listeners
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to sort of give them a sense of the flesh and blood person behind the ideas and the work that
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we are going to hear about because too often I think that in the world we and I've been thinking
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a lot and talking a lot about this recently that we focus on abstract things and not enough on
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concrete things so if you're talking about somebody's work and somebody's ideas and you
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can go into all these abstract areas and it's also interesting to me to get a concrete sense of
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who is this person what is her journey where does she come from what are the you know and I'm not
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referring to Manu as a her I'm just it's a generic pronoun and so which is why I do that but to sort
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of and I think I actually talk enough about myself in little bits and pieces here that readers should
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already feel they know me but basically I was sort of my dad is Punjabi my mom is Bengali my dad was
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my dad was an IAS officer so I was born and brought up in Chandigarh where I was still I think
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the eighth standard and then my dad sort of shifted to Pune where he was a director of the
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Film and Television Institute of India in the late 80s in fact he was a person who took the decision
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to expel Sanjay Leela Bhansali from the institute who was then an editing student and demanded that
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his graduation film should be one that he's allowed to direct and my father was like tickler for rules
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and know what are you saying you are an editing student and all of that so I would have expelled
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him for aesthetic reasons alone but I don't think my dad thought along those lines or could have seen
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the future monstrosities that would come out of there so but I mentioned that as an important
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point because I you know as a child I basically grew up watching a lot of world cinema and thinking
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of it as something completely normal not a separate genre like world cinema or something
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not as you know a different kind of cinema but as something completely normal I would watch two
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three films a day that was a big influence on me I was also fortunate because my dad is a reader
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and loved collecting books and we had thousands of books at home literally many thousands so I
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would read I would just pick up whatever I came across and serendipity helped me when I was about
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the age of 10 and I saw this book I still remember it was a hardback modern library
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edition and the book had the intriguing title of house of the dead so I thought okay this will be
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some really funky nice you know thrilling book zombies and all that whatever I don't know let's
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check it out and it was a book by Dostoevsky about his years when he was in a prison in Siberia
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and I was just blown away my whole world was blown open though I haven't read it since then
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so I need to go back and read it so I read all of Dostoevsky and then I read all the Russians and
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then I got to Shakespeare I had I read all of Shakespeare when I was 10 though my I must say
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that while my reading was prolific my tastes weren't very evolved because if I remember
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correctly my favorite Shakespeare play was Titus Andronicus and kind of moved on from there and
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then as I entered my teenage years I kind of read less and less my reading habit sort of went off
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into adulthood but there was that early base where I had kind of read a lot and so on and at this
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point I had no sort of ideological sort of leanings I was sort of probably mildly left liberal like
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many people tend to be in college and then I went to college and I decided okay I want to be a
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writer so what do I do how does one write and it seemed made sense to be to say okay I'll be an
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advertising copywriter and right so I did my BA in English Literature in Ferguson College and I
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did not then know of his story past you know it was in Ferguson College and I think 1892 or 1893
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that Gopal Krishna Gokhale and who had one of the founders of the college met Mahatma Gandhi for
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the first time and they went for a walk on the grounds of Ferguson College and had a long chat
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and it had a history of atheism it's also in Ferguson College where Gopal Ganesh Agarkar one
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of the great figures of our independence who sadly died too young a great classical liberal
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once while teaching a biology class he asked all his students if a donkey had God what would that
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God look like and then he held both his hands up above his ears and and brilliant and I remember
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in you know Gokhale's biography by B.R. Nanda there's an anecdote about how Gokhale tells someone
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about Ferguson College and that person says something to the effect of oh you come from
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that hotbed of atheism anyway I wasn't aware of any of these in when I was in college and nor was
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I an atheist then like I said I was mildly left liberal and mildly very fuzzy about God and I
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thought spirituality and there is some bigger force out there and we cannot give it a name and
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all of that complete rubbish but now of course I'm an atheist but defined as the absence of belief
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so I don't believe that there is no God it's simply that I don't believe that there is a God
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so this is a complete digression but I remember a letter writer to the economist once said that
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you know saying that atheism is a belief system or a religion is like saying that not collecting
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stamps is a hobby so that's kind of that's kind of how I look at it but so what happened was then
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I went to Delhi from there and in Delhi I joined this place called HTA Hindustan Thompson Associates
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where I spent a few months and for whatever reasons I wasn't happy advertising wasn't doing
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it for me and at that time you know channel V had just started and they had come out with the quick
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gun Murugan commercials and all of that and and my then girlfriend now wife was in Pune and she was
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planning to go to Bombay to study although she didn't end up studying she said she would study
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but she was trying to go to Bombay and the long-distance thing wasn't working out so I said
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okay I'm going to go to Bombay and that's the best decision you have made it was so so I went to
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Bombay I I kind I think I landed in Bombay on a Friday and in Monday I was employed at Channel V
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I worked in Channel V for a couple of years I worked for a couple of years more in MTV after
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that you know spent kind of five years between those two places and then sort of moved on and
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did a bunch of things I've spoken about that journey in other places but basically I sort of did
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I tried to be an entrepreneur for a very short while which was right after the dot com bubble
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burst so not the best of timings that didn't work then I joined Wisden which bought Crickinfo
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and I became managing editor there did that for a few years and because I didn't want to write
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only about cricket started a blog called India Uncut which you know back in the day became kind
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of fairly popular wrote that a lot I called it my writing gym like you know when I sort of teach my
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writing course now I tell people about how important it is to write regularly and India
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Uncut was great because I was writing five posts a day and because my attitude was it is just a
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blog I wasn't paralyzed by the fear of anxiety that what will other people think of my writing
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and so on and so forth so I ended up doing some 8 000 posts in five years then I moved on to sort
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of playing poker professionally for a living and after five years of that I decided that you know
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it was taking a toll on my lifestyle I had saved up enough to kind of not have to work for a while
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so I thought let me be a writer again left that then I kind of became editor of the online magazine
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prakati for a while started the scene and the unseen around the same time and now I can safely
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say that I am either a professional podcaster or a professional educator none of which I would have
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you know expected five years ago but like here we are it's it's it's um yeah it's a wild journey
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you know one of my favorite things about you and especially because I have seen about the last 15
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plus years of this this transition in your life is that you never wait for there to be this
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infrastructure or this institutional system I say this specifically because I have students
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who ask me how do I do this how do I become a lawyer or how do I become so and so how do I
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start writing a column and if I were to give them your example it would be just start doing it
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and it will figure itself out and something will come of it most people wait to be asked to do
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something most people wait for a job to exist before actually doing what they care about you
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are one of those few people who's just like I really enjoy doing this and I'm going to do it
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and that's the end of that and it's one of my favorite things about you so what is your attitude
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about that were you always like this as a kid does it come from having certain amount of privilege
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and also certain amount of self knowledge that you know you do something long enough you know
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it's going to turn into something valuable where does this unique you know sort of it's not even
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entrepreneurial it's really like it's entrepreneurial it's experimental it's really interesting
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characteristic of you that I have observed look I think the privilege is always there because
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obviously you know I've had the good fortune of not really having to worry about my next
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meal is going to come from though at the same time I have essentially been completely self-made got
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nothing from elsewhere and you know been working since I was 20 and all all of that but my my
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approach is you know it seems like it's planned and there's a grand philosophy behind it I do
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have a sort of not a grand philosophy but a way of thinking about these things now but a lot of
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it when it happened was that I just felt enamored with something and I went ahead and did it and I
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was always sort of an idealistic fool and I never sort of thought about is there a market for this
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is this going to make money is this going to sort of lead to short-term results and validation and
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all of those things I just jumped into it having said that the one thing I wanted to do all my
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life which is write novels is something I've just written one bad novel so I haven't done enough of
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that so actually I haven't done what you're saying I've done which will jump into what I love but
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I've done a lot of other things which have interested me because I wanted to do them now my broad sort
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of advice to people would be whenever you're doing something two pieces of advice one is don't
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overthink it I think there is a trade-off between getting it done and getting it right and wherever
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there is a conflict between those two you should privilege getting it done and in fact getting it
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done is a way to get it right because you get it done once and then you keep doing it doing it doing
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it you keep iterating it becomes something else and event that's actually the only way to get it
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right like even the scene and the unseen for example like I'm really proud of the episode that
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I've done since say maybe episode 80 90 and you know the last the last hundred episodes so to say
#
but I don't like the early episodes at all because the conception of the show was very different and
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as you keep doing it you know you sort of keep learning you keep growing you discover new things
#
and then it becomes a different kind of beast so my first piece of advice is don't overthink it
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where there's a you see that trade-off between getting it done and getting it right err on the
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side of getting it done just start and see where it goes throw things at the wall my other way of
#
looking at it which is something I've come to realize this year and maybe we'll get a chance
#
to speak about it at length later in this episode is that and this is a piece of advice I give
#
creators that I think much as they say about futurists and science fiction writers that they
#
tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term I think creators do this as well
#
that many creators will start creating something and they'll overestimate the short term and what
#
it will get them in terms of validation and financial rewards and they'll say my podcast
#
will be so popular and I'll get so many hits and I'll make so much money and they overestimate that
#
and they could get disheartened by that and stop doing it but you might underestimate the long
#
run because what will happen in the long run is something that you don't really know I mean look
#
at someone like Joe Rogan he's been podcasting for donkey's ears and now he gets a hundred million
#
deal from Spotify and obviously there's a little bit of survivor's bias at play there but regardless
#
I think those who succeed in creative enterprises will be people who do it for the love of it and
#
of course you have to be practical and you have to think about how you want to make money and so on
#
but there are people who do it for the love of it and then it works out and then they sort of
#
start thinking of all of these other aspects many of which fall into place so I won't say that I
#
didn't want to make money of this but I started seen in the unseen obviously I wasn't like the
#
first 108 episodes made nothing and till I went independent in fact and broke with my as well
#
partners it was making very negligible money and now for the last few months it's better partly
#
because you know and again this is something which in the context of creators I can speak
#
about later that as creators you have to think of what you do for each and what you do for revenue
#
and they may not often coincide and you may do something to build your brand which then pays off
#
in other ancillary ways so there's a sort of now post-facto of figuring out a lot of stuff
#
but the bottom line is that there was a long long period when the show wasn't you know making any
#
money and it was a labor of love and especially when it became the long-form conversation thing
#
you know I would often read many many books to sort of prepare for it and for each episode and
#
it became really hard work so I remember once I was going to an episode recording and I was feeling
#
and I was feeling very low that day I was saying like what's the point you know it's there's no
#
money there's nothing again you know one more time in my life like India Uncut I'm doing
#
something which is very popular but there's nothing in it and then at the end of the recording I was
#
like walking on air I just felt so elated and I thought that you know it's worth it for its own
#
sake it doesn't matter the other stuff can come or not come but it's worth it for its own sake
#
and and the recording for those who want to know though it could have been many recordings because
#
I've you know almost all the recordings I've done in the past couple of years are worth it for their
#
own sake but this was episode 150 which was with VK Kartika and we were talking a lot about books
#
so that's sort of something that I enjoyed. We have VK Kartika coming up later in some questions
#
but I want to go on to one of your more recent episodes with Rajat Ubhayakar right this was
#
this lovely episode on his book on how he traveled across India with truck drivers and he's
#
asked a really interesting question about influence of your parents your father in particular so just
#
give that a click. Apologies if this question is a bit personal but I recently found out that
#
Amit's father was an IAS officer now I have several friends who are children of civil servants
#
IAS, IPS and so on and so many of them are now committed vocal libertarians
#
so anecdotally there seems to be a pattern at work here so my question for Amit is what role if
#
any witnessing the workings of the Indian state growing up play in you later becoming a libertarian?
#
Yeah that's such a great question a great perceptive question you know to really speculate
#
I mean I don't know too many other libertarians and I don't even like to use that label now because
#
I think labels make people think in tribal ways so what I would kind of say is if I may speculate
#
on why it may be the case that children of bureaucrats might tend to distrust the state
#
a little bit more is that they don't think of the state in abstract terms anymore that they have seen
#
some concrete effect of it because in a sense they are part of it and beneficiaries of it in
#
indirect ways so perhaps that could be a reason but I never actually consciously thought about it
#
as it happens my father was a remarkably honest IAS officer and known for that and perhaps even
#
suffered for that but regardless of that I think the state is all around you but I would like to
#
think that you know just growing up in those times even if my father wasn't who he was I would
#
probably have you know grown to think the way that I do because in fact I was not like a libertarian
#
in a childhood or something like I said I was mildly left liberal if there's any problem my
#
you know I'd want the state to step in and solve it and you know all my intent for everything would
#
be compassionate and I would not think about outcomes and the way the world really works
#
and it's really much later in adulthood that I kind of turned away from that but I would say
#
that you know what you call libertarianism is I think a common human decency that all of us share
#
and this is something I want to elaborate on at book length at some point but the point of it is
#
that in the concrete in our personal lives most of us behave in ways that you would call libertarian
#
we respect the consent of others we don't try to coerce others we won't force somebody else to pay
#
for our preferences if we go to a restaurant with a bunch of friends you know we won't force everyone
#
to order exactly what we're ordering and so on and so forth but when we go beyond the concrete and
#
talk about the abstract and we talk about the state suddenly these values go for a toss and we
#
you know because we don't see the cost of the sort of coercion and the other things that we then
#
begin to recommend so I would say that in our personal lives most of us if we are decent human
#
beings we are by default what you are calling libertarians I mean I use the term in a shorthand
#
way and you know and I'm just wary of using terms like these because they're so tribal but
#
all of that so I say that so I don't know what part that played in my life and I know the kids
#
of a handful of bureaucrats and none of them think like me so I think maybe Rajat's
#
experience is different I wonder how you know I should have asked him this during the episode
#
when the timer came up I wonder how truck drivers feel about sort of the state because they are
#
actually constantly victims in so many different ways of the oppressiveness of the state though
#
given how so many of us normalize that perhaps they don't think about it at all. The next question
#
I want to ask you comes from another one of my favorite episodes on your show which is Chinmay
#
Tumbe and you know his wonderful book and work on migration that you talked about and it just you
#
know some of these stories like whether it's Rajat's book or Chinmay's book to me when I heard the
#
episode it didn't feel like it was about truck drivers or it was about migration it felt like
#
it was this broad story about India and Indians and there is like this universality to these themes
#
like whether it's migration whether it's driving that each one of us can immediately connect to
#
what it is that's going on so big shout out to both of them and I'm gonna play Chinmay's question
#
for you now. Hi Ahmed this is Chinmay Tumbe here congrats on your 200th episode as you know I love
#
migration and so my question for you is tell us something about your own migration story what are
#
your roots? Oh yeah my own migration story so I mean there are two ways in which I can tackle this
#
question and one I've already kind of spoken about my background born and brought up in Chandigarh
#
and then moved to studied in Pune for a few years was in Delhi where I worked in HTA for a year and
#
then Bombay since then the last 25 years more than that but before that if you kind of look at
#
where my parents are from my mother was you know a Calcutta person a hardcore Bengali a Bhattacharya
#
as it were and my father was born in 1941 in what is now Pakistan in Shekhupura which is a place in
#
Lahore and as a kid shifted to Calcutta and he and my mom you know met in college and had a roaring
#
love affair which was the talk of the town and parental opposition and all of that nonsense and
#
I guess fortunately or unfortunately for me they kind of battled through in fact it's an interesting
#
story my father had you know when he graduated he had sort of options where he had he had private
#
sector offers I think from Clarion advertising which was then the number one to join the then
#
editor of EPW and this would have been the mid to early 60s the then editor of EPW loved something
#
he did and he said come and work with me and one day you will be the editor and all of that
#
he also I think got a scholarship to Cambridge and whatever for further studies but he wanted
#
to marry my mother and my mother's father said the boy must have a job and a proper job not some
#
silly private sector job and what is this going all over the place for studying so my so my father
#
decided that okay he'll try for the IES so without really preparing for it he gave the entrance exam
#
and got through and voila and the interesting thing is when I ask him about his past and in
#
fact at one point I thought that I should record these memories so I sat down with a recorder and
#
recorded a couple of hours of me talking to him not for the purpose of publishing anywhere but
#
just for my own sort of personal memories and he doesn't really kind of care about his past like
#
you know when I was going to Pakistan for the cricket tour in 2006 I said where were you born
#
you know should I probably go there and he said no no don't bother I don't even remember it doesn't
#
mean anything to me so you know that's kind of how it was and I once I've asked him a couple of
#
times about counterfactuals about how his life would have been had he say gone to Cambridge or
#
done this or done that or whatever and he always kind of hedges and doesn't really even answer to
#
that and and but anyway I mean here I am so also that ended well the other way to answer that
#
migration question is to also think about it in terms of the mental geographies we inhabit that
#
while I have of course been born and brought up in India and have lived here all my life
#
the mental geographies I have inhabited and this would be true much more for millennials here today
#
than perhaps people of my generation but the mental geographies were always western in some
#
senses all the books I read were in English and they were from all across the world and all the
#
music I heard was largely American and rock and all of that and my mental landscapes were mental
#
western my ways of thinking about the world were western so I think that you know people in India
#
are a khichri in more ways than just their physical geographies may indicate and by the way I want to
#
say you know whenever someone asks me to recommend a book that they should read about India I don't
#
recommend some of the famous books that I've done episodes on I recommend India Moving by Chinmay
#
Tummay because I think it's a masterpiece one of the best books of the last decade and people
#
haven't heard of it and that's just such a blooming tragedy so kindly go and listen to my episode with
#
him because it tells us so much about who we are it has so many TIL moments like for example you
#
know the biggest TIL moment in that episode for me while reading the book in fact for me was
#
when he spoke about how the highest amount of migration in India happens when women get
#
married and they leave their parental homes and they go to their marital homes and most of us
#
wouldn't even and it's invisible it's invisible most of us because we have such a male-centric
#
view of the world wouldn't even think of that as migration right you know it just seems so
#
naturally you're going from one home to another home but it is migration and what are the influences
#
that has and what happens so it's a wonderful book I'm sorry I can't help plugging past episodes and
#
books that I have enjoyed no I'm thrilled because part of why I wanted to do this with you is also
#
reflect on these episodes right and the wonderful moments that have taken place I want to take
#
Chinnai's question one step further and ask you some of the counterfactuals right are there places
#
you chose not to migrate to where you had maybe job offers or you know family or school or you
#
know what what were the parts you did not take well so like I said when I was a kid you know
#
growing up as a kid in the FDII where my father was director I used to watch movies all the time
#
and at that point you know I wanted to be a writer since I was like four or five years old
#
but at that point I said I also want to be a filmmaker and my father through his connection
#
said listen you know after you're done with whatever I can get you admission into the French
#
Film Institute because a director there is a friend and blah blah blah and we can do something
#
and you want to go and I was a lazy bum I said I'll have to learn French he said yes I said forget
#
it I'm cool here and I didn't go so which I have actually not thought about since the time that
#
conversation happened but since you asked me I suppose that is one counterfactual and for what
#
is worth I'm still passionate about cinema but I decided not to follow that path because
#
your creative product is dependent on too many other people and too many things falling into
#
place and I said with my writing I can just turn out books on my own it doesn't matter now it so
#
happens I've been a lazy bum and I haven't actually written the 15 books I should have by now although
#
there is time to make up for that but I don't really have any big counterfactuals apart from
#
that the fact is I was you know if you want to look at counterfactuals it would not be in terms
#
of opportunities that came to me but paths that I chose not to chase so I could have gone you know
#
I'm sure I could have gone the IIT IEM way if I wanted to but I wanted to do art so because I
#
wanted to write at some point I'm sure if I really wanted to I could have gone abroad and studied
#
there and made a life there but when I was young I had this very rebellious attitude of why should
#
I go abroad I will do things on my own and I was very anti the education system and just anti just
#
all those traditional paths that people take and and I don't regret any of that I mean if I have
#
any regrets is that I haven't worked hard enough at what I set out to do but I am convinced that
#
I set out to do the right thing no absolutely now the next part you know I mean since we were
#
talking about the parts that you have taken and you haven't taken these are two of not just your
#
guests you know that I whom I have loved in the episodes and so on but also two of my favorite
#
people who've come on your show one of them I know well and it's Prem Panikkar the other one
#
I don't know at all Joy Bhattacharya but I feel like I know him through your episode through a
#
number of other things he does also because I'm a cricket widow and you know he's kind of around
#
in the background if you're a cricket widow and I love him on Twitter I love everything that he
#
does so I'm going to play you first Prem Panikkar's question and then Joy Bhattacharya's question and
#
you will know why in a minute that they are coming together hey Amit congratulations on the double
#
hundred and here's to the triple and beyond you've had a storied career you've been a cricket writer
#
editor or fiction writer columnist a two-time winner of the Bastiat a poker player pioneering
#
podcast or writing coach I may have left out a couple of things but that's quite a comprehensive
#
CV as it stands so which of these gives you the greatest satisfaction and what is that one thing
#
or things that is on your bucket list of things that you still want to do
#
Hi Amit congratulations for 200 incredible episodes so this is my turn to ask you a question
#
and here's my question you've had many of that from being a cricket writer to you know working
#
in MTV as a producer to being a poker player to being an award-winning business journalist
#
and now a podcast you know of course so if you had to make a choice which one of these
#
previous professions or vocations would you have avoided? If you had to lose one of them which one would you have avoided?
#
Yeah lovely questions by both of them and they are both people who are personally close to me I
#
respect them a lot and I'm really fond of them and Prem has been on a couple of episodes and
#
Joy was on a very memorable episode about sports ecosystems where I you know the second half of
#
that episode with Joy where he talks about you know all the work he did setting up the football
#
under 17 world cup and all of that was just made me so happy and it was so inspiring because
#
you know I was like here is another idealistic fool so someone who's making much more of a difference
#
to the world than I managed to but just absolutely wonderful people and wonderful episodes to answer
#
that question I you know the tragedy is I think none of them mentioned the the one thing that I
#
really thought of myself all my life as and which I haven't really done enough of which is
#
writing novels writing fiction or literature or whatever and I haven't done enough of that
#
and I will at some point do more of that I've just written one shitty book as I said long ago
#
and which was yeah so you know but out of all of these look the early years like I don't even
#
mention advertising or television on my cv because it just doesn't mean anything to me it didn't
#
enrich my life didn't teach me anything you know as I think I enjoyed my blogging a lot because
#
sort of the more you write you know writing forces you to think and you know there's something that I
#
talk to my writing students about when I teach writing these days is that there is a two-way
#
causal relationship between clear writing and clear thinking that not just that if you're you
#
know it's obvious right if you're a clear thinker you'll write you are more likely to write clearly
#
but equally if you force yourself to write clearly in simple language about complex things you have
#
to think that much deeper about whatever you are writing and that just improves the way that you
#
think so I think all that prolific writing that I did in my blogging years was useful to me
#
I'm kind of I'm happy with that but you know I used to say until recently that there is nothing
#
I have done in my life that I can really be proud of I think to some extent now when I think about
#
it I think the seen and the unseen is I think I've created value and obviously some of the
#
I think I've created value and obviously it's an ongoing journey but I'm proud of some of the
#
conversations that I've done I also think that in what is a very new field I've been able to
#
sort of gather a certain understanding about a medium which did not exist there earlier like
#
I'm teaching a podcasting course now and while preparing for it so I had a whole bunch of
#
insights I wrote that down structured it and then I thought let me see what others have taught
#
and I tried started going through other podcasting courses and they were all like your basic
#
dummies guide to podcasting kind of thing these are the kind of mics this is how you edit this is
#
how you do and none of the conceptual stuff that I had gathered over all this time like why is
#
audio so different as a medium which people don't get so many people think of it as video with
#
visuals but it is incredibly different in every way why are podcasts so different from radio
#
podcast is not just radio on demand like people think of Netflix as TV on demand and that's correct
#
but podcasts are much more than radio on demand and you know and some of that also came from my
#
realizing the insane level of engagement with which my listeners have with the show and the
#
sense that many of them have that this means something to them that they have a stake in it
#
you know and all of that so in that sense I think that you know I've kind of the podcasting
#
journey is very interesting and it's an ongoing one and I'm sort of enjoying it but at at some
#
point if I had to give up any of them look I'd give up the poker years not because I mean I took
#
it up because it was a an intellectual challenge and b unlike my other great passion until then
#
which was writing I actually saw I could make money of poker and I did and one of the reasons
#
I left was that I thought I'll play it for a while make a few money and then you know do my
#
thing and I found it doesn't really scale that way you know you get to a certain point and after
#
that it becomes a question of access to bigger games and it becomes very political in that
#
respect and also it destroys your lifestyle because you're playing like you'll play a 15
#
hour session come back sleep for eight hours go play another session and I also found that
#
during those years I felt like I was getting dumber because poker you have to be obsessive
#
to be good at poker and you can't do anything else so I stopped reading books I stopped hanging
#
out with friends apart from the people I played poker with and and you know I was reading the
#
biography of some famous poker player of the 70s and there was a story about how for 20 and he was
#
an American player and there was a story of how for 20 years he didn't know who the president of
#
the US was and I could understand that because it was just constricting my whole whole world and I
#
felt my brain and I felt I have to get out so even though I am not knocking kind of what I did going
#
back if I had to give a piece of advice to my younger self in 2009 it would be no no no don't
#
don't play poker just just just focus on writing and do your thing but poker also taught me a lot
#
about the world that I think enrich the way I think about the world for example I think of the
#
world much more in probabilistic ways I recognize the impact of luck in our lives much more which
#
most people don't most people give too much credit to their agency and what they have um you know
#
they imagine they are responsible for their successes and their failures and that's true to
#
a very small extent you know so when we succeed we'll tend to let it get to our heads and become
#
arrogant and when we fail we let it get ourselves down and it will hurt our self-image and the truth
#
is in both of those there's a lot of luck involved and part of what you have to do as you go through
#
life is become equanimous about the outcomes of the things that you do and the and the the card
#
that life deals you like in poker you you know that you know it's a game of skill but the quantum
#
of luck is much higher than in other sports or games of skill so any single hand will be mostly
#
luck it's over a long period that the edge the skill plays out so you play a hundred thousand
#
two hundred thousand hands the tragedy is that in life you cannot do that in life you get the cards
#
that you get and it is what it is but it is still important not to sweat what you cannot control
#
and instead to focus on what you can control which is you focus on the process or as that great poker
#
player lord krishna once said you know uh just do the right thing and don't worry about the fruits
#
of your action so before you continue on this because you know you keep anticipating the
#
questions which is very frustrating for me as a host because you you can almost see what's coming
#
next uh i have a question uh for you from akshay amukul also who has been on your show he wrote
#
this fantastic book about the geeta press it once again you know it was one of those books that just
#
opened my eyes to this entire world and subculture that i didn't know existed and akshay amukul has
#
really become one of my favorite thinkers so uh you know i'm just gonna play his question for you
#
and then we can continue talking about poker hello amit akshay amukul here good to see my
#
favorite podcaster being interviewed by my favorite columnist sruti can you tell listeners
#
about your life as a poker player thanks sruti for this opportunity see you both in person soon
#
yeah that's a lovely episode and akshay is such a wonderful warm person and i can't wait to see
#
him soon as well and that's a great book again i'll say that that's again you know i don't i
#
don't in this age of hyperbole when you use terms like masterpiece it almost feels like you know
#
it's but again as in the case of chinmay's book for akshay's book i absolutely mean it uh the
#
book he's written on the gita press is just incredible and so eye-opening for someone like
#
me so my life as a poker player would you know this gets into odd territory because poker is
#
illegal in india and it's only legal in the offshore casinos of goa which is where i first
#
started playing i think in 2009 i took a holiday uh to goa and we went to casino royale the offshore
#
casino there played a little bit of poker uh had beginner's luck and then decided this is what i
#
want to do and of course i didn't know anything about the game then but as i studied the game the
#
intellectual challenges overtook me and i kind of loved getting into the math and the game theory
#
and all of that and that sort of changed the way i think about it and i used to write a column on
#
poker for the economic times as well uh which i think i wrote 42 installments for them and
#
stopped it at exactly the point where i decided to leave poker and one of the interesting things
#
about poker is that it is on the intersection of being a serious sport slash science and gambling
#
so uh you know you might be treating it as a serious sport and a serious science but there
#
are people who are sitting with you who are essentially just addicted to gambling they're
#
playing it for the dopamine rushes and i wrote columns about this as well it's uh you know the
#
way the i mean gambling addiction in biochemical terms is you know the same as addiction to alcohol
#
or uh cigarettes or whatever you take a puff or you drink a peg you get that dopamine rush it's
#
a similar thing with uh sort of um gambling and and and that led to this period of frustration
#
where i felt that what is the point of my skill it's i'm not playing against other people who
#
are also treating it as a serious skill and as a game theoretical thing i am playing it with people
#
and and by this i mean in the underground cash games that i used to play in mumbai and around
#
who are just sitting off you know have no idea what they're doing and eventually it's all going
#
to come to us and i remember there was uh me and a very close friend of mine who's also a pro and
#
a really good player and who's um gone on to do phenomenally well uh in the last uh five years
#
since i left though not because i left but in general uh so he and i were at a game together
#
in washi and there was a third person in the game after the whole game had wound up and he was a
#
big builder there and he was high on cocaine and he would just every hand he would just you know
#
push a ton of chips and huge amounts of money blind without looking at his cards so it's only
#
a matter of time right and then we are driving back and and both my friend and i um his name is
#
jagdeep and and both jagdeep and i were we didn't feel good about the whole thing and and we were
#
like that what is the difference between us and drug dealers it almost feels like we're exploiting
#
someone's addiction so there was that aspect of it where as you would know i keep talking about all
#
how all human interactions are positive some interactions right so if i create a podcast
#
and someone listens to it and like every interaction that takes place is a double thank
#
you moment both people benefit which is why they say thank you to each other poker is not like that
#
right it's a zero sum game and you know considering that if you're playing at a place where the game
#
is being raked it's actually a negative sum game and uh you only win when someone else loses and
#
someone else losing is not just someone else losing someone else losing means their sort of
#
lives could just fall apart and i've seen that happen to people i've tried to make interventions
#
in the case of two friends of mine who were addicted to gambling and i remember you know um
#
i mean there are just very sad stories i don't want to get into them right now but one thing
#
you realize is that interventions don't help and people might rationally realize that they're
#
addicted to something but they can't help themselves you know and i for example see that
#
like i think i might be addicted to social media for example so you know or maybe addicted to
#
distraction if they can be such a thing but the bottom line is i think all of us know this that
#
we know that i should not you know go on twitter now or i should not start watching a youtube video
#
now because i'll go down a rabbit hole and watch 50 of them but then you just start and you know
#
and most of the time the sort of the impact of harmless addictions like that as it were is not
#
such a big deal like when i was trying to wean friends of mine of poker i'd say just play online
#
chess here you know and you know that's a better thing to get addicted to because you're not losing
#
money you're losing time and i've just seen horrendous consequences of this and it all
#
happens below the surface you know the the families of people realize what has happened to them they
#
may try to help them there's really nothing you can do it's a downward spiral and it's horrendous
#
and that's why you know when i started playing poker i had the impression that the winners stay
#
in the game the losers leave the game and over a period of time what i realized when i was leaving
#
is that it's the other way around that it's the winners who eventually leave the game but the
#
losers are addicted they cannot leave the game so there are all these aspects so while i was an
#
evangelist of poker once upon a time because it's so intellectually stimulating and all of those
#
things there is also this other dark see me uh sight to it and you cannot you know rationalize
#
that by saying that this is you know the voluntary action of consenting adults and all of that which
#
of course it is which is why the state should not ban it but uh it is nevertheless a social problem
#
and you would hope that you know solutions emerge from within society yeah and this actually brings
#
me to another really lovely question that karthika has asked almost exactly on this aspect of
#
you know you nurturing your love for poker and then walking away from it so i'm going to play
#
karthika's question now hi amit this is karthika congratulations on this fabulous milestone of 200
#
episodes and here's my question for you it's a bit personal actually i know you were really involved
#
with poker at one time you played poker you wrote about it then at some point you decided no more
#
i was reading about addictive personalities the other day and i wondered is that how you
#
would describe yourself what's it like nurturing a love for something and then killing it i really
#
want to know yeah that's such a lovely question and i should say my episode with karthika is of
#
course one of my favorites and i and i kind of mentioned why for sort of those reasons but also
#
i mean it's a great episode by itself but also she is the publisher at westland and as i mentioned
#
in the introduction that they are publishing uh the four volumes of the scene and the unseen uh
#
you know selected excerpts from conversations i have had you will have to wait a while shruti to
#
see if your conversations get featured or not but yeah that's that's a really good question and it's
#
something that i thought a lot about like number one i would venture that many more of us are
#
prone to addiction than we think except that you know in some cases it may manifest in
#
a very overt addiction to either alcohol or drugs or whatever but there are so many other things
#
that we can get addicted to like when i you know i've done a bunch of episodes with uh uh about
#
the mughal period with say manu and mani mugdha and ira makhoti and i need to record with her
#
again soon she's incredible and one of the things that keeps coming up again and again parvati
#
sharma also and one of the things that keeps coming up supriya gandhi recently and one of the
#
themes that keeps coming up again and again in all their wonderful books is how so many of these
#
mughal princes and all that died of alcohol addiction and the thing is that it just strikes
#
me thinking aloud that that is the only thing you could get addicted to what else are you there's
#
no social media there's no twitter there's no poker there's no chess so alcohol is going to be
#
one of the most common ways for affluent people who can afford enough alcohol to get addicted to
#
but to come back to it i think you know when i was sort of playing poker i the thought crossed my
#
mind when i decided to leave that i am a winning player but it could be the case that i am an
#
addict and a winning player and what will happen if that is the case and i am glad to report it
#
wasn't the case once i left i had no urge whatsoever to play the game like once in a while i will you
#
know um watch some interesting poker videos or whatever you know just for the intellectual
#
aspect of it like these days we're recording on november 10 there's a great match going on
#
between duck poke and daniel nigranu sort of a heads up grudge match and i'm a big fan of
#
duck poke and i think he's going to destroy nigranu so although nigranu in popular circles is much
#
more famous but he's like the chetan bhagat of poker frankly so uh in terms of i have no idea
#
who these people are yeah but that reference i know yeah so i'm i'm kind of you know following
#
that match but otherwise i don't get the itch to play at all uh which is great but i think i might
#
like i play a lot of online chess i think there is this interesting case that there is an addictive
#
side to my nature and the question is what outlet do i give it and uh you know online chess is an
#
interesting outlet and i and i play online chess on chess.com like uh though you won't find my
#
name there i play under an avatar and in fact i have a girl's avatar so people keep hitting on me
#
horny indian boys keep hitting on me and also i probably win more games and i should because of
#
that but i played at the way the fish used to play poker the the bad players used to play poker that
#
is that i don't want to improve i just i'll play one minute games for time pass uh bullet or bullet
#
or blitz games for time pass and i don't want to improve so i don't want to work on my game
#
which is how a lot of people played poker back in the day that they would not improve at all
#
while you know the rest of us would study a bit and we would discuss hands with other good players
#
what were the choices what do you think his range was but uh bad players are just playing for the
#
heck of it and of course many bad players will make a show of going through the study but not
#
actually um do any of it so to answer that question i think i think i am i don't know if addictive is
#
the right word for it because it's never gone beyond a certain limit but i think i am intense
#
uh where i'll you know get into something and just go all in like i've i went all in on podcasting
#
i went all in on blogging and i'll i'll just go all in into things which is great but what i need
#
to do is i need to go and you know with kartika's encouragement and help i think i'm on my way to
#
doing that now um is go all in on actually writing books you know not just a compilation like this is
#
but actually go all in on writing books because everything that i've gone all in for while
#
rewarding for its own sake and in many other ways has also sort of distracted me from that
#
thing which i think is so core to myself as a writer and storyteller so i need to do a little
#
bit more of that yeah do you think you're being a little bit you're judging yourself too harshly in
#
the sense that maybe the only way you know how to do some of these things is to be all in right so
#
it's not a question of addiction or no addiction it is that you do things by immersing yourself in
#
it whether it is writing a novel or whether it is doing a podcast and it is very hard for you to do
#
things on the side like you just completely commit so the the product that comes out of it whether
#
it's a podcast whether it's columns whether it's the blog it is uh the quality and the output it's
#
a function of the fact that you are that immersed right for for the rest of us it never quite hits
#
that level uh maybe because of that lack of immersion yeah no no absolutely i i don't regret
#
the immersion of the going all in uh because it's it's fruitful and it works and and um uh you know
#
and i also know how to sort of disengage from something if it is not working or i'm not loving
#
it so much so it's not like i go all in on every single thing that i do but when i'm enjoying
#
something like uh you know like indian cart or back when i was blogging regularly or um the scene
#
in the unseen or poker i'll just go all in but the regret is that the uh you know the going all in
#
comes at the expense of something which is in my case it's a writing of books like pre-poker i
#
don't really regret the very meandering journey i took because i don't think i had the life
#
experience or the maturity to be able to write good books anyway but um um i i think i was just
#
kind of getting there when i gave five years to poker and i think that had had the opportunity
#
cost that i could have written a number of books by now which i haven't so that part for uh that
#
reason in terms of a life choice i kind of do regret yeah so now i have a slightly lighter
#
question on poker but before i play the question for you this is from harsha bhogle again one of
#
the best episodes you know you've done uh for many reasons i mean i am not a cricket person at all i
#
play cricket as white noise but because i was raised in india and because i started watching
#
cricket in the early 90s and also because i'm a cricket widow today harsha bhogle's voice has
#
literally been the soundtrack of my life right it is always in the background so uh when he sent in
#
the question for me the most joyous thing was just hearing his voice and and that you know he asked
#
you a question so i'm just gonna play it now and it's related to poker but it's related to life
#
ah the hunter becomes the hunted so i mean i had a question for you i've always been fascinated in
#
sport by the interplay between skill and bluff there are a lot of very skilled people can't
#
play the bluff shane born was a master of combining extraordinary skill and bluff now
#
you played poker and i would imagine not having played it myself that there is a wonderful interplay
#
of skill and bluff in poker as well my question is not about that though my question about poker
#
players do you find that people who play poker and who therefore are playing the bluff almost
#
every day and playing it with a lot of skill do they live life like that as well are they do
#
they take chances are they gamblers in life are they a little edgy or is that a persona they put
#
on when they get on to the uh onto the poker table love to know yeah that's such a lovely question
#
and i really enjoy i've got to you know again um a few words about harsha before i answer this
#
question my first introduction to audio as someone who did audio my first attempt at audio was i was
#
you know i i traveled to pakistan with um you know following the indian cricket team in 2006
#
and i was covering it for the guardian and also writing about it for cricket for where i was
#
actually employed at the time and i also got a side gig where for one of the bbc channels every
#
day i would have to give a one minute update on what was happening at the time they called me
#
and if at that and so i would have my narrative prepared so many wickets have fallen and all that
#
but i'm actually watching the match at that point and if something happened right then
#
i would have to weave it in which i found difficult so i was struggling with that
#
so harsha was on the tour as a broadcaster and at one point i uh you know i mentioned that i had
#
this problem and he was so kind i think if i remember he sat with me for half an hour told
#
me about the sort of the all the basics of uh what to do for radio and you know really calm me down
#
and gave me great advice all of which i have completely forgotten and i didn't do audio after
#
that for many years but it speaks to his kindness that he was also such a huge superstar at the
#
time like you correctly said and and such a you know a warm and helpful human being to answer the
#
question there are different aspects to it uh number one is that as far as uh what are poker
#
players like do they also bluff their way through lives i think the the people who are addicts to
#
poker are also people who are doing all kinds of other gambling so there would be people who would
#
be constantly on the phone call with bookies betting on cricket betting on this betting on
#
that and that's the way that they are the people who were treating it like me were not like that
#
number one but number two the thing about bluffing is that has the sort of a has a deal that when
#
you're bluffing you're playing a game of probabilities for example um i hope i don't get too technical
#
here but i'll try and kind of explain the way to think about bluffing let's say that if there is
#
a pot on the river with a thousand rupees right so i bet 500 rupees into it okay now there's
#
1500 in the pot to win that 1500 you have to call 500 bucks right so you are getting three to one
#
odds which means that you have to be right one in four times for your call to be correct right
#
which means that optimally i have to be bluffing there one in four times and the rest of the time
#
i have to have value bets if either of us deviates from these percentages they are making a mistake
#
and they will lose in the long run so the result is that if you do not if somebody never bluffs
#
and they are betting a value hand 100 percent of the time two things happen one is you don't get
#
enough value hands in poker so you will not win enough hands but more importantly your opponent
#
will see that you are never bluffing and therefore they will always fall to your bet so you're never
#
going to make enough money so therefore bluffing is not something that is any different from any
#
other kind of bet that you're trying to fool someone it's just something that mathematically
#
you have to throw in for your poker to be profitable in the long run and you throw it in
#
depending on a variety of factors like how you are building your ranges and how your uh sort of whole
#
thinking uh about the game uh is in fact you know what is known as like there are two and and this
#
is another interesting thing to note is that people think that tails count that you know in
#
movies they'll show that somebody bluffs and then he's completely still all over and the other guy
#
looks at him and he'll see a vein popping somewhere and he'll be like ah he's bluffing call call but
#
in real life actually that that once you pass a certain level of poker it doesn't matter good
#
players won't even look for tails it's all about the math and there two things come in and poker
#
there are two kinds of sort of uh poker that you can play one is exploitative poker where you try
#
to exploit a mistake the other person is making so if they call too much you value bet more if they
#
fold too much you bluff more you adjust according to that the other is game theory optimal poker
#
like in the example i pointed out where it doesn't matter what he does you get your frequencies right
#
so if you bet 500 into 1000 to a river and you give him three to one odds you build your range
#
in such a way that you have that percentage of bluffs and that percentage of value hands
#
and then in the long run you cannot lose if he deviates he loses by either calling too much or
#
folding too much but you cannot lose so if you play game theory optimal poker it doesn't matter
#
what the opponent does you don't need to look at him it doesn't matter what his tendencies are
#
now obviously game theoretical optimal poker is a theoretical construct no human being can possibly
#
play it perfectly but the better you have an idea of what gto poker might be the better you will be
#
at spotting um mistakes that the other person makes and therefore exploiting them now the
#
fascinating thing in fact about this duck poke versus daniel negranu match that i'm kind of
#
talking about is duck so daniel negranu is an old school poker player who plays exploitative poker
#
he'll sit at the table and he'll stare at your neck and he'll look for bluffs and he he'll kind
#
of do all of that and it's all a lot of psychology and all that duck poke is a new computer generation
#
player who basically at one point in time was the best heads up cash game player in the world
#
and he's completely into gto stands for game theory optimal and he's completely into game
#
theory optimal poker and he had an incredible video channel which sadly started after i left poker
#
where he would you know talk about different hands from a gto perspective and just really
#
mind-blowing and educative though he retired from poker at a particular point in time but he had
#
once mocked negranu and they had this feud going on and it was a feud about ideas like one of them
#
said rake is good the other one said too much rake is bad there should be a limit this guy said no
#
uh more rake is good and blah blah blah so they had a battle over ideas but being macho they
#
decided to settle it over the felt and so therefore they are now having a challenge match which is
#
25 000 hands and at the time of speaking i think only a thousand hands are over and poke is already
#
up i think 250 000 dollars or something and yeah they both deposited a million each to begin with
#
though i think if negranu goes all the way he'll end up depositing more and losing more so it's
#
like new school versus old school but anyway regardless i think the idea that most people
#
have of poker that is that is a of exploitative poker and b i think they overplay the psychological
#
and the tell aspects and the bluffing aspects and as far as bluffing is concerned the way you think
#
of it is you have a range for every particular situation whether you're calling or you're betting
#
and you play with that range and that range will include both value hands and bluffs
#
so when you psychologically when you think about it you're betting with that range and it doesn't
#
really matter you're playing correctly and uh you know equally when somebody else is playing
#
against me if that person is a competent person i'm thinking of their range and my range in that
#
spot and uh you know playing accordingly and and and all of that and i i don't really want to get
#
into poker theory here but i'll say that those typical popular cultures stereotypes of poker
#
players are uh you know where those stereotypes are of these dynamic people wearing the you know
#
sunflower shirts and dark glasses and doing flamboyant things and all of that i think that's
#
completely false but where it comes to geeks who are sitting in front of a computer and uh you know
#
i have known of people who play 24-hour sessions and they'll have a bottle near them so they can
#
pee into it because they're playing 20 tables at a time and they don't want to get up to go to the
#
loo that's true oh wow no there is one interesting element to to what you said which is the difference
#
between when you do this in a repeated game not just necessarily with one person but also with
#
yourself like you know when you play lots and lots of hands versus if you were sort of you know
#
playing with your family you know over thanksgiving or on diwali you play tash something like that
#
you're just hanging out and you're playing a game right so to me it seems like the element of
#
surprise or bluff can have a lot of value there in this one-time game or in a new interaction
#
but in the repeated game it doesn't right uh as you just pointed out that that other things take
#
over so now i'm going to ask you harsha's question from that point of view when you meet people the
#
first time do you hold your cards close to your chest are you able to like sort of you know bluff
#
easily not in the sense of telling lies but in the sense of you know just being polite and not
#
getting too much into it or not letting them know exactly what you're thinking but with people over
#
a long period of time people who are close friends collaborators you know people in your family that
#
you know all of that goes away does that end up mimicking about the same you mean my real life
#
interactions not my poker playing with them your real life interaction not your poker i think the
#
thing is like first of all it's unusual that i should do a podcast where i actually talk to
#
people because in real life i am almost like a super introvert and as you know and i i'm not
#
really you know and like like with all introverts it it saps my energy to interact with people
#
especially people i haven't met before so left to myself i would just be sitting in a corner and
#
kind of uh writing books but um but yeah so i mean i i don't know the thing is yeah okay it's the
#
first time i've had to think about it how do i kind of interact with people it is true that i have very
#
few close friends uh you would count as one of them don't worry but um i don't sort of make friends
#
very easily i mean that that's kind of true and i don't really get out all that much and i'm very
#
awkward in in those senses um also i think i i don't know i mean the other aspect of this is that
#
i have just changed so much as a person over the years that i don't really like the person i was
#
when i was uh younger at different phases of my life and and maybe that's a good thing you learn
#
as you go along and all of that but it's it's sort of difficult for me to therefore you know uh i
#
don't know this is if any of my guests gave me an answer like this i'd be mentally uh pissed off
#
right i've completely waffled i know it's okay i it's nice to get to know you there are some things
#
you know i've known you a long time and even i know don't know some of these things about you
#
probably because most of the times we're talking about something very specific you and i are both
#
introverts we don't like just randomly call each other and chit chat it's usually about an argument
#
or something we're reading so it is very nice to hear you think aloud uh you know and and i and i
#
hope that the listeners also appreciate it so we are following the scene and the unseen format
#
almost to the t we're about an hour and change into recording and we have just about scratched
#
the surface of you know your personal journey all the roads that you took some some of the roads
#
that you did not take and we haven't yet gotten to the meat of the show which is actually talk
#
about the 200th episode and your journey of you know life as a podcaster but before i get to that
#
i want to have a quick commercial break and when we come back we will talk more about podcasting i
#
promise are you one of those people who not only loves to read but also wants to write better if
#
so i have something for you since april this year i've been teaching an online course called the art
#
of clear writing four webinars spread out over four saturdays in which i share whatever i've
#
learned about the craft and practice of writing over 25 years as a professional writer the course
#
also contains many writing exercises discussions on email and whatsapp and much interactivity
#
it costs rupees 10 000 or 150 you can check out the details at indiancar.com clear writing this
#
link will be in the show notes if you want to bridge the gap between the thoughts in your head
#
and the words on the page then the art of clear writing might be just what you need december batches
#
begin on saturday 5th december so hurry and register before then indiancar.com clear writing
#
welcome back to the show welcome back from the break and i am shruti rajgopalan and i'm
#
speaking with amit varma to celebrate the 200th episode of the scene and the unseen which i
#
presume is your favorite podcast because you're still here right so amit just before we get into
#
your journey as a podcaster and some details about you know the various episodes and and
#
your thinking behind it are you doing anything to celebrate the 200th episode yeah like i mentioned
#
in the introduction we've got some merchandise out which are these nifty mugs uh you know which
#
you can see on the merchandise page you can just go to scene unseen dot in slash stuff and i'll
#
also be linking to them on twitter etc and they'll be in the show notes and besides that of course
#
there is again as i mentioned in the introduction the four volume anthology that's coming out four
#
volumes of the scene and the unseen across these four different themes politics history economics
#
uh and society and culture and i guess economics and policy uh but yeah so you know hopefully like
#
big ass books which excerpts with many of the insights and many of the things that i have
#
learned from the show over this period of time so those are like pretty exciting now that all
#
of these things are happening i'm going to come back to the the four volumes and the books a
#
little bit later uh but i do want to say i love the merch i got a sneak peek at it and i love
#
the one from our episode on covid i told you and you know we we discovered later that you didn't
#
know that rodin is one of my favorite sculptors and i love that that particular one of the thinking
#
man in fact one of my favorite places in the world is the rodin museum and the sculpture garden in
#
paris so i am really thrilled about that i should in fact interrupt here and say that you know when
#
i teach my writing class i bring up rodin there as well because i talk about how editing and
#
writing are basically the same thing and the example i give is of rodin coming up with the
#
thinker where when he conceived of the thinker he is not creating it out of thin air he's taking a
#
block of stone and then he's editing that block of stone so writing and editing really amount to
#
the same thing so rodin comes up there as well you'll be pleased to know yeah and in this case
#
he's wearing a mask i believe and you know the other one is the the puzzle that makes up the
#
indian flag i think that's another one of my favorite visuals that you've had accompanying
#
the episodes so i'm very excited about the merchandise i don't know when i will be next in
#
india and get access to it but but you know it's going to be soon for the rest of you who are
#
listening in india well you're lucky right i want to now start talking a little bit about the podcast
#
so i want to start right at the beginning what made you start the scene and the unseen yeah so
#
i mean like i sort of mentioned in the intro what really happened was that um uh this friend of mine
#
called amit doshi who runs ivy podcast podcasting uh network approached me and said will you do
#
something with us and i said oh i don't listen to podcasts i can't think of anything listen i have
#
this interesting idea for uh which i could thought i'll someday do a youtube show of called the scene
#
and the unseen which is about the unintended consequences of public policy so he liked the
#
name he liked the concept he said let's do that and that's that was really the concept behind the
#
show that you take a little bit of piece of public policy and you talk about that in fact we um we
#
did pilot episodes on the minimum wage but i never ended up ever doing an episode on the minimum
#
wage which is interesting because it moved away from public policy and became more about um uh
#
you know these deep dive interviews into ideas and lives and history and uh so on and so forth
#
so what what really happened then was that over a period of time it just evolved along with my own
#
intellectual curiosity and the journeys i wanted to take and i figured out that um you know longer
#
is better and i learned a number of different things about audio along the way which uh you
#
know i've explored a great length in my podcasting course but i'll briefly sort of go over some of
#
that one is that audio is different from other mediums because of the way people consume it
#
like if you're watching a youtube video it's probably on your laptop or phone and you can
#
click away to another tab or look away or press the back button or whatever people will typically
#
consume audio when they are either commuting working out or um doing errands like washing
#
dishes for example which um uh was a use case for so many of us during the lockdown now what that
#
means is that a they are a captive audience if chosen to be a captive audience they're not
#
going to be distracted the primary thing they are doing is something else but it's automatic
#
like it doesn't require their brain so therefore they are uh sort of listening secondly uh i uh
#
which is very different right because in no other thing you have a captive audience like this is
#
only audio secondly people are listening at higher speeds and the reason for this is that
#
while our natural while our brain can allow us to speak at a natural rate of between 150 to 200
#
words up to 225 we can listen from 275 to 500 uh which is why you know it's difficult to hold
#
someone's attention when you're talking to them because they've got spare attentional capacity
#
and they can do other things while they are listening to you which is also why people can
#
listen at higher speeds because they can actually take it in so it's not like squeaky squeaky it
#
normalizes very fast people will take it to 1.25 1.5 and it will just normalize and so these two
#
things are coming together it's passive listening they're listening while doing something else so
#
they're a captive audience and they're listening at double speed so when you do a 20 minute episode
#
by the time the guy has put his shoelaces on to go jogging which might take 10 minutes the episode
#
is over right so when i started kind of working out and listening to podcasts at the same time
#
i realized that if i'm out for an hour a two-hour episode is perfect for me the third sort of
#
learning that comes from this is that people have great hunger and desire to for deep content that
#
typically you know first of all it is true in a sense uh that we live in the age of short the
#
short attention span but the opposite is also true and it is not true that there are shallow
#
people and there are deep people it is that we contain multitude so within each of us there is
#
a shallow me and a deep me and uh you know so the shallow me might be surfing tv channels or
#
you know i'll have 50 tabs open on chrome at the same time but the deep me also craves deep learning
#
and deep knowledge now the thing is many of us may not have the time to actually listen to books in
#
our uh daily lives how much time do we have how much time are we going to devote to reading but
#
because we listen to audio while doing something else we are more likely to take in knowledge that
#
way which is why i often say that you know audio books and printed books are not really competing
#
with each other they're entirely different use cases so a lot of people therefore like getting
#
their sort of deep sense or rather fulfill their hunger for depth by listening to audio whether
#
it's audio books or podcasts now this is one aspect of it now the thing is that as i said earlier
#
uh podcasts are different from radio it's not just radio on demand and there's a reason for that as
#
well which is that let's think about this concept of space in media let's for a moment look at visual
#
media that when you go to a cinema theater to watch a movie there's a certain distance between
#
you and the screen and similarly on the other side of the screen there's a certain distance
#
between the camera and the actors uh you know they are much further away then when you come to
#
the television age you are in your living room and the tv is across the room it's a couple of
#
meters away and there's a distance between you and the tv and similarly the shot and the tv has
#
become closer and you have sitcoms and everybody's in a room and it's closer similarly if you're
#
watching a youtube video on your laptop if it's a made for youtube video the again the two distances
#
correlate to each other now think of the distance in terms of audio that when you're listening to
#
radio say you're in your car or whatever and you're listening to radio there is a certain
#
distance but podcasts are in your head they're literally in your head is the most intimate
#
medium that there is it's a one-on-one conversation and this is a reason this is a critical reason
#
why um a critical difference between podcasts and radio that in radio you in a sense you're
#
broadcasting you're speaking to many people in audio you're not doing that you're speaking
#
to one person so you can take that tone which is why i say that many of the qualities that make
#
for good radio like oh radio voice and diction and you must speak like this do not apply to
#
podcasts at all you don't need a good voice you don't need an accent you don't it's an intimate
#
one-on-one uh conversation which um uh you know makes it uh uh such an incredible medium and and
#
when you're listening to people for like two hours a week three hours a week or whatever when you do
#
with a long episodes then you have that sense of relating to that person also trusting that person
#
respecting that all of those things you know all the podcasts that i listen to you know you and i
#
both you know admire someone like russ roberts or we'll listen to tyler carvin who you're fortunate
#
enough to work with and meet regularly and um you know so there is you feel like you have a stake
#
in those shows it's not just their shows it's also your show in a sense of speaking and and and they
#
are merely the custodians of it in a manner and and podcasts have that kind of intimacy which makes
#
it such a such a sort of remarkable and uh special medium absolutely you know it's like i said at the
#
beginning of the show i was a bit of a naysayer initially because i just couldn't imagine why
#
anyone would find it interesting to hear me and amit speak to each other because we talk like
#
this with each other all the time and we were like now we're just recording it like there's
#
no music there's no script there's no jokes there's no punch line so i was a big you know critic in
#
the beginning but over the 199 episodes and i've been on the show more than a dozen times uh ha
#
take that big call uh but i've been on the show you know a number of times and when i have come
#
to india and i have met people who know me through the show and that number keeps increasing they will
#
literally quote things i have said in the show back to me which i'm always just you know so
#
surprised by one because i never i don't like listening to my own voice so i've never heard
#
any of the episodes you and i have done with each other and second i just don't remember them like
#
you know i'm in that moment i'm having that conversation with you and i don't remember exactly
#
what i said i've had a couple of people correct me you know you said this and we went and looked this
#
up but you know it's actually that and i find that really incredible one that someone would care so
#
deeply they would remember things one said they would quote one back to oneself you know things
#
like that uh but the other part of it was also that we live in the information age but there is
#
almost too much information right and in that sense what you bring to the table aside from the
#
intimate conversation is you are curating i i know that it's the other person living in your
#
household who is the curator but you are also an intellectual curator of sorts right like you
#
you are really reading so much and cherry picking and presenting and saying hey you one really must
#
reach in my spoke right or one must really read this thing about the gita press that no one may
#
have heard of before that so in that sense a lot of people are also listening not because of i mean
#
in addition to the things you mentioned it is passive it doesn't compete but it's because they
#
may not know what to read yet right because they may not have had time to go to the bookstore or
#
browse you know do things like what you and i do or in your case in my case we're particularly
#
privileged because we get early manuscripts of people's you know working drafts i routinely
#
get review copies from book publishers so you and i get to read very differently sample very
#
differently for most people and that is also something i learned about the show that amit
#
varma is not just someone they listen to for information it's also someone they listen to to
#
tell them what is worth listening to what is worth reading what is worth thinking about in the world
#
and i don't think that can be done quite as easily in the written format you know you can put out a
#
blog post on india uncut tomorrow 20 books one must read today it will have nowhere close to
#
the impact that discussing those 20 books over you know the podcast medium has i'll tell you why i
#
mean one reason of course is that i am sort of i kind of follow my own intellectual journey and
#
you know just take the listeners along with that so i'm not really thinking that i'm not thinking
#
of it as a curatorial function i'm following my own journey and that curatorial thing becomes a
#
default thing but the other aspect is that you know you read a book review what is it it's 800
#
words you know even if you read a long essay on a book a long read on a book it's like three four
#
thousand five thousand whatever that's that's about it but a scene in the unseen episode can be you
#
know is usually over 20 25 000 words which you're consuming in a short period of time like my episode
#
with kartik murli dharan was not just the longest episode of the scene in the unseen so far maybe
#
this will break that record but it was also uh he speaks at 1.5x right and so i got that episode
#
transcribed and it was 43 000 words now where are you going to get 43 000 words of directed
#
conversation not just a person talking but a conversation that is directed in interesting
#
directions and so on and so forth and that's again something that makes podcasting different
#
from radio radio because of all the imperatives has to stay broad and shallow you've paid a
#
license fee you've got a radio station one you have you recoup your money through advertising
#
so you go for lowest common denominator which is why fm in india is so uh horrendously bad but
#
even otherwise even if there were no entry barriers you are catering to broad audiences
#
and therefore you can't go too deep like who's interested in an argument on how india's first
#
amendment came about and all of those things you'd rather talk about bollywood and cricket and gossip
#
and all of that podcasting allows you to go deep to find what kevin kelly calls a thousand true
#
fans that there are plenty of people out there who are interested in deep knowledge interested
#
in books maybe they don't know where to look maybe they don't know there are others like them
#
you know and maybe they don't and suddenly you give them access to these kind of discussions
#
with the author and not just those you know every author that i've spoken to will probably have
#
videos on youtube where somebody speaks to them for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or even an hour and i
#
find them incredibly shallow all these lit fest they have these uh you know these panels where
#
you'll have a one hour session and 40 minutes you'll talk to four authors and then have q&a
#
and that's incredibly shallow you're not going deep at all and the way i think of my podcasting
#
is one i want to go deep and two i don't want to follow the news cycle like even if i cover
#
something that is in the news i'll wait for a period of time and like my two most popular
#
episodes are with srinath ragavan on kashmir and the caa and in both of those cases i didn't
#
release them immediately when the event happened i took a couple of weeks and i think they're like
#
definitive and classic episodes you can listen to 30 years from now and my aim with everything
#
that i do is i'm not just sort of um going across space in terms of people across the world listen
#
to me i want to go across time i want someone 30 years later to binge on my show you know when you
#
were starting your ideas of india podcast one of the pieces of advice i gave you uh was that you
#
know do not think of what your listener will hear on episode one think of what they will binge on
#
episode 100 you know and you want to create that for them you want to create that uh body of work
#
so that was sort of my ethic towards podcasting and and and why it is so incredibly you know
#
exciting because you know you can do all of these things no it's it's amazing i think one you've
#
also sort of cracked open the podcast space especially something which is not cricket or
#
bollywood you know the usual suspects of mass podcasting uh but the other is you have also
#
sort of i think set the template or become the role model in one sense right i am of course in
#
a particularly privileged position that if i'm starting a podcast i can pick up my phone call
#
amit perma and say hey i'm thinking about doing this what do you think i should do
#
but for most others they've sort of started many many of our common friends in fact
#
have started their podcasts and a lot of their template or the way they think about it has been
#
informed by how you think about it or how people engage with you there were two pieces of advice
#
that you gave me three pieces of advice actually which really stuck with me and one was you said
#
be yourself because it is exhausting to be anyone else and you can't sustain it and that is in one
#
sense the only secret sauce that one brings to the table right which is they're coming of course to
#
hear all these different episodes some are coming just for caa some are coming to hear manu billai
#
but the people who are coming over and over again are coming for amit varma or are coming for shruti
#
rajagopalan as as you know you were talking about me the second was the thing you said about uh
#
think about creating a bank of knowledge you know over a period of time but the third thing is
#
something i have imbibed from you not because you specifically said it to me but just by looking at
#
your journey uh you were talking about how you were frustrated you know at various points is
#
this really worth doing it takes just an enormous amount of work to put together there's no
#
infrastructure there is no money in it and so on so forth and i realized that you know many people
#
say you did it for the love of doing it i think this whole love business is you know it's a little
#
bit overdone i think what the reason you did it is that you also converted it into a consumption
#
good for yourself right if i do a podcast with karthik murlidhar and i must inform myself on
#
the education system in india and that is something that's going to broaden the horizon and then i'll
#
speak with karthik and of course karthik will crack open anyone's brain and you know broaden
#
their horizons and so on so forth and that is something i followed to the t i've only done
#
single digit you know episode numbers so far but i treat it as a consumption good that even if there
#
were zero people listening to the show i get enough out of doing each show and having each
#
conversation that you know even if no one tuned in i would walk away pretty happy and once again
#
we are in privileged positions where we don't need to do this for money of course so there's that
#
but i think these are three bits of advice that i got from you which you know for the podcasters
#
who are listening out there that were just incredibly useful the fourth one came from
#
my producer jeff and you know this is also a bit of the culture at mercatus which is that we won't
#
look in metrics i actually have no clue other than the first episode how many downloads or listens my
#
podcast got and so on and the rule is that i won't ask and that he won't tell me until we're about
#
you know six seven months in at which point you know we can have a little bit of information
#
and and the goal is that you know the tail doesn't wag the dog uh which is also something i learned
#
from you don't worry about the numbers don't worry about what is going on even if the numbers are
#
very few you have a thousand genuine fans and so on and so no my my approach towards the numbers
#
was i don't care about the numbers because like i said it's across time and all of that and the
#
quality and the amount of feedback i get is enough to you know tell me that it's kind of really worth
#
it just to sort of elaborate on the two uh other pieces of advice you pointed out uh one as far as
#
you know you know i tell keep telling my writing students don't use jargon and you're just saying
#
consumption goods and all of that no i think i think one of the byproducts of my podcast is
#
certainly that i enrich myself intellectually in terms of what i'm reading and in terms of the
#
knowledge i'm taking in and i appreciate that but that's not the reason i'm doing it because
#
it's a byproduct and i the reason i do it is to be able to have these great uh conversations but it's
#
a great byproduct and it's a good reason to do it if uh you know that matters but the other one is
#
also so important like i'm teaching this podcasting course and one of the things i point out is
#
you know people will get too obsessed with you know where is a gap in the market and uh what is
#
a hole that i can fill and all of those things and i'm like don't be market obsessed because no
#
matter what you try to do like you know there are interview podcasts are a dime a dozen interview
#
podcasts with public policy people are a dime a dozen there are seven billion people on this
#
planet there are already more than a million podcasts everything's been done all ideas are
#
out there even if you find a gap in the market 20 people will fill it before you what makes your
#
podcast unique only one thing makes it unique and that's you because nobody else is you and you are
#
you so what i therefore try to do is i'm following my own intellectual journey i'm thinking aloud i
#
am almost having no filter in that sense that uh you know you can listen to something i said in a
#
past episode which you know and say that hey but you know that's such a silly line to go down on
#
and i have often changed my mind while thinking aloud over the course of all the episodes that
#
i've done so yeah i think that's you know as far as podcasting advice goes that's in fact number
#
one on my list that be authentic to yourself that's the only thing that gives you a shot
#
and then what you end up with will at least be meaningful and valuable to you to that one person
#
rather than to nobody at all and i think this is also why uh you know we have to be honest
#
very often you and i have spoken to the same people or discussed the same book and our shows
#
have been completely different because one we haven't coordinated what we're doing right except
#
knowing that hey what's coming out next or something like that but i have no clue what
#
conversation you had with dinnyar patel when i had the same conversation or with viral acharya
#
more recently and then when i hear your conversation and i know the one i've had i'm like wow
#
everyone would think amit and i would think along the same lines but it's just completely
#
different so your advice has helped me in very good stead yeah and and see that's a remarkable
#
thing that people would think that in terms of ideas i mean you're probably in a sense
#
ideologically the closest person to me on the podcast i disagree with everyone but i disagree
#
with you the least perhaps um and uh and yet the episodes are so different like we and it's not
#
that if one of us records with person x the other one will listen to that episode and then avoid it
#
no in fact what's happened to us is you recorded with madhav kosla before i did
#
and my episode came out first and ditto you know uh the the viral episodes where i offered to share
#
my lines of inquiry with you and you said no no no i don't want to be influenced by that because
#
either i'll try to avoid it or i'll you know it might influence what comes to my mind and and so
#
without that sort of foreknowledge of what the other has done we would just go into those episodes
#
and uh you know come up with entirely different results which speaks exactly to that that you
#
know don't don't think of what others will think of your questions or what uh you know don't game
#
it don't game it don't overthink it don't think too hard of the audience be authentic to yourself
#
respect the audience but don't don't you know ultimately you got to be authentic to yourself
#
no absolutely and you know now i want to talk a little bit about the philosophy of the conversation
#
or your philosophy of interviewing people you spoke about this quite a bit with rust roberts
#
which by the way i know we're not supposed to pick like the most favorite episode but while
#
listening to a podcast i mean if i didn't pick my favorite episode as the one that rust roberts did
#
with amit varma i i'm going to go to libertarian hell which might be what we're living in but you
#
know who knows anyway so uh i just love the conversation you had about discourse uh about
#
the way we change not just ourselves but also what we're putting out there in society like
#
what is it that it takes to have a good conversation that episode for those you know of the listeners
#
who may not have had a chance to hear it yet is one of my absolute favorites in in all 200
#
but aside from that aside from you know just this simple art of listening and talking what is your
#
larger philosophy of speaking with someone for the purpose of the interview or the podcast
#
not when you meet them over lunch yeah i think you know the thing is stephen covey once said
#
that we don't listen to understand we listen to respond and i think there's a profound point there
#
in the sense that that is almost kantian in a sense you know where uh you know immanuel
#
karn's categorical imperative warns against treating other people as a means to an end
#
now there is a sort of a larger conversation to be had here about do we do that in our lives is
#
everyone a means to a particular end and i don't have a good answer for that and i think much of
#
the time that is the case even if we think that should not be the case it is the case
#
but i think that becoming aware of this can enrich our lives treating other people as people with
#
agency and an and an individuality and respecting them for that can enrich our lives and part of
#
how you do that is through listening where you know if you are listening to respond you're
#
listening for reasons of self-aggrandizement that you want to respond because you want to win a
#
point or you want to show people who might be listening how smart you are and all of that
#
and therefore i made a conscious decision that i am not going to do that i am going to give the
#
person i am talking to maximum respect because it is also true that no matter how knowledgeable
#
i might be or how intelligent i might be every single person in the seven billion plus in the
#
world knows something that i don't and therefore my life can be better off if i can get them to
#
share it with me and so you have to give that respect to everyone even someone you disagree
#
with so some of the sort of principles that i have come up with therefore is that you never
#
interrupt right you know i just want them to go with their flow of thinking i don't like to sort
#
of i will not interrupt them at any point and it's very rare when i do that when there is an
#
interjection that must be made and i will then guide them back to whatever they were talking
#
about or whatever but i might disagree very strongly or i might have something to say
#
even if they go on for 20-30 minutes i will write down the points i want to make and i will make
#
them sequentially later so i will often say when my turn comes that okay i have three responses
#
to that and i'll go through them one two three because i'm also writing down and taking notes
#
but i will never interrupt i'll let them go where they want the other sort of trick to avoid is
#
um sort of when you have a list of questions prepared and then you want to follow that order
#
so the other person is talking but you've already tuned off and you're thinking of the segue into
#
your next question and you go down to that and i like the conversation to flow in a natural way
#
and to make sure that doesn't happen so obviously i have really exhaustive notes and i do uh sort of
#
cover a lot of ground in those notes and i know what are the themes i want to cover and i make
#
sure i cover them all or as many as i can of the broader themes but i don't try to force the order
#
i like to keep the flow of the conversation going if they say something interesting i can pick up
#
on that and we can go a little further and that's what i aim for and i've been you know because i
#
teach this podcasting course and we are recording this on the 10th this sunday um on the 15th a week
#
before the episode releases i'll be giving my second webinar which is also about talking about
#
interviewing at much length so i've been thinking about how different interviewers do their stuff
#
you know joe rogan russ roberts tyler coven sam harris uh the some of the people i've you know
#
listened to and admired their craft for different reasons and it's really interesting and i think
#
i'm most similar of course to russ and i agree with you that's a beautiful episode it just
#
warmed my heart to record it and i think um you know russ felt similarly about it and it was just
#
a lovely episode on conversation but that's also partly because i think we have the same sort of
#
ethic towards conversation though i wish his shows were much longer which is i think the one
#
fundamental difference between us that we're both very respectful of the guest and we are trying to
#
unpeel the layers but you know while we both go around as deep i probably go broader because i
#
have that much more time to play with and sam harris is a little different joe rogan is uh you
#
know extremely different in different ways and uh tyler is brilliant because he can ask things that
#
i can't even think of which you know questions and areas that i can't even conceive of and i'm
#
just wow at the question you know the question alone sort of enlightens you in many ways but i
#
think what he also does is that he doesn't go enough with the flow of the conversation
#
where he will have a sequential list of things he wants to cover and so that's a style and it's a
#
great show conversations with tyler these are different sort of styles so you have to figure
#
out what works for you because you're being authentic to yourself and i found that this
#
worked the best for me that don't interrupt give them the space don't look for gotcha moments
#
right i don't need to show off how smart i am so i'm not going to uh you know keep interrupting to
#
show off my cleverness so that i have done my research or whatever i'm not going to look for
#
gotcha moments right on you know last year at so and so time you said this now you're saying this
#
because i don't want the conversation to be adversarial because i want them to come relax
#
to at the level where they are much more open and honest in sharing their thoughts and their ideas
#
with me and it's important not to so even when i for example disagree with someone i will i always
#
state my disagreements people don't realize this because i'm being very polite and we are not
#
used to politeness on social media disagreements and all of that but i state my disagreements but
#
i don't push the point so you know in fact people have i don't know if you're one of them but people
#
gave me feedback on the arvind subramanian episode that i didn't push back enough and the thing is i
#
stated my disagreements but then i don't want to push back and say no you didn't answer this
#
properly or what about this or what about that because i don't want it to be adversarial i'm
#
happy to let the listener make up their own mind about what i asked and what he said but beyond that
#
i see no point in litigating something um beyond the point in time and i also think that it's a
#
little disrespectful that when the person has been generous enough with their time and their um you
#
know with their insights and you cannot take that generosity for granted to then disrespect that by
#
uh you know taking it into other directions and showing how smart you are and all that i'm saying
#
my philosophy is you take in all that you can from the conversation and whatever the disagreements are
#
you state them politely and let the listeners sort of uh make up their own mind which is why
#
so many people have disagreed with have come back on the show very often because they enjoy that as
#
well to give in the take so yeah yeah and i don't think there's anything wrong with disagreement but
#
you know it's a question of means and ends right your show is not about holding public office
#
holders accountable right this is not prime time television or this is not you know you are not as
#
you said litigating the purpose of your show is to educate you know both oneself and you know the
#
broader audience and that's of course the larger point of it but also in that immediate moment be
#
in that moment right treat the other person look in their eye have that conversation learn something
#
from each other have the benefit of spontaneity that the conversation may take your mind to a
#
place that you've never been to before so it's not so much that i think interruptions are bad or
#
having prepared questions are bad it's just that it doesn't fit with the goal that you have in mind
#
right which is to see where this conversation might take you and you can do that because the
#
guests on the show are so high quality that they need very little you know direction or interruption
#
and things like that so i i don't know if what you do and what rusts does can be done by many other
#
people with many other guests but for the kind of purpose that you have in mind i think the format
#
just works beautifully and also too few people as you said the end goal is usually to can an episode
#
in a particular way that's the other thing i learned from you i am exactly like you i prepare
#
a lot of notes i go in with like 20 pages of notes for each episode but i actually don't you know
#
prep questions or read out questions i'll usually have my first question in mind but other than that
#
it's like you know usually cracked open and that's another thing i've learned from you
#
and i think the the joy of that for me has been leaving myself open to be surprised in a way that
#
it is impossible to be surprised if you go with a very fixed idea in mind yeah absolutely i mean
#
and and and the thing with research is i always feel under prepped but i always you know cover
#
very little of my prep so here i have a question since we talked about like you know how much you
#
and i prep and the notes there's another question from akshay mukul because he is prolific not just
#
in his books but also in his questions on on this podcast so here is akshay mukul second question
#
i'm always amazed with your research on diverse books and the manner in which you make conversation
#
free-willing can you tell us what kind of homework goes before each podcast yeah lovely question so
#
you know since i got into the long-form conversation i think see the thing is the
#
challenge of doing a three-hour conversation is exponentially tougher than say a half an hour
#
conversation it's not that you need six times as much research it's just exponentially tougher
#
so what i try to do is i try to like first of all of course there is a selection bias in that i'm
#
choosing subjects which are already interesting to me so i'm likely to have already read books
#
on them and have a certain amount of background information but otherwise the thing is like if
#
i'm talking to an author i will obviously read all his books like last week my episode 199 was
#
with ambi parmeswaran and so i read five books by him and he's actually written 10 but the other
#
five are like case studies and things like that so i read five books by him watched a bunch of youtube
#
videos took a lot of notes all of that you want to read around the subject like for a long time i
#
wanted to do episodes on gandhi with ram guha and i read more than 30 books on gandhi but the thing
#
is many of them had already read they're not specifically for the episode so besides his own
#
two books on gandhi i read a whole bunch else and some of them i you know did a reread scheme when
#
the time for the episode came about so i've often had 20 30 pages of notes on microsoft word for a
#
particular episode i have just recently discovered this app called rome research and that's amazing
#
because it allows you to categorize and have nested queries and bi-directional linking and
#
i'm so for the last two three episodes i've used that and really enjoyed that so which is much
#
better than you know microsoft word where everything is one long list and you've bolded
#
the parts but when you have 20 pages of notes it's like very difficult also that when you're
#
at the start of the show somebody may mention you know some subject which you know your 25th
#
question is about or roundabouts there so you're quickly scrolling to it because
#
while it's been mentioned you want to quote that relevant bit from that relevant book
#
and that's far easier in room research and uh you know all of that uh so i i put in a lot of
#
research and the idea is not so much to ask about all of those things but because i think you need
#
that background information that i need uh if i'm talking to someone who is going to give me deep
#
knowledge on a subject i need a certain baseline of knowledge myself to be able to take the
#
conversation to those uh sort of interesting places like in akshaya's case is not just reading
#
akshaya's books but i also have to have some awareness of the history of that time and how
#
the indian freedom movement was shaping up and you know all of those other kind of things despite
#
that i must say that akshaya's book is just such a eye-opener for me because there are so many
#
things that i didn't uh know in that which is why it's such a remarkable book there are very few
#
books which you know have so many TIL moments uh especially about one's own country uh so yeah so
#
i put in a lot of work into research which is rewarding for its own sake i feel like i know
#
the subject much better uh but i often you know at my age uh i'm in my mid 40s almost touching 47
#
uh next month so i uh sort of so i forget a lot so i forget what i've discussed in you know uh 30
#
episodes ago with somebody or whatever but the point is that you know at some level you've
#
internalized aspects of the knowledge and that informs your worldview and your views on things
#
to some extent so so yeah but i think i think that in a sense the one unintended consequence the
#
unseen effect as it were of the show on my life is to just really kickstart my reading habit again
#
and make me read a lot more and because of that think much more deeply about knowledge management
#
like i was you know when i was doing the last class for my podcasting course somebody also said i
#
should sort of one day teach a course on knowledge management i don't know if someone will be
#
interested in that or not but i've been getting into that because i think one of the great
#
challenges i face is that when you are exposing yourself to a lot of knowledge how do you sort
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of say build a second brain so to say in you know tiago forte's world so that you know that
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that knowledge is sort of systemized and it's not just diffused and lost and all of that so
#
that's again something that i've been thinking about and i don't imagine i would have been
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thinking about it so much uh had it not been for the work that the scene and the unseen makes me do
#
you know on knowledge management there are two parts to it one is of course knowledge management
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in terms of creating a record of what you're doing right i think in that sense what you're
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doing with the four volumes of the scene and the unseen is going to be this incredible
#
you know resource especially because unlike me you don't put out the full transcript right so it's
#
hard for people to go back and look up things or you know they may want to but if they didn't have
#
a piece of paper because they were doing chores they couldn't get the name of the book down
#
so i think it's that kind of knowledge management i really believe in like you know just putting a
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body of work out there the personal knowledge management i don't believe in that much you know
#
i always tell my students this i my my students are always taking copious notes you know they're
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like what is the best you know is ever note better or rome research better by the way thanks that's
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a lifesaver i i just started using it uh but i always tell them think about it internalize it
#
if you wanted to find it just have faith that you will be able to find it it might take you an extra
#
five minutes in that moment but you'll be able to get it the reason is now unlike when you and i
#
were studying in college and things like that everything is available on the internet search
#
functions are so good you know our own personal mobile phones and things have started getting
#
search functions so i think it's just much easier to go back and find something my worry with
#
knowledge management systems is they they are so hard to create and maintain for personal use
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i don't know if 95 percent of that crap i'm ever going to go back and see now of course if you're
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doing it for a project like a book or a podcast it's a little bit different but i think just like
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a general personal knowledge management system i'm i'm not a big fan of it i think just have faith
#
in your brain and your curiosity and your ability to internalize concepts and i think you know that
#
will take you quite far no i mean i'll disagree with this because i think our brain is not meant
#
to uh our first disagreement on the show i think our brain is not meant to retain information in
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systematic ways and all of that our brain is meant to be creative and think about stuff but not
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really retain information and i have often find knowledge management to be frustrating and i'll
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think of something that someone said and simply not be able to find it at all right and no matter
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all the search functions and all that and what i find is that i actually find rome very helpful
#
because what i'll do is every time i come across an interesting quote maybe in something that i'm
#
reading i'll just do that bidirectional thing i'll put double brackets and quote around it so now i
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have a page on rome called quote which includes all the quotes i've ever you know tagged in that
#
way which is useful and then within that there'll be other similar things so like for example when
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i was getting my podcasting course ready i said i have to read books on the history of radio the
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history of audio and blah blah blah whole bunch of resources books videos do all of that created a
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one page for that then for each of them i had these nested bits where for each book there's
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this nested bit you click it it opens out i have various insights there i'm sort of linking them
#
to each other and just in terms of organizing my mind it was incredibly useful and during that
#
process i mean part of it turned out to be useless because most of those insights were not at all
#
useful to me and most of the insights some of which i've shared here are not something that
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are actually written anywhere so uh you know it's um just coming from my experience but for other
#
subjects like when i research for episodes like when i did the episode with umby i had sort of
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like i had umby parmeswaran as the name of a page below that i have personal then that's nested you
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click on that it opens up it has you know which room of godavari hostel in iit madras he was
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so then you use little nuggets like that and then he also relaxes and it takes a nice personal tone
#
when you bring that in i had each of his books i had you know separate nested sections for that
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within that conceptually i have separate nested sections i come across interesting quotes because
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he uses quotes a lot in his book they are now part of my larger database of course so it's um so i
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find it's useful for me but you're right i mean you said that it's good for projects but not
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otherwise i haven't used it long enough to be able to tell but i think for individual projects like
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for researching for episodes is great but one of the things i'm going to do now as i prepare my
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for anthologies for the seen in the unseen is the transcripts of all my episodes when they get to
#
me i'm going to put them all in rome research so that then it becomes really much easier to do that
#
sort of bi-directional sort of forming connections like i have asked so many times that was a liberal
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constitution imposed on an illiberal society and it's very easy for me using tools like this to see
#
how many people have asked it to and just bunch all the answers together and all of that so i
#
think my brain struggles with the enormous amounts of knowledge out there and i think finding ways
#
like this to kind of bring it all together is useful by the way on the whole you know saying
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incentives a number of times or talking about a liberal constitution imposed on illiberals
#
my biggest complaint about the scene and the unseen merchandise is that it does not come with
#
short classes because then your listeners can't play a drinking game every time every time i say
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incentive says incentives or every time you say multitudes we all contain multitudes or you quote
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john lennon or or you talk about the liberal versus illiberal constitution so uh my next
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suggestion for the merchandise maybe for episode 250 or 300 is uh we desperately need short classes
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to play drinking games for the scene and the unseen now i want to i mean i know you have no
#
trouble booking guests because i mean of course you don't have trouble booking guests uh but there
#
are a couple of questions about you know choosing your guests and the first question comes from
#
someone who might be one of my perhaps one of my most favorite thinkers alive in in our time
#
and that is Pratap Bhanumetta uh you know i mean i've read pretty much everything Pratap has written
#
over the years it is just a joy to read him he's a thinker who once again contains multitudes right
#
i mean the breadth and the depth with which he thinks about any subject is amazing how it is both
#
historical but it's also abstract and it's philosophical but it's also about a contemporary
#
issue it's you know he's really one of my favorite thinkers and i was so thrilled when you got him
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on the scene and the unseen i heard that episode on uh you know 1x i didn't speed it up because i
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wanted it to just go on as long as it does and like enjoy every moment of it um but Pratap was
#
very generous and instantly responded with a question so i'm going to play Pratap's question
#
for you and then we'll talk a little bit more about guests on the scene and the unseen
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so Amit uh congratulations on your double century um and uh i know this is just the beginning
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so one question i've always been meaning to ask you um is you have this great love for literature
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and you're one of the most voracious readers of novels that i know of so if you were doing
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a seance version of the scene and the unseen and you were inviting back a dead novelist for a
#
conversation who would that be and what's the question you would be dying to ask them
#
wow what what an incredible question i think yeah i mean that's you know like you said uh like i
#
love Pratap's writing and he's incredibly thought provoking with everything he writes and i am afraid
#
he is thought provoking with his questions as well because i'll have to think a bit to uh you know
#
come up with this but i'm really glad i could finally get Pratap on my show because you know
#
it's you know when i first started the scene and the unseen i remember um you know opening up the
#
notepad on my phone and thinking about who the possible guests would be and i'm so happy that
#
the possible guests would be and i put five names down and then i couldn't think of anymore
#
and Pratap was there so i'm really glad we kind of uh crossed that one off and hopefully he'll
#
be back on my show at some point in time without necessarily having a subject in mind just to
#
sort of shoot the breeze as it were uh to answer this question as far as novelists are concerned
#
well you know i'll cheat a bit i'll say george orville but what i really love about george
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orville yeah as i said that shruti held up a piece of paper on which she had written george orville
#
so she guessed it but again my admiration for orville is not so much for his novels which is
#
why it is a bit of a cheat but really his non-fiction writing especially his remarkable
#
collected essays which is just so incredible and every time i'm stuck writing a piece i'll
#
you know open that and read three four essays by him on whatever subject it doesn't matter
#
and just the rhythms of the language that he uses will get my brain working properly again so i love
#
orville now what would i ask him i think i would ask him that i mean he was already i think by the
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time he died disillusioned with the extreme left by that time even though you could call him a man
#
of the left and i would ask him that you know if he had uh presumably if he comes back in a
#
seance and as a ghost he's been witnessing everything that's been happening since in some
#
depth that has that disillusionment deepened what does he feel now and you know would he be more
#
likely to agree with his contemporary higher who i don't think the the two ever would have met or
#
known each other or even written about each other so maybe just his views of the world because it's
#
interesting seeing his views evolve over a period of time and i think orville was one of the greatest
#
you know he he through his novels he looked into the future i mean the warnings against
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totalitarianism and uh statism that his novels contain is second to none and even today you know
#
especially people keep talking about 1984 and how uh you know this combination of state power and
#
technology could be bringing about something that makes what was once a dystopian seem not so
#
outlandish after all and i'd ask a little bit about that because i think that he would have seen
#
clearly enough to sort of you know be able to paint that crisp picture where you realize that
#
this sort of totalitarianism and statism doesn't come either from the left or the right it comes
#
from both places and in a sense it comes from the same instinct of imposing your vision of the world
#
on others and i'd be very interested in seeing how his thinking would have evolved over these
#
um you know these sort of last 70 years um but that's a bit of a cheat because my admiration for
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orville is because of his non-fiction though i love both 1984 and animal farm uh so give me a
#
moment let me think about um whether this i am so kicked right now while you take a moment that i
#
called it because as soon as i heard pratap's question i said i'm pretty sure he's gonna say
#
george orville and then i'm pretty sure he's gonna hedge and say you know his fiction writing is
#
great but you must really read his non-fiction so i feel like i have gotten to know you well and
#
i'm feeling very smug right now though for me animal farm is always going to be very special
#
yeah it's very special i'd love to speak to guys like for example solzhenitsyn or you know even
#
someone like dostoevsky or you know the japanese guys mishima tanizaki but i don't know what i would
#
ask them i mean for example my the literary writer at whose altar i worship is actually alive
#
it's alice monroe and i would not want to meet her because i would not know what to say i would
#
not be able to say anything i would be sort of uh struck speechless uh and there's really nothing
#
to say i mean what do you say you know her craft is in a sense beyond imitation so with novelists
#
i think that's the thing if you ask about dead intellectuals from the past who were thinkers or
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non-fiction writers uh you know i i'd love to talk to kant i'd love to talk to john loch
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uh you know i'd love to talk to adam smith uh you know as i know you would and russ roberts would
#
have speaking of people from the past and people who might not be around anymore there is another
#
one of our favorite guests and narayani basu uh who's been on your show who wrote the wonderful
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book on menon and uh you know i i want to uh play her question for you because i think she will give
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you the out from having to come up with a name other than george orwell and coming up with a
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question to ask a literary figure hi amit this is narayani many many congratulations on 200 episodes
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thank you so much for making longer conversations fun again i wanted to ask um is there anyone
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from any period of history um and this could be anybody right it could be a literary figure an
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actor an economist a social reform activist you get the picture anyone that you'd want to sit down
#
with today um whether it's on or off your show uh and chat and why great question and a tough
#
question i don't really know i mean the easy answer and the name that pops to mind and i hope you
#
haven't written it down and you're going to wave it at the screen in front of me but you have it
#
ready okay it's probably i mean bastia is obviously you know uh the first name that comes to mind i
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mean the name of my show the seen and the unseen is inspired by bastia's great essay that which is
#
seen and that which is not seen and uh his works are remarkable the law is beautiful his essays are
#
great the law is just a masterpiece and um in so many ways i mean the law contains so much of what
#
you know uh it almost anticipates public choice theory in uh so many ways and also i look at bastia
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as you know i i kind of find there's a certain sense of both tragedy and inspiration there that
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he spends those last years from 40s to i think he died when he was 49 or 50 uh much much like
#
orwell and he's essentially fighting a lonely battle that it's inevitable that no one agrees
#
with him but he's putting his ideas out there because it is important to do so and in a sense
#
he's again not writing across space he's writing across time because which is why someone like me
#
uh you know a century and a half later can be inspired by him and uh you know of course i've
#
won two prizes named after him but that's orthogonal uh and uh but someone like me can
#
be inspired by him and can you know find value in doing just that and it also tells you that
#
you know the fact that that battle was never won that you know which he was fighting which is for
#
um individual rights and agency and uh you know controlling the power of the state and even
#
understanding it was something that was never won and may never be won but you have to keep fighting
#
the good fight and sort of working on that so find him inspiring for that reason the thing is
#
you know when you ask a hypothetical question of if you could talk to someone from the past novelist
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or otherwise and ask them a question or whatever the thing is like i said i am so incredibly
#
private and introverted and whatever is that i probably wouldn't want to meet them i would i
#
would just you know like what what would one say with bastia of course i'd love to do an episode
#
of the scene and the unseen with bastia like what is a french parliament like do your friends mock
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you for your views like my friends mock me and all of that but you know and i would have tried
#
to get a human sense of that battle sort of the loneliness of the battle because and you know i
#
can reach out to many other people who think like me across the world and i have that access and
#
all of that but uh you know bastia would not have had that so then what kind of uh keeps you uh going
#
in a sense i think i somehow in some strange way managed to make this about me but yeah i mean
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bastia is interesting adam smith is of course interesting when you just see the the sort of
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the breadth of his work in just those two books a journey from a theory of moral sentiments to
#
um you know uh the wealth of nations just in sort of that journey and how much he covers and of
#
course uh you know russ robertson i spoke a bit about adam smith in our episode and he's written
#
a great uh lovely book on adam smith which i recommend everyone uh goes out and reads adam
#
smith would have been interesting lock would have been interesting um you know and i i think had he
#
lived today he would have refined his ideas to a much finer degree but but to think that a man
#
like that wrote you know works like that when he did is just uh remarkable apart from that yeah i
#
should i you know i'll be accused of being non-sanskari if i can't name uh indian figures i
#
would have loved to hang out with kabir just you know talk about poetry and sort of you know how
#
he thinks of language and how sort of all of those sort of different things and i haven't done enough
#
episodes on that i mean i kind of should but kabir would have been fun even you know i did an episode
#
with amardeep singh on the travels of guru nanak and nanak panthi and uh nanak is a very kabir
#
like figure a very interesting person not just someone who founded a religion but a very interesting
#
deep thinker so again i would have liked to hang out maybe just be a fly on the wall and maybe
#
travel around a little bit with someone like that not necessarily do an episode and get gyan
#
because i think there is something beyond intellectual gyan and just discussing ideas
#
but you know just maybe travel around and uh though you know as far as travels are concerned
#
i am notorious for being the kind of person who uh you know i don't like to walk very much and
#
i don't i'm not the explorer kinds i'm like you know uh book me into a comfortable place i want
#
to chill and relax because that is what vacations are for uh but i think it would be different if i
#
was hanging out with either nanak or kabir or any of uh these guys and maybe i'd be live blogging
#
while i was with them like um you know after the tsunami had struck in 2004 i'd as you'd know i'd
#
gone along the coast of tamil nadu and those were early days in my blog and i was posting updates
#
every day and that was in a different way sort of a very um it was interesting and i'm glad i did
#
that it was difficult also you know like at nagapattin i'm just when i wrote about the
#
swaridif also about you know just in a field where you have dead bodies all around you and
#
kind of walking through them and at some point it normalizes in your brain and you don't think of
#
them as you know former people so to say but it's interesting i don't know if i've told you this
#
before but that's how i found you uh through the tsunami coverage on your blog uh because i was
#
there at the same time in nage district oh really when the tsunami yeah i had a break from you know
#
as you know it happened between christmas and new year and there is you know the term break
#
and just figured out that you know things need to be done so i got on an unreserved ticket
#
and just went to tamil nadu and then you know figured it out from there and joined a volunteer
#
group and they placed me in a tiny village called kutiyandir which is in nage district
#
and so not very far from where you were blogging and your blog was really lovely it was one of the
#
very few sort of you know i mean now we have all the blogs and the live tweets and all those things
#
going on but at that time it was very unique to get that you know instant not just news but also
#
reflections you know that was an odd thing that was going on at the time so that's how i found you
#
yeah and i was also trying to i think look in a different way if that makes sense like not just
#
look at events and talk to people and ask about the experience but like i remember when we went
#
through village after village and i found that in different places the watches the clock stopped at
#
a different time and you could make out by the last time on on these time pieces across all these
#
villages across the shore when the waves had hit and that's so incredibly poignant and almost
#
heartbreaking because it carries with it the loss of life and the loss of so much you know it's just
#
so yeah and at some level i wish i'd done a little bit more of that that kind of reporting and
#
and in that sense you could say i didn't take the initiative enough in some ways that i was just
#
like a desk-bound person per se which is what i even am for the scene and the unseen right i'm
#
just like you know sitting in a studio or during the lockdown at a mic in my room and just talking
#
to people and not really out there but perhaps in this case i think this is the value that i can
#
create now so it sort of um makes sense and i was but at that time i i think i should have
#
gone out more and i was probably too lazy you know the the time piece part that you mentioned
#
another really poignant moment i had when this was happening is you know one the first act of
#
you know any kind of relief work is obviously clearing rubble and making sure you know people
#
have food and things like that and by the time i reached the village most of the you know sort
#
of the dead had been found and sort of disposed in whatever manner was uh you know possible
#
possible or appropriate at the time but there was this one place where the dwelling structure
#
had really caved in and clearly someone had been trapped in there and they hadn't found the body
#
but obviously it had decomposed to such an extent that there was a stench and then you know people
#
were called in to move the rubble and things like that and the only thing that hadn't decomposed
#
was the polyester sari you know and the thought that someone's you know i mean this must have
#
cost 100 rupees or less right and the idea that this polyester sari is in some sense more durable
#
than human life which can just be so fragile in a disaster like this that like that that picture
#
has never left me and you know i can if i close my eyes i can just i can see that rubble and i can
#
i can see the sari so that was an eye-opening experience for sure yeah yeah and so you know
#
one of the things that you know so i mentioned this watches thing in a recent episode i think
#
with nilesh mishra and then when i was linking that post from my show notes i went back to all
#
the posts i'd written during that period and i'd realized how unformed my thinking otherwise was
#
how naive i was in my faith that uh you know the state could have sorted this out with better
#
regulation there would have been less life lost and we needed sterner coastal laws and a bunch of
#
other things which over time i you know i had reason to think about deeper and say that okay
#
that was misformed that i just sort of intentions and not probable outcomes and the way the political
#
economy actually works and blah blah blah so it's interesting also to see one's own journey
#
through that past and realize how about you know one's opinions were just wrong about so many
#
things but you know and even during the scene in the unseen i think there's a sort of a mirroring
#
of that where i remember i did that episode with akar patel on uh you know the intellectual
#
foundations of hindutva which i remember you saying at the time that you really loved that as
#
well and that was a great episode but both of us were of the opinion at the time of that episode and
#
um you know my view before it in fact very firmly was that there is nothing there there is no
#
intellectual tradition and whatever claims to be an intellectual tradition is a just a cover for a
#
makota for a bigotry and all of those other things and later in the course of doing episodes with
#
people like akshay mukul uh you know that episode then tells you that there is a tradition and the
#
reason many people like me are missing that tradition is because we read in english where
#
those arguments aren't made in english but there is a rich tradition in hinduism now you may not
#
agree with that intellectual tradition but it is coherent and cogent and it exists and you know
#
chatting with people like akshay mukul and rahul varma and others sort of made me realize that in
#
that regard i was i was wrong and i needed to have a more nuanced view and that that view reflected
#
my own shortcomings as someone who read mainly in english rather than you know something that was
#
actually the truth you know i want to since you talked both about the blogging days and now
#
i want to play the next question from again one of our common friends and you know ace podcaster
#
and writer this is pranay kothastani and you know he's been on on your show multiple times
#
he's just a wonderful thinker and intellectual i always enjoy reading him i love listening to him
#
so i'm gonna play this next question from pranay and then uh take this conversation forward hey
#
amit pranay here many many congratulations for doing what you do and for inspiring so many of
#
us to get into podcasting now here's my question for you you've been both a podcaster and a writer
#
so what do you think are the comparative advantages of both similarly from the consumer's end what do
#
you think are the comparative advantages of podcast listening over reading if any fantastic
#
question and i i share your admiration of pranay and i uh know him fairly well uh because you know
#
when i all the times when i was editing pragati he's of course part of takshashila and he wrote
#
a lot for me and just a wonderful warm human being um you know such a good person that you think that
#
you know it's you know the correlation of great thinker and good good person is surely not common
#
so you imagine that such a nice guy cannot possibly be a fine thinker but i think he's just
#
one of the finest sharpest thinkers about policy that i personally know you know really you know
#
he's such a humble down-to-earth guy that it's hard to sort of think of him as someone on a
#
pedestal but as an intellectual he is on a pedestal for me uh and these and he does a
#
great hindi podcast buliyabazi which is um yeah wonderful um i was i have been a guest on that
#
show uh and and i had i was just sweating and so nervous because i've never thought about property
#
rights concepts in hindi i didn't even know the right words and he and sorab sort of held my hand
#
through it but i feel like i interact with pranay a lot because of the newsletter and the substack
#
and it's i just look forward to it every time it you know shows up in my inbox i i think
#
he's doing an incredible job yeah yeah no i was also in buliyabazi talking in hindi about hayek
#
so yeah that was that was a good fun pranay is great and his newsletter is great co-written with
#
raghu jetli whose real name i know but shall not reveal uh though i never met him oh yes okay oh
#
really you don't know that okay yes yeah bragging rights um but so i have bragging right yeah so
#
these these uh so great questions and and i think the short answer to the difference between writing
#
and podcasting is really breadth versus depth uh in the sense that you know as far as reading
#
writing is concerned you can just read a lot and you can read a lot about a bunch of different
#
subjects and you can get breadth that way whereas the best podcasts go deep into one specific thing
#
and obviously if you're listening to different episodes or different podcasts you're getting a
#
certain amount of bread that way but writing doesn't allow you to go as deep as podcasting
#
does like i said my um episode with on education with kartik mudlitharan was um 43 000 words when
#
it was transcribed which um at double speed you could have listened to in one and a half hours
#
you know that's almost a short book that's a monograph you know how are you going to consume
#
that and get um you know that many words um uh you know in that much time and um where are you
#
and and that's like a sharp focused kind of uh this discussion that is happening you know an interview
#
of kartik in a newspaper would be 800 words even in a long interview in something like caravan would
#
be seven eight thousand words at most and here you have 43 000 words and i think in one word i think
#
that's the main difference which is why one has to sort of embrace length and i'll i'll pat myself on
#
the back a little bit for this because i think when i started growing long you could say i shifted
#
the overton window of length in indian podcasting that uh you know now uh interviews which last one
#
one and a half hours are perfectly common especially uh you know among um the policy
#
podcasts and all of that and that really wasn't the case you know it's like a string that i
#
remember that i just kept lifting it and i have so many three hour episodes now including presumably
#
this one by the time it's out that a one hour episode feels like nothing at all and i'm sort
#
of happy about that the the other aspect of that and i don't know what the related stat for other
#
indian podcast is but the one part i don't look at metrics but the one interesting metric that i
#
have sort of that gives me satisfaction about my podcast is that most people listen most regular
#
listeners listen to podcast apps on listen to podcasts on their podcast apps while i i still
#
get about 30 to 40 percent of my listens from chrome which means that these are not regular
#
listeners from the browser rather and this means these are not regular listeners these are people
#
for whom that episode of mine has acted as a gateway drug of sorts and that's how they've
#
come into it which you know and hopefully i'm kind of uh i managed to convert some of them so that
#
gives me a lot of happiness because i think the ecosystem is very young and we are at a stage
#
where nobody's competing with anybody else we just want to grow the listening habit among people and
#
we all benefit from that and that's something that we need and which is why i go out of my way to
#
help people do podcasts i've sort of um you know as the editor of prageti i you know started the
#
prageti podcast which pavan srinath does so well and he he did that with hamsini for a while she
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started her own podcast and so i sort of tried to keep that tradition going even now with my
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podcasting course what i sort of stressed on in the first class that i did was that i don't want
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this to be like taking a gym membership i want a podcast at the end of this i want to you know
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so let's work at that so initially i thought that the first two webinars the total three webinars
#
the first two can be kind of conceptual and then we get down to the nitty gritties that this is
#
your basic equipment this is how you record blah blah blah but i i devoted half of my first webinar
#
to the nitty gritties because i said that you got to kind of uh you know get down to it right now
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that we can't stay at the level of the abstract we have to get down to the concrete and actually
#
get things done and i feel strongly about this because you know i am in a limited space in the
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sense that right now podcasts in india seem to be heard a lot by english-speaking elites and i think
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the real scope is in the languages because there is so much more hunger for knowledge and information
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in the languages if you if you read in english today you can go on the internet and the world
#
of knowledge is at your fingertips you can go to youtube watch the best videos blah blah blah
#
but supply of that kind of knowledge and insight is so limited in the languages and there is much
#
greater hunger and scope for it and i'd really like to see young entrepreneurs start podcasts
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which may not cater to the same use cases because beyond a certain class of society people may not
#
have the time to actually be working out for an hour a day so when are they going to listen
#
but uh you know figure out different ways of distributing podcasts maybe not a podcast app
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maybe on whatsapp a guy is getting a five minute update every morning in hindi which gives
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perspective on what happened that day not just news or things like that just throw things at
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the wall try interesting things because that's where i think podcasts will uh kind of really
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explode and really make a difference in our society you know the thing you mentioned about
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language that's the other thing i really love about podcasts which is that even people who
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don't speak english as fluently maybe as you and me because we we have the privilege of you know
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being english medium or whatever they can listen to the podcast at their own pace in their own time
#
you know they can actually hear how the words are said in what context they are used
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whereas you know normally the only access to these ideas would be through the written word
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which is much harder to access if if your fluency levels are not that high so i think even for non
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english speakers or those who are perhaps less fluent i think the podcast medium does something
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really interesting and really special and and you told me not to use jargon you admonished me a
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few minutes or was it a few hours ago i've lost track of time uh but i think there is some value
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to that right like people are also learning we might make fun of drinking games and talking
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about incentives and liberalism but with us the listeners are also learning the language of how
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to think about these ideas and how to communicate them um yeah first of all let me correct you i
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did not admonish you i scolded you so let us use a sort of simpler words but no that's a that's a
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great point and that brings me to a related sort of i thought it was little more gentle than scolding
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well i mean yeah so uh i mean there are surely simpler synonyms of admonished so you you know
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but that's absolutely true because you know a good friend of mine i don't know if you met him
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yogesh dashrath who runs story tell yeah you haven't met yogesh so yogesh who runs story
#
tell and i've done some work for story tell in the past and they have this and they've you know
#
sponsored many episodes of the scene in scene in the past so friends of the podcast in a sense
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early sponsors so yogesh once told me and and they have a great bank of marathi and hindi audiobooks
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so a lot of the listeners are people who are listening to marathi and hindi in fact i you know
#
i heard rag darbari there because i read it in english and i wanted to read it in hindi but i
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thought let me listen to it in hindi and it's such a masterpiece and he told me that many of those
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listeners we think people who listen to audio listen at higher speeds he said many of his
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listeners listen to the english content of story tell at lower speeds 0.75 0.5 because that's how
#
they understand and that also opened my eyes and another similar sort of eye-opening thing
#
that i learned recently is that when i heard someone complaining about oh netflix now allows
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you to play videos slower or faster and he was appalled by that because he said why should
#
someone speed it up or whatever it's made for natural speed but then i looked into why that
#
was and i'm very impressed by the reason and why netflix has done it and the reason is that when
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blind people are watching shows in a sense they're not really watching the shows they're
#
listening to a description of what is happening which is how they consume the content and they
#
like to speed it up because they comprehend audio faster so the higher speeds help blind people
#
watch shows which is such a you know remarkable thing and what people who can't hear what they do
#
is that they are reading the subtitles because they can't follow the dialogue and so they like
#
to slow it down because it takes them longer to read so it makes perfect sense and those of us
#
who can see and hear perfectly well don't realize this and we think of our experience of the world
#
as a normal experience and this is the way things should be and you know so you know credit to
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netflix for building this stuff into the software and just suddenly expanding that universe of
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content in such a you know heartwarming way no absolutely and i mean one is of course people
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who are differently abled or visually impaired and things like that but the other thing is also
#
we are all differently abled also in the sense of the background that we come from right
#
i mean when we're talking i consume monetary economics as i learned while i researched for
#
viral acharya's episode so much slower than any other subfield of economics which is applied
#
micro right and i'm a professional economist but there are capabilities i have built there are
#
words i have learned there are shorthands i have learned and i think we don't pay enough attention
#
to this as we communicate right and the nicest thing about technology especially one that is
#
asynchronous like podcasting is that people can do this and they can also do this in the
#
privacy of their own home because normally when we do it in the classroom when we do community
#
viewing or community listening or you know community education as we do in schools
#
people are routinely made fun of for pronouncing a word wrong or not understanding a question the
#
first time it is posed many people who who lack fluency skills in a particular language need that
#
question to be posed maybe multiple times maybe a little bit more slowly i mean for me if when it
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comes to tamar anything other than food needs to be said you know a little bit more carefully and
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gently for me you know especially if it's something like economics and i think that is a lesser
#
appreciated aspect of how podcasting and video streaming can really crack open the education
#
space even which shows that are not intending to educate but they can educate because they've
#
built in the infrastructure to do so no and it's out there because you know just being out there
#
just being available at a certain depth is important because we are surrounded today by
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mass media which for a number of different reasons and they're responding to different
#
incentives and being rational unnecessarily being shallow like if you look at the indian
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new cv channels i had a brief episode on this with ashok malik a long time back when i did short
#
episodes and his point was great his point was that one they have paid such license fees that
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the investment in a tv channel is massive and two uh you know government regulations have price
#
controls on how much they can charge subscribers therefore the bulk of the revenue comes from
#
advertisers and so they need to dump it down which is why you have the shouty nonsense
#
which is why you have the shouty nonsense that you see and which is or bollywood or bollywood
#
which is why all our channels are functioning at a lowest common denominator and you cannot get into
#
any niche and here is where podcasts has an advantage even over something like radio where
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you can cater to any niche right and anybody can start not having an entry barrier like imagine if
#
they were giving licenses for podcasts one i would never have got a license and two even if i would
#
have applied i wouldn't have applied and i would never have got one and even if i got one it would
#
have been for a different show and some babu would have shown up at my door saying you wanted to do
#
20 minute episodes on public policy now you're doing three-hour interviews with known dissenters
#
what is going on so not having an entry barrier is interesting in the sense is important in the
#
sense that people can then follow their own interests and often surprise themselves with
#
how many of people share those interests and just having the knowledge available out there is really
#
uh kind of important so so yeah i agree with you it's it's it's just stunning you know one element
#
we've been talking about is the technological infrastructure which makes us more able communicators
#
using the podcast medium the other is content and here i want to you know talk about another
#
question from our guest or rather cue another question from one of your guests and one of our
#
common friends who is kumaranand right and uh i i think you know we've had some fantastic
#
conversations one-on-one and the three of us together and he's been on your show and he's
#
talked about especially agriculture and agricultural reforms which is more recently an area which after
#
you know so many years has cracked open so so maybe you and kumar had a little bit of something
#
to do with cracking open that space i don't know how far and wide the podcast reach can go but i
#
just want you to hear this question from kumar on the content and communication hi amit congratulations
#
on this great milestone i used to think of you as the dan carlin of indian podcasting but i have
#
changed my mind i now think dan carlin is the amit varma of podcasting anyways here's my question
#
you have now done 199 episodes of the seen in the unseen in your episodes on several occasions you
#
have dealt with issues with elements that are difficult to communicate to an average common
#
person issues like the concentrated benefit and dispersed costs the free rider problem
#
unintended consequences a public myopia where only the short-term cost of a policy is visible
#
and the long-term benefits are not the spontaneous order of things a majority preference for a grand
#
central plan rather than the invisible hand of voluntary exchange and cooperation so given these
#
and similar challenges in communicating the unseen in your experience what do you think
#
are the best ways in which we can overcome this challenge thank you yeah very very powerful
#
question and i'm kind of embarrassed at the comparison with dan carlin because no one can
#
be like dan carlin i i really got turned on to podcast as a medium when i heard hardcore history
#
by dan carlin which is just next level you know it's it's amazing i fell asleep you told me to
#
listen to it and i think about halfway through the first couple of episodes i just like fell
#
asleep he has a lovely voice but also it might be a lack of interest in that kind of a deep dive so
#
it wasn't for me i think also spare attentional capacity because you might have been listening
#
to him at normal speed and he is rather slow uh so i listened to him at 2.5 at least and i got
#
turned on for those of my listeners who want to know to this incredible episode called blueprint
#
for ramageddon which was on world war one and i think it's like 25 hours of content spread over
#
five episodes of five hours each or something like that and it's just him talking it's nothing
#
else there's no sound effects there's no music it's just him talking it's so pure and beautiful
#
and incredible and thought-provoking and that's kind of just brilliant and i've always since then
#
wanted to do a solo history podcast at some point but that you know requires resources far beyond
#
anything i might have right now so maybe someday in the future but to answer kumar's perceptive
#
question and it's something that i have you know we all three of us have lamented this that our
#
brains are wired in prehistoric times where we lived in different realities and and therefore
#
many of the truths about the world the way it really works are unintuitive because you know in
#
prehistoric times we used to live in uh you know where things were scarce and and and there was
#
brutal competition as it were as hobs would put it harsh and brutish competition and therefore our
#
brain evolved to think of the world in zero-sum ways that the only way somebody can benefit is
#
if you take it away from somebody else and we don't intuitively understand the positive some
#
nature of voluntary interaction it's what john strassel calls a double thank you moment that you
#
know when i buy a cup of coffee at a cafe when the coffee is handed to me i say thank you and uh the
#
person at the other person says thank you and the thing is i value the coffee more than the money
#
and they value the money more than the coffee and it's a mutually beneficial interaction uh which
#
is why you know both of us saying thank you double thank you moment it's it's um it's a positive sum
#
game but our brain think of the world in zero-sum way is that if the rich are getting richer the
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poorer must be getting poorer and that's a difficult truth to communicate communicating
#
something like spontaneous order is very hard to communicate that you don't need a grand central
#
planner that uh really complex systems like evolution like uh markets like the like languages
#
cannot happen by central committee you know they uh you know um they happen in different ways and
#
there's a great episode called the evolution of everything that i read with matt ridley
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where we spoke about um this at some length so this is a challenge and i've i've thought
#
about this and i've recently sort of come to realize that the reason for this also lies
#
in the distinction between the abstract and the concrete that the reason these things have
#
evolved is that if you're living in a time where you are in a little tribe and you have to everything
#
is scarce then your concrete reality has scarcity in it and you will see the world in zero-sum ways
#
because that is what you're doing for you to you know uh get the meaty part of that deer you have
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to sort of uh you know um win it over somebody else that means someone else doesn't get it
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and so on and so forth that tribes of a hundred people are best handled from the top down perhaps
#
and spontaneous order is not necessary because that level of complexity is not there so i think
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perhaps the way to getting closer to communicating uh some of these things is by getting concrete
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what is the problem for example with concentrated benefits and um uh with concentrated benefits and
#
diffuse costs now i'll quickly go over the concept and obviously shruti you've thought about it and
#
taught it a million times but the concept basically is that let's say in the case of air india that
#
every year air india basically a failing dying airline is kept alive by infusions of taxpayers
#
money and let's say each citizen is paying two rupees for it i'm just picking a hypothetical
#
number now the point is that uh the benefit is concentrated air india gets it and therefore
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they will lobby for it and they will do all kinds of things and if the beneficiary was a private
#
party they would contribute to party coffers they would buy politicians all of that the benefits
#
are concentrated but the costs are diffused that all of us are losing only two rupees it is unseen
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we don't even know that we are losing it and therefore why should we protest and this becomes
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a dilemma and the problem that therefore arises from this is that how can we therefore make it
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um you know make this concrete aspect of the situation uh more explicit uh so that uh the
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abstract principle then becomes obvious and and then that kind of comes across like i remember
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once in a conversation with kumar when we were chatting about this i spoke about it as flicking
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a light switch that you know once you flick the switch and you turn it on it's fine the light is
#
there but you have to flick it and you know even for me i i suffered from all these misconceptions
#
because that's how we are wired and then you gradually flick the switches and you see the
#
world in a different way because there is that so as communicators of these ideas which we care so
#
deeply about we have to find ways to flick these switches and we cannot do that at the level of
#
the idea at an abstract level we can't do that at the level of abstraction we have to get concrete
#
and we have to relate it to their own lives and that becomes a complicated challenge like if the
#
garbage outside your house has not been collected you know there are so many like you and i had
#
done an episode on urban governance where we spoke about the disconnect between power and
#
accountability and you know why that affects the governance in our cities and all of that is
#
abstract how do you make it real by talking about why the person's garbage outside his house is not
#
being collected or why uh you know whatever whatever problems that um citizens face in their
#
everyday lives and i think as communicators that is a challenge that we have to sort of communicate
#
at that level and not at an abstract level because if we just talk about stuff at an abstract level
#
we will fail utterly and i think this is something that you know the extreme right wing does this
#
very well they they are wrong but they are wrong in uh they talk about concrete things so they
#
build simple narratives like one of the reasons i i wrote a column on this once about why trump
#
succeeded in 2016 and it wasn't because he was right because he was basically wrong about
#
everything then and as he is now which is not to say his opponents aren't also wrong but he was
#
wrong but the the stories he sold were simple and were simple stories which are easy to understand
#
so when you're speaking to people in the midwest who don't have jobs anymore it is easy to sell
#
the narrative that immigrants are taking your jobs therefore immigrants immigration is bad
#
and that your jobs are being shipped overseas to china so you know china is bad now both those
#
narratives are wrong but they are simple so similarly if you want to sort of communicate
#
any kind of ideas at a mass level you have to find a way to make it simple and relatable and
#
you do that at the level of the concrete no and also you know you don't have to do it just once
#
right so there's this great quote by frank knight who is also one of my intellectual heroes and he
#
said it takes varied reiterations to force alien concepts upon reluctant minds right so it's not
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just about putting it out there or even as you said though it's very important of making it less
#
abstract i think it's also story after story example after example so the way you gave the
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example of air india i think if you gave a hundred such examples then you know the the broader public
#
choice principle of concentrated benefits and and diffused costs might might penetrate and this is
#
also where i really enjoyed your conversation with nilesh mishra you know i mean it was
#
the importance of storytelling the value of sentiment the value of nostalgia you know of
#
course there are broader themes they they invoke certain emotions which make you connect or make
#
things more intimate and it's related to the art of conversation but it's also related to the art
#
of education right everything is not passion and information it is also sentiment it is also
#
nostalgia it is also storytelling and fitting things within a broader tradition i didn't ask
#
him for a question though i would have loved to because by by the time we planned this episode
#
that one wasn't out so to the listeners who are disappointed i apologize i want to take a break
#
at this point because in good you know seen an unseen tradition we have breached many many
#
barriers we are now almost at like the two and a half hour mark i think so i want to take a little
#
commercial break we're going to talk a little bit more mainly about some of the policy ideas
#
that you have and i know your love for books so you know i'd love to talk to you more about books
#
so more for the listeners when we come back from this commercial break how would you like to start
#
your own podcast since you're listening to the scene and the unseen i don't need to sell you on
#
the power of podcasting audio is a unique medium different from any other and it allows for a level
#
of depth and engagement that no other form does you have no doubt experienced this in the long-form
#
conversations that i've had here but even for storytellers this is the most exciting medium
#
and the best part of it all is anyone can start a podcast you are limited only by your imagination
#
and desire and i want to help you by sharing my insights with you i've just launched an online
#
course called the art of podcasting in which i will talk about what makes audio so unique the
#
different forms of storytelling that it enables the art of the interview and what will make your
#
podcast stand out i'll talk about these broader concepts as well as the nitty-gritties of what
#
equipment to use how to record how to distribute how to market your podcast and build your brand
#
my course consists of three webinars over three sundays and cost rupees 10 000 plus gst or about
#
a hundred and fifty dollars for more details and to sign up head on over to scene unseen dot in
#
slash learn the art of podcasting at scene unseen dot in slash learn
#
welcome back to the show uh we needed this commercial break very badly because we're
#
recording at a time when i need to eat uh to make sure i don't get hangry and amit just you know
#
can just go on like this forever with no coffee no food no water nothing he seems to be like this
#
ace podcaster but we took the break for me so welcome back and amit now there are a bunch
#
of questions now you know most of the show as you named it is the scene and the unseen it was
#
inspired by bastia and a lot of the early episodes were on policy topics like very specifically
#
right so you were like for instance with alex you spoke about fsi or with you know kumar you spoke
#
about agricultural reforms and you know minimum and maximum land holdings when you and i've talked
#
about property so we have a few of your guests and some of our common friends who have policy
#
questions for you so i am just you know i have very little to add to their questions they're all
#
great thinkers so i'm just going to queue up their question and then you know you can give us your
#
policy response and i'll start with one of our common friends barun mitra you know again someone
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that you and i usually agree with on on most aspects this question has something to do with
#
our agreements and disagreements so i will uh you know play this for you and then get your take on
#
it amit likes to use the guideposts of consent and coercion to assess public policy matters
#
while i prefer the means and the end framework most of the time despite these slightly different
#
guideposts have still led us to very similar conclusions on a range of public policy issues
#
but with the onset of coronavirus for the first time amit and i disagreed on the appropriate
#
policy response to our public health emergency particularly the relevance of lockdown in an
#
epidemic situation amit held that a lockdown was justified while i didn't see any justification
#
in penalizing every citizen in search for the virus so the question that has been making me
#
think for the past few months is why our frameworks didn't lead us to our common
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policy positions as had been the case for all these years yeah wow what a fantastic question
#
and barunda of course is again one of my favorite people on the world such such a uh uh delightful
#
gentleman i've learned so much from over the years i think our frameworks are pretty common
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in the sense that i also care about means in the ends in the sense that i want the means to
#
not include coercion and uh i i value consent a lot and i agree with barun and indeed the
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mahatma gandhi that uh you know the no end is ever justified by uh unjust means and therefore
#
we should be careful now in this particular case i also think that look and i could be wrong here
#
this is one of those areas where one is never sure and i'm i'm open to accepting i could be wrong and
#
i think and i hope barun will also share that sentiment not am i being wrong but either of us
#
could be wrong but that um you know i think the purpose of the state is to protect the rights of
#
citizens and uh that includes say protesting the rights of citizens against external invaders for
#
example which is why libertarians will say that you have to have rule of law so that rights are
#
protected within a country and you have to have um you know an army or some kind of defense which
#
of course should be voluntary which protects you from external invaders how do we classify a virus
#
i think that you know the point is that when it comes to public health i think for example uh you
#
know not wearing a mask in public can create externalities for others for example this is why
#
in general anti-vaxxers have it so wrong vaccines are important you don't take a vaccine just for
#
yourself you take it to protect others as well and if enough people refuse to get vaccinated
#
you are putting everybody else at risk and we all agree that there is this liberal paradox right
#
that to protect everyone's rights that is to protect everyone's um consent for that matter
#
you have to infringe on them a little bit the very existence of the state is an infringement
#
on individual freedom because uh you know a state can only exist based on taxes and therefore there
#
is some amount of coercion and we all agree that the state is a necessary evil the night watchman
#
state as the old classical liberals put it is a necessary evil now i think all ideological
#
discussion comes down to how much coercion is justified by the state that's all it comes down
#
to i think anyone who denies that every act of government is an act of violence i wrote a column
#
with that headline once or that the state depends on coercion is deluded it is obvious that the
#
the existence of the state depends on on coercion and the only line of argument is about how much
#
coercion is necessary uh and what justifies coercion so uh does us like everything that the
#
government does whether in terms of spending money or whatever it does has a cost uh and that cost is
#
coercive so that's a question and and therefore the argument would be about um uh you know you
#
can argue does a statute justify that coercion does um you know keeping a failing headline
#
uh alive with all the other associated costs that you have of crowding out and all of that
#
does that justify the coercion do roads and bridges justify the coercion because of the
#
positive externalities they have and i think in this case there are reasonable arguments to be
#
made at both ends so similarly does a lockdown justify the coercion and it's a very difficult
#
question you know you and i did an episode in april where we spoke about uh the policy trade-offs
#
involved here and the point is that no matter what you do it will seem like the wrong decision
#
because the cost which is the lives that were lost and what happened to the economy the costs
#
will be visible and the benefits which is the lives that were saved because of the measures you
#
took uh will be invisible and and this is regardless of whether there is a lockdown or no lockdown or
#
whatever now this question becomes extremely complicated because even if you say that a
#
lockdown is necessary you then look at the state capacity even if you argue that our lockdown was
#
necessary at the time the prime minister called it uh you know you look at state capacity and you
#
uh think that okay there's still going to be enormous suffering because state capacity can't
#
handle what is required and added to that you have say political apathy as in the case of the
#
migrant workers which was a humanitarian tragedy that played out at scale and you have all these
#
other things going wrong and i just think that this is a really difficult kind of question and
#
we argued about this we discussed it rather i don't think you and i really argued about it i
#
think both of us agreed that to some extent you had to have a lockdown at that point or public
#
health could have fallen apart at the same time i get barun's point that you know uh it's coming
#
in the way of the voluntary interactions which make us prosperous as a society in the first place
#
and if amit wants to trade with barun who is the government to say that he cannot leave his house
#
and do that and meanwhile both of them starve at home and that is of course a problem and in a
#
sense i'm not even disagreeing with him i agree with his concerns and uh i think he would agree
#
with mine as well and where the policy decision should fall i don't know i still think that a
#
lockdown was necessary i think it was completely botched but i think it was necessary otherwise
#
our hospitals could have been overwhelmed and we could just have had a disaster that spiraled out
#
of nowhere now the point is the lockdown was badly botched in terms of what happened to migrant
#
workers and the implementation and the fact that i'm not sure that the government managed to use
#
that time wisely to get in the state of readiness that they they should have managed but all those
#
questions apart i think it's very complicated and nuanced and i'm completely open to realizing three
#
years later that i was completely wrong had there been no lockdown it would have been better for all
#
of us but um at the time you make the sort of uh you know it's complicated and messy but i don't
#
think i would say that the state should not have the right to call something like a lockdown because
#
if like for example okay the you know the corona virus is what it is but imagine a far
#
deadlier virus you know imagine a virus that is both extremely contagious and say kill 60 percent
#
of the people who get it is a lockdown justified then where do you draw ebola yeah ebola was
#
different because it wasn't so contagious it was um much more fatal uh you know the this corona
#
virus uh was hyped up as being in that sweet spot where it is both very contagious and sufficiently
#
fatal to be problematic in that sense almost a game theory optimal virus but um uh ebola wasn't
#
there but imagine a virus that is as deadly as ebola and as contagious as any corona virus what
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do you do then is a lockdown justified if it is not what are you you know i don't know how you can
#
justify a lockdown not being necessary in those circumstances and if you think it is justified
#
then but not justified now where do you draw the line based on what information do you draw the
#
line especially when we are in the kind of epistemic fog if i may use jargon again so i
#
think that's it it's a deep and nuanced question but i think baron and i have the same kind of
#
framework and and you could say that um i am in fact being hypocritical here because i am sort of
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um you know turning away from the question of consent that the government did not take the
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consent of um all the people that it forcibly locked down but i think we also accept that there
#
is a state that has a certain minimum sort of role to play and the real argument then is that does
#
something like this fall within that role you know i'd add a couple more things to this so one of
#
course i mean i like you i'm completely open to realizing i'm wrong about this a few years from
#
now i already have a more nuanced view than maybe in you know early april when we talked about this
#
which is of course you know some kind of intervention i thought is necessary but is it necessary in
#
rural bihar is it necessary in arunachal pradesh for instance where there are no cases at least
#
at the time of the lockdown there were no cases right it's important to you know maybe come down
#
really hard on the mumbai locals where you can think of them as super spreaders right is it really
#
that important to come down on rural areas or farm activity so you know that is one kind of you know
#
aspect of the lockdown for which i completely understand why someone like barun and even us
#
would just be you know think not twice but many many times over this kind of an imposition of
#
government over liberty but there is another aspect to it now normally the public choice
#
economist in me takes over and we talk about government failure and you know the incentives
#
and how government does things badly does that mean government should not do it at all right
#
and this is a question for which i honestly don't have a good answer now i think policing is an
#
incredibly important function of government i think india is under policed i think the people
#
who pay the most because it's under policed as minorities and you know dalits and women and things
#
like that now because we haven't figured out policing and how to do it right does that mean
#
the state shouldn't be in the business of policing right some libertarian friends we have would say
#
yes right some would say absolutely not there are very very minimal areas like you know this is
#
probably someone like ajay shah right or someone like niranjan rajay dhyaks right these are critical
#
state functions night watchman state functions and it's very important to slowly give the chance
#
and allow the state to build capacity in these areas now i know the lockdown is not the same
#
thing as you know policing nor do i want the government to get very good at imposing lockdowns
#
because then we are in kashmir and china and that's a horror scenario in itself but to me the fact
#
that the government doesn't do the lockdown well is normally a good argument in this instance i
#
think it weakens just a little bit because usually when we say the government is not good at providing
#
you know telephones you know let the market solve it the market actually solves it pretty well okay
#
in this particular instance i'm not sure how voluntary interactions because we're not talking
#
about a market for viruses but how voluntary interactions or that they necessarily solve it well
#
right we know people who've continued having big events super spreader events there are people who
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continue having weddings right political rallies chief minister adityanath was planning this huge
#
event just before the lockdown was called for ram navami and they would have probably gone ahead
#
with that you know had some kind of a mandate not come in so it's not that private citizens are in a
#
place to act in the same way as they do when they are buying telephones and bread and butter either
#
relative to you know let's say the government running modern bakery or the government running
#
lodhi hotel or air india so there is also that comparison did the government watch the lockdown
#
absolutely it wasn't necessary to me some intervention was necessary this kind of a horrific
#
lockdown especially i thought it would go on for three weeks it went on for like whatever 70 80 days
#
right so there is that element of that trade-off and there is also do we need a lockdown the
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question is compared to what and i honestly do not see private citizens acting that responsibly
#
right as one would require in this kind of a pandemic because for everyone it's important
#
to get married it's important to have a family event it is important to have a political rally
#
right and the and the losses are passed on to someone else or the externalities passed on to
#
someone else so i think even within you know the libertarian classical liberal framework of
#
thinking there's obviously a lot of things to consider but this is how i have started to think
#
about issues of the lockdown now i know it doesn't get me to the exact same point as
#
barun and i keep wondering why because like you i i hugely admire him and maybe you know over a
#
period of time we all kind of figure out where we are on this but you know epistemic fog is real
#
i thought the dead bodies would just be piling up in india based on my experience with the
#
health care system in italy when i lived there and you know then when they had like you know this
#
kind of crazy fatality rate in italy i was like if this is happening in italy what will happen in
#
india but at that time when i was imagining those horrifying things we didn't know that it
#
disproportionately affects older people or that younger people are not you know affected quite
#
the same and the fatality rates are much lower you know we just didn't have this this information
#
end march early april or at least you know the really good studies from the cruise ship and
#
things like that hadn't come out yet so i think the epistemic fog lifting also genuinely helps
#
our understanding of hey only seven percent or six point five percent of indians are above 65
#
years of age so you know maybe this wasn't that necessary also indians don't overwhelmingly uh
#
you know put their elderly in old age homes or nursing homes which means you don't have this
#
kind of huge impact where one event and you know you suddenly have lots and lots of people dead
#
in a particular area or a particular county so you know those things have helped us understand
#
why india wasn't as badly affected uh but at the time i i still believe some intervention was
#
necessary uh should it have been all india should it have been as a grave as it was should it have
#
you know been extended three times over those things i i would agree with barun were quite
#
unnecessary i mean i'll say a couple of things i mean one is a fairly a trivial point almost that
#
um uh people i i have noticed uh worryingly often come up with responses to policy based on
#
where it is coming from who is a politician in charge for example it's almost interesting to
#
see here that we had the right wing government of modi calling a lockdown in india and a right
#
wing government of trump opposing a lockdown uh in the u.s so i don't like to use words like right
#
wing and left wing because i don't think those frameworks are correct but regardless and similarly
#
the opposition breaks breaks out along those lines that those who oppose modi here will say array
#
the lockdown was too strict and those who oppose trump there will say that we need a stricter
#
lockdown and more of a lockdown and all of that and but i'm not saying that's why barun uh opposed
#
it at all i mean he's he of course opposes modi but this is perfectly opposing the lockdown is
#
very cogent according to his framework so i respect that but i that the deeper point i want
#
to make is a point that i think every libertarian will agree with and again i don't really like to
#
use these sort of uh uh tribal classifications but i think anyone who uses these to describe
#
themselves will agree with anyway which is that what went wrong in india the botched lockdown
#
also speaks to a fundamental structural problem and i'm not even referring to the flailing state
#
and i wrote a column about how india's great disaster as this has shown is uh you know even
#
worse than the viruses are flailing state uh which you know causes far more um suffering than uh the
#
virus can or has but rather that our structure of governance is true top down and if it was far more
#
local the responses would have been better like as you just said that the policy that you carry out
#
in mumbai is not something that really fits in arunachal pradesh or rural bihar or whatever
#
so if governance is really local and responsive to what the actual needs on the ground of local
#
citizens are then better decisions can be uh taken that way at a local level now there will be places
#
where people get it wrong but there will also be places where people get it right and the point is
#
a bad decision will not scale in the way that it can when there is just one guy in delhi who is
#
making a bad decision and then uh it just percolates down so i would have i would have preferred that
#
and and you know the yeah and and those sort of i've just written a paper on this with gp manish
#
and abhishek chatagunta so i will send this paper to you talking about the reason we had such a
#
terrible lockdown imposing these horrible you know unintended consequences and costs on the poor
#
is because india's federalism is too centripetal which has made our governance structure very top
#
heavy and very dysfunctional so i'll send this paper to you i'm already intimidated centripetal
#
uh let's let's move i'm sorry there is no easier word to describe that you can admonish me again
#
or scold if you shall uh but uh it's it's hard to come up with another word for centripetal
#
right because we're supposed to be federal we're not centralized right but we have a bias towards
#
the center we we are gravitate towards the center so if you have a better word for that you should
#
tell me uh we can change the title of our paper we still have time let's let's move on to the
#
next question i don't want to change the title of your paper uh yes so the next question i mean
#
these are just you know it just so happens that some very brilliant women have asked a lot of
#
policy questions and you know all great economic thinkers so i'm going to start with one of our
#
favorite you know books in the last few years which is puja mehra and her book the lost decade
#
she's i think one of the the best uh you know economics covering journalists that we have in
#
in india and that book was really an eye opener for me again because as a as a public choice person
#
we always you know think less about a particular individual or their role and think always in terms
#
of incentives and institutions and structures but her book simultaneously i mean while illuminating
#
that her book also illuminates the importance of good leadership the importance of accidents
#
the importance of personalities and histories of people getting together and not getting along and
#
things like that so um it was again one of my favorite episodes that that you have done and
#
i don't know was this before 100 or after 100 well after 100 okay well after 100 so definitely
#
we haven't discussed this before and so i'm going to play a puja mehra's question for you
#
hi shruti and amit many congratulations on the 200th episode milestone wish you hundreds more
#
so the question for me for amit is this what i'd like to know amit is if you feel optimistic
#
cautiously optimistic or like me pessimistic about the future i feel india's made a hash
#
of the window of opportunity it had when a lot of good things came together for it
#
first a prime minister who's a good economist and understands rather well how the system functions
#
and how this system resists change then a prime minister who enjoys tremendous popular support
#
favorable demographics with a large young population and a global openness for trade
#
etc a corporate sector that was chasing excellence for a change this window and its many positive
#
things are now closing many negatives among them increasing cussedness in politics policy
#
and in general dominate the scene now so what does the economic and socio-economic future for
#
india look like to you should we still hold on to our dreams of a vastly improved future
#
or should we brace for a prolonged period of difficulties of all sorts thank you her question
#
almost made me sad that that was a lovely episode by the way and a book is really an eye opener into
#
what goes on behind the scenes in government and politics and all of that and a very nuanced book
#
which shows you that it's wrong to blame one party or the other one per person or the other
#
that everyone's responding to incentives and this is how kind of things work out and puja is of
#
course a very nuanced sinker and you didn't mention that she has this podcast which we'll
#
link from the show notes of course yeah you've cracked open the space right now all your guests
#
have have had spin-off series of their own podcast i'm not going to take any credit for it at all and
#
puja's podcast i think you should i think you should there is you've cultivated an audience
#
for it so that's pretty pretty special but i'll let you answer puja's question first yeah so
#
yeah this is almost like the hope and despair question i asked so many of my guests and
#
um and i think i've answered it somewhere or the other um but uh it's it's um yeah it's tough
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i mean you know one i think that it's going to get worse before it gets better if it gets better
#
so it's going to get worse before it gets better is actually a hopeful statement not a despairing
#
one um that um uh you know our discourse is very polluted and what has happened is that
#
we are inevitably getting more and more polar polarized because the worst angels of our nature
#
as it were the worst demons of our nature are given scale by social media and technology and
#
that you know that makes me feel fairly sad sometimes about the way things are going and
#
i don't know what one can uh really do you know politics has become politics has always been
#
not about governance but about narrative and all narratives that are out there are in some way
#
reductive and toxic to different levels so what do you kind of do about that and and that's what
#
i've always said has given me hope is that i've and i take you know while i despair of what is
#
happening in the larger broader scheme where abstract ideas rule what i do take um hope from
#
is the small concrete ways in which our lives are improved especially by technology like i think
#
where politics has failed liberalism technology has succeeded by empowering individuals in many
#
different ways by empowering them with choice by empowering them with access to information and
#
so on and so forth and you know maybe there is hope there i mean anyone who is listening to this
#
is listening to this because of technology that didn't exist 10 years ago and you could have
#
podcast 10 years ago but the precise confluence of technologies that has brought my voice to your
#
ears right now didn't really exist or not not in the circumstances and so and i think the future
#
is largely a sea of unknown unknowns so you know we can't tell in what ways good things will happen
#
or even bad things will happen and there will be domains in which things will get worse and the
#
arc of history will bend towards injustice as it were or it will seem like that in the short term
#
um but you know i have hoped that in the long run it will um sort of and maybe i'm being delusional
#
so here is again this is something somewhere where i could realize that i should have been
#
more pessimistic in the future who knows um you know for me i try these days i try not to think
#
about what's happening in the broader political space or in the economic space because it is
#
it makes me angry and frustrated and there's nothing i can do about it so i want to keep
#
exploring ideas and keep you know keep keep the discourse going about all of these things but
#
there's nothing i can do about it so at a personal level my personal philosophy really comes down to
#
cherishing small joys like the good conversations i get to have or uh just uh you know the kachoris i
#
had earlier today uh and which makes makes it sound very trivial but you you thought no i wish
#
i had kachoris today yeah there you go i have just darkened your world in virginia i have darkened
#
yeah so yeah so i i think you know so you you do what you can at an individual uh level both for
#
yourself for your you know own mental enrichment uh and and all of that and whatever you can throw
#
at the wall of ideas out there you throw it you know the point is you don't you don't i mean i
#
think of bastia again you know no chance of success but he writes all those great books like the law
#
and all his essays like that which is seen and that which is not seen so you just got to do what
#
you got to do the future is unknown unknowns you increase the probability of good outcomes
#
if you can continue doing good things now without hoping for you know good outcomes later so you
#
know you you just increase that probability you add your voice to the mix you kind of do what you
#
can but you also i think i think all of us also need to sort of look us look after ourselves as
#
well no and you know on this aspect i feel like also there are things we are optimistic about and
#
the one thing i'm optimistic about the older i get is i think most people are fundamentally good
#
decent people right and in that i have a very large amount of hope for the future of india right i
#
know everyone thinks everyone hates everyone and there is all this right-wing anger and left-wing
#
anger and people think twitter is what the real world looks like the real world in my sense i
#
mean i know india is remarkably violent and remarkably difficult and all of those things
#
uh you know casteist racist misogynistic but it's also full of remarkable kindness you know in the
#
face of uh extreme shortages and and you know some really difficult circumstances for a lot of people
#
and the more i travel in india the more i see that kind of you know individual level kindness
#
that gives me a lot of hope the other thing that gives me a lot of hope is uh i uh you know also
#
do emergent ventures right which is one of the mercatus center uh platforms with which we support
#
moonshot ideas and just reading the applications from really young people their ambition you know
#
their imagination their creativity i anytime i work on emergent ventures applications on a given day
#
you know the next few hours are very bright and optimistic for that particular reason so i'm
#
also hugely optimistic of of the younger people in india i want to now move on to the other
#
uh favorite resident economist that we have and that is rajeshwari sengupta right i mean she is
#
just uh such a great thinker again you know our fields of specialization are different
#
so anytime i read a column or a paper by rajeshwari immediately it's got like you know my my brain
#
just expands and opens up a little bit more so i i really value her as an academic but also as
#
you know a guest on your podcast as a fellow guest because we we did one episode together so
#
i had the pleasure of meeting her and uh she also has one of these big think questions for you so
#
i'm not going to say more i'm just i'm going to you know play the question then and then we'll
#
talk about it hi this is rajeshwari first of all heartiest congratulations to amit and team on
#
completing 200 episodes of a podcast which i think is one of the best in the country on the topics
#
that it covers i've thoroughly enjoyed listening to several episodes and learned a lot i wish you
#
guys all the best as you hopefully continue to enlighten us with more such informative shows
#
my question for amit is as follows the podcast can safely be categorized as one that caters to a
#
highly educated english-speaking elite audience but the word elite now has a negative connotation it
#
seems in several societies including ours all over the world we are witnessing a sort of a backlash
#
against us elites the unsaid unwritten criticism seems to be that we the elite the intellectual
#
thinkers of the country have ignored or marginalized the common man and in doing so
#
somewhere we have lost the plot we have lost the narrative there seems to be a deep disconnect
#
between what we say or think or write and what the common man who votes in our democracy
#
believes in so my question for amit today is that is there anything that he thinks that we can or
#
need to do to bridge this ever-expanding divide or do we risk becoming redundant and reduced to
#
passive observers reminiscing about the past when things were different yeah what a fantastic
#
question no uh yeah it's it's and it doesn't surprise you that it comes from rajeshwari right
#
like she she never thinks narrowly she just thinks so big and broad i just you know macro economist
#
thinking macro questions yeah she's great i i did an episode on gdp with her which was a fabulous
#
episode and for anyone who wants to understand the concept of the gdp and the way it's measured and
#
the larger conceptual questions as well that's a great episode and um you rajeshwari and vivek
#
call were my guests in a four person episode we did 12 dream reforms which is one of my 10 most
#
popular episodes i think and uh that was great fun and and you and rajeshwari were of course
#
fighting all the time and we're not fighting this is how economists talk to each other i think we
#
scared everyone yeah very deep question so let me let me respond to it by saying that first of all
#
i mean i of course use the elites in a banal descriptive sense where it's obviously true
#
we are the elites right we have to acknowledge our own good fortune and our own privilege and
#
all of that and it's true we we we are the elites by definition because uh there are so few of us
#
and we are so fortunate uh as far as the criticisms of elites are concerned i think they are largely
#
justified uh i think they're largely justified because elites too often um people like us and
#
i include uh you and me will sit in uh ivory towers and be sanctimonious about what is good
#
for everybody including what is good for uh the common person and uh you know and and and because
#
for so long elites have controlled the levers of the state and the levers of media and all of that
#
we'll you know we can do what we want and we can sort of uh our narratives are the ones that get
#
through and you could say in a sense that has started to change in recent times and there are
#
ebbs and flows in that i think the the the two you know to get back to the constructive part of it
#
that what can elites do better i think there are sort of two important things that we can do better
#
one is at a level of attitude we need to be open we don't need to look down on uh people who um
#
you know are not elites and and say that oh you know so and so voted for modi because he's bigoted
#
or so and so voted for trump so he must be a racist and i think that kind of condescending
#
demeaning attitude doesn't help people's concerns are different from ours we have to be open to
#
understanding see people contain multitudes like you said earlier uh you know there is much kindness
#
in the common person towards others even towards those who he who he would consider in an abstract
#
sense to be the other you know that abstract term but there is kindness in an actual concrete way
#
towards that and i had a i had an episode recently with achal malhotra where um we discussed the
#
concrete and the uh abstract a lot and and a very moving episode for me and uh so i think that this
#
we need to do that we need to stop looking down on people and say that these are the unwashed
#
masses what do they know we know better and all of that and we need to be open to a their concerns
#
and open to their concerns not in a way that we are you know uh giving compassion from on top
#
but actually try to understand where are they coming from why are they because the point is
#
you know there but for the grace of god go i as it were and and and that's actually the wrong
#
quote because it's not even as if somebody is in an inferior position and someone is better or
#
someone is inferior or someone is better it's not like that at all it it's just that everyone is a
#
creature of their circumstances and their thinking and maybe it is some of the elites who are in fact
#
intellectually hobbled by a narrowness of vision so i think elites need to be open and especially
#
and one good way of doing this is uh through considering what barun calls means and i would
#
call consent that if you want to if you want your ideas to percolate through society kindly do not
#
impose them at the cost of others but try to make it happen in a bottoms-up way too many of the elites
#
have a particular vision of the world which they want to impose on others out of the best possible
#
intentions and i sort of have an issue with that so that's one aspect where the elites can do
#
better just in terms of their attitude and their approach have some humility be open don't um you
#
know try to look at the world in a top-down way and impose your ideas in that manner and and
#
secondly i would say that if the elites really have a sense of conviction in what their ideas
#
are like you and i did and going back to kumar's question then a focus on a narrative where you
#
are not talking at someone but you're actually talking to someone you're respecting their
#
concerns and you're trying to convince them in a respectful way instead of lecturing to them
#
and judging them because they don't agree with you so they must be bad people and so on and so
#
forth which is happening too much and and uh yeah so these two things i think a lot of criticisms
#
of and anger at elites are justified and we should have the humility to accept that
#
and the capacity to then think about how do we communicate better and i think a lot of the
#
answer comes in learning from others who are not like us and some of the answer comes from
#
being able to have the sort of dialogue with them that we can convince them of our ideas
#
i would add one more thing and maybe this is because i have been in the academy my whole life
#
that i feel this particularly i think elites not just indians everywhere in the world but also very
#
cliquish and you know it's like a club with a secret handshake right because if you didn't
#
know how to pronounce that french word correctly or you know you know you said rodin instead of
#
rodin then you know oh you are you are not you don't know the secret handshake right so there is
#
there is a very cliquish nature we use pronunciation we use schooling we use brands
#
you know what you wear things like that right like how you speak as proxies for whether you are part
#
of the club or not part of the club i find that particularly disturbing and i never realized this
#
about indian elites while i was living in india i was probably one of them who would have made fun
#
of someone you know i hope i wouldn't have been that unkind but you know i can easily imagine
#
myself being one of those people either openly making fun of someone or at least like thinking
#
in my head i can't believe they don't know how to say that but i think one thing that has changed
#
me is also being an immigrant right so once you leave the place that you were raised in and you
#
come to a new world which was open enough to accept you even though i'm not one of them right i'm not
#
i'm not american and being welcomed with open arms people engaging with you people mentoring you
#
teaching you so on so forth and now suddenly the lens with which i look at my own community or
#
childhood or my own people so to speak people like us just flipped so you know ever since i left india
#
i have had actually i guess a more harsh view of this club nature of of elites like i just despise
#
you know i mean they people in a very pejorative way say you know khan market kabal or something
#
like that but i grew up in khan market you know bari bookstores was my bookstore right like india
#
international center is where we had family dinner so i have also been in that sort of you know kabal
#
to know enough that it is very much an in-group you know you are one of us or out sort of
#
environments and i think that is something indian elites really need to change as an at an individual
#
and at a group level i think this there's also a value in networks right thanks to twitter i have
#
been speaking to more people who are from different backgrounds right dalit's lgbtq members who
#
who i normally wouldn't have met we would have never been in the same room you know
#
given the circumstances in which i grew up in india and one of the things i realized is one
#
of the hardest things for dalit students to get into american universities is letters of
#
recommendation right there aren't enough people that they know who would write a letter for them
#
that would carry weight in an american university that you know would get them admission of course
#
they know wonderful thinkers i'm sure they have great teachers but there is this gap and this
#
gap exists because we wouldn't let them in right so i have made this offer multiple times on twitter
#
and privately and i'll make it on your show that you know students who need help and help opening
#
doors opening networks within academy in india or abroad they need people to recommend them or at
#
least people to mentor them and we need to open up a little bit and not say i'm only going to mentor
#
so and so who came from you know my father's friend's son or you know someone who grew up in
#
my neighborhood or is the you know alumni of my school and things like that so i think this in
#
group clique behavior really needs to end yeah and and some of these exclusionary behavior is of
#
course a default condition of being an elite and not necessarily an intentional uh this thing on
#
the part of the elites but it helps to be aware of it and that self-awareness is important i'll
#
just respond to a couple of the things that you said one is about pronunciations you know i read
#
someone make the point once which i agree wholeheartedly with and it's a great point is that when you
#
hear someone pronounce something wrong you should actually respect the person and applaud him
#
because it means that he is not in those circles where people talk about that person or that idea
#
but nevertheless he has read up on it enough to know about it but he can't pronounce it which which
#
shows that added sort of work that the person has put in and therefore you know if someone says rodin
#
instead of rodin which i'm sure i must have done at the start the very first time i read the word
#
how would i have thought of it exactly like that right so it's it's perfectly fine and and and we
#
need to sort of lose some of that inbuilt snobbishness uh the second thing i'll say is that
#
you know i think i've i've sort of been an outsider in every sort of community that i've
#
been remotely part of in my life whether it's a intellectual community or writers or poker
#
players or whatever i've kind of been on the fringes one foot in one foot out very different
#
kind of view bringing a different lens and all of that so i've kind of gotten this from the start
#
that while i am extremely fortunate and privileged and all there's just so many problems with uh you
#
know those sort of narrow constricted worlds and the other thing i would say is that you know we
#
know for a fact that this podcast for example does have an elite audience it goes out to a lot of
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the elites and especially young phd students and so on and so forth and if they are listening to
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that i'd i'd just ask that always retain intellectual humility because you know we we reflexively
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fall into certain ways of thinking that are common in our circles you know depending on
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where we are being educated or the circles that we talk to and whatever and it's always sort of
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tempting to harden the ways in which you think to fit in with your peers and to gain brownie points
#
for them or whatever and that's a natural human tendency but always try as far as possible to
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retain a certain amount of intellectual humility and to not make the mistake of dehumanizing those
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who disagree with you like one thing that is so sad about these modern times is that discourse has
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become so toxic that if someone disagrees with us we treat them as if they are a bad person there
#
is a character flaw there they are the enemy they are the enemy and and kindly uh avoid that but
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enough of my hectoring as the elites uh would do and and let's move on i think that is a posh
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word amit you need to find a simpler word for that hoist by my own petard to use an elite cliche
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again something i want against by the way in my course but yeah uh now uh i want to get to a
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couple of like more concrete policy so the next question again comes from you know one of our
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favorite people and thinkers uh this is hamsini hari haran i mean i off late i mean not that i
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didn't admire her before but my admiration for her has increased manyfold since she got into the
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world of china right and it feels like this different universe whether it's the language
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whether it's actually going to china and spending time there whether it's really trying to understand
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the world from a completely different lens right seeing india through a different culture through
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through the neighbor's point of view so hamsini if you're listening to this uh you know my my
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admiration for you has only increased and hamsini has a question for you so i will
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play the question first and then we'll talk about it hi amit congratulations in 200 episodes the
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seen and the unseen here's my question for you if the government of india came to you tomorrow
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and asked you for advice on policy reform what would be the first on your list that the government
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needs to reform yes i know you tell the government not to do anything and to butt out but this is
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hypothetical so what's the first thing that you think the government needs to address yeah nice
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question i mean where does one even start hamsini of course was my colleague at prakati for the
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time that i was the editor there so we were basically the she and i were the editorial team
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she was based out of bangalore so whenever i went there we would have our editorial meetings at
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blossoms bookstore which is the best possible place to have editorial meetings i would imagine
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and she's always been into china by the way from the time i knew her so not recent good question
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where do i even start i mean oh no the recent part is her actually going to china immersing herself
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in that world that's the recent part true she was already a scholar of china before that and
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studying and learning chinese and all of that um i think you need an overall mindset shift right if
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you just change one little thing that doesn't help but i don't want to cop out so okay what are the
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specific things um i mean easy answers would be okay abolish you know all but maybe five or six
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ministries uh in uh in all the areas where you don't need them apart from that yeah i mean just
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sort of um you know i mean there's so many policies that i've discussed over a period of time there
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are you know urban development uh uh related policies like you know fsi and rent control
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there are policies at the agricultural uh level which is you know where we have really failed our
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farmers and shackled them for decades and there are tons of policies with all kinds of externalities
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you know you should immediately shut down all psu's for example um can i interrupt you for a
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second sure and prompt you a little bit because i have a feeling you'll agree with me i think the
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number one thing if i had been asked that would be on amit varma's list would have been education
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yeah allow for profit schools and don't regulate them and i've had different episodes and why this
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is important and it's a tragedy it's what we have done to our children for decades is you know
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keeping them poor and uneducated is just a crime but it's so unseen and it's it's um uh it's a crime
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and uh yeah i mean i could i could um uh sort of uh get all emotional and upset over here and uh and
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i of course am one of those elites who had the privilege of getting a decent education though
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our education system is actually completely shitty i consider myself self-educated but
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regardless of that uh whatever base one was given just in terms of learning the language uh but
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extremely privileged that way but yeah what we have done to the children of our country keeping
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them poor and uneducated for decades is a great tragedy and every government is to blame for
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thinking about this uh the wrong way so yeah that's that's uh you know certainly one area that i can
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think of but it's like where do you even start if your body has like 80 cancers and uh you know 40
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ulcers and all kinds of things going wrong and organs are falling apart and you know there are
#
every bacteria and virus has infected you and you say which disease would you like to cure first
#
like you know it's like you feel like saying it's um uh yeah so and i know that's not a satisfying
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i think reincarnation is the only option if we were the religious sorts if we were the religious
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sorts yeah i mean uh the the question is you know the reason i'm sort of uh floundering is that the
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question is just i've just heard the question maybe if i'd had it a day in advance i could have
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thought of something eloquent and a good reasoning for that but education uh you know certainly uh
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you're right that that's something that i've written about a lot and that would kind of make
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sense but in general you want a mindset shift where you know it shouldn't be as if the government
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owned the people uh the fact is the state is there to serve the citizens and not the other
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way around we have the opposite mindset and we need to get past the mindset and i don't know
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whether it's a problem of the state i think it's a problem of the people that we have normalized it
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and we have this mindset if you change the demand end of the political marketplace then the supply
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end will take care of itself and but i think that you know the state is a different beast that is
#
almost insulated from a lot of what happens in the political marketplace partly because of
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all the mistakes made in designing the state to begin with when we gained independence and
#
that's just a whole new story and it could have been far worse so you know maybe we should just
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be thankful for what we have i think there is another question along similar lines and this
#
is by one of your biggest fans this is sudhir saranubat and i am going to play the question
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and now don't say i surprised you because you've had a little bit more time to think about it
#
but it's basically putting modiji out of a job so just you know let me play sudhir's question
#
hi amit congratulations on 200 episode of seen unseen what are the last 200 episodes i have
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learned a lot about states markets economics and indian political history there's a lot that's wrong
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with our society politics and overall political structure various themes have been discussed on
#
seen unseen taking that thread forward i would like to indulge you into a thought experiment
#
what if you are made a prime minister of india with thumping majority for let's say next 10 years
#
from 2024 till 2034 then what are the top five initiatives that you would implement which would
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make india a country and a society that you dream to have can you just give us your thoughts on this
#
thank you yeah wonderful question sudhir is an ardent fan and supporter of the show which i'm
#
very grateful for since i opened up support in april he also enrolled himself for the writing
#
course and all of that and and just keeps giving wonderful feedback which is what i meant when
#
you know so many of the readers feel like they have a personal stake in the show so they want to
#
constantly you know if they don't like something they'll tell you about it they want something
#
else they'll tell you about it which you know and i love that makes me feel like i'm also a
#
custodian of something that belongs to other people and means something to them as well
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okay five things i don't know i think where do you start now if you are
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let's start with you being elected prime minister yeah i mean that's so varmaji varmaji so obviously
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varmaji is never going to happen it's observed but i love thought experiments and and i appreciate
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that sudhir put a thought experiment so i'll respect that and let us say that okay if i am
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ever in that kind of position of power first of all do an audit rationalize everything the
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government does and think about should the government do this or should the government
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not do this and you know my sort of rather heuristic for looking at what is wrong with
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the public policy or where the problem is with the like if there's a particular outcome in the
#
world why is that outcome there where is the problem and one heuristic i use is to ask the
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question where is the coercion so i would do that in the case of government where i would look at
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different policies and say okay where is the coercion is it necessary why is it necessary
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what is the impact of this what are the outcomes that it is having do a complete audit on everything
#
that the government does which will immediately knock off a lot of the ministries which will
#
knock off a lot of the spending figure out ways to do it because even though you you can't shift
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from one equilibrium to the other overnight there are what i would call transaction costs in that
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uh and you got to figure out ways to make smooth transitions but one do that have a clear vision of
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what the government is to do you know and and think about that like one metric that i would love
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using for this is gandhiji's metric where mahatma gandhi's metric was that for every public policy
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think of whether it will help the poor or not which is actually i'm quite happy for that to be
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the single metric that i use for everything in terms of outcome when i think about outcome
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that will it help the poor or hurt the poor and the interesting thing is that most of the
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of the policies that many people think of as being tailored towards the poor actually hurt the poor
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they don't help them and vice versa so think a little deeper think about unseen but entirely
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foreseeable effects and work according to that so rationalize according to what the government has
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no business doing um what it can do to solve poverty which is our um number one problem and
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should be our number one uh problem and think about it not at the basic uh you know patronizing
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level of you know handouts and schemes and all of that thing but think about structurally what can
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we do about our poverty how the rest of the world has tackled it and therefore that's what we need
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to do uh so i really start with these two and the the thing is the problem with the indian state is
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that it is too small and too large at the same time that it doesn't do the few things it should
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do properly such as maintain the rule of law and so on where basically in most of the country there
#
is no rule of law for elites like us we can buy figure out ways to work the system but there is
#
no rule of law for most people so the things that we should do strengthen the state there and there
#
are so many things that we should not do and get the state out of that as smoothly as possible so
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these are the broad areas um you know i i you know can't really think of five and all of these are
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in the realm of wild fantasy you know it's it's uh um but but yeah i mean if you put me in that
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thought experiment uh these are the lines i uh along which i will think you remove restrictions
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on private enterprise voluntary action is what what makes society grow with every act of voluntary
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exchange both people are better off that's a secret to prosperity so remove all restrictions on acts
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like that you know if you know there'll be one class of people in india who will say that we
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should be free to do whatever we want in the marketplace but not in the bedroom and there'll
#
be another class that says the opposite and i'll say that no two consenting adults should be able
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to interact with each other in whatever way they want as long as they're not infringing on the
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rights of someone else be it in the bedroom or the marketplace so get out of you know the
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regulating people's personal uh morality or passing judgment on that and also let them interact
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freely in the marketplace unless they are doing a deal to get someone assassinated in which case
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you're obviously infringing those rights but otherwise respect the power of voluntary exchange
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we do not do this enough and this will automatically take care of a lot of cronyism like people often
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confuse markets with business that what is good for markets must be good for business and it's
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actually they are at opposite ends that you know pro-business policies will be bad for markets and
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therefore bad for the people because every big business will want to shut down competition
#
and you know put barriers to entry so that their position is protected and they will want special
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favors from the government and in the end this harms the people and this harms the poor so you
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know the more we get out of regulating voluntary exchange the less this kind of cronyism becomes
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uh possible so uh this sort of a rambling answer uh i hope will uh satisfy uh sudhir yeah i mean
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that covers more than five right that covers like hundreds of potential uh interventions or
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initiatives that you could implement uh so now we are moving on to i think what is going to be one
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of the most exciting parts of this conversation for me i want to move on to a really exciting
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area so you know one of the things i have been so jealous of pretty much the entire time i have known
#
you is how broadly you read and more importantly how quickly you read you know by the time i
#
finish one book you have finished five and i think i read a fair bit but you just put the rest of us
#
to shame the other thing is you manage to read you know not just the same type of thing over
#
and over again and of course you know being in the academy has stunted me in that we specialize in a
#
particular discipline and things like that but you read everything right you're not a snob about
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things you may make fun of chetan bhagat but you will make fun of chetan bhagat after reading
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chetan bhagat right you've read everything uh so there are a number of uh your you know guests
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and fans not surprisingly who have questions about books and so i want to start queuing that up and
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you know ask you those questions right so the very first question comes from as we have discussed
#
this multiple times in this episode rus roberts uh the host of econ talk and one of my most
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favorite thinkers uh you know you talked about education and of course i am not self-taught like
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you i have had a lot of formal education you know uh which a lot of your listeners have also you know
#
learned about through various episodes but i feel like i have learned more from rus roberts than
#
virtually any other book in economics or any other single professor of mine because i have
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been listening to his podcast since i think 2006 or 2007 from the very very early days and he was
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a professor at george mason and that was the pull uh but you know i have just learned how to think
#
about the world through his voice and you know through his eyes i also think he's a remarkable
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human being and just so incredibly kind and generous i feel like i hope somewhere that has
#
also seeped into me maybe you know the i hope i have become less judgmental less critical less
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snobbish you know more kind more willing to listen all all the things that you know rus just embodies
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i don't know how he's been doing it for so long and uh so i uh when i emailed rus he sent in a
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question and in uh you know uh those of the listeners who don't listen to rus roberts on
#
econ talk do so immediately and now i'm going to play the question for you i meet rus roberts here
#
i want to congratulate you on your 200th episode and to thank you for the opportunity
#
to be one of those 200 on your podcast the scene and the unseen was one of my favorite
#
conversations ever here's my question for you i'm going to ask you to name and recommend three books
#
one that has influenced your view of the world one that enthralled you as pure entertainment
#
perhaps a novel or biography and finally one that inspired you one that made you a better person or
#
that touched you such as a book of poetry or maybe even a single poem that's special to you again
#
amit congratulations yeah wow it's almost overwhelming to be asked the question by rus
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roberts right because he is such a legend of both podcasting and and and you know i've obviously
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never met him personally but his humanity shines through his writing and is therefore so inspiring
#
and and that that episode of course was such a you know wonderful conversation that i did with him
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i really loved it and just reading i mean even his short book on adam smith is really in a sense
#
a guide to how to be a better person and to live a better life so i i kind of uh love that
#
a book that changed my view of the world i'm not going to name a libertarian book here oddly
#
enough i'm going to um uh name the blank slate by stephen pinker because and and what that book
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sort of did to me and and um uh was that it made me much more cognizant and aware of human nature
#
and the fact that we aren't blank slates that we have a hard wiring and in fact it made me
#
very conscious of the different ways in which our culture is both a reflection of the hardwiring
#
and also an attempt to mitigate it and to fight it that we are wired in certain ways and we are
#
also wired in certain contradictory ways but the most remarkable thing is that we are the only
#
animal so to say that has been given the tools to fight its hardwiring which is the ability to
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think about the world in conceptual terms and to make value judgments about what is a good way
#
to behave and what is a wrong way to behave and that awareness of our own humanity and sort of
#
the different ways in which um um you know we are like i i think of the brain as a machine that
#
we have to fight that the machine is wired to do so many things to look at the world and uh you know
#
different kinds of uh toxic ways and we have to fight that machine and we have to fight it even in
#
more everyday mundane things like our brain is wired to be distracted to take the easy way out
#
to preserve cognitive energy and not actually do deep work and in various ways we have to kind of
#
fight that and the blank slate is this wonderful book that you know uh through this long arc shows
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one on the different ways in which we are shaped and our cultures and our societies are shaped by
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our wiring and be in the ways in which different fields um have you know are shaped by it and also
#
reflect uh sort of the different battles that then uh arise when we try to fight this and also how
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dangerous a view of the world would be that rejects um the fact that we are wired and treats us as if
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we are blank slates when we are absolutely not so you know it takes a very nuanced view of nature
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versus nurture i think in one of his books um pinker writes about how uh you know nature gives us
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knobs nurture turns them which i think is you know such a powerful line that's one book which i think
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changed the way um i look at the world um another uh a great book which i think sort of moves me a
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lot and um you know has me sort of connects me deeply with the shared humanity of all of us
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and the shared tragedy of life as it were is a book of poems called almost invisible by mark strand
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and i would recommend all my listeners to just go and buy mark strands collected poems uh because
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that will include this book obviously and uh that's a remarkable volume and he's a remarkable poet
#
and these poems were written i think when he was towards the end of his life if i'm not mistaken
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it's his last book of poetry and it's prose poems right so it's just it's just prose and um um and
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since russ said maybe i should read something out from it let me let me let me quickly uh find
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something to sort of uh read out from this yeah so i'll i have opened the page and i'll read out a
#
couple of poems they're very short and they're very powerful you can always get there from here
#
by mark strand a traveler returned to the country from where he had started many years before when
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he stepped down from the boat he noticed how different everything was there were once many
#
buildings but now there were few and each of them needed repair in the park where he played as a
#
child dust-filled shafts of sunlight struck the tawny leaves of trees and withered hedges empty
#
trash bags littered the grass the air was heavy he sat on one of the benches and explained to the
#
woman next to him that he'd been away a long time then asked her what season had he come back to
#
she replied that it was the only one left the one they had all agreed on i'll read out the next one
#
now like a leaf carried off by the wind by mark strand after leaving work where he is not known
#
and where his job is a mystery even to himself he walks down dimly little streets and dark alleys
#
to his room at the other end of town in the rear of a rundown apartment house it is winter and he
#
walks hunched over with the collar of his coat turned up when he gets to his room he sits at
#
a small table and looks at the book open before him its pages are blank which is why he is able
#
to gaze at them for hours and i'll finally read out a third one and this is called harmony in the
#
boudoir by mark strand after years of marriage he stands at the foot of the bed and tells his wife
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that she will never know him that for everything he says there is more that he does not say
#
that behind each word he utters there is another word and hundreds more behind that one all those
#
unsaid words he says contain his true self which has been betrayed by the superficial self before
#
her so you see he says kicking off his slippers i am more than what i have led you to believe
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oh you silly man says his wife of course you are i find that just thinking of you having so many
#
selves receding into nothingness is very exciting that you barely exist as you are couldn't please
#
me more and what was the third kind of book i was about to ask you the third question is one that
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enthralled you as pure entertainment perhaps a novel or a biography or something like that
#
fascinating i mean as a biography i love the power broker by robert caro but not enthralled
#
but not enthralling it's very insightful and very interesting i'd say i was sort of maybe
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you know enthralled by lord of the rings for example which is uh you know great fantasy in
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just the world building and everything and that's a favorite of so many people and um i guess
#
growing up it's it's one of those uh books you remember for uh you know the ways in which it
#
enthralls you and and and uh i guess at the moment i'll pick that you know at a later point in time
#
i will sort of regret not mentioning i'm sure so many other books but but yeah i would say
#
that that that certainly did enthrall me i now there are more and more questions on books
#
so i'm going to ask you a sukhada chaudhary's uh question next right because this is also book
#
related hi amit this is sukhada i've been a big fan of your podcast and big congratulations on
#
completing 200 episodes of this fabulous show and the question that i want to ask you is
#
if you could make sure that everyone in the world could read just one book which book
#
would that be would love to know your answer thanks so much and all the best yeah great
#
question again she hates you yeah a difficult question one question one book just one book
#
yeah i i must say i you know she's a fan of the show in the sense she's a supporter of the show
#
she keeps uh retweeting all my episodes and as kind words to say about them i haven't really
#
interacted much with her i think i've just met her once she organized uh with her bar lit fest
#
earlier this year at nakpur where i went and where i in fact met a number of authors who
#
subsequently uh figured on my show like you know madhavi menon uh in that episode about the secret
#
history of desire in india which was great and you know i met rajat upekar there uh so yeah yeah
#
so over a period of time i've taken three or four guests from that festival good question it's also
#
a very sad question imagine a world where people could read just one book um you know it's also a
#
question that appreciates the opportunity cost of time if one had time just to read one book so i am
#
i am with her on this and i'm going to corner you and make sure you don't weasel your way out of it
#
no no i won't weasel but i'll i'll name more than one book because there's more than one sort of
#
dimension in which this can uh play out and um you know in the realm of ideas the book that
#
immediately comes to mind is bastia's the law uh because of what you know the relationship
#
between the state and the individual and the principle stand that it takes and but it's a
#
difficult book to read it's actually very simple but the language is archaic so it's kind of
#
difficult for that reason i mean one could also point out you know you know adam smith's um both
#
his books theory of moral sentiments and though i mean if you don't have time to read both of them
#
you could maybe just read russ roberts's book on uh adam smith um i love orwell's essays but i don't
#
know what would be the value of reading them if you read nothing else because where do you get
#
context from right uh and and similarly you know i wouldn't recommend mark stans poem if it is the
#
only book in the world because again there is no you know your taste would not have built up to
#
the point where you could appreciate it perhaps it would just um so it's it's a tough question i
#
think you know i don't know maybe just just yeah so in non-fiction like i said you know
#
maybe bastia's law maybe orwell i don't know in fiction you could go to orwell you could go to
#
something like 1984 or animal farm which also uh are in their own ways books of ideas and books
#
that kind of contain a lot of truth about the world but i mean depending on how one is feeling
#
one could come up with you know a bunch of different answers but i can't think of a
#
satisfactory single answer for fiction because the joy of fiction is that with every book you enter
#
a different world and enter other people's lives and all of it collectively uh just increases your
#
empathy and makes you a better person i mean some book like if somebody read only one book
#
you have to give them a book which is also easy enough to read so i would think but it's not
#
somebody right if it she's asking if everybody in the world could read just one book so there is a
#
shared context i think in her question unless i'm reading too much into yeah but the point is there
#
are many books which are great books but uh if you know people haven't read any other book it
#
it doesn't have the same impact maybe something like a curious incident of the dog in the night
#
time by mark haddon which is a delightful book about especially able child solving the murder
#
mystery of his dog and and and just beautiful writing and that also gives you a sense of how
#
you can enter someone else's head and see the world differently and yet is written in simple
#
enough language that everyone can get it so that's one sort of book that comes to mind but you know
#
you get the fundamental difficulty with uh the question and also perhaps this is my shortcoming
#
that i read so much that i am simply unable to uh imagine what it must be like to not have read
#
anything it's somewhat like you know thomas nagel wrote um this famous essay about what it is to
#
see like a bat and uh you know which makes a philosophical point that some experiences are
#
so outside of our realm that we cannot even imagine uh what it must be like so so yeah i
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mean i i think i've kind of edge but i hope so forgive me i'm an economist and uh if there was
#
only i mean i i like you can't imagine a world where only one book could be read but i would
#
say economics in one lesson by henry haslett if everybody in the world read that book then 90%
#
of the remaining economics books don't have to be read in some sense right yeah and that's by the
#
way that's by the way a big book based on bastia's essay that which is seen and that which is not
#
seen so it ties in beautifully it's a great book it ties in beautifully it's a great book it's easy
#
to read and uh you know uh economic imperialism all the way uh at least for now for me uh uh i
#
have a couple more book related questions uh so this is subrata muhanti i don't want to say too
#
much i want to play the question first and then then talk about it amit hi this is subrata here
#
longtime listener in fact from the time you dropped your first episode congratulations on
#
the 200th episode here's my question for you why have more people read dust capital than road to
#
serfdom thanks and all the best for future yeah what a great question isn't it yeah so it's not
#
about books but about reading which is also a subject on which you have a lot of insight on
#
how people read how you read yourself you know how one should read to write better and so on so
#
forth so i think this is a good question of why why the world has gravitated one way instead of
#
another yeah subrata by the way is a host of a brilliant podcast called hal chaal theek thak hai
#
which is which is a lovely podcast which looks at hindi films and hindi music and indeed our
#
society itself at an earlier time and i recommend everyone listens to that great question and i i
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i remember once when i was a teenager and i remember this memory and like i said my father had
#
thousands of books across ideologies and across genres and all of that so i remember once um i
#
was meeting a bunch of friends in college and in my bag i took the book dust capital which he asked
#
about because i thought it would be cool i thought it was fashionable it would make me seem intellectual
#
and all of that when i was a very young uh teenager and i think a lot of what draws us
#
towards ideologies as also ideological books is the desire to fit in and you know with a cool gang
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and to be seen as you know one of a cool bunch of people and all of that which is why we shall uh
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you know we will read dust capital and we'll read marks and we'll wear t-shirts of uh the mass
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murdering yeah which is which just repels me when i see someone wearing uh that uh t-shirt but um
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yeah so it's kind of those social currents where you want to fit in with a cool bunch of people and
#
especially if those cool bunch of people seem to be enlightened and they've read a lot and they're
#
compassionate though you know we have seen where compassion can lead society in the 20th century
#
that kind of shallow stated uh compassion that remains at the level of intention um and uh i
#
think that's a big reason why uh some ideologies are so fashionable and others don't really take
#
off also i think a lot of leftism appeals to simplistic ways of viewing the world which are
#
inbuilt in us uh for example you know zero-sum thinking or thinking of uh you know the world in
#
terms of uh adversaries in an adversarial way that oh then you know the workers versus so and so and
#
all of that and and these sort of simplistic narratives that the way to get rid of poverty
#
is that uh you know just redistribute and you know all of that and i can see why those are appealing
#
and so i'm not really surprised why more people have read dust capital than uh you know hayek's
#
books and hayek also writes in slightly dense language but so does marx of course and and of
#
course i read marx before i read hayek which uh you know tells you something about the way the
#
world is that many people will never even move to hayek which is why it's a responsibility of those
#
of us who read hayek and uh you know find illumination in him to spread those ideas
#
in concrete terms in a simple language uh because i think that there is a social cost to reading the
#
wrong books there is a personal cost and a social cost to reading the wrong books and this is
#
possibly the wrong time to sort of elaborate on that but we are shaped by what we read and what
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we then become is what shapes society uh if enough of us turn out that way no and also the other
#
thing to note is that besides dust capital a book that has been perennially on the bestseller list
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in india over the years is my calf by hitler and you could also ask that that is another toxic
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dangerous book why are people reading that but because one because i suppose at some level is
#
enthralling and two because it speaks to simple narratives that you need a strong leader and all
#
i mean i used to hear these kind of arguments back in the day that india needs a strong leader
#
like that and uh you know who can get things done and the trains will run on time and you still
#
hear arguments like that from people so these are sort of uh you know from different end from
#
different ideological ends both simplistic both dangerous we have seen the damage they have
#
caused in the 20th century with stalin and mau and of course hitler himself and so on and so forth
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and both having commonalities in terms of having a simplistic vision of the world
#
and believing in the power of the state to shape society as you wish through coercive action and
#
we of course haven't learned any lessons and i think it also i mean the way the question was
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phrased though i know subrata mean it quite as literally i'm not sure so many people have read
#
das capitola right it's like most people think they understand the punch line or you know the
#
cliff notes version of it and i think that has a lot to do with you know this lovely article that
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hayek wrote called intellectuals and socialism where in a way you know the socialists managed
#
to capture an intellectual elite class who then furthered and propagated those ideas probably
#
for all the reasons that you mentioned which is you know the simple narrative the appeal to
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tribalism the appeal to our base instincts of thinking in terms of zero sum and things things
#
like that but the liberals have not quite as well you know penetrated the intellectual class
#
to then convert it into simpler messages you know which are easy to consume easy to repeat easy to
#
turn into a proverb and you know so on and so forth so i think there is something to do with
#
both the content but also the messaging and who's doing the messaging i have another question which
#
is not about before that if i may interject it's also you know this is similar of piquetti also
#
that piquetti is very fashionable these days almost nobody has actually read piquetti and but
#
it's very fashionable because it makes you seem both intellectual and compassionate at the same
#
time and actually the man is just profoundly wrong in so many different ways but you don't even want
#
to enter into an argument about it with anyone because it'll seem like you who has no compassion
#
for whatever and all of that and i would you know before people start arguing about piquetti with
#
me i would request them to actually read his full book and then you come and talk yeah i would also
#
recommend they read you know deodre mccloskey and phil magnus's critique exactly which is also not
#
just a substantive critique but also you know many issues with the data and how the data is
#
interpreted and analyzed and so on and so forth exactly so now i have another question on books
#
but this is not about your favorite book this question comes from ram guha again one of our
#
you know probably favorite writers thinkers historians i mean again someone who has multitudes
#
just i mean right now i'm excited about guha for a completely different reason i was reading
#
something that he had written on you know forest nationalization and forest rights of tribals and
#
my husband is incredibly excited about guha because he's coming out with a new book on cricket
#
right and in this household that i think there are very few intellectual figures who excite both of
#
us in equal measure on dimensions which are so far apart so thanks to you and thanks to the 200th
#
episode i got to say hello to ram guha on zoom during the pandemic and you know get to ask this
#
question so i'm first going to play the question and then talk to you more about it hi abit this
#
is ram guha and i'm here to wish you on the splendid anniversary of your fabulous program
#
and to request you to please write an accessible book on the relevance of sri rajagopalachari
#
you do not have to be a tamil you do not need to learn tamil you need to understand economics
#
politics and have an independent point of view which is exactly what you have and we need to
#
rescue rajaji from the fundus who are claiming him as one of their own so please do it abit
#
please do it abit what what a what a magnificent question and a difficult request i mean i am
#
possibly not capable of writing a biography and uh you know and there are so many books that have
#
yet been unwritten the written and the unwritten could be uh you know the story of my life except
#
the first part of that would be very scant uh that there are just so many things that i want to write
#
but i'm getting to but i agree with ram that you know rajaji needs to have a nuanced deep
#
biography written on him by you know someone who is apart from those who claim him these days i
#
mean it's really tragic to see what has happened you know the magazine he once founded swarajya
#
being the filthy rag that it is today and it's tragic but yeah and again it's it's kind of
#
um awesome to have to actually have someone like ram guha ask you a question i mean amarika he's
#
asking more than a question he's asking you to write a book i think that's an even higher level
#
compliment yeah yeah no i would you know i'm going to pass the parcel on to my readers and say that
#
this is something that i agree with uh ram that it would be great if somebody did it so if one of
#
you is up to it uh you know we i've had a lot of great biographers on my show talk about their
#
methods of work and all of that so take inspiration from some of that and uh go do it i do however
#
think that you know i think one incredible uh sort of talent that ram guha has is to boil down an
#
entire cultural moment into a single question i mean something that might seem like an innocuous
#
podcast question uh but what ram is saying is like a critique on on the entire right-wing
#
intellectual movement that's going on right now right so that is also one of my favorite
#
things about him so what is said and what is unsaid could be another way to think about that
#
and and i think pratap has the same quality you know ram guha has the same quality they're able
#
to think and capture these big ideas and big sort of cultural political life moments and you know
#
turn them into something like a question for amit varma to write write a book on raja ji
#
no i mean ram has so many great insights and thankfully he's one of those public intellectuals
#
who keeps writing columns regularly and not just withdrawing to a shell in in the face of severe
#
criticism from both sides and that makes me so sad i mean one it does make me sad that one of the
#
things that the troll farms of the bjp did after they came to power was that they sort of um you
#
know demonize ram guha and made him out to be uh you know a liberal historian who was against the
#
hindu cause and just whatever which is a complete misreading of his great body of work none of these
#
people have read his books and and to paint him in that manner was really tragic and what has also
#
happened after that is that today you'll have you know woke liberals on twitter also ranting about
#
ram for different reasons one of which of course is is contempt for the gandhi family which i
#
entirely share and which we discussed on the show i think in the republic day episode that we did
#
at the start of the year and and that's really tragic because this is a great story and a great
#
thinker of our times and a very nuanced thinker so uh you know obviously both ideological tribes
#
will reduce the world to a binary and anybody who doesn't fit that binary is by default uh
#
you know a bad person a bad thinker or whatever and it's sad but his books sell well and i hope
#
that you know and i'm sure that you know within that silent majority which is not part of uh the
#
barking dogs of twitter uh you know ram has enough people who have the same sort of admiration and
#
reverence for him that you know you and i do you know another thing here is we talked about this
#
a little bit earlier when we were talking about intellectual influences and how you know partly
#
because the our you know school curriculum is so heavily you know got this this colonial hangover
#
you know sort of thing uh we don't read uh whether it is in literature whether it is non-fiction we
#
don't read too many of our own uh you know indian voices indian thoughts indian letter right and i
#
think one thing that india after gandhi did was it just cracked that wide open right it made me
#
at least understand uh and i'm a keen reader of history i mean i'd already almost finished
#
law school by then you know the i remember having this conversation with my husband i had given him
#
the book you know so it was i think one of the first presents that i i gave him it had released
#
in india but it hadn't released in london so when i was going to see him i i got the book for him
#
and he said i had no idea all this happened during the emergency right i on the other hand
#
had been to law school and you know i knew a lot of it from the litigation point of view
#
but i had no idea what was going on in nagaland for instance right and just tracking that open
#
you know talking about indian events and indian intellectual thought from the point of view of
#
what was going on with our people i don't think anyone has done that better uh you know than ram
#
and in in one sense i hope that you know the silent majority and like the lots of people who
#
buy and read his books we are able to create a culture of you know indian thought and writing
#
now it doesn't have to be liberal it doesn't have to be centrist it doesn't have to be right wing
#
it could be all sorts of things because india also contains multitudes right but i think that is a
#
critical piece and i think that's also where his question is coming from which is in this homegrown
#
intellectual thought or tradition you know raja ji is an incredibly important member and uh if your
#
listeners are interested in looking for their next book project maybe maybe one of them could
#
write it no and and and more than that i'd say that you know the significance of ram goa himself
#
let's leave aside raj gopal achari for the moment the significance of ram goa himself is i think
#
something that perhaps he himself would not be aware of because in a sense uh his books are like
#
a gateway drug for so many people into reading history into caring about history you know would
#
a great historian like srinath ragavan for example have less readers if ram goa did not exist
#
the answer clearly is yes maybe srinath himself would be a different kind of writer if uh you
#
know part of that uh way wasn't uh sort of uh laid out for him before that and and that's important
#
and and this you know things like the the books like what ram writes can then have a domino effect
#
on future historians or would-be historians or people who would not have thought of themselves
#
as possible historians but who like good stories and who like reading about the past suddenly
#
reading you know something historical written by ram and saying that damn this is so exciting i
#
need more of this and then they read more and then they want to write more and all of that and these
#
are all unseen effects which will you know play out across generations and one may never know where
#
it kind of ends up and i i wish more people express their admiration for him you know on twitter and
#
elsewhere rather than the the sort of recuperative space that has become and forgive me i keep going
#
back to that but it's just disturbing that i know that i know people like you know ram and
#
barkha dutt and all of those probably ignore their twitter notifications completely but it just
#
disturbs me to see the amount of sort of abuse and hatred that they get that what is what is wrong
#
with us as a society when we cannot you know cherish people who do such remarkable work
#
yeah and on this i think both the left and the right are pretty similar maybe the left has
#
slightly better grammar and punctuation and their hate and vitriol on twitter but i think they're
#
about the same i think this is where conversations like yours and people like you and rus you know
#
things like that i don't know if you've noticed this but all the people we've talked about you
#
know who've asked the question i mean one of the first few things we've said about every one of
#
them is how kind and wonderful they are right and we're not just doing this as platitudes a lot of
#
these people i you know we know them when i come to india i have lunch with you and prem and you
#
know like we're talking about you me prem and pranay at a table together is one of the nicest
#
conversations you know that i have ever had i've immediately remembered those dosas that we had at
#
mtr right wasn't it in bangalore at mtr oh my god that was so good i i just i think i killed your
#
keto uh and and i'm not on keto as i'm not on keto as you can probably see it i i envy bangalore
#
people for that reason you have mtr you have blossoms and you have ram guha speaking of that
#
you know migration is always a possibility since we started with that theme uh i have two more you
#
know i mean this i know we're like way past breaking classic scene and the unseen episode records
#
but i have a couple more sort of you know broad themes uh one is just something you and i have
#
talked about more recently as we have grown older which is gratitude right and so i mean i should
#
just say out there i'm very grateful to have the opportunity to do this but i'm particularly
#
grateful you know all the guests and everyone i wrote to just instantly said oh my god this
#
is such a wonderful idea some of them took a little bit extra glee in saying finally amit will get to
#
know how hard it is to be a guest and answer questions all of them sent their questions
#
really promptly um your sound engineer and producer vijay doipade i think i've just like i
#
think i've traumatized him uh you know if he quits after this i apologize uh but he has been
#
wonderful he could quit because he's my editor uh the there's no sound engineer per se because
#
we are recording remotely ourselves and i am the producer but he's the editor and as i mentioned
#
in the introduction a lot of the shaping of the show and the fact that you know it sounds
#
you know as good as it does and it's also smooth is all because of vijay so yeah credit to him but
#
sorry i i had to interrupt yeah i have to add on this episode he's also the sound engineer because
#
we got you know so many different clips all in different formats all with different levels and
#
volumes and i i just i'm very very thankful to vijay for doing this i'm incredibly grateful to
#
all the guests and fans who responded so warmly uh and sent in questions and i kept asking for
#
lots of questions because i thought you know we have so much time uh but as always there are more
#
ideas and thoughts and interesting conversations than there is time so you know we've we've sort
#
of covered all of it but more generally one of the things i have i have personally experienced
#
being a guest on your show and i'm incredibly grateful for is two things i have never had the
#
kind of engagement that i get from your listeners uh to pretty much anything else that i do right i
#
write academic papers which we all know nobody reads right i write columns which people read
#
but you know it's a very quick and dirty sometimes not even past the headline or the first couple of
#
paragraphs i've had i have students who pay money to listen to me and learn from me but not all of
#
them are quite as engaged but there is something incredible about your listeners and obviously
#
there's a selection bias here because only the most engaged reach out but their questions are
#
so penetrating they are so you know they're critical but they are so civil uh they're really
#
like a model in my mind of you know how discourse should be conducted i think the way you conduct
#
your discourse has a lot to do with how your listeners respond but i have you know immense
#
gratitude for the engagement from your listeners and the second is the love i mean they are just
#
ridiculous i i'm both envious and also still quite astounded because when people are that
#
sort of profuse in their praise and warmth i'm always like wait a second i mean what do they
#
want or what is going on here is this normal this just feels very awkward and uncomfortable
#
but um i wanted to talk to you a little bit about that how you know what are you grateful for now
#
that you do the show i know how much work it is to put it together but i also know that you feel
#
so happy and so much gratitude for how it's turned out yeah i mean two things i mean one of course
#
to begin with gratitude towards my guests that they trust me that they trust me to come on the
#
show they are generous with their time and their insights and it's okay you and i were friends
#
before and people who've come on the show have been friends but there are many people who don't
#
know me from adam who will still come on the show and who will still sit and they will still speak
#
with intellectual honesty assuming goodwill in good faith and have that kind of uh conversation
#
that is uh so enriching so obviously you know that that's part of the whole thing that you're
#
trusting yourself in the hands of a stranger in a sense and that's um you know one essential thing
#
which is actually one reason why uh i've sort of taken it easy on having foreign guests because
#
i could you know write to foreign guests and get them but they may not know me they may not have
#
heard that show so that same level of trust isn't there it can become a bit like a q and a which
#
you know a couple of episodes in the distant past have have gone that way and it just doesn't feel
#
like that relaxed conversation so i feel much more comfortable doing an episode with someone who's
#
uh probably you know heard me at some point at least heard of me or is willing to take that
#
step and maybe listen to an episode or uh you know engage so that's great and the other thing
#
obviously is like you said the listeners the listeners are incredible and i don't even know
#
what to say and like you said one of the things is not just the depth of engagement and very often
#
they'll disagree with me but they'll be very polite i mean it's a you understand the dual
#
meaning of the term civil society that they are just lately yeah that they're just so polite and
#
you know when they're engaging with you on twitter it seems like it seems like a world within a world
#
because twitter is otherwise so shouty and adversarial and all of that and then you have
#
this sort of very polite reasoned engagement from folks and which i really value i mean the the one
#
thing i block for on twitter is actually rudeness anyone is rude i just block them um you know and
#
but uh you know so many of the listeners and they'll disagree with me and they'll say they
#
disagree and they'll say where they disagree and whatever and they're just so polite and and it's
#
also kind of struck me that you know since i opened up support for you know when i asked people to
#
buy me a cup of coffee from april onwards if they enjoyed listening to an episode of the show so many
#
people were so generous and i just want to say here that you know i didn't have time to sort of
#
i couldn't write to each of them in person and and thank them for it but also because i procrastinate
#
and i'm really bad at this stuff and email and all that and i have literally thousands of hundred
#
emails and all of that but i was blown away by it it's really been enough to keep the show
#
independent and i appreciate that because that means i don't have to i don't have to tailor it
#
for anybody else but just keep going in the directions that i want to go and like this
#
episode i think is already well over four hours and i can do this no one's going to say you know
#
no one's going to come up with old-fangled notions of who listens to something so long
#
and all of that so yeah so i'm kind of you know i'm just in a sense grateful to even beyond these
#
two categories of people to guests and listeners to to just dumb luck that's brought me in a
#
situation where i've discovered something that gives me satisfaction and that i'm enjoying for
#
however long it lasts i mean i've reached 200 and i think one of the questions said may you do
#
hundreds more and i don't think it's gonna happen but it's nice to get this far and to feel that
#
i'm still part of the journey and you know while putting together my course for podcasting i
#
started thinking deeper about it and realized that i'm still learning so much about it and then that
#
makes it so exciting and that one can kind of go ahead and do that yeah but that that's that's
#
broadly you know on gratitude i know you are grateful to your guests but there's something
#
incredible you've done for the community right i spoke about this before a little bit you've
#
cracked open an audience for a policy podcast right things that people thought were just
#
impossible you yourself thought anything longer than 20 minutes is going to you know just not
#
work and you are brave enough to experiment right you're brave enough to put it out there and say
#
i'm gonna do this and let's see if it works or if it doesn't work i'll change it and so that is
#
incredible and what you've done is you've created a very keen listening audience which is different
#
from a keen reading audience right it's a little bit different and there's a lot of overlap
#
but you've created this entire space for policy podcasts and whether it is pavan who's been a
#
guest on your show whether it's pranay you know whether it is hamsini myself srinath puja we've
#
all launched our own podcast i'm sure i'm missing a few people and so much of our initial audience
#
has come from the scene and the unseen or because of some recall value right that oh i heard them
#
on the scene and the unseen and i enjoyed that episode and i would love to listen to them and
#
in that sense you know you really are sort of a model for how to create a market how to expand it
#
and it also takes generosity and mentorship i know you've mentored each one of us i have never heard
#
you say hey i'm doing this so i don't want you to do the same thing you would be as generous
#
you know to someone who is launching the scene and the unseen part two versus you know someone
#
who's doing something very remote from what you're doing or someone who's doing it in a
#
different language and and i think that policy podcast space you know at least i'm very grateful
#
and a lot of us are grateful that you exist the other thing i think people are grateful for is
#
the books right i mean i i watch this on twitter all the time there are people who have shelves in
#
their homes which are the scene and the unseen shelf right which is all the book recommendations
#
that they got from your show and then they picked up those books and they enjoyed reading it and
#
that of course creates this whole other ecosystem whether it is you know publishers i know many
#
publishers are vying to get their next book launched on your show and things like that
#
but even book authors you know someone who spent a couple of years writing a book
#
the kind of very sympathetic and generous profiling you'll give you know like you said
#
you're not one of those literary festival spiels where you talk to five people for 10 minutes and
#
they come with this programmed spiel about their book this is a very different kind of conversation
#
whether it's profiling the author so i think all of these things i am very grateful for like there
#
are so many books i wouldn't have discovered i never read as much history you know before i
#
started listening to the show it was more policy and economics and things like that
#
you know i mean something like uh you know i mean chidmay of course is an economist so i would have
#
you know read him but something like ira mukoti's book right would have not been anywhere on my radar
#
for instance right or the book with anchal malhotra on partition right i would have just
#
you know thought oh this is a sentimental sweet memoir sort of thing you know i'll read it later
#
and and the way i have the discovery process is another thing i'm grateful for it's not
#
getting an annoying mailer it is not a publisher like bombarding you with things it's someone
#
really thoughtful who is carefully putting this together uh you know for an entire community
#
building out other ecosystems so that's another thing i'm very grateful for as far as your podcast
#
is concerned i'll just say a couple of things one is that you know it's you make me sound like a
#
great sort of philanthropist you know doing so much for the world but actually it's all out of
#
self-interest right and and it's a great way of how self-interest and altruism are really the same
#
thing they come together um you know when you have voluntary interactions so so so so yeah i know it's
#
not like a grand plan that i i'm going to do this i'm going to do that i'm going to make people read
#
more i'm going to do whatever whatever of that has happened has happened uh you know has been
#
an unseen and actually unforeseen effect it has been organic has been an unforeseen effect of my
#
just following my own intellectual journey and my curiosities and kind of getting there so i feel as
#
um so i feel blessed and the other side of it is as far as helping others is concerned is that i
#
think there was a time when i was much younger when i might have been competitive about it
#
what helps me not be competitive at all is the sense that i am making something across time
#
which is i think you know and broadly like i said i'm i'm also making this show for listeners of 30
#
years later and that approach is something i come to almost out of necessity because i think i have
#
realized that as far as the ways i think about the world and my ideas and all of that it's
#
it's basically you know it's it's it's kind of a lonely road and even in terms of success
#
you know i might not achieve any kind of success with anything i do
#
immediately or in the short run that's the default attitude i've taken after all these years of doing
#
whatever i have done because i have sort of been on the margins of every community i've been
#
sort of involved with uh in a sense and and i'm used to people not taking me seriously
#
so i figured that okay i'm not going to bother about all that and think about present day
#
validation and riches and all of that i'm just going to do something i love and maybe you know
#
30 years later people can look back and say okay these were great conversations and i know that
#
sounds very vain and arrogant for anyone to imagine that he can create something of value
#
even for the present moment as an act of arrogance but to say that 30 years later people will be
#
listening to this or reading me is even more so but you know what do you do that's what you do
#
right so no i i don't i don't completely agree and this probably because i've known you a long time
#
even when there were real space constraints like say you know columnness you know and things like
#
that whether you were a blogger which was a little bit less constrained i have seen this quality in
#
you across all the things that you have done or engaged in you immediately build a community you
#
reach out to other people doing the same thing you encourage them you have honest discussions
#
about how to do it better right you you don't compete on those margins you may you may compete
#
on quality or you know making a better argument or writing a better post but you've never really
#
competed on those margins i think so many of us got our first break you're the first person who
#
ever told me to write you're the person who introduced me to niranjan rajadhyaksha was my
#
first editor who told me to write in a newspaper and you know so on and so forth and i know i'm
#
not the only one who has benefited either from that generosity or that mentorship so i don't think i
#
think this is something a little bit more inherent in your personality uh i'm this is the last nice
#
thing i'm going to say so you know take it you know i remember i remember uh you know hamsini
#
once said something nice about me at one point in time and i told her that she was committing the
#
salman khan fallacy have i told you about the salman khan fallacy no but i must suffer through
#
it so go for it yeah you must suffer through it the salman khan fallacy is that just because
#
someone is nice to you you imagine they're nice people i didn't say you're a nice person yeah but
#
i mean no no no okay we are back on normal territory no for our listeners amit is very
#
grumpy amit can be really like annoying uh grumpy he can be very very irritable about so many things
#
he lacks patience he doesn't travel well uh you know he will complain about traffic and new york
#
city restaurants so uh yes so the the long list of things about how annoying amit is and how he's
#
not a very nice person exists now we are talking having said that uh no but there is something very
#
generous about you and there is a great mentorship model that you have created and this is not because
#
you've been personally kind to me it's because i know lots of people like me who benefited
#
from it it's a it's a matter of creating an ecosystem it's about creating a community
#
i think this community creation is underrated you know whether it is talking about the mailing
#
lists you create the whatsapp groups that you've created all of this you've always brought people
#
who i normally wouldn't have encountered and put us in a space together that obviously also creates
#
friction and we have arguments and intellectual disagreements sometimes we are complaining behind
#
each other's backs can you believe so-and-so wrote that or so-and-so said that on twitter
#
but still the value of creating that community and engagement is incredible and and i will give
#
you credit for doing that by the way the most annoying thing about you is that you don't like
#
sugar may i just put that out there no i i don't like sugar at an abstract level sugar is poison
#
i know that but at a concrete level i keep getting drawn back to it time and time again
#
so you know i had a very successful period on keto where i lost 20 kgs but after that i went
#
off keto and put back 22 so in fact i've been sort of by the time you listen to this hopefully
#
i'd be like at least a week into my new discipline routine but then you know so there are you know
#
people seem to think from my output that you must be so disciplined and all of that i'm just a
#
freaking opposite so uh no you are disciplined on certain intellectual margins you have a lot
#
of discipline when you write when you teach when you engage i mean those are incredible qualities
#
but you're also a very annoying person to go to lunch with because you'll immediately talk about
#
how many carbs there are in the mtr masala dosa and things like that noted i did eat all the mtr
#
masala dosas the last time we were at lunch while complaining loudly instead of just quietly enjoying
#
the moment uh we'll put a picture out you know maybe on twitter or in the show notes there's
#
a great photograph of this lovely event of uh you know amit and me enjoying masala dosas just pre
#
pandemic uh we have reached the end and i have three quick questions for you these come from
#
guests and fans and i think you know they're they're sort of like the perfect questions to end on so i
#
want you uh you know the first we're going back to chinmay chinmay is like having this you know
#
salman khan's style style stardom on this episode very much well deserved but he asked another great
#
question in addition to the first one so you know let me play chinmay's question and everyone will
#
know why when we discuss it hi amit this is chinmay tumbe here congrats on your 200 episode we all
#
know how much you love tiktok and so my question for you is if you had to record a tiktok video
#
for 20 seconds what would it be wow fantastic question there's so many different yeah so let
#
me first preface with amit as you all know loves tiktok or you know before it got banned and another
#
lovely thing about amit is he always knows what the future looks like and he's not at all snobbish
#
or elitist or classist about it he used to send me tiktok videos all the time and at one point
#
it was so many that i couldn't keep up with them the first time he told me about tiktok amit sent
#
me 45 videos on whatsapp and i was like are you kidding me you want me to watch all of them and
#
he said yeah this is going to be great for you and it again opened my mind into another subculture
#
uh so two things you know before you answer chinmay's question tell us a little bit about your
#
fascination with tiktok and then tell us what tiktok video you would make yeah so i'm glad
#
you asked that first question because it gives me some time to sort of get away from us answering
#
the second one which i don't yet have an answer for but no my fascination for tiktok is because
#
of i think one of course the quality of the creativity uh within tiktok if you look at it
#
and two i think it like i taught a course called i put together a course called tiktok and indian
#
society i taught only one batch of it because tiktok was banned by then so there was no way for
#
i mean i had all the videos downloaded and i taught it on whatsapp because that's the only
#
way to send people hundreds of vertical uh format videos um and then i decided no point doing it
#
again because people can't actually see tiktok but the reason i was blown away for it is that i think
#
it gave a voice to people who did not otherwise have a voice before that like i think couple of
#
things happened in india simultaneously one is that broadband on smartphones became almost became
#
much more widespread i won't say ubiquitous became much more widespread at a certain point in time
#
partly because of what geo was doing and forget geo's means of getting there and the cronyism
#
that might or might not be involved but the bottom line was that broadband became much more
#
accessible to many more people um and then along came an app which actually empowered them by uh
#
you know allowing them to showcase their own creativity now here's the thing if you think of
#
popular culture in india you know popular culture in india has gatekeepers and is run by elites
#
for example just stick bollywood i mean i know there are film industries across the country
#
let's take one of them let's take bollywood where if you look at the there are two different kinds
#
of elites which dominate bollywood today though is gradually changing and one is that old school
#
elite who have their old school regressive attitudes which they bring into everything
#
and the other is perhaps their kids who have gone abroad and studied and come back and they are like
#
the woke elites and they've got a different conception of what entertainment is and what
#
they should do with it but they're both out of touch with the uh real india which is not a judgment
#
on either of them but you know they're in cities and they've lived different lives and they're out
#
of touch with the real india and what tiktok did was that it did uh it changed this at two levels
#
one is that it allowed anyone to create anything without a gatekeeper being there and put it up
#
two as consumers it made them realize that there is a world of entertainment out there on tiktok
#
which has not come through these gatekeepers and which reflects their lives and their values and
#
their struggles and you see this in various little niches for example the lgbtqi community
#
where you have an outpouring of incredible creativity and self-assertion confident
#
self-assertion from them on tiktok because suddenly so many people uh realize that they
#
are not alone that there are so many others like themselves and it's one thing to be an english
#
speaking marginalized person in a city and to be able to go on the internet and see people like
#
yourself and connect with people like yourself but if you don't know english if you're in a village
#
somewhere or whatever and you might feel that you are a freak it will affect your self-image and the
#
way you live your life and all of that which i think was uh you know true for marginalized people
#
over decades and suddenly along comes this app and on this app you see that you know that you
#
are not alone in a sense that there are people in identical social conditions to yours and identical
#
um orientations to yours who are expressing themselves powerfully and the kind of sort of
#
crea and obviously a lot of the creativity is the lowest form of humor there'll be puns and there'll
#
be memes getting played out but there's also a lot of sophisticated humor there's also a lot of
#
heartbreaking stuff and and uh some insane creative talent on tiktok like my god so good
#
you know and uh and and then it got banned and it's it's such a tragedy i feel like it's personal
#
that it's it's i mean i just feel so sad about it it's it's horrible and it also tells you the
#
happenstance that if that particular app which worked like that didn't come across at that
#
particular time this would not have happened and now you've left them high and dry again
#
but the question here for entrepreneurs and for people who you know feel the way i do is that
#
think of the unknown unknowns of the future what are the ways in which you can sort of fill some
#
of these gaps that even people may not know exist people in those gaps may not know exist and you
#
know and there's so much hope for doing something there and and that moment is lost to us i mean
#
it's weird to think of it in terms of gaps right like i mean a gap exists if you know that there
#
is a world that fits in a particular way and and there are things like twitter or you know initially
#
when people said 140 characters well you're going to tell them i got you know a macchiato today
#
morning or something like that right and then twitter became this point of reference for
#
everyone it became something that can change elections it can be some it became something
#
where that can lead to revolutions because people know where to congregate on in the
#
middle of the city or something like that and and it just become this extraordinary platform
#
right and i think tiktok did something similar and it goes to show how powerful it was if the
#
biggest threat you can be to the chinese is to take away a massive audience or consumer base from
#
tiktok then you know how how much it penetrated and how powerful it was and i don't think the
#
ban was even well thought out in political terms because this base was not a threat to modiji this
#
was kind of part of his base you know like there were stories after tiktok was banned i think
#
shautik biswas did a story on bbc and he i think we chatted that morning because he took a quote
#
from me and shautik pointed out how all the tiktok creators he had spoken to were actually
#
confident it would be repealed because they were fans of modiji and they said he'll repeal it
#
but the other point that i kind of want to make here is that the loss is not just that a niche
#
is not not being served but that it is not being discovered like one of the points i make in my
#
podcasting course about the difference between radio and podcasting is that because radio out
#
of necessity has to be so broad that not only can it not serve certain niches they don't even
#
discover those niches and those niches don't discover themselves and you see for example in the news
#
if you go to the top paid newsletters at substack and you'll see so many niches being covered there
#
that bill bishop is doing cynicism which is a newsletter on china and it is such a huge hit
#
and is making him so much money and who would have thought that niche existed emily auster is
#
you know doing the economics of parenthood and pregnancy and all of that and that's a hugely
#
popular newsletter and there is that niche you know even the scene and the unseen serves a
#
particular kind of niche if i had to apply for a license for a podcast and i told someone i'm
#
going to do three r interviews with intellectuals who write obscure books like no way man it's crazy
#
i myself would have thought it was crazy crazy i discovered it by the serendipity of just get
#
being able to do it in the technology existing and i think tiktok served some of that yeah and
#
now i'm not going to let you weasel your way out of chinmay's question chinmay's question if i had
#
to do um i don't know man i've i've never actually thought about it because tiktok is the one sort
#
of medium where i was just a pure consumer i never fantasized about doing something on it
#
so i have i have no idea if tiktok existed i would take it up as a challenge and uh maybe do
#
something uh and maybe fulfill ram guha's request as well and do something on raja ji
#
i i can't uh uh you know nothing really comes to mind i guess i'd pick up an existing meme and
#
subvert it in some way and just kind of run with that but i think the thing with tiktok if i were
#
to start a channel just thinking aloud i think i'd start off doing mundane boring things which in
#
retrospect would seem horrible but then over a period of time it would evolve and it would
#
probably be my hundredth video which would be nice and my 3000th video which which would be
#
which would be incredible and then i would get into my groove so i'm surprised you didn't mention
#
your limerick i thought that would have been perfect for tiktok right the the limericks that
#
you used to write for times of india they're almost like crafted for that 20 second video they
#
have humor they are current they are political you don't think that's a good fit that's just
#
completely different that's kind of you but they're english and i don't think that's a good fit i
#
think i'd find that you know with my creativity i'd figure out things to do but i never even
#
thought about it because it and also anybody who gets on tiktok their first few videos will
#
always be shit even the best creators it's after a period of time that you begin to find moments of
#
magic and i say moments of magic because tiktok has just given me so many moments of transcendent
#
magic and just watching something over and over again and saying like wtf like i have not seen
#
anything like this anywhere else yeah for me the dancing i mean the humor and the dancing were the
#
two things which i was astounded by one that people could actually move like that and that
#
you know i mean indian humor is very specific right it's not like your typical american stand-up
#
comedy humor some of it as you mentioned is quite misogynistic it can be quite regressive
#
but a lot of the humor there like some of the satire was just really high quality the other
#
thing you can potentially do on tiktok is tell pj's because you specialize in pj's it is entirely
#
my quality control that no such terrible pj's have occurred on this on this episode and i say
#
occurred because they are like a disaster no if i do a video of me telling a pj i would you would
#
find me instructing a pajama see are you happy now this is what you do this is what you asked for
#
let's let's move on to the next question and apologies to tinmay if tiktok is ever back in india
#
i promised that just for chit chin may i'll make a video of some sort and show him okay the next
#
question is probably your from your biggest fan ever this is vinayak on twitter right and i know
#
him only from twitter he absolutely loves your show i think he he even sometimes beats you before
#
you manage to you know release the show online and things like that he's also just really wonderful
#
very engaged very spirited person on twitter i love engaging with him so this is vinayak's
#
question to you hi mitza hi shruti i want to thank you for enriching my life and lives of
#
many other unseen listeners of the show so many of my great moments in recent times have been
#
from engaging with you and learning from you so i'd like to know what is the best moment of
#
your life also i have a request can you start a publication community like yascha's persuasion
#
and persuade all the intellectuals from the podcast to come together for the project
#
and finally please never stop making episodes for seen and unseen thank you yeah that's that's a
#
really nice question and a nice sentiment and uh vinayak is a pseudonym i i do happen to know
#
his real name but he's got reasons for why he called himself vinayak so we shall respect that
#
and call him vinayak as well and often i have found that he has retweeted a tweet of mine before
#
i have even tweeted it it almost feels like that he is so incredibly prompt best moment of my life
#
i don't really know i have sort of now one our memory is sort of tainted by who we become at
#
any particular point in time so we look at memories differently and two i have come to the point where
#
i have learned to consciously think about taking joy from small things so the best moment in my
#
life might have been a little thing that happened today for example so it's really hard to say
#
but as he's the kachori but as he's gone to the effort of asking the question
#
i mean i won't go into the personal happy moments because i like to keep the personal out of the
#
podcast and all of that um so i'll leave that aside but apart from that you know i think
#
winning the two basia prizes was great especially because i had friends around me when i won them
#
and the second time i got to uh celebrate with you and nandu and yazad and all the other friends
#
over there um but i don't i don't know i i think that somehow you know how does one even define
#
happiness it's um you know and does happiness exist when you consciously think about a moment
#
and you say i am happy now if you just experience it without classifying it like that is it happiness
#
can there be for example the quiet happiness of enjoying a sunset without my thinking about
#
it and therefore classifying it as a happy moment so yeah so there are as usual i've got a little
#
meta and ask these meta questions so i i don't really know maybe happinesses would be personal
#
moments that i wouldn't want to share here but you know even in terms of my sort of professional
#
career or whatever i don't know it's it's it's very hard to say and you know i i know that tomorrow
#
i'm going to regret this and i'll think oh i should have given this answer and you of course did not
#
give me time to prepare uh answer as much as i do to so many of my guests they could say so this is
#
uh sweet uh revenge i think there's a trade-off between being genuinely surprised and spontaneous
#
and being very prepared let me rephrase uh you know vinaik's question a little bit differently
#
maybe i i don't know if you want to put pressure on yourself for that one single happy moment when
#
you know something like the bastiat prize especially the second time stands out but what i've noticed
#
about you is that you're a really grumpy irritable introverted person who wants to complain about
#
everything but it's the smallest things that make you happy right i mean you get really happy if you
#
eat good luchi at oh calcutta and break your keto diet or you get really happy if you've read a
#
beautiful poem and you're like oh my god this was amazing or you get really happy if you've had a
#
fantastic class or workshop and someone said amazing and something amazing in that class and
#
you're like that made me think or you know like that conversation with kartika that you mentioned
#
at the top of the show so what i have observed about your happiness is that it's very spontaneous
#
and fleeting and it's always in the little things it's not in like some grand prize and design and
#
things like that you're quite a happy person in in everyday life despite your middle-aged grumbling
#
yeah that's a middle-aged grumbling is a nice uh description i'd say i broadly have a pessimistic
#
view of the world in the sense that life has no meaning and we are all going to die and that's it
#
but within that therefore how do you cope with that what is your coping mechanism maybe at some
#
point the coping mechanism doesn't work but right now it would be to you know just find joy in your
#
work and uh happiness in the small things i mean i'm sounding very much like a self-help guru and
#
all of that now and i'm also sounding i'm sure incredibly ungrateful to all the people who have
#
given me happy moments that i don't think of those or that they don't kind of automatically
#
come to mind but i mean conceptually what is happy i can look back on a memory that has happened and
#
classify it in retrospect as happy even if in that particular moment it might have been some
#
other elation such as an unseemly pride or whatever uh going through me i mean memory is a strange
#
thing right like you know the way memory works is and of course i discussed memory in great detail
#
and with Anshul in the episode i did with her which another episode i enjoyed a lot but you
#
know memory is strange in the sense that the way our brain works is that the first time we remember
#
remember something we remember it but the second time we remember it we are remembering the
#
remembering and across time therefore memory it becomes fiction it becomes fiction so in that's
#
and we are inventing our own fiction and adding to it as we go along so in that sense i can i can
#
look back on past events on my life as either happy or unhappy in retrospect and maybe then
#
that happiness that i remember is the happiness now of remembering it which makes this the happy
#
moment rather than that itself okay you're a terrible guest on your own show we can't get a
#
straight answer out of you everything becomes very meta meta meta and so i'm just yeah i'm i'm
#
you're a terrible terrible guest i'm glad you picked the job of the host you know i'll tell
#
you something meta is the only damn thing i'm good at
#
so and and now to move on to when i second question which was about why don't i start
#
a publication like yasha monk's persuasion it's you know so i was editor of prakriti which is a
#
magazine of ideas and policy and uh whatever and one of the problems is something like that is
#
is just finding enough writers that do we have such a rich ecosystem full of intellectuals where
#
you can get enough content out regularly and you know and and if i were to make a list of just a
#
guess on my show the answer would seem like yes but then you have to get them to write regularly
#
and all of that and um it it just didn't feel at that time like it would be worthwhile maybe
#
when the ecosystem is richer maybe 20 years later or 10 years later maybe someone could do that
#
but if i were to do that i think that there's a danger that it would just fizzle out that
#
they wouldn't be that i'd be working much harder than i would like to to try and get people to
#
write for it and there just wouldn't be enough of them and and i think that that's kind of
#
the thing with the intellectual ecosystem that is one thing that you know people can have the
#
generosity to come on my show for three hours and have a relaxed conversation and all that
#
but actually writing and then writing regularly is a whole different ball game so just speaking
#
from my own experience of trying to do a version of it uh it's difficult i have had various ideas
#
at times for media startups in the sense that i think that the way people consume and discover
#
content in india has changed radically over the last 10 years and no publication mainstream or
#
otherwise gets it so i've often thought that why don't i try to fill the gap and uh do interesting
#
things but i just don't have the appetite to be an entrepreneur and the thing is everything has an
#
opportunity cost the scene and the unseen takes some time and i want to get down to writing books
#
which is what i'm trying to do now and you know which is the one thing i've always wanted to do
#
and if i don't do more of that i'll sort of that's the one thing i'll regret so that's what i'm
#
trying to get down to so i'm not sure i really have the time and that you know yeah so that
#
that's kind of a short answer and i stood the third thing when i said that he hopes i keep
#
doing it forever look i love doing it so i'll keep doing it for as long as i can but uh you
#
know one doesn't even live forever so who is to say now we are finally i promise the listeners
#
at the very end and here is the last question and it's quite fitting it's from one of our mutual
#
friends mohit satyanand we talked about you know uh the that voice or a great voice is not important
#
for podcasts the way it is for radio but mohit is one of those people i mean he's an incredible
#
person an entrepreneur just such a kind wonderful person and mentor but has the most remarkable
#
voice which is completely wasted in his day job in his regular life and i feel like you know he
#
could read i don't know the yellow pages and uh and it would still be amazing to listen to him
#
so here's mohit's question and you are going to complain i didn't give you more time but
#
for what it's worth here it is amit how would you like your epitaph to read
#
yeah yeah mohit is of course a dear friend i almost think of him as family in a sense like
#
when i go to delhi i stay over at mohit and premie's place and um uh just i have great love
#
for him um he asked me this question on whatsapp a few days ago by the way and it's not such a
#
difficult question to answer because and the answer will seem like a cop-out but it's a genuine answer
#
that i uh i don't care i mean i'll be gone so what difference does it make what my epitaph uh reads
#
i mean i don't have the vanities of leaving a legacy and all and this might seem at odds with
#
what i said earlier about creating a show for 30 years later and all of that but it gives me
#
pleasure to think that i am sort of uh i might be able to create that kind of content but once
#
you're gone you're gone so uh it doesn't really matter you know the thing is i don't anymore have
#
the vanities that i did as a much younger person that i will imagine that i can change the world
#
in some way or that my ideas have great meaning or resonance or whatever so i don't know i'm kind of
#
i'm kind of pessimistic about you know any epitaph it's just you know one does what one does
#
but i think you're thinking of it too literally right an epitaph has two purposes one of course
#
it's you're leaving something behind in the world to be remembered by and things like that
#
the other is it's also a very pithy way of summing up a very rich large fulfilled life
#
so i will ask you mohit's question from the second point of view not from a point of view of vanity
#
but like what would you want to be known for what would you like the life to add up to
#
okay tough question like you said no preparation there are different aspects to it i mean one can
#
break it down and say that what would you like the way you phrased it what would you like to
#
be remembered for or the other way of looking at it is like what would you have liked to achieve
#
have achieved in your own life like if i am on my deadbed and i look back what is my epitaph to
#
myself and the thing is the answers would be completely different and in the first case
#
at some level when people look back it's fleeting yeah you know maybe as someone who you know
#
engage with the world with intellectual honesty or made people think about the world a little
#
differently uh that would be nice you know the things i want to be remembered for are things
#
that i want to go ahead and do such as in the books i write and not anything that i have done
#
yet so if you're expecting me to say that in someone who had great conversations on a podcast
#
that's not my answer i'm very happy to have done this but i don't think it's that memorable that
#
people will remember it's not the iconic status of econ talk for example 750 episodes or whatever
#
but even otherwise i you know what one would like to do in an ideal world is that you want to sort
#
of um let your ideas reach far and wide you know the way bastia's ideas reach me but it is such
#
vanity to expect to have that kind of an impact on people and also i i grow less and less hopeful of
#
that happening but i want to sort of increase the probability of that happening by at least doing
#
everything i can to that end which involves writing the books and continuing this podcast
#
so that when i can others can um and enjoy listening to it so so i guess that's it i mean
#
this is just you know i don't know what's your answer dude to my epitaph yeah or your epitaph
#
no to your epitaph it's a good question see and i did have lead time see i think my epitaph is
#
gonna say something like tell your dog i said hi you know it's gonna be something very simple
#
something that brings me joy you know this is the perfect spot for your dog to be that's probably
#
what the the tombstone and the epitaph is worth if i was being facetious but it would be something
#
really simple i i don't i mean i certainly don't think of myself as like a public intellectual of
#
your caliber or anything like that um but i think you know the the bigness and the richness of my
#
life is always in the personal you know that you know you know enough about me and my life and my
#
private life and my family to know that so it would probably be something very very personal
#
like here lies col and trains human mom you know col and train by the way for the benefit of the
#
listeners are her dogs and she is of course a big fan of john coltrane maybe you should get a cat
#
called john yeah uh i i think we are enough of a zoo right now you know i think that there's
#
there's enough people in this in this apartment of multiple species i think we're done for a
#
while uh once we are done housebreaking the new puppy uh maybe we'll think about uh you know other
#
animals i think my epitaph could easily be finally we are done with the bad jokes
#
uh no i think uh the the amount you have griped about not writing your novel uh it should say
#
something like herein lies many manuscripts yeah i hope not because i hope to get some of them out
#
so i i i really hope not but that's really uh the only thing that i will regret if i don't do and
#
and and that's you know um the one thing i should have done i mean the scene in the unseen just kind
#
of happened accidentally and i'm glad it happened uh but you know you're incredibly young right like
#
you could write lots of novels it's not like you're an old person and you're dying and we're
#
actually discussing your epitaph like get to work dude i know why did mohit ask that question it's
#
very sad yeah though though i am just a little short of the ages when my two heroes bastia and
#
all will both died but i hope to continue for another they didn't have the benefit of modern
#
medicine or the hockey stick prosperity that you have been part of listen i i would love to give
#
vinaya 2000 more episodes of the scene and the unseen and uh you know uh so so yeah so that's
#
what one aims for you try to live the sort of you try to look after yourself the world can be going
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to hell as i said earlier but you try to look after yourself the best that you can and do work
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that kind of uh makes you uh happy which could be an epitaph also i guess yeah thank you for
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doing this amit thank you for letting me take over your show uh this was the scene and the unseen from
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uh you know amit as a guest and someone else as a host i must say that you're a terrible guest
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because you you find it very difficult to answer questions and i find it very hard to pin you down
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but on the other hand uh you're a fantastic host so you so you chose uh the profession correctly
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and thank you for doing this and thank you for giving us 200 199 episodes no i promise i'll get
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back to my core competence now and something i'm much better at if you give me 200 episodes of
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practice as a guest i'm sure i'll be much better but there will be no audiences by then i mean uh
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you know uh the show will need an epitaph then listen shruti i'm i'm so i'm so touched that you
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you know opted to do this and took the effort and reached out to all these people and i'm so grateful
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to all of them also this is like uh deeply moving to me and i'll probably dissolve in a bucket of
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tears right after this because uh it means a lot to me this is one of those things that kind of
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makes everything worthwhile and you actually think that okay it's it's not for nothing so thank you
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so much i have to tell you it was very spontaneous and everyone responded with great spontaneity and
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warmth it didn't feel like a chore it felt like an adventure and i'm glad it worked out and my
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impetus for initially doing it was just you know you have such great thinkers and fans and things
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like that but the other impetus for doing it was i was terrorized at the thought of being the host
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for a show that would last three hours and i said i have no idea what i'm going to ask and what we're
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going to talk about and how much homework i need to do and things like that and as we have seen
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you're a terrible answerer of questions uh so i thought i will get help from the smartest thinkers
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and minds that both of us know and i'm really really thrilled that they obliged yeah and we've
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crossed five hours so at least in the recording so uh so congratulations you as a host have managed
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episode you as a host have managed what i never could so we'll get back to regular programming
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next week and miniature episodes that are only three hours long thank you for listening
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if you've gotten this far into this episode and indeed this far into the show well thank you for
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listening i'm so grateful to shruti for doing this and if you enjoy listening to her as much as i do
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check out her podcast ideas of india it's linked from the show notes you can follow her on twitter
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at s raj gopal you can follow me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a and remember you can now buy
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merchandise for the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n slash stuff and you can of course
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browse all 200 episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n and in your favorite
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podcast app thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so
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would you like to support the production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash
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support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking thank you
