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One of the many ways in which we don't keep up with the times is in adjusting our self-image.
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My image of myself has always been that of a creator, though I would not have used that
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word creator when I was younger.
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I thought of myself as someone who would write books one day.
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When I fell in love with cinema as a kid, I thought I would make movies one day.
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But then in my early teens, I chose between the two.
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I decided that writing books was easier as it didn't involve other people.
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If I was born 30 years after I was actually born, these might not be the outlets I would
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We are surrounded today by so many other ways to express ourselves, to tell stories, to
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Maybe I'd want to be a YouTuber.
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Maybe I'd dream of being a showrunner for a web series.
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Maybe I'd want to be the Picasso of Instagram or the Shakespeare of stand-up comedy.
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Maybe I'd want to be a podcaster.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Varun Duggirala, a creator and podcaster whose personal journey feels
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quite different from mine, partly because he's almost a decade younger, but who has
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recently been trying to figure out the exact things that I've been obsessing about.
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First, let me give you a bit of his bare bones bio.
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Varun did engineering, then he did Mascom, then he worked for a while as a producer in
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MTV and Channel V, then he started his own advertising agency, The Glitch, which was
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acquired a couple of years ago by the global giant WPP.
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He also runs a podcast called Advertising is Dead and has a newsletter called Unschooled,
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as well as a YouTube show called The Varun Duggi Show, in which I was a recent guest.
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Now what is the common obsession here?
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It's understanding how the world has changed for creators.
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You could say that by joining music television, Varun jumped in at the deep end at the end
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And then when he struck off on his own in 2009, a new world was forming.
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Now here are the salient points of this new world, which is still evolving.
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One, anyone can be a creator.
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You don't need fancy training and expensive equipment and the backing of a big platform
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A smartphone is enough.
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Two, the relationship between creators and their audiences has gradually become more
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intimate with less need of a platform in between.
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And this has threatened advertising as well, which is a pertinent point given that Varun
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for more than a decade has been a creator working in the advertising business.
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And three, these new ways of how we connect with our audiences have changed not just the
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way we create, but also who we are.
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I've said time and again on the show that learning the art of long conversations changed
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In this episode, Varun echoes that sentiment.
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I enjoy chatting with him because I think like with most successful creators in this
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new world, what you see is what you get.
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Varun is straightforward, curious, humble about what he does not know, hungry to know
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more and always thinking about the world, getting meta as it were.
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So I enjoyed this conversation that goes over many of these areas, but I have to warn you
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that it doesn't touch the emotional depths of the last couple of episodes I did with
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Gazala Vahab and Prem Panicker.
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This conversation won't make you cry, but it can make you think.
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And what's not to like about that?
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Before we begin though, let's take a quick commercial break, which because I don't actually
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have a sponsor for this episode is actually about my own writing course.
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Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
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Well, I'd love to help you.
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One of the great joys of the lockdown for me was discovering how much I enjoy teaching
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what I've learned over the years.
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And my online course, The Art of Clear Writing is now open for registration.
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In this course, through four webinars read over four weekends, I share all I know about
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the craft and practice of clear writing.
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There are many exercises, much interaction, and over the year that I've taught this course,
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a lively writing community has formed itself.
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The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST or about $150 and the April classes begin on
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So if you're interested, head on over to register at IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
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That's IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just a willingness to work hard and
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a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Varun, welcome to the scene in the unseen.
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Thank you for having me.
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This is I'm really looking forward to this one.
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Yeah, I mean, this is I have, of course, just been on your show, The Varun Duggie Show,
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And also, of course, you have your long running podcast, Advertising is Dead.
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And you know, when I was kind of researching for the show for this episode, I came across
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this quote by yours about how you don't do any prep, like you switch on 15 minutes before
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you're recording and you switch off 10 minutes afterwards.
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And my process is somewhat different.
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So I thought this is almost like, you know, Tendulkar and Dravid together in the popular
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stereotypes that it's effortless for one and so much effort for the other, though obviously,
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like I keep telling people about Tendulkar and Dravid that the stereotype is completely
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false because Tendulkar also put in a heck of a lot of work and Dravid also had immense
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So it's an unfortunate stereotype.
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But to come away from those particular superstars to you, tell me a little bit about your early
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years like what is intriguing about you is that, you know, if one just sees the image
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of Varun Duggie Rala, co-founder of the Glitch, content creator, productivity guru, all of
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those things, a podcaster, you get the image of a guy who's like full on hipster type,
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you know, would be at home in Bandra, but you actually grew up in Kokkinada in Andhra
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So tell me a little bit about that.
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What was that like growing up in Kokkinada?
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So it's interesting you said Kokkinada, right?
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So Kokkinada was its original name.
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And then it eventually became Kakkinada when I was growing up.
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And I have a sort of school to call it Co-Canada.
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Even when you're young and you think, okay, where do you come from?
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So Kokkinada, just for everyone, is the coast of Andhra Pradesh, East Godavari district.
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And a large part of the family is there.
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I mean, everyone grew up there.
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So standard South Indian, Telugu Brahmin family, everybody is either a doctor or an engineer.
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The doctors stay back home.
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Engineers go to America.
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Literally, like the standard template is my family.
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So you will find a large part of my engineering family in San Francisco, in Boston, you know,
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the regular sports as such.
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And my family back home was a multi-specialty hospital.
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I didn't know you had to pay for medical treatment as much as you did for the longest part because
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every specialization there was some uncle or there was somebody there.
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So that's how I grew up.
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I actually grew up in a hospital.
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My grandma, even though she practiced as a gynaec, was an MBBS, but because she became
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a doctor when she did, she had basically delivered generations in families and stuff like that.
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So I grew up on the first floor of a hospital, had walked into an operation theater from
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the youngest of ages with a mask and a cap and watched operations, fainted in one of
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And then I realized I will never be a doctor because I just couldn't deal with it.
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I think I grew up at an interesting time there as well, because I think my parents were not
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I grew up with my dad and mom listening to Pink Floyd and Deep Purple and Michael Bolton
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on the other end of things.
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And they had me when they were very young.
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They were in the early 20s when they had me.
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So we kind of grew up together.
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Dad was still studying.
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Mom was still also studying.
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And Kakinada is a great place because I had a good set of friends at play, but I also
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had got my own space and in hindsight, I mean, I think a lot of how my mind works still originates
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from a lot of stuff I learned as a kid over there.
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But yeah, it feels like a different world.
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And, you know, once in a, not even a one-liner and a half-liner, you sort of spoke about
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your Kakinada years as being full of Chiranjeevi and Michael Jackson.
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But one thing, you know, that I'm really kind of curious about and that I ask all of my
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guests at different ages, whether they're in their 50s, 60s, 40s like me or 30s or whatever,
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and I feel it also gives me a great sense of what it was like to grow up at that time
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You know, tell me the years of your childhood and what kind of stuff were you consuming?
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Like how much did you get to read?
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What was the access to books like?
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What kind of music did you listen to?
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Like I remember when I was growing up in the 80s and the 90s, it was all the, you know,
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the stereotypical music, like you named Pink Floyd and there will be the Deep Purples and
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And you had to make an effort to look beyond that.
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The world was not at your fingertips as it were.
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So what were your sort of early influences in terms of, you know, music, films, books?
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What was that like for you?
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So I actually had a lot of access to both music and books growing up.
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Mom and dad read a lot, still do, so I had access to a wide spread of books, right?
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And they almost like pushed me to read more, primarily because I felt it's a good thing
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You're going to get to know more about the world if you read.
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And that's what I ended up doing.
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So on one end you would have your standard, you know, you would have your Annette Blitons
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and Bliton, I keep pronouncing her last name wrong, or on the other end, you would also
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end up getting books, which so I was a huge, I have to admit this.
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I spent the first three years of my life watching the same movie, which was Jungle Book, because
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I would walk across the street, there would be a video lending library, which was a thing.
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And they only had like this one tape for kids, everything else was Telugu movies or a couple
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I just picked this up and just, and they were like, just keep it because I would go every
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day, watch it, return it, and then I can go back the next day.
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And they were just like a couple of houses away.
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So growing up, I actually was, I say I'm a weird mixture of being very extroverted, but
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yet extremely, a person with a need to kind of have time to himself.
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I was that as a kid, like I would go out and play, but I wanted to come back into my room
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and play with my GI Joes and play with a lot of Lego and growing up at that time, it was
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a lot about playing with toys by myself and a lot of friends across the street would do
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the standard stuff, but it was an interesting time because, you know, I'd love music from
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There's this story my mother tells that I would dance to water splashing in the bathroom.
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I would go for breakdancing competitions from the time it was allowed for me to go in terms
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And you would go to an audio cassette shop and all you would find was Michael Jackson.
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Michael Jackson and Madonna and a few others, once in a while Bruce Springsteen would pop
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And that's pretty much what you had available.
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And I watched a lot of his lecture and he was a huge influence at that time for most
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I think I saw his Thriller version before I saw the actual Thriller version of Michael
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So I grew up that way, but I feel it was an interesting mix of things.
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So my parents were people who were very exposed to the world outside.
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So you know, at home I would still have, you'd have a Michael J Fox movie playing on one
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end or you'd have, I remember there was a book, there was Karel Gebran's book, which
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used to be there or, you know, you would find such varied things at home and you wouldn't
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understand when you suddenly left the house, you see a lot of people weren't necessarily
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into a lot of that stuff.
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So my parents kind of balanced it.
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I think I learned to balance it as well.
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And eventually you same for my sister as well many years later, but it was an interesting
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time and they had a group of friends who I grew up with and so this is a close group
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I kind of grew along with.
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So yeah, I actually got a lot of my music influences from my parents.
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What they would listen to, I would listen to, there was a lot of Beatles at home.
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There was the standard, you know, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, et cetera.
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My uncle, my mom's younger brother actually became an interesting influence for me because
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I had moved towards listening to a lot of pop and stuff like that.
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Like he came home and he saw, I think he saw me listen to Backstreet Boys and he was like,
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there is no way you're going down this route and gave me a Marilyn Manson and a Nine Inch
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My life changed after that.
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Mother was not happy because I used to play Doom at that point of time and listen to Marilyn
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Manson and at that point of time in America, a lot of the school shootings had happened
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with people who were listening to this and playing that game, right?
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And I was like, you know, I know you're worried about it.
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That's not what I'm going to do.
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And so I feel a lot of, and then my journey with music's been interesting.
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It's one of the things I obsessed over so much.
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I listened to so much music through every single genre.
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So that was like a huge point, which is also kind of led me to being this person obsessed
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Like I would only watch Channel B and MTV in the nineties.
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Before that, for people who remember it, every Saturday or Sunday, DD Metro would have a compilation
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of music videos that would come, Top Of The Pops.
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I don't remember the exact name.
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There was an interesting name to it.
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So I used to record those on a tape and re-watch them.
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So Careless Whisper, I remember there were a bunch of those videos at that point of time,
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And I used to love the music video as a form, it was something which really appealed to
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And the dream was that in life, I wanted to do something with MTV in life.
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I didn't know what it was, but I think that it originated there and eventually it did
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So one tick off the box happened, but my influences are very varied in that sense.
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So I would be a guilty boy when you come out of the house, two buttons of the shirt kind
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You go hang with the boys, talk about Chidunji, we do all of that stuff.
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But when you're back home, I kind of also get my own space to be myself.
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So it was an interesting time growing up.
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From that period, what's your comfort food, like not just in terms of food, but are there
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songs you keep going back to, are there movies you keep going back to, books you reread?
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So I'm actually a hardcore Massey Bollywood buff.
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Tridev is still one of my all time favorite movies.
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I still go back to it when I need to find something to watch.
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Andaz Aptapna, etc. were obviously always there, but I think Tridev is something I don't
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know why I keep going back to it.
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Mithun movies, Dance Dance, Disco Dancer, that kind of cinema somehow appealed to me
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There was something so interesting about it, I think they had characters, right?
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And for me, what I used to enjoy about those were not the main guys.
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You would have just two guys around Amrish Puri or you would have, you know, those other
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characters for me was so amazing.
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I miss them in movies now.
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So I used to do a lot of that, though I go back to that.
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Yeah, I still eat pickle with every single meal that I can.
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So pickle is my comfort food.
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I, through the pandemic, because my mom couldn't ship me some, I eventually found someone who
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can ship it off Amazon.
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So food wise, I'm pretty straightforward.
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I enjoy all kinds of food, but I am eating by myself.
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You still old school, right?
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You'd have some pickle if you're guilty.
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And but yeah, so I still go back to some of those things.
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Also got a lot into science fiction at that point of time as well.
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So Austin Scott Card was a huge influence in terms of his books, not necessarily his
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political views later on, but as I, as I learned, but he wrote a series called the Ender series,
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which kind of really stuck with me.
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And what I loved about that is he wrote a series with one character and then he went
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back and he wrote the same story from the perspective of different characters, which
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I found so interesting for an author to actually do in science fiction and fantasy.
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So yeah, so varied influences, varied directions, as you can see, you're fascinating.
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And you mentioned that your parents had you early.
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They were in their early twenties.
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And you know, just today in my writing group, someone shared one of my favorite poems by
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Philip Larkin, where the first verse effectively is they F you up your mom and dad.
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They may not mean to, but they do.
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They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you.
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And then it kind of goes on.
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What were they like as parents?
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Were you a rebellious kid?
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What kind of kid were you when you look back in hindsight, like now you're a parent yourself
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and I'm presuming you became a parent a little later with a little more reflection and all
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So what was it like growing up?
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Because in a sense, I think young parents, when they have their first kid, they are growing
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up at the same time as a kid, which is, you know, kind of interesting and something that
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you might only see in hindsight.
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So I actually have a very interesting relationship with my parents, right?
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Because like you said, we grew up together in many ways.
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They were learning things as at the time and, you know, they were very young.
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But I think that what I had in many ways was we were very close knit unit.
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We were always together.
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I remember when I did my kindergarten in Manipal because my dad was doing his masters in surgery
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And I spent a large amount of time there because me and my mom would generally just like roam
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I mean, I didn't have school and you'd explore places.
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You kind of go somewhere and me and my mom on her, on her, I think it was a Luna would
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And I think that's what made it interesting for I think for all three of us, because we
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kind of got, you know, I feel that you have a lot more moments when you're not watching
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something or not doing something.
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And I feel we had a lot more moments nowadays, obviously, which is what I still try to do
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I still retain that a lot more.
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And eventually when you kind of got back, obviously, everybody gets into their work
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But for me, those early years were very interesting and whichever part I recollect.
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Because I feel that, you know, they were trying to get to a point of actually doing something
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in life while I was still trying to figure out what I mean, if you're in kindergarten,
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you don't know anything.
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So and I was a reasonably naughty kid.
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I would not be so, you know, they'd be having breakfast and get a call from school that
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I've cut my tongue by jumping around with my tongue out.
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So I had to get surgery on my tongue to stitch it up because my tongue was flopping out and
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I'd just done something in or like fallen off a lunar somewhere and some stones gone
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So I was I don't think I was troublesome, but I would get into trouble a lot.
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I've always been good at avoiding being caught.
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It has been the longstanding trend to a large part of my schooling years is that I would
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be involved in the planning of things.
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I would be involved in the execution of a prank or something to do, but most times would
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And I kind of see that trait in Leah as well.
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So I at some point, I call her out on some of those things.
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I like, I know what you're doing.
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So for a three and a half year old, three and a half year old, she looks at me and says,
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But I think that it's all it was great fun growing up with with them being so young as
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well because I got to see parties as I was growing up, I got to see them being young.
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So those are my oldest recollections of both of them, which is great.
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And what was it like growing up in a small town?
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Like how long were you there?
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And also, I guess a small town can affect you in two ways.
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One is that it can give you a certain sense of confidence because back in the day, you
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don't really know the big bad world out there.
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So you can be comfortable in your skin and all those other anxieties that might come
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in when you're in a big city, when you feel you're being judged, where all those other
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pressures aren't really there.
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But at the same time, what's your view of the world in the sense of view of the world?
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Even given that you're in a home of some privilege, there's exposure to books and music and all
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But even all of that is kind of limited.
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So what's your view of the world at that time?
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And when you look back on the small town, what strikes you?
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There is an interesting flip and you mentioned it in the right way.
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When you're in a small town and you do reasonably well at things, I was an average, sometimes
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I was one of those guys who go to a PTA meeting saying, he has so much potential, that kid.
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But I'd still be like house captain easily.
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I would win a swimming competition because there were five kids who would swim.
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So there was things where in hindsight you think about and you're like, so I would hustle
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my way into being every single sports team, very bad at sport in general.
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And so I don't think I was overconfident, but I was in Kakinada with a certain sense
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of confidence that I was among the top set of people.
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Not necessarily studies, because obviously, and you know, I have a huge issue with education
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and systems in general, because I feel they're built for almost like a supply chain system
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of getting people out with the same sort of mindsets.
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So I wasn't like silly, those guys would get like 95% 96%, right?
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I ended up in my 10th standard with like an 88% which in hindsight is not bad, but it
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wasn't necessarily that you didn't get above 90%.
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So a lot of people would be like that.
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My parents didn't necessarily care as much.
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They were like, you know, 88 is good enough.
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And so, but after that, when I actually went to Bangalore for my 11th and 12th, and that
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actually was an interesting story is that I actually joined junior college in Kakinada.
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I took the standard, all my friends were joining a couple of those colleges to study to become
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I said, okay, I don't want to be a doctor.
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My logic was it takes X number of years to study to be an engineer, X number of years
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to study to be a doctor.
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Engineering is much lower.
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I also still love to code coding was a love of mine because I discovered computers and
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I still remember that first dial-up modem that came in trying to open that website
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Opening a website at night was for obvious reasons because you could also discover things
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which are not allowed to watch when parents were awake.
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And so I was, I was obsessed with that.
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So I learned like, you know, early programming, like basic and, and C plus plus and stuff
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And, and I still do a lot of that.
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And I joined this college, which is supposed to prepare you for engineering entrance and
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And the culture shock would be weirdly enough, even though I was in school in Kakinada was
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immense because it was a factory outlet to create people who would get into engineering
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college and it would almost be a scenario where you'd be in college from seven in the
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morning till like seven at night.
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You were pushed to study Sanskrit as your language because Sanskrit, you can actually
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get almost a hundred out of a hundred because all the questions come from the textbook.
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So it was almost, you're mugging up the entire textbook.
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So you could actually get that, you know, you can get that higher percentile.
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And there's a reason why I feel that if we have a factory outlet of engineers coming
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out, because he not necessarily bringing out creative engineers that I really related to.
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And I even talks about three idiots, but when I saw that and I, and I saw, I think Chichore,
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I related to those more from those times as much as engineering years, because that is
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And, and my uncle had come down to get a procedure done.
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One of my dad's friends had come down to get a procedure done with my dad and he's like,
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what are you doing here?
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And I'm like, I'm doing this.
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It's like you, you are a person who should not be here.
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And he said, let me take you to my school.
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And he was from a school called Bishop Hortons in Bangalore, um, boarding school, been around
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for years and years and years and some amount of heritage and et cetera.
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Somehow managed to get me.
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So me, my dad and him drove down, sat there dad and he figured out how to get me admission.
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I don't know what they did.
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They got me in because term had started it been a few weeks, but, uh, he was an ex-student
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and he kind of pulled a few pieces there.
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But once I got in and I had to go to a hostel, very nice boarding school.
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The flip that happened in my life is whatever I perceived as cool, whatever I perceived
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as a confidence building thing for me back in Kakinada suddenly became a big negative
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Cause you would watch a movie, let's say I watch kuch kuch hota hai and this is a fact
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and you find him wearing a neon color t-shirt, you would buy a neon color t-shirt.
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I had that cool chain, that Charu quote, right?
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Which is not cool at all in hindsight to wear and I was told it was not cool.
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So I believe those two years in boarding school, although I made some great friends, some of
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them who I still kind of chat with them on a, you all reunited on a WhatsApp group recently,
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Um, I feel those couple of years really pushed me down in terms of just generally what my
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So I retreated and I was this kid who would get onto stage to do anything, would do it
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I finally become this guy who was very averse to prove that I was cool.
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So I would do stuff like bunking out at night or go out and get biryani for the entire dorm
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because I'm not like I was paying for it.
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I would be the guy who do those things just to almost get some sort of approval.
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And I feel a lot of people go through that.
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So years later, when I was asked to do my first TEDx talk, um, and it was in the engineering
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college in Kakinada, what actually spoke about was, uh, a small town mindset that I spoke
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about that because I believe a lot of guys go through that.
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A lot of people come from a small town with an immense chip on their shoulder that I'm
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somehow lesser where no lesser.
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I'm not where all these other guys are in everything apart from maybe marks.
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And I did that primarily because I felt that through my years in Bangalore, my parents
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call those the dark ages of, of my time.
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I made a lot of friends from a Bangalore time, but it was not the nicest time in my own headspace
#
And that's like a fascinating transition you spoke about, about how you sort of land up
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in Bishop's cotton in Bangalore and all these other imperatives come into play where what
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was once cool is not cool.
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So you've got to prove you're cool and you're, you know, signaling in different ways.
#
And that reminded me of something Jonathan Haidt recently said, like I produce a podcast
#
called Brave New World, which is hosted by Vasanthar.
#
And he did an episode with Jonathan Haidt where he was talking about what social media
#
has done over the last 10 years, essentially.
#
And apparently for boys, it's not been a problem because I spend a lot of time playing video
#
games and all of that, and it builds up skills and it doesn't really hurt them for girls.
#
It's been devastating and has led to a rise in teenage depression and all of that.
#
And I think what girls go through seems to be similar to what you said you went through
#
in the sense that you are suddenly on this platform where everyone is performing all
#
You know, all the other nine-year-old girls, if you're a nine-year-old girl, are brand
#
managers of themselves where they're putting a particular face forward.
#
And if you want to belong, that's what you do.
#
And back in the day before social media, maybe you hang out in person together and you build
#
But over here, everything is performative.
#
There are all these anxieties and pressures and at a larger societal level, you know,
#
it seems to me just thinking a lot to be an analog of what you went through when you went
#
from a small town into the big bad world.
#
And that seems to be happening to kids everywhere all the time.
#
I mean, is that something that's kind of struck you as well?
#
Yeah, definitely has, right?
#
Because this need for acceptance is so high and you'd also have different kinds.
#
And I feel that that's it.
#
I knew there were people in my batch.
#
If I go back to boarding school, I wouldn't necessarily care, you know, there would be
#
one set of people who were generally the guys who just came into studies, stay in the dorm,
#
go do what they want to do.
#
Then there were the cool kids, right?
#
There were some of them who've been around boarding for a long time.
#
Some of them who were good at sport or, you know, the guys who became prefects or had
#
I know all those things.
#
I became a prefect at some point, also stripped off it for a reason which I'll get into.
#
And so they were all of those.
#
And at some point you want to be friends with the cool ones.
#
And I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong about what was going on.
#
You have your regular stuff that happens and it is a little bit of pulling of the leg and
#
But I feel that for some people who kind of stuck in between, which is what I was, I didn't
#
want to be the person who was not hanging around with everyone.
#
But I knew I wasn't cool enough because I didn't play football.
#
My taste in music at that point, while I still had a few of these, Meryl Benson's and Nine
#
Inch Nails and stuff like that, I was still also did have a Backstreet Boys CD because
#
I still like listening to Backstreet Boys.
#
So oh, you don't listen to Guns N' Roses happened.
#
You know, I discovered Weezer and I discovered Green Day.
#
And so people had progressed beyond some of the stuff I listened to because I didn't have
#
And so that became a thing and you slowly make friends.
#
But I feel that boarding school more than anything else, which I don't think it's going
#
to be the same now because of cell phones and everything else.
#
Boarding school taught you that you'd meet so many different characters from across the
#
It's almost like a mini social network where you kind of put into and you don't know what
#
anyone's thinking because I don't think anyone's coming in with bad intentions, even has their
#
And you learn how to navigate life a lot more.
#
And I learned a lot of that in two years.
#
But in trying to do that, you would do stuff like, you know, jump off the gate and go and
#
watch Firbidile Hindustani of all movies and get caught, get stripped off your prefect
#
ship, kicked out of boarding, live in a friend's house, take money from home and not necessarily
#
spend it right and use it more for partying and other things and not spend it on food.
#
And I remember that there was a time when I would call my mother and I knew that she
#
was really upset about it, that I was spending change to eat bananas as food, but spending
#
all the money on going out to party and have a drink and all that stuff.
#
And in hindsight, really stupid things, but I feel doing stupid things in life teach you
#
And I think I've learned a lot from it, especially those years when I look back at those.
#
And it also kind of strikes me and I'm thinking aloud that in certain ways, you know, ambition
#
can be a drawback in the sense that you spoke about kids in your boarding school who are
#
not ambitious in a sense of needing to fit in so they can just chill out, they can study,
#
they can do whatever, they can listen to Backstreet Boys.
#
But if you are ambitious and you want to get ahead in the world and you want to fit in,
#
then you start kind of doing things to fit in.
#
And it can especially be a con, it strikes me in the modern world where, you know, we
#
grew up where our early thoughts are not captured for posterity, right?
#
Because there's no Twitter, there's no Facebook.
#
We are not the kind of garbage that we thought and said, like I know I thought and said,
#
I'm sure you must have as well because young people do, right?
#
And it's not out there, nobody's, you know, taking a screenshot, putting it out there.
#
And with young people, it seems to me that there is this pressure to be performative,
#
to kind of enter that race.
#
And once you have, it can harden who you are.
#
Because I think what happens is that, you know, if I have a bunch of private thoughts
#
and I don't articulate them, it's that much more likely for me to change my mind, to learn
#
But once I take public positions, then because of reasons of ego, I can feel compelled to
#
double down and defend the positions I have taken.
#
And then I can harden and that alone can just make me a completely different person from
#
what I, you know, otherwise would have been.
#
And again, I'm just thinking aloud.
#
But do you think there's something to that?
#
And you know, how much of sort of happenstance do you ascribe to your becoming the person
#
Because, you know, all these little things that happen in our lives can just shape us
#
and take us in directions which changes completely.
#
For example, what if you hadn't gone to Bishop Cotton School?
#
What if you'd stayed in your engineering factory in Kokkinada or what if, you know, the directions
#
that we'll discuss that you took after this where you got into communication and all that
#
and shifted from that path?
#
What if all that hadn't sort of happened?
#
I think that there are moments in your life which define who you become.
#
One moment for me was definitely coming.
#
And because also it was weird that my parents actually sent me because when I was in my
#
fourth standard, they took me to another boarding school in Ooty and I came back in three days.
#
I literally went with my dad and came back with my dad saying, I don't want to do this.
#
Basically cried and came back with him.
#
But that would be one strong moment.
#
I feel another moment would be right after my 12th standard around that time.
#
Now, here's where I think some things were just meant to be right.
#
Everybody's supposed to write for IIT.
#
I don't think there's any chance I would have gotten into IIT.
#
IIT pre-exams were on 2nd of Jan, 2000.
#
Now for anybody, I'm just trying to think of the person who decided that would be the
#
day for an IIT exam to happen.
#
It is a day after New Year's Eve and I knew so many people who were sitting and studying.
#
I literally, I didn't even give the exam and I remember telling my parents that I'm going
#
And that was, I was anyway on a downward spiral in life.
#
And then that led me to not preparing properly for engineering entrance exams, didn't get
#
Then you start escaping the reality that you are on a downward spiral.
#
And I went on that route for a long time because what happens is that you start, I feel the
#
difference is that at that point in time, you would hide stuff for fear of what your
#
parents or what society would think.
#
But we would hide lesser things.
#
So the lot of stuff you would do was not entirely documented online.
#
But I think the realm of what all you hide, like I know that sometimes I kind of go back
#
to some old posts on Instagram or on Facebook and think, okay, was there stuff I would say
#
in the past because I didn't know it was kosher or not.
#
There were terms we use, there were jokes we made, there was gentle behavior trends
#
because I don't think people, I think there are two kinds.
#
You either don't know any better because everybody else is doing it or you know it and you willfully
#
And I feel a vast majority, maybe even now, don't know any better.
#
They don't understand the concept of many other things and why something is wrong.
#
And I feel that was obviously much larger then, but it's not like it's gone away even
#
I still meet many people who don't understand.
#
I remember meeting someone in Bombay when, when the Me Too movement was happening and
#
he was like, yeh Me Too sab hota hai kya?
#
Because I, and I don't think he, I think he was oblivious of it.
#
I don't think he really meant it as to say, okay, do these things really happen?
#
I think he really meant it in terms of, is it actually such a big thing that, you know,
#
it hasn't, you know, more than disbelief, it was more like, really, is it such a big
#
So, and I found that interesting and I, I take those parallels back in life through
#
many things, right, and, and, and you would look at even something as small as what it
#
meant to kind of get into a place on merit, which I never knew.
#
I'd gotten into bishops through my uncle, I eventually got into engineering college
#
again through another dad's friend because management quota had to happen, so he figured
#
a college which was good in Bangalore.
#
Management quota, dad upset to pay money, gonna got in and that was again one more downward
#
spiral in life, right, didn't do well, kept flunking papers, managed to escape through
#
a four year degree in six years, but, but yeah, so I, I feel that that period I look
#
back at a lot, many times, sometimes, especially when I would write something down, whenever
#
I tried to write a book, I always go back to those years because I feel like in hindsight
#
I learned so much from those years than I did at that point of time.
#
And you know, in one of the earlier episodes of Advertising is Dead, in fact, the most
#
charming episode in my little opinion, you know, the Valentine's episode where your wife
#
sort of chats with you, Pooja, and at one point she, I think, used this phrase about
#
you, which I found fascinating, which is, she said that you're in a, quote, deep relationship
#
with yourself, stop quote, and I was kind of struck by that and, you know, I've been
#
sort of thinking about how we construct our sense of the self in recent years and it strikes
#
me that it is all so contingent in the sense that we are hardwired in a certain way and
#
And then we are born where we are in the circumstances and families and that's also an accident.
#
And then we go through life and all these different accidents happen to us.
#
And in the end, we end up as, you know, whoever we are at that point in time, which is to
#
me, it seems almost entirely a product of accidents.
#
And you know, for someone given to this, you know, the kind of self-reflection you've done
#
in your podcasts and in your newsletter and all of that, what do you think of that?
#
Like, you know, do you think that if there is, like, who is Varun really?
#
Like, you know, it's easy to say that, okay, we are a product of all these different things
#
But let's say that other things happen.
#
Is there a constant Varun who is at the center of it all through this or do circumstances
#
Does a chemical imbalance in your head, which, you know, a different set of things happen,
#
You know, there are people who will get a brain tumor and they'll go into mass shootings
#
because something has changed in a subtle way.
#
So is there a core Varun in there or, you know, like me, do you also sometimes feel
#
that you're kind of floating, that, you know, who am I sort of?
#
The floating happens all the time.
#
But there is something I've realized, especially in a weird way, after I started the podcast.
#
I've always tried to play the role which I felt I needed to post my Bangalore years because,
#
you know, I went through the engineering phase, didn't get, didn't even apply for a job in
#
engineering because I didn't want to do it, did that whole, did a call center stint where
#
I worked for AOL cancellations for about, I think it feels like a year, but I think
#
it was just four to six months and worked for Jack Daniels Whiskey and a few others
#
as an alcohol promoter.
#
When I went to Pune, I took a call for myself because and I feel that's which adds back
#
to everything which I am at this moment is that when I got into symbiosis in Pune, I'd
#
actually gotten it through merit and I got into merit also through a bit of a fluke.
#
So that's one more crucial point in my life is my mother's was, I don't know if she still
#
is, but I should ask her, was a Reader's Digest reader for the longest subscriber.
#
I'd always have that at home and my mom would always be reading it.
#
The symbiosis entrance piece application form came in a Reader's Digest edition, sends it
#
to me in Bangalore while I was working in the call center, said you always want to work
#
in the media, why don't you just apply?
#
And because I was doing the job of a promoter as well, I had applied to it saying I want
#
to study PR because I thought the same thing.
#
I didn't know any better.
#
Quit my job, went back home, didn't study, just like lied around on the couch and watched
#
MTV for those few months.
#
And then when I went back to Bangalore to give that exam, I actually, I remember I went
#
back to Bangalore, got a haircut, met a friend after a long time, had drank all night and
#
went for the exam in the morning, answered English, answered general knowledge and walked
#
Didn't answer stat, didn't answer math, none of those things.
#
Cause in my head I was like, if it's for mass com, why do they need these sections?
#
It was common for a lot of, you know, it was a random punt.
#
I don't, I was still not serious in life, right?
#
I still had a job and I was still figuring it out.
#
So and I got in, I got in the first list.
#
I remember when I got in the first list, I didn't believe it.
#
I didn't even check, someone checked and called me and I cut the call because I was asleep
#
at two in the afternoon.
#
And I think at that point I'm like, wait, this is finally, you're getting a chance in
#
life to prove something through merit, something you always wanted to do.
#
So when I went to Pune, I said, it's not like I will suddenly become this saint, but if
#
I don't focus now, there is no point.
#
And so I became this person who knew I had a role to play and my role was, okay, during
#
this time I need to learn as much as I can about this space that I've always been so
#
fascinated by that I can get a career here.
#
Where do you want to work?
#
Channel B, MTV, literally two places I wanted to work, went to internet, MTV, did all of
#
that through my reality show period, focused on being a producer.
#
That's what I wanted to be through the period of glitch.
#
It was about being the right kind of, I don't think entrepreneur, but just being that person
#
who was around to make sure enough support was there.
#
The podcast actually let me suddenly be myself again after a long time out in the open, which
#
I was always the guy who even at glitch would not go out and have a lot of, even if it's
#
kind of going out for a drink, I would not go beyond the first drink and I would leave
#
because I'm like, I will not, I still have to have that relationship where you can turn
#
to me when you need something, not someone who's always hanging out with you, even though
#
Um, so some of the early guys was who I crossed that with very early on and, but with the
#
podcast, I realized that now I'm so open about, I'm like an open book.
#
I talk about everything in my life, people like, why are you so open about things?
#
I'm like, I finally have come to a point in life where I'm like, all the stuff I've been
#
interested in, all the stuff I've, I like to do, even though it's, some of them might
#
That's what makes me who I am.
#
And the more I speak about it with that tone, if there is a young kid from another small
#
town listening to me in a small way, and I feel like I want to give back to that kid
#
that I was who, who was a lot of fun when he was growing up in Kakinada, um, had a lot
#
of confidence of all the stuff that he was interested in.
#
Like I was a kid who would jump off a stool for a breakdancing competition, um, and jump
#
onto stage and try and do a Prabhu Deva move.
#
And I went from that to being a person who was just very happy to be at the back and
#
not really be in the forefront of things.
#
And so I agree that what we are as kids is the purest form of what we are, but I feel
#
at some point when you, when you reach a certain point in life, you kind of go back to that
#
if you're lucky, um, and get to have a slightly more mature version of, of, of that kid.
#
That's kind of fascinating.
#
And I like last week I did an episode with, uh, Prem Panikkar and who, you know, had a
#
turbulent childhood, turbulent sort of early adulthood and, um, you know, nothing was working
#
And, uh, then at one point he says that he finally got a job in Bombay in the free press
#
journal and he went out there and, um, when he was given the job, he was shown his desk
#
and said, okay, this is where you'll be sitting.
#
And he said that that was a turning point in his life because he sits down and then
#
he goes to the loo and he throws up because he realizes that, you know, for the first
#
time in his life, that, you know, everything that he's ever spoken about, he can do it
#
Now is the time for him to actually act and get stuff done.
#
And you know, when you were sort of speaking about that shift to symbiosis, like earlier
#
in your episode with Pooja, you spoke about how you were always blaming others for everything
#
that went wrong, uh, you know, including, uh, those unfortunate choices of school or
#
engineering or whatever, and now you couldn't blame yourself anymore.
#
You had to kind of take charge.
#
And another thing that struck me about that episode was how, you know, your wife mentioned
#
that your symbiosis friends remember you very differently from your Bangalore friends.
#
Uh, you know, they remember you as much more driven and focused and, uh, all of that.
#
Now when you came into it, obviously, like you said, you, you weren't even sure of what
#
PR was early on you shifted into, uh, you know, video production.
#
I think you said, what was that formative period like because you are discovering the
#
media now it's also the early two thousands where the media is kind of changing shape
#
and just becoming a whole different demon.
#
Like I think when, you know, when I was on your show, we, we spoke about how I was an
#
MTV and channel way from 95 to 99 and you made the same journey 10 years later.
#
And yet it struck me later that the organizations that we worked in at that time were completely
#
different from each other.
#
And indeed that they are completely different now from when you left it.
#
Uh, so everything is evolving, everything is changing.
#
And you are in this place where I presume some of the teaching must be teaching about
#
an old paradigm, an old world, which is actually, you know, a lot of it is just not going to
#
You have to figure stuff out.
#
So take me through your process of kind of, um, you know, discovering, uh, what is the
#
kind of work that you want to do and, uh, you know, uh, and how your image of yourself
#
therefore evolves like at that point in time, what do you see yourself becoming?
#
So if I look at my symbiosis time, it, it wasn't as much about what I was taught, to
#
Um, I still wasn't focused in studies that I was still like, if we had a 8 a.m., um,
#
and 3d animation class, I would not show up because it would not be awake at 8 a.m.
#
Um, but there were a few modules that really spoke to me and interesting enough, so I remember
#
my editing teacher, right, um, he would show us Amar Akbar Anthony, and he would talk to
#
us about certain shots and how they were edited.
#
Um, and, and he was this fascinating man and, uh, Yogi Shmatoor, I think his name was, and,
#
and he'd come in from FDI and he would talk about these things.
#
And I was never, so I'm not a purist in that sense.
#
I won't talk about film the way people do and digital versus film and none of those
#
things that I'm a product of the nineties MTV.
#
I keep going back to that.
#
For me, having, being able to have worked with Chenapa and, and Cyrus and all these
#
guys was like a dream because I, I'd kind of, for me, the benchmark of someone who was
#
really held that spot for me has been Nikhil Chenapa, right, by far, like the range that
#
managed and still continues to show, in fact, he's still there, still relevant, is phenomenal.
#
And I look, and so when I was there, I think I met a great set of friends and we all interestingly
#
had similar interests deep down, I feel a lot of my friends I still have from Bangalore
#
We'll have a lot of fun.
#
But I think deep down, what we were really interested in, what we could talk about for
#
days and hours was not necessarily the same thing.
#
And I think that's really the big difference.
#
And secondly, when you're in a communication school, no matter how much structure they
#
might want to put around you, it still is a lot more open ended, right?
#
You'd have an art class and you would have a class around editing and, and I was terrible
#
at camera, so I will not say camera.
#
And I feel that gave me a certain level of freedom and also because we all were living
#
Pune was an interesting space at that point of time for us because we weren't in the huge
#
campus that the Symbicates are now and we were on this small campus and we had like
#
four rooms and we would all live around campus somewhere.
#
So I feel that period for me was great because of the friends I made and because of the conversations
#
I had with some of my professors, some of them who were from an old time, right?
#
So when I went to intern and came back, me and Rohit had, my co-founder, we'd used cameras
#
like it was something we would, we could rough around with.
#
But back in college for a lot of those professors, a camera was, I remember professors said camera
#
tumari maa hoti hai, roti usse milta hai, it's the actual thing that was said, right?
#
Because we were playing around with the camera, I said, why can't I just throw it off thing,
#
I'll pad it up so I can get that drop down shot of something falling.
#
And I saw the shock on, on my professor's face that I would even think of something
#
But I'm like, it's okay, it's a handicap and we'll throw it off.
#
And he like really had a bit of a fit, I remember, but more than anything else, I feel you need
#
to be around the right set of people at the right time in life.
#
I feel at every single point, like I would not have been as reasonably fluent in Hindi
#
if it was not for my friends during engineering college who were all Punjabi.
#
I learned Hindi from them because till then school Hindi is not Hindi.
#
You do not say hain at the end of every sentence.
#
I have never understood why that is written that way.
#
I learned it from a group of Punjabi boys, almost all of whose weddings I've danced at
#
and who I meet whenever I can when they're here or whenever I've been able to travel.
#
And what is fun about the bunch who I met in Simpi's, those are the guys I still hang
#
They are still my closest friends.
#
They're still the people I can truly be, no holds barred, hang the same baby we've hung
#
since 2005, 2006, I think.
#
And what was sort of, you know, during this period where you're learning the craft of
#
different things, whether it's editing and you said not so much camera, but you're learning
#
the craft of different things.
#
What is the kind of art that appeals to you?
#
Like what are your influences?
#
Like, of course, you've said that there's an attraction towards MTV and Channel V, though
#
by this time they had actually changed a lot because I remember, you know, when I went
#
to Channel V shortly after Quick Gun Murugan happened and all of that, because I was sort
#
I was there for a couple of years and I went to MTV and, you know, your ex-boss, Cyrus
#
Oshidar, joined a bit after that, who you've mentioned in other conversations.
#
And I still remember there was one drastic day where, you know, at that point in time,
#
our early CEO, before Alex came in, was a guy called Sunil Lulla, who I remember when
#
he first interviewed me, he was wearing shorts and green socks, which I thought is so cool.
#
This is what MTV should be.
#
And he would always say that we will only play Western music.
#
We are not going to do Hindi, we're not going to do this.
#
And then there was this regional meeting one day where, you know, there was, I think whoever
#
was in charge of MTV Asia came down and he's like standing in the middle and the entire
#
office is there and that guy stands there and, you know, reels of the figures that this
#
is how much Bollywood sells, this is how much Hindi sells.
#
I don't understand why we are not playing that music.
#
And Sunil is, of course, nodding vigorously and we went Hindi with a vengeance.
#
And that was the first shift I saw and it was still okay.
#
And I came in from this very sort of snobbish and elitist position of no, no, you know,
#
I came here because, you know, I love alternative rock and, you know, I'd be talking about all
#
those great shows in the MTV US and, you know, I was devastated when they dropped Beavis
#
and Butthead, you know, when I joined MTV, it was playing and they dropped it.
#
And I thought that's a horrible shift.
#
But then what I saw in the 2000s was that the shift was, you know, they just went into
#
reality TV and roadies and all of that, which, you know, not my thing at all.
#
And then they went, I mean, it just seems to me that they progressively went further
#
and further away from what I like them for in the first place, but that's a digression.
#
What I was asking was, what were you looking up to then?
#
Like you're learning the craft, what kind of work do you want to do?
#
Like, do you want to make movies at some point?
#
Do you want to make music videos at some point?
#
What are the music videos that you really liked from that period?
#
So weirdly enough, I wanted to just make music videos.
#
I thought that's what people in music channels did, that we would make music videos in hindsight.
#
You find out that's not true at all.
#
So I went through phases.
#
I think for me, some of the typical ones, right, you would listen to Nirvana, very into
#
Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison.
#
So when he said, how was I in college, I at some point became that pretentious, okay,
#
and now I'm in a communication school person.
#
It's okay in college, we're all pretentious.
#
So I think that's not necessarily a negative point.
#
So I had grown my hair out a little bit.
#
I would have a jhola on the side.
#
I would listen to Jim Morrison at night after having had a couple of extra drinks, shoot
#
my own shadow in the dark with some light on it and edit something weird with my own
#
poetry, which was horrendous.
#
And it wasn't like I was not warned.
#
I remember Rowe telling me that I was influenced by the world's worst poet, who was Jim Morrison,
#
because I used to read Jim Morrison's poetry books and try to write poetry like him.
#
Not the best frame of reference in hindsight, but that was my frame of reference and that
#
So I would write these poems and I would dance in this thing and I would show it in college
#
to some professors who were also a little warped and they would try to find meaning
#
in what I was shooting and I was just a drunk guy who was shooting his shadow.
#
And it was a lot of fun.
#
So I remember that I submitted a lot of music videos as projects during that time, except
#
for my final project and love shooting that kind of stuff, because anything was orbit.
#
I would try stuff out, but I also realized that I was always a bit of a, I think a jugard
#
So you would end up shooting a lot of stuff and you realize you don't have enough footage.
#
So you started reversing the footage to cover up for it and make that seem cool.
#
So I do a lot of those.
#
I used to love to edit.
#
The edit room was something which I fell in love with very early on, because that's where
#
stuff really gets made.
#
I actually went to MTV at an interesting time as well.
#
My internship, I remember, was in MTV and I said, look, I'm going here.
#
I managed to get into the place I've always wanted to get into and that office was phenomenal.
#
It's that huge space they had, the vibe of it.
#
It was just more than I expected it to be.
#
I remember walking in the first day and you see Brocha sitting there and Brocha's doing
#
what Brocha does in life, which is just generally being, he was being a, he was in an element
#
of being a prankster in those days.
#
So he was doing that because you'd pull off buckers on every new person who joined MTV
#
And he was pulling that off on someone.
#
So I happened to notice it.
#
And my, one of my first shoots was with Nick Hill.
#
So all of that is happening, right?
#
I did research for ODs, but my thing was that, okay, I'm gone here, let me learn as much
#
So I worked on every single show that was possible.
#
So that influenced me a lot because I learned the art of formats at MTV.
#
I actually learned how stuff has to be short, how you can, because we were doing a lot with
#
very little and we were using time like nobody else was.
#
And I realized that only MTV did that, Channel V never did that because when I later on went
#
to Channel V, how much ever time it would take me to do three edits would take someone,
#
people would do just one in that because MTV had taught me to work a certain way.
#
They taught me a certain work ethic and almost a structure of working with just, I feel that
#
whatever we have as internet culture now is still for me, stuff we did in MTV and Channel
#
I can take every single format.
#
There is a connection there and I feel, and I'm a huge format junkie.
#
I love to explore different formats of just not everything, like even how people write
#
a newsletter to how someone makes a YouTube video to an Instagram reel, I look at formats
#
It's one of those things I love to see because I think it shows variation and gives you something
#
to kind of use as a framework.
#
And I kind of brought that back.
#
So after my first year, when I first year was generally chill, I was learning the ropes
#
and stuff, but I feel I came back to college my second year after that three, four months
#
stint at MTV, having learned so much in that period.
#
And that's when I was clear about what I wanted to do.
#
I knew I could be someone who worked in that kind of television, like youth television
#
and reality TV was weirdly not something I really enjoyed.
#
I gravitated towards it because, and I think at that time reality was a little different
#
than what it became eventually, which is when I kind of tuned out of television.
#
Reality TV then was saying, can you take a set of people and put them in a situation
#
that will make them react with some sort of emotion, right?
#
So in my head is actually, if you go deep into, it's almost like you're looking at
#
human psychology, right?
#
What will make someone, because you are under pressure, you have cameras on you and you
#
need to find a way to kind of push someone a little over that edge to be able to react
#
in the way they would naturally would if they were under pressure, but you just have to
#
So, and you would sit and do those things.
#
And I remember the first time I made someone cry on camera, I felt I was really upset and
#
I would sit and I remember Raghu came up to me and he sat down with me because he saw
#
And he kind of sat with me and he spoke to me about the mindset you need to have and
#
the fact that you're not forcing someone to do this.
#
They have signed up to be on a show, you're doing what you have to do.
#
You're not in any way causing them harm.
#
This is the pressure of it.
#
And so I had a bunch of really good mentors at that point in time, there were a bunch
#
of producers, the entire ODs bunch.
#
I remember Nikhil was a person that would turn to, I still turn to sometimes, who I
#
would speak to about how he did all the stuff he did.
#
And I feel for me, those four months and the stint I had after that, when I went back to
#
MTV, that was my true university in everything I've done in my career.
#
How to manage teams, how to organize stuff, logistics, I've learned it in that year and
#
And you know, a lot of things to kind of unpack there.
#
Firstly, you know, I love reality television as well, but as you know, one of the early
#
years of Twitter, I think I was live tweeting Big Boss, which I kind of liked much more
#
than Roadies to be frank, which I thought was, you know, kind of obnoxious and difficult
#
But one of the things that struck me when you were talking about your early four years
#
into Jim Morrison's poetry and all of that, is that typically when we are young, and especially
#
when we try to create things, and of course, it is a fact that in men, the prefrontal cortex,
#
which is responsible for socializing and all that doesn't really, you know, develop till
#
Which is why a lot of teenage violence and all that is kind of common.
#
So people take time to get formed.
#
And when you're young, often you have energy, but you don't necessarily have either taste
#
And experience, of course, comes with time and taste also forms.
#
And I think part of taste forming is, of course, you want to fit in with your peers so you
#
listen to whatever they're doing.
#
But through all that, there is kind of a core of your own taste, your own aesthetic, your
#
own sensibility kind of forming.
#
So you know, a couple of things, like one, clearly from a lot of your work, like your
#
newsletter, especially recently focuses on things like frameworks and processes and all
#
of that, as you mentioned, and that's a craft of it.
#
And that's also incredibly fascinating.
#
But before we get there, tell me a bit about how your taste evolved during this period.
#
Like out of, you know, what are your guilty pleasures still out of what you used to like,
#
then what makes you cringe today?
#
And you know, what parts of your early work do you look back to when you say, Hey, that's
#
And what part is, you know, not quite like that.
#
So actually look back on a large part of that work and deliver sometimes fascinated about
#
the stuff which we did.
#
So I did all my reality TV stuff actually really enjoyed maybe my last show and channel
#
which I can get into with because the format was so bizarre.
#
And in hindsight, I was like, I don't even know what we were doing.
#
And it was a show called channel we kidnap where you would have a couple and you would
#
And then you would make the person who's left behind and this person's best friend compete
#
in a series of tasks to win money and free the person who's been kidnapped.
#
In hindsight, when I'm saying this out loud, it makes no sense.
#
We made a really like interesting show, but, but what I think that was us really just enjoying
#
a format because of the stuff we could do, right?
#
So we would give them tasks and each episode there were three producers and all of us would
#
have one, one episode each.
#
And so we were all reliving our fantasies of stuff we wanted to do as tasks.
#
I think we had come to that point in reality TV where producers were just thinking of the
#
tasks and the masala you can get.
#
Like I would come up with stuff where like I put an entire basement on fire and this
#
person's outside with locked up and the keys are inside and these guys are going with heat
#
suits and getting the chabis out with fireballs going off and there was the stunt crew and
#
all there, but, and I would also do stuff like drop one of them in the middle of Ganpati
#
Visarjan and two people have to go find them in the middle of it.
#
The camera crew got lost trying to shoot them.
#
I'm sure many of my crew were groped as well, but we would think of these really bizarre
#
Thankfully, the entire crew was men.
#
I'm just putting it out there.
#
And it was, I think we were doing all of those, but in general, I loved it.
#
The only things I cringe about whenever I try to do a format that wasn't Bollywood or
#
reality, I've always been terrible at it, which required editorial or required finesse.
#
So I remember doing a tech show for channel B when I was there and it required animation.
#
I'm like, how tough can animation be?
#
So I just made my own animation.
#
I didn't know how to animate.
#
I did something random, put it up on television.
#
I don't know how it went on television.
#
And suddenly the creative director of channel B is looking at TV saying, what is that?
#
So I was pulled up and I was like, the animator was busy, right?
#
So when I look at some of those, I was like, okay, I sometimes pushed it too far with almost
#
being cocky about it more than being lazy.
#
I think I was just cocky about it because I was really, I feel that once you're in a
#
certain flow and you're doing shows, when you, when you skip to a different format,
#
you need to skip your mindset.
#
I was still functioning the way I would actually even move to channel B to do Bollywood shows
#
because nobody in channel B wanted to touch Hindi because channel is still doing English.
#
So, and I love working Bollywood.
#
For me, it was like, okay, one second.
#
I've gone to Amitabh Bachchan's house for a shoot.
#
I've gotten to meet him, shake his hand.
#
I've been able to shoot in a set with Ram Gopal Verma to create a set for Sanjay Leela Bansali.
#
So for me, I would still, I, you know, you, you revel in those at that point of time because
#
you have some of those things in your head and I think it was great fun to do.
#
And I have a lot of fond remembrances of my entire Bollywood shoot period, but I don't
#
What I might cringe at would be me trying to do stuff, which I should not have tried
#
doing like animation, but so none of my tastes I ever cringe at because I feel I still go
#
back to many of them with music is a great example for me.
#
I listen to every single genre possible apart from classical, maybe classical something
#
I still, I have a, I say I have a speak make a problem, which is that, and when you're
#
younger, if you go for enough speak make a concert, you have a certain aversion to Indian
#
If you're too young to understand it.
#
So when you grow up, you tend to not want to listen to it.
#
It's not my mother's fault.
#
It's not anyone's fault.
#
It's just that I just did not have taste when I was younger, but yeah, so I don't, I don't
#
cringe at any of those things.
#
I would just say that doing shows like where I put animations up and doing kidnap for two
#
cringe pieces and kidnap actually made me also realize I wanted to quit because by then
#
reality TV had reached that point where you didn't have to press those buttons to get
#
People were reacting on camera because they knew that would get them footage.
#
So for me, that took the fun away of the fun of looking at what will psychologically make
#
this person react and really plan stuff out was no longer needed.
#
You could set it up and people were reacting anyway so that they'd be seen a certain way
#
And I'm like, I'm not here to get like people to act and never really excited me.
#
So that's also something that's made me tune out.
#
And in a sense that sort of extreme move in reality TV where people are reacting because
#
you know, it's expected of them also presages the coming age of social media where everything
#
is performative anyway.
#
But you know, let's take a quick commercial break and after we do we'll come back to 2009
#
and you know, the changing times and what you then went on to do next.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India uncut,
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons.
#
And now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
#
regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to the scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Varun Duggirala about his fascinating life and journey.
#
And we've reached 2009 where obviously there is, at approximate level, one interesting
#
shift where, you know, you leave Channel V and you start your own advertising agency,
#
But you've also spoken in the past about how, you know, it's not just a career change.
#
There's sort of a ton of stuff happening around that time.
#
Television is changing, digital is coming up, the internet is changing the way people
#
consume information and all of that.
#
So tell me a little bit about that.
#
What about those changing times is sort of driving whatever is happening?
#
So this is, I think, from around 2006, 2007, there was a bit of an interesting period,
#
It was an interesting period mainly because on one end, digital was just becoming a thing.
#
I remember Channel V used to have their website, MTVindia.com.
#
Those were early days of people really putting up curated content online.
#
And I remember there used to be, I remember Arjun Ravi used to run a website, forgetting
#
the name right now, which used to kind of curate stuff around indie music.
#
And so it would be weird for us who would work in music television, who would go to
#
a website which used to curate indie music to kind of get what was happening there.
#
Because we had gone beyond that and we were primarily playing Bollywood by then, our jobs
#
were to do reality TV, there were very few music videos, non-regular going on.
#
And although I was lucky enough to be one of the last people to do a show called Launchpad
#
for Channel V, which is a show to find next big rock band and stuff like that, before
#
Rock On and everything else that happened post that.
#
And I remember when we were doing that as well, it was a lot about let's find different
#
languages who would kind of come in.
#
So we got a band in from Cal who sang in English, but Cassini's Division was a legendary band.
#
We had a Hindi band called Fareed Kot who still play, they compose for a few movies
#
So we had all that going, but it was still largely repetitive because I was going from
#
one reality show to the other.
#
I had almost quit twice, I had almost gone back to MTV because I still had one bucket
#
I never produced roadies.
#
I always wanted to produce roadies because I just had Journey and what that involved
#
at that point in time, something I always wanted to do.
#
I would say I once walked up to Zulfia who was my then boss and I was just going to quit.
#
And she said, do you want to do Launchpad?
#
I said, okay, I'll stay in my head.
#
So I stayed and I did that show.
#
But I feel that me and Rohit had come to that point where we had grown up the ranks really
#
quickly in our time in Channel V because when we were in Channel V and he used to shoot
#
promos and I would shoot shows, there was a set of people who were senior to us who happened
#
to quit around the same time.
#
So suddenly we were assistants who suddenly became producers very quickly and we learned
#
those things by hookah or like we had to learn on the job, right?
#
So a lot of the stuff kind of were put deep into the deep end and figured it out.
#
But when Channel V said we're not going to play music anymore and we're going youth GC,
#
we're going to fiction, that's when we were like, we can stay here, we'll have great careers.
#
And Rohit said, I think I want to quit and do something on my own.
#
And I'm like, what are you planning to do?
#
And he said, I don't know, we'll do something, maybe try something with digital video and
#
I didn't know what you were going to do.
#
He didn't know what you were going to do.
#
I said, okay, even I'll quit.
#
And there's a line which I stick by and I stick by that most times.
#
I feel it's one of those benchmarks you need to have is what's the worst that can happen,
#
And so worst case, we'll find a job and this will fail because we didn't really have responsibilities.
#
We used to say we were paying for bed, bread and beer.
#
As long as you had money for those three, you'd survive.
#
We spent six months thinking of the name.
#
One month trying to figure out what work we would do.
#
Quit when we were leaving, everyone told us the mistake was post-recession India in the
#
world in 2009, 2008, people really were trying to hold on to their jobs and these two young
#
guys who were doing reasonably well would not have lost their jobs or quitting to start
#
We didn't even know who will give us work.
#
And we had one project, one and a half, and we finished that project and we didn't actually
#
didn't have work for I think for two weeks, two, three weeks.
#
And we were like sitting at home because we didn't know how this worked.
#
We just thought we talked to a few people and we'll get some work.
#
And that's when we really started to understand that we need to be open to doing anything
#
So we started off as a production house because he used to direct.
#
I was a terrible director, but I could edit and produce.
#
So we would take turns editing.
#
I would produce and he would direct.
#
And we just took projects like that, but we kept trying to do stuff in digital.
#
So we would pitch some stuff and we both geeks in our own right of the stuff we geek out
#
I'm both was huge into tech, just fiddling around with doing stuff with it.
#
So we would pitch stuff on the side, but we would still do like, I remember we used to
#
do one of the first projects.
#
We used to do promos for Disney.
#
So for the DVD section.
#
So we would do a promo for Princess and the Frog DVD coming out.
#
So we'd have this DVD come out as an animation and it would have a voiceover and so we get
#
a voiceover recorded too.
#
We do projects like that.
#
We made a, we made Priyanka Chopra showreel for her to go to Hollywood.
#
One of our first projects, because I remember all the UTV DVDs had come to our house amongst
#
others and we had to run through all of them, find those shots to show her range of acting.
#
And we got, and we were stupid enough to take that money and go buy a TV.
#
Like we would do stuff like that in the early days.
#
But at some point, I think six, eight months in, I think, yeah, about 2010-ish we had Prashant
#
who's actually still with us, who wrote in and said, can I intern with you guys?
#
I'm hearing you guys are doing some fun stuff.
#
And so he came in from Simbi, realized our office was our apartment, slept on our couch,
#
worked on project, went back and he said, will you guys hire me?
#
And that's when we actually became a company because we realized, okay, we're hiring someone.
#
And we had a few other people and a lot of these initial set up people who weirdly connected
#
So Prashant's on his third stint with Glitch now.
#
So he's quit a couple of times, come back, wants to be an entrepreneur, wants more to
#
to work for Apple for a bit.
#
And there's a second employee was a guy called Venky who came in, who incidentally now works
#
And we end up still doing some stuff together in that sense.
#
So in a weird way, there are a lot of these characters who are still around in our lives.
#
But that was also a time when people didn't really get digital.
#
I think we were looking at it as a fun, like it's what podcasting is now, it's experimental
#
budget for all brands, if at all.
#
And so we would go pitch really random activations and stuff that would like, you know, if someone
#
tweets this to this thing, then a random nerf gun would fire something at a target.
#
And if we hit the target, your handle will come on the screen, right?
#
We would pitch stuff like that.
#
Or that we used to do stunts like diesel was turning into and they had to make a bring
#
people to their sale website and the websites creation had taken so long that one week for
#
launch and had not done any publicity.
#
So we made a bunch of hundred people change their relationship status on Facebook from
#
single or whatever it was to in a relationship.
#
And we had Roshan who unfortunately had to go from married to in a relationship.
#
And he had to answer to a few people on that front, not necessarily Cheyenne cause she
#
Because we made them all posting because single is boring and twosome is awesome, diesel turns
#
So we used to pitch stuff like that and like a thousand percent increase in traffic on
#
the website because nobody was on the website.
#
So in hindsight, a thousand percent isn't much when you look at it that way.
#
But we would pitch that stuff, but also do television, we would shoot stuff for MTV was
#
We continue to make that pay the bills and then slowly, but surely became a company somewhere
#
in between and became an agency at a later point when at some point, Brian said, you
#
guys are doing all the fun stuff.
#
Do you also want to do strategy?
#
And we're like, how tough can it be?
#
We realized it was much tougher than we thought it was, but that's how we became an agency
#
So, you know, a lot of what you're saying actually brings back memories and it's very
#
interesting how, you know, our journeys over a few years apart has these sort of resonances
#
in the sense I straight out of college, I went into advertising and then channel V and
#
then MTV, and you seem to have taken kind of the reverse path.
#
And also in the late 1990s, I, you know, I was one of the judges at this event called
#
the great Indian rock, which was done by Rock Street Journal and MTV together to find the
#
next great Indian rock hope.
#
And it's around that time also, that channel, we announced that they were not going to be
#
a music channel, but a youth channel in the words around 99.
#
And of course, they didn't make the definitive shift until much later, but they carried out
#
a grand experiment in 99, which didn't quite work out.
#
In fact, I shifted back from MTV, I shifted back to channel V for a second time around
#
Now, you know, my number of thoughts that come up here and number one is that, you know,
#
did it make a difference that you were in a sense coming into this business of advertising,
#
not with an advertising background, as you would expect that people have worked in ad
#
agencies and then they've said, we'll strike out on our own, but from a television background.
#
So you're coming at it from a completely different angle.
#
And that makes a difference to how you look at it and what you offer.
#
And the broader question is that do different angles matter?
#
Because even when you come before that into media, you've got that engineering background,
#
You've done engineering and then you're doing masscom.
#
So in a sense, there is already a little bit of a difference between you and the other
#
guys, you know, and maybe your early love for coding played a part in that.
#
I don't know if coding, you know, helps you think in a more structured way or whether
#
it just attracts the people who think in a more structured way and the causation is the
#
So one, you know, do these different frames of reference that you bring into something
#
help you stand out from what's already in the field?
#
And number two is that do you think that because you weren't from an agency background and
#
you don't have those sort of set conventions and ways of looking at the world that you
#
brought something to the table or you saw something that others did not see?
#
I feel we lack the legacy baggage that comes with advertising, right?
#
And I feel advertising suffers even today with that.
#
I don't have any of that, even though now I've been in it long enough, thankfully,
#
because there is beauty to how advertising used to be done.
#
And there are many elements of that still stay, but it's a very different world.
#
And interestingly, what's been constant in our lives is when we got into the agency side
#
is that we were a digital agency, right, the digital agency of that time was a lot more
#
focused on websites and banner ads and all that stuff.
#
And we came from production.
#
So our edge was we knew video.
#
And we knew how that was produced.
#
So we would go and pitch stuff which nobody would even like think was possible.
#
Like an example, I remember we did something for Connetto around Valentine's Day where
#
we said you can, I think we could tweet or write to us on Facebook and give us any lyrics.
#
And we have a set of cupids with musical instruments who would make that into a song and post it
#
We actually went and took 11 small tiny studios, the small ones you get in, you know, which
#
And we dressed up guys as Cupid, people who are musicians, put cameras on them, had an
#
We built a software to be able to edit that out.
#
The software half the time did not work.
#
So we actually had to have manual editors in place.
#
So a guy would write in meow meow and this guy would make meow meow into a tune and it
#
would go onto their page that we did that over three to four days.
#
And what people didn't get was traditionally how even advertising video was shot was never
#
We were taking our learnings from the hustle that MTV and Channel V had taught us and
#
And we would do stuff like this.
#
So by the time we got to being an agency in an agency lens, Brian said, we want that.
#
We want that mindset, but also with you managing what you put on social, because you very clearly
#
We'll continue to do all the, we'll do video, we'll do interventions, we'll do all of that
#
And that's how it became one.
#
And then we learned the ropes of, I remember when we first started pitching stuff to do
#
on Facebook, we had people who said, but Facebook's free, why should we pay you to do it?
#
We've actually heard those things.
#
And it was so interesting when I think back on it, because people didn't necessarily know
#
what to do with social.
#
It was one of those, you know, in the checklist, it was the lowest item that you need to have
#
You need to have a Twitter account and maybe be on Google plus, which is to be a thing
#
and many of those, and we will just keep pitching stuff and thankfully because of video.
#
And because we did stuff with clients, so people didn't really think about, so we would
#
So we would do something for, with YouTube motion pictures for Barfi, or we would go
#
to a Balaji motion pictures and do something.
#
So we would go to these guys, cause you know, they'll want to experiment cause short span
#
want to get buzzing and we do the bizarre stuff ideas.
#
And then suddenly brands like a Unilever, et cetera, who we were doing smaller productions
#
So can you do this also for us?
#
And we still kept the ship sailing by doing TV productions.
#
We did an MTV unplugged.
#
We did a season of that.
#
We did all of the, we will continue to do those shows till we reached a point where
#
we had a team who understood.
#
So I'm not an agency person.
#
I still look at the production and content business.
#
Thankfully have been able to stick to that my entire career.
#
Always always been the more creative person who understood the nuances to a broader extent
#
of advertising and design, especially.
#
So he kind of focused on that.
#
And at some point Pooja came in and cause Pooja had that experience.
#
She helped bring some of that structure that agencies require, which we didn't have before
#
she came in and she brought that structure in and that's when I think it truly became
#
I think we were, we were still a, it was still a fun bus creating agency who had a bunch
#
of accounts, but were not necessarily long standing accounts till Pooja came on.
#
Pooja came in and put structure, but she channelized the madness of what we would come up with
#
and do, which would surprise everybody that this is the kind of stuff.
#
And it's not just us that the team we had built over time would think of these outlandish
#
Like an outlandish sometimes is not the obvious.
#
So I remember when we did the season of MTV unplugged, the biggest ask was, and I remember
#
Aditya Swami who was then the head of MTV had asked us, and guys we're doing MTV unplugged
#
here, but most times in India you have to get a, you kind of have to get a crowd that's
#
not necessarily the audience who wants to listen to the music, right?
#
And we don't want to do that.
#
And because that was that's traditional practice.
#
Most of the audience who's seen all your TV shows are paid audience.
#
You know, the people are paid to sit there and clap.
#
He said, I want actual people.
#
Can you crack that for me?
#
So we figured a digital activation where we had a bus go around Bombay saying KK is going
#
to be doing an MTV unplugged.
#
We'll take you to Trombay, which is outskirts of Bombay.
#
So that's the studio where we were shooting it.
#
Spend the day there, be in the audience, figure a way to record it because most times you
#
would end up doing some songs twice just to get a couple of extra shots, get to interact
#
with the talent come back.
#
And so it became an experience plus a show, which was never the way it was done.
#
So we'd always find these hacks to do it.
#
And I think one of our turning points was a show called Nano Drive with MTV, where we
#
really became digital in our mindset, um, in, in a social world.
#
Because what we were doing was you were sending four nanos into four parts of India with four
#
And every day we would be uploading videos of what happened in that day within that day.
#
Like, so shoot the whole day, edit at night, upload by morning.
#
And basis the number of, and think about it in hindsight, this is the number of views,
#
retweets or likes they got.
#
They would get points, which could eventually convert into prize money.
#
So, and the logistical nightmare that was, and this is not like post geo India, this
#
So we would have those internet dongles that you would carry around.
#
Every form of internet would fail at most times.
#
Um, some edit machine would fail in the most bizarre stuff places.
#
We did three seasons of that.
#
And I think those three seasons taught us how social influence worked, how you can really
#
create different kinds of content online that can get this.
#
And, and because we were doing all of that, it helped us with the brands because the brands
#
saw that you were doing these things.
#
It's like, how much of that can we tap into?
#
So we had that madness with some form of the strategic thought that kind of came in over
#
And then that's a scaled up and became the agency, which is why whenever someone asked
#
me that I'm an advertising person now, I still say I'm not an advertising person.
#
I'm still a content person.
#
I'm still a production person because I think that at the, at the root of it, I'm still
#
And you know, a fundamental question about advertising, it seems that what has also happened
#
over maybe the last 20 years is that advertising has changed in many basic ways.
#
For example, you know, just from the point of view of a creator, one of the things that
#
kind of delights me about the modern age is that, uh, you know, if I want to connect with
#
my audience, I can now go directly.
#
I do not need a platform.
#
Uh, and typically what would happen is I would sell whatever I'm doing to a platform or make
#
They would then sell advertising and I would get a little chunk of that.
#
And now all of that loop from a creator's point of view is completely bypassed.
#
I don't need the platform and therefore an advertising, you know, as, uh, uh, you know,
#
Prem Panikkar in the last episode that we did, and, um, you know, he was, uh, the editor
#
at a number of online publications like Rediff and Yahoo and all that.
#
And he was pointing out how it's gone from, you know, dollars to pennies for comparatively,
#
uh, the same, whatever.
#
So in a sense, there is, uh, a sense of, you know, advertising going sort of downhill in
#
And the particular period of time which you're talking about when digital comes up is like,
#
like one of the things that you've spoken about earlier is how you needed to change
#
the mindset of your clients and tell them, quote, don't do one big TVC.
#
You need 300 pieces of content in a year.
#
So instead of thinking about, you know, one big television commercial, which they'll play
#
everywhere and they'll buy space on, uh, you know, maybe Doordarshan in the eighties or
#
all the different satellite channels in the nineties.
#
Now you got to think of this mix of stuff.
#
And also the other mindset shift is that very often what happens is when a new media comes,
#
it becomes one of the boxes.
#
So you say, okay, Facebook, Insta, and you take those boxes and you're done and you don't
#
really put your heart into it.
#
And it's just stuff that you do and, you know, it becomes that kind of a game.
#
So what were these mindset shifts, both in terms of getting others to sort of change
#
their mindset in this way and your own mindset shift, like one, of course, it helps that
#
you come from television, but did it also make a difference that you're part of a generation
#
which is used to digital, which is used to, you know, consuming on multiple screens as
#
part of sort of your growing up and taking in the world, which might have been very different
#
from some of the sort of managers you're speaking to at these various brands.
#
A few things happened around that time.
#
And I feel it took a certain transition.
#
You know, when we first started doing stuff that agencies do, we were always those people,
#
you know, you would not even sit on the chairs around the table in those meeting rooms that
#
you will be standing at the back because you'd have someone talk about the campaign, et cetera,
#
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
#
You almost become that at the end of it.
#
It was never the prime point.
#
I think a lot of us in that generation of agencies, there's us, there's WebChutney,
#
there are a bunch of us.
#
We worked really hard to have that seat at the team.
#
And we did that by showing a few things.
#
We showed them true value in terms of what they could get out of it.
#
And I feel the learning has been in three stages.
#
learned first because consumer behavior moved very quickly right as soon as they could get
#
the internet and start doing stuff with it consumers adopted this like this whole mobile
#
first india piece is so important to think about because we tend to compare things to
#
how the west does it and the west even now for me is a lot more drilled on from laptop
#
and and computer culture india is very mobile culture like that's how our consumers function
#
that's a very important distinction to make us be very naturally that way um i go back
#
to my aol call center days and i think about how they were and the issues they had and i remember
#
that they were so analog um even at that time and so because of that what happened here was that
#
a the consumer shifting and the brands are trying to figure out what to do
#
the brands adapted first i have to give them credit for that most brands including larger
#
ones like i feel like even someone like a unilever who's fairly large i have seen that transition
#
from how they were when we started working with them i think way back in 2011 to now and even
#
then it was a focus area for them they were still figuring it out and now it's a prime focus area
#
for them so i've seen that with with many of them so they who kind of moved early agencies moved
#
last agencies for me not necessarily guys like us who were anyway doing what we were doing and
#
didn't really care about the traditional stuff the traditional players in many ways because they also
#
were doing a lot of things which weren't really threatened as much by digital then so was were
#
doing what they were really good at like you making great television commercials and you're doing
#
you know those those long planning sessions and all of those things and at some point when these
#
two moved fast and then you had a bunch of these brands coming in who was selling only on digital
#
that you have your your startups or your d2c brands and when that happened stuff moved so quickly
#
that's when the agency space really got disrupted because brands suddenly switched quickly to saying
#
okay let's put because for a brand in many cases become easier because once again this completes
#
my loop i can see where my products being sold what piece of marketing for me will is getting me
#
to get someone to hit buy on a website and suddenly so they start moving quickly and everybody
#
started to adapt and now we're in another weird point of flux in the industry which is what i
#
find interesting and it's already happening but i see the largest option happening is that
#
right before the agencies for the central point of creativity now i feel the brands are
#
agencies are helping facilitate the creativity in many ways i'm it's very i know there will be
#
people who will tell me what i'm seeing right now is sacrilege but i truly believe that i feel that
#
brands are taking the ownership of the overall brand and creativity a lot more now than they
#
ever did you know just because it is easier to go to an agency and they would handle it for years
#
the number of pitches that will happen the number of people who will come in for each and every
#
project the number of collaborations that are required i am seeing more and more the brand
#
teams are filled with people who are thinking of it from a creative lens and so they're pulling
#
in collaborators so the agency's role is almost to be in a way your navigator saying okay great
#
set of things don't do this this is how it will affect you or you want to produce 50 000 pieces
#
of creative in a year this is how i can help you do it at the best roi or this is how you need to
#
work with data this is how you need to work with your media so we are navigators now we're not
#
necessarily people holding the rails in that sense right so that's the ship that's happened
#
everyone's adapting to it but when i look at how our journey has been i look at how things have
#
changed i think the change has really been the day you could turn around from being a marketing
#
team that would say i'm helping you market your product to saying i'm marketing that helps sell
#
your product that's when the whole game changed because suddenly you are actually controlling
#
sales and that just changes the whole game because you suddenly have that happening and then your
#
distribution channels of old which were you know what's your channel of sending it to different
#
stores across the country and all of that and suddenly econ came in and suddenly those didn't
#
matter if you can have a tiny startup who just distributing off online who can hit as much sales
#
as as some of the biggest established players of decades of if or if not longer so that's really
#
been the change so you know i want to drill down on something interesting you said like you know
#
when i joined advertising in 94 there was this old court going around or not this old court going
#
around then but i heard it then by john vanamaker saying half the money i spent on advertising is
#
wasted but i don't know which half and when i did a recent episode with ambi parmeswaran the ad guru
#
he spoke about how a lot of digital marketing or digital advertising is prey and prey that you know
#
you don't really know what's going on and i chatted with him about metrics as well which i want to
#
ask you about because you pointed out that you know you said that there was a shift where brands
#
began to take attention of you when they realized that you're not just going to help them market
#
the product they're going to help them sell it does this to drill down on this does it then mean
#
that what you are doing the kind of advertising that you are doing is actually quantifiable that
#
there are metrics that can actually show the impact so that old dilemma of i don't know you
#
know whether this is truly effective or not it's just a box i have to take does that old dilemma
#
then go away is it possible to quantify effectiveness so it's extremely quantifiable
#
to a larger extent than it has been before provided this is the one big provider that you set
#
what you're what are you setting benchmarks against like what do you want to achieve
#
and that's really important many times again that gets missed no matter what you might get
#
as metrics whatever might happen that is where you end up failing and it's also an iterative
#
game it's no longer okay let's make that one perfect piece and have it go there so it's also
#
iterative so you're trying stuff out seeing something that works doesn't work i give an
#
old television analogy that you know how you would program a television channel for the shows and
#
what would follow what and what you would make a programming calendar for the year that's what
#
brands are doing now right so you'll have some stuff that will fail some stuff that will work
#
but at the end of the year you're looking back and say i did a bunch of these things these things
#
didn't work these things worked these are my learnings and i'm moving ahead next year and
#
and that's really the way it is happening i agree with umbi i think that there's a lot of the so
#
measurement is a tricky thing because i feel that the word data is thrown around very very in a very
#
loose form data is not important what data you look at and how we interpret is important so in
#
most cases what happens is you will try to find data to prove what your idea is to be right
#
rather than looking at data and deriving your idea from it which is the right way to do it so
#
um there's this piece that we say in office a lot um i don't know it says it uh the most is that
#
data is a creative director's best friend because what you would have you know the quintessential
#
creative director would walk around outside find inspiration in something and kind of come back
#
and now it's that same creative director looking at a stream of data and really getting some insights
#
from that so it's it's about how you look at it and i feel and again data and content two words
#
that are the most widely used for for bizarrely random reasons across the industry but data is
#
truly just that you're getting the insights you would get by doing 10 market visits talking to
#
50 100 consumers you're getting that by looking at a stream of a piece on a monitor and as long
#
as you use that right um then that's good data and i think we're also moving towards a slightly
#
more secure form of doing this right we're moving towards first party data we're moving towards all
#
of that and i think while that does affect the business i feel it's important because
#
at some point the consumer should not be the product and i feel that at sometimes the tendency
#
is to use data to kind of get to them as the best way you can for the business but it's important
#
to kind of have that difference in your head but i think that thankfully it is the way i've seen
#
most brands are very who we've worked with have always been very cognizant of that that you know
#
there's a line and they don't necessarily want to cross it and you know you called your podcast
#
when you started it advertising is dead and which is of course a provocative title coming from an
#
ad man though you claim you're not an ad man but what the hell now what is the scene for advertising
#
is it actually dying because it strikes me that you know when i look at it from the content point
#
of view a lot of the content i consume most of the content i consume has no advertising
#
i've put ad blockers on my browser i subscribe to netflix and amazon prime and i'm you know
#
consuming from there i literally don't watch any television the only advertising i consume is
#
possibly during cricket matches when i can you know just mute the damn thing and similarly as
#
a creator i find that now whatever money i make is coming directly from people it is not coming
#
through i mean i do get some advertising thankfully on my show after all this time but it's a small
#
chunk of what i otherwise make and the direction in general seems to be even for creators to not
#
have to rely on it so much so now the point is that if content is not you know reliant on advertising
#
you know if that bridge is broken people are willing to just pay directly for content what's
#
the future for advertising you know what are your sort of thoughts on this because i am looking at
#
it very much from the outside this is not something i have ever thought deeply about so enlighten me
#
so there are few things that are happening which is why sometimes you think about is the term
#
agency or advertising right for what we do there are parts to what the agency business is right
#
now one big chunk is digital transformation so you're helping clients to transform every
#
part of their operation to digital right so in some ways you're competing on one end with an
#
Accenture and a Deloitte etc because you're helping them build those large tech builds so
#
everything from looking at how they function internally how to add digital elements into that
#
adding tech into that process flows everything else so there's that's one part big part of what
#
agencies are doing now then there is a big amount of work we're doing even on like i think the
#
technology part of the agency business now is so large it doesn't get talked about enough
#
you know you're doing stuff around sales force implementation crm you're doing a lot of that
#
and i see a lot of that growing and scaling and it's being very stable businesses for agencies
#
the creative part of the business i feel is the one that has actually died in some form
#
when i think of how the classical way of it right i think the so you know that i'm a huge scott
#
galloway fanboy one of the things he said which i always liked is that he says advertising is the
#
tax of the poor he uses the word poor i don't like the word poor but all of the people who
#
can't pay for subscriptions how i like to term it and i think that's important there's still a
#
large amount of people who still are okay to get something for free with an ad in between and
#
eventually they will pay for you know not getting those ads in between you know their content so
#
that's still relevant what i feel is important to note is that whatever you make as advertising now
#
has to be relevant for the audience now and not the old for instance whenever someone talks about
#
okay did you see the ads during the ip l i say that you realize when an ad comes on people are
#
looking at their phone because if they're watching it on tv they're looking at their phone they're
#
not necessarily paying attention to the ad right so then what are you making on as an ad that is
#
playing on their on that phone for me is more relevant than what's playing on tv and i think
#
those nuances are there so content will still always be the prime focus on the creative side
#
but when whatever you're creating now has to have far bigger legs as a piece that you would share
#
when i think of some of the biggest disruptors in the ads some of the not disruptors some of
#
you have done the most brilliant work in recent times like for me maximum effort which is Ryan
#
Reynolds's brand company is a phenomenal case study right like he is a guy who is so creative
#
as an actor and everything else and is genuinely funny who builds this company that does really
#
interesting pieces around some of the brands he owns and the movies he works on that they are now
#
considered to be some of the most innovative ideas around stuff that happens and he's doing
#
that because he's thinking digital he's thinking what is shareable and he's thinking on the fly
#
versus you don't have two months to come up with a script and shoot something you know how do you
#
do it Martin Sorrell famously says faster better cheaper is his focus now with media monks and
#
his foreign what he's doing and clients want faster better cheaper but i feel clients also want true
#
value and i feel that that's what we're doing so whenever we're creating we're also not just
#
talking about the creative idea we talk about how creating it a certain way will make them spend
#
lesser in the short term and in the long term i use the word tech stack more than i've ever done
#
in production context over the last year and a half than i ever have so the actual part which
#
you've always spoken about in advertising which is okay let's make the film and let's talk about
#
something so i have not spent any time doing that in in recent years i know a large amount of my
#
team focus a lot on the strategy part and that's still very relevant we're still thinking long term
#
but the classical madman-esque advertising for me is dead because that's now a small part of what
#
brands will do in the future and that's going to go down more and more what will stay is what all
#
are you creating to connect to every single category of consumer so you know and all of that stuff so
#
and i've given a slightly long winding and and and in most cases random response to your question
#
but there are so many pieces to the advertising business now that what was traditionally known
#
as the ad business is now a small part of it it's no longer the whole of it that's fascinating so
#
again i'll think aloud and you know i hope you and other people who really know advertising will
#
forgive me if this next question is a bit naive but let's do a thought experiment you know you
#
just spoke about how scott galloway spoke about advertising being attacks on the poor and so on
#
let's do a thought experiment let's say that at some point in the future and hopefully sooner
#
or later either we go extinct or this happens there's a sort of poor scarcity world where in a
#
sense nobody is too poor to pay for content so everyone's paying for content nobody needs to
#
have their attention you know sold as a product so to say which is what advertising typically is
#
and so what does the advertiser do because on the one hand as a consumer i do want to know
#
what is out there and all of that but at the same time i don't want any intrusions on my attention
#
if i'm watching content i want to watch content you know i'm like obviously i'm one of the
#
privileged but i i'm subscribing to youtube premium so even there i don't see ads netflix
#
prime all of that and presumably there will be similar options for any kind of content at all
#
so thought experiment utopian or dystopian world for the advertising people where so then what does
#
a brand do how do brands reach people what is advertising then is an agency just the people
#
who are doing tech backends and crm and you know whatever else you spoke about or how are they
#
actually managing to get their products in front of the consumer a large part of what you said
#
is already happening and i feel it's already a point in focus so think of what you consume
#
which brands are all still a part of even though they're not ads right think of the entire creator
#
and influencer economy the influencer economy especially right so people do follow so many
#
creators slash influencers primarily because of the brand stuff so which is why a lot of the
#
startups focus so much on that and and i've noticed this right you'll have a startup they'll they'll
#
do primary focus on performance marketing and e-commerce do influencer marketing raise a few
#
rounds come to that get that series a round in then go get that big agency do that big campaign
#
right because in a country like india i feel for at least in the near future you traditional mediums
#
are still relevant tv is not going anywhere hoardings aren't going anywhere a lot of that
#
stuff is still here to stay print i have my own questions on but that's i think more in terms of
#
maybe my habit then i think how the like i know people in my house here read the newspaper right
#
i don't um and so i feel that's more my own personal prejudice if that's the word to use
#
and so when i look at it from that sense the advertising business in the future will exist
#
wherever brands are they have to connect with the consumer today it's on an instagram on an amazon
#
on you know on a youtube it might not necessarily just be as an ad i've spent the last year also
#
studying how creators monetize and because i thought okay as a podcaster there are certain
#
regular ways that you're known to monetize what are the other ways and i would say so much happening
#
which weirdly enough i didn't know about even though i work in the space right so the amazon
#
affiliate program for me was a revelation i didn't realize it because i realized a lot of the tech
#
youtubers i follow all have almost packs you can buy and they make some money off the fact because
#
you know you follow someone and that guy use certain equipment you know okay when i love the
#
content so this must be legit equipment so you'd end up buying it and so this person gets something
#
for it similarly how we put some products out there you know and and so i feel that part is
#
going to scale up more and more each individual now is a media channel to themselves and eventually
#
maybe the entire world is going to be an influencer at different categories and
#
everybody can just kind of keep making money by putting stuff out there right i mean
#
from what i hear and i don't know enough about it in china they've reached a more far more advanced
#
stage in this journey than the rest of the world has on the other end i feel the traditional ad
#
is going to be one of those big once in a year blockbuster things right so
#
it's like how in the us we have the super bowl they have the super bowl we have the ip l i feel
#
you'll end up having some of these big movement pieces which will have ads happen i don't think
#
that's going away they'll evolve in what they are they might become may become content pieces
#
might become series might become shows you'll have all those forms and and you know brands
#
will invest more and more in this i know brands who are looking at what they do from an editorial
#
mindset now right so you know you look at a brand and say okay why would you follow a brand online
#
is because not because you want to see their ad because you want to see what is something about
#
the content they post excites you or interests you and at some point brands are making that shift
#
to an editorial mindset so suddenly the content they're putting out is content to itself not
#
necessarily selling their product and i use this this term a lot i said consumers either come to
#
you to get two forms of value one is that you're giving them some value like a great deal you give
#
them something like that or they'll come to you to connect to their values in some way and that
#
values doesn't have to seem very hardcore it could be just a form of entertainment or a genre that
#
you like which really works i mean i i think of a bunch of brands which are there online which i
#
follow because i just am entertained by what they post and i think that's really the future the
#
future is that we'll go brands will go a lot more editorial and they'll realize at some point that
#
that editorial content is also monetizable it will be a tiny piece of their pnl but let's say
#
tomorrow if i am a beauty brand and i'm doing a lot of these tutorials and everything else and
#
packs and stuff like that at some point it's helping me sell but what if some of that content
#
is exclusive what if some of that stuff is only for a subscription based cohort of consumers and
#
i'm just i'm freewheeling here in my head maybe someone will pay for that you never know right
#
i mean maybe that's the future maybe that's the future of what we'll build out as agencies
#
because as long as brands have to connect with a consumer there'll be some form of this thing
#
called the agency will it be what it was i don't think so which is why the name of the show came
#
in the name of the show actually interestingly came from a talk scott galloway gave so advertising
#
is dead comes from this thing he keeps saying called the death of there was a video he did i
#
forgot where i think it was a video from his stern school class where he said the death of the
#
advertising and industrial um no advertising and marketing um industrial something and so i said
#
it's too long but if you break it down and advertising is dead is is an interesting term
#
to use and that's how the name of the show kind of came to be so that's what i truly believe i
#
think we're already there um is just that and it's a good thing that you hold on to certain
#
things which are great there are many beautiful things about how advertising has been which i've
#
come to learn after becoming part of a network i never realized that while i was an independent
#
agency but i don't think we're a generation who is nostalgic about this at least i am not
#
i know the people who are younger i know there are a bunch of them who are i'm not i think things
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evolve you move ahead you can't stay in the past you enjoy those you kind of go back and look at
#
those but um yeah i mean so that's that form of agency that's going to stay so you know i i'm
#
going to get some of your thoughts on the content ecosystem and the creator ecosystem as well because
#
that's something i've also been thinking a lot about over the last one year these are exciting
#
times but before that uh you know to kind of wrap up your uh not your thoughts on advertising per
#
se but that part of the journey you know at one point you got acquired by wpp and i assume things
#
have worked out extremely well for you so you know there is a journey where around 2009 you
#
leave channel v you say okay this is interesting work this is what we're going to do you get down
#
to it you go in the directions and you follow those directions and then you have what i presume
#
is your big payday and you can now chill and do whatever you want but one you are still in
#
advertising you're still part of the glitch you're still sort of doing whatever and at the same time
#
you are also exploring these other new directions with first one podcast and then this uh youtube
#
podcast of arun duggie show and all of that so my question is that you know in one of your
#
newsletters you've written about how you need to think about what you're doing for your career and
#
what you're doing for your life uh in the sense that you have to view one as the means to an end
#
and so how have your thoughts of sort of you know the kind of work that you want to do evolved over
#
these last 12 or 13 years since you started the glitch you know where initially you go out there
#
saying hey we'll you know we'll make videos for digital and we'll do all of that and then in that
#
journey presumably as a company grows your mindset is also changing you're putting your
#
different kinds of processes in place your goals are changing then the acquisition happens then you
#
discover you know the creator ecosystem and how that's going but at the same time you have one
#
foot and you're still running the glitch so um take me through your thinking on all of this
#
so when we started glitch rohith and i chose not to have traditional resignations we were called
#
left brain and right brain i was left and he was right because we thought that sounded cooler but
#
also it felt very like and we just found it very weird that two guys start a company one becomes
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ceo one becomes cco and because we decided none of us will be neither of us will be ceo
#
so puja's been our first ceo which because the designation didn't exist before she came on um
#
so my role was always very operations oriented right because of my experience with reality tv
#
i knew how to do logistics so um stuff like administration a terrible math person but
#
managed finance for the longest time uh with on a with a in hindsight a very very junior team
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and not really really focus on that as much as we should have but my role is always that my role
#
was to make a few things happen is to make sure that the ship ran work with rohith to make sure
#
the stuff we sold and that's something which he took on us honestly stuff he sold would really
#
come through and executed right i had to take care of is there enough money in the bank is there you
#
know just kind of getting people in managing their life so i always had that role i always enjoyed
#
that having those 50 things to do over the years what also happened is that kind of we brought in
#
people who took certain things off our plate um and eventually once we came towards and we didn't
#
we never thought being acquired was a thing like we didn't even know that existed till someone
#
approached us many years before we even got acquired and we were like okay this is something
#
that happens um we actually even worked with the team and i remember the team kind of came on because
#
in 2011 roshan came on to be our first investor and he was one person who would keep telling us
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these are things that will come ahead for you and i feel that he's kind of great person to have had
#
as a mentor partner because he would never tell us what to do he would tell us something like
#
this will come up and i will let you guys take a choice and maybe give you a point of view from my
#
experience but i will not make your choice for you so we had him to help us out with a lot of
#
with a lot of those decisions and and at some point by the time we decided to get acquired
#
because we realized that's the way to go if you want to scale the way we want to scale
#
and and at this base at which we wanted to we then end up trying to choose networks and we
#
went through that and i think post the acquisition when when we finally did get acquired in 2018
#
i was at a point when i handed over a lot of my response so i no longer had to look at finance
#
ops was pretty much out of my this thing because at some point you hand over a bunch so i was left
#
with a few things to do and i always like to have different things to do and this kind of just
#
happened the podcasting may happen kind of filled a gap of stuff i wanted to do because i had also
#
gotten very comfortable i get very nervous when i'm comfortable right when you sit and you feel
#
like okay have a relaxed day most days that's when i get really like i panic a little bit because
#
i'm like i'm worried when things are too relaxed something can go wrong i'm happy when there is
#
some stress to deal with in the 50 things going on so and that's when this thing happened and
#
then i've done i feel it's also fed back very beautifully to what i do at glitch so i come back
#
to the team i come back to clients i come back with with perspectives and insights which i
#
wouldn't have gotten if i didn't do the podcast not just from the guests i get a lot from the
#
guests i feel like every guest i learn something from but i also feel like i've learned a lot about
#
the talent out there who wants to work in this space because i interact with a large part of
#
my audience also wants to work in this entire new business world and i also then get insights into
#
tools that creators use and and so i'll go back to the guys in our production team with hacks
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which i am thinking of which they might not use like somebody used to using bigger equipment
#
something something which is very like you know which is tiny which is a youtuber piece
#
they're like okay where did you get this from and so like and so all of that kind of adds up
#
but my role over time while i've played many roles like you know there are certain clients
#
i've had great relationships with and kind of built that over time there'll be times when
#
i'll pop so i've always been that person who filled gaps and gave support my job is always
#
i still consider that to be my job is just that over time we've luckily had people who came into
#
the system who said okay i'll take care of things till like we have this thing called
#
the level to which people can manage that hitting the fan has increased
#
so when it still comes to us it's still going to be a big problem to deal with
#
but thankfully now we have a solid set of people leading the organization who take care of a lot
#
of that and so and i think that's what i enjoy which is why i think the creator thing happened
#
because i suddenly go let me get my hands dirty after being in a leadership role for so long
#
what i don't want to do is to have too much of a team which is why i really like
#
it's very shoestring in terms of even the guys that you work with on the world do you sure i'm
#
like i don't hire someone i'll work with the team which is established and so i i'm very wary of
#
falling into the trap of again becoming this person who's taking care of an organized set
#
of people like i don't want to deal with HR again in parallel and then stuff we have a fabulous HR
#
team now thankfully take that off my plate as well so yeah so that's how my roles evolved and it's
#
i genuinely find that it's great to work with people from this generation because i feel that
#
they have a very interesting mindset and i feel that so i'm late i'm very like on the border
#
millennial because 82 kind of just hits that line there but i feel now the term purpose while people
#
make fun of the fact that gen z has this thing purpose and i feel they truly want to do stuff
#
which kind of connects to what they really believe and at some point we need to be able to do enough
#
to be able to connect to that and and the constant endeavor is to do that i don't think we succeed
#
all the time as a business world it's not decided i think in general but i find that so beautiful
#
about and i don't know what gen alpha is going to be like but i think gen z at least has that
#
and and so that's one thing which really excites me i think my podcast helps me connect with this
#
group of people who i find so fascinating who i feel have a lot of the pressures every generation
#
has but also lives in a world like you said right which is a constantly everything you say is on the
#
record everything there's so much pressure there is your mental health has taken a beating because
#
of everything else and so in some way kind of giving back to making sure telling them the world
#
will be okay right there are many many things to unpack there but i'll begin by asking a question
#
on leadership like you've in the past quoted mandela talking about how a good leader should
#
lead from the back right so how how did you sort of discover and evolve your leadership or your
#
managerial style because that seems to be something which you have a very settled version of now which
#
has come over a period of time did that come through trial and error were there moments where
#
you had to reorient yourself and so on some pieces were already set in place by the time we started
#
glitch because i also led smaller teams right so again i go back to like reality tv you're
#
dealing with the team of people right you have producers you have camera crew production team so
#
so i had some nuances of how to handle a widespread set of people roed jokes that i use a lot of my
#
tropes from reality tv contestants on employees in the early years because i'm like how do you
#
deal with this person if the person mindset this way so i might have in all honesty there is a
#
strong possibility i could have done that but in general i've always so i've never been a person who
#
gets to um what i put it i'm not angry very easily that i don't get i get flustered but i try not to
#
show it too much with a team because i feel that it only seeps down and naturally try to be the
#
person to try and find a solve and move ahead have i lost my shit sometimes have i said stuff
#
which i shouldn't have said have i dealt with the situations wrong of course but i think i've
#
learned from those and over time um kind of developed a style which was um and i think it
#
and i think it also comes back to the fact that i don't necessarily want to sit in the room saying
#
i am the center of attention i never wanted to be that person i still not i think even as a creator
#
now i'm not putting out videos which say okay this is what my court is this is what i have said right
#
i am literally trying to share as much of the people i talk to rather than what i say and i
#
think there's there's so much in that and i feel that i did that as in glitch as well is that i
#
would recommend there are a great bunch of people together how do i help them do what they do want
#
to do by taking off all the headaches if they have you know it could be you know at some point
#
companies become bureaucratic we so have we we have many parts which are bureaucratic at some
#
point there are stuff which like you know like like reading a contract or looking at you know
#
there are those things which are not exciting for a larger part of the people you hire so i
#
would take care of those by instinct to say okay let them do what they're doing i can take care
#
of these once in a while i'll get a project which i'm really kicked apart and i would do that
#
and and so on and so forth so i think my style evolved because i naturally gravitate towards
#
logistics i enjoyed i'm actually very unstructured but i still enjoy logistics and that's why i took
#
to production so well because production in india is a very unstructured business it's very it's
#
like the wild west so that's how my leaderships have evolved and at some point also because i
#
kept a certain distance and i learned that from my mtv days and from my channel v days that the
#
more distance you keep with not like being cold but like there needs to be a line so i wouldn't
#
like even when i had like my first assistant producer i would take care of that person like
#
he was like almost like a kid i would take care of right but i would still make that the relation
#
i was still not your friend in the normal sense i'm still that person you can turn to when you
#
need help i also became this person because of the people i learned from i you know the producers i
#
had back at mtv back at channel v who i learned good and bad from i learned how you should not be
#
whenever i seen someone try to make them the center of it it becomes a problem whereas you're always
#
a facilitator i think we can be a good producer and i still say i'm a good producer because
#
you're a facilitator you're not the director you're not the script writer you're not the
#
dop you're not the actor you have to make sure the ship runs and and reaches its destination
#
and so i just took that mindset of me being a producer and put it into me being an entrepreneur
#
and that's always worked out let's move on to i think another of sort of the big changes that
#
we've seen in the last decade and a half you spoke earlier of about how you know tech has
#
changed so much and you know one realization of this was you know i think back in 2016
#
these guys from the u.s got in touch with me and said would i do a youtube series for them and would
#
i kind of make some videos where i'm talking about concepts for three minutes and whatever and i
#
scripted it and they said i'll we'll pay x amount for the production which was decent enough why
#
don't you get someone to produce it so i reached out to a contemporary of mine who had also done
#
the mtv channel we think and you might even know him david polycarp yeah and yeah so david is a
#
very dear friend so david very kindly said don't worry i will take care of everything and he got
#
like a 20 person crew to my house and they moved bookshelves around and hazard production went
#
into it and i was at that time just thinking in my head that oh okay my imagination was that a guy
#
will come with one camera and one lapel mic and it'll just kind of happen and there is this massive
#
kind of crew and you know recently i've also been thinking of experimenting with youtube and all of
#
that building my own setup researching that and the thing is that it is incredibly simple like even
#
for podcasting you know like what i'm doing now i mean i'm basically producing my own show and i
#
can get near studio quality output you know with really basic budget equipment what 20 years ago
#
would have you know been a full production involving so much and probably beyond the reach of one
#
person but today you can sit in your room and you know just kind of get it done and this is something
#
that i think sort of older people perhaps of my generation haven't quite fully come to terms with
#
but younger creators have immediately figured it out because they are native to this they're
#
consuming this stuff all the time they're much more comfortable with technology and so on how
#
has that transition been for you because in a sense you started off in the old world where
#
you are using all those i presume those big ass cameras and whatever but at the same time like
#
you mentioned you're fortunate enough to be in a place where the workflows are not that dogmatic
#
where you're constantly doing jugar sugar and you know getting doing things very fast which is very
#
much sort of the youtube ethic in a sense just get it done get it done just keep doing throw things
#
at the world what was that sort of process for you like and is that stuff that the agencies also
#
also internalized in the work you do like you said that you pick up tips from creators and you'll pass
#
it along to them so you know how has that impacted your workflows for example like you know what's
#
the workflow of the varun duggi show the workflow of varun duggi show is pretty simple actually so
#
i go through this period of experimentation where i will in some time spend unnecessary money on
#
random things and eventually come with a simple solution so i wanted my for instance video to be
#
slightly better than regular zoom quality so i bought a webcam eventually which worked great
#
because it got me i'm like okay youtube is 1080 you don't need a 4k camera got a webcam
#
for 3000 rupees that took care of that so for me that was great took care of one entire piece
#
because every time i went to another platform and i've tried many there was some problem i've always
#
faced in the video part of it the audio parts have always been great so i've still stuck to
#
using zoom in most cases but my workflow is pretty simple i have like i have a bunch of people i've
#
kind of working with now from this company called the small business project that rachit and his
#
team are fabulous and i've known rachit for a bit and and what i've actually done with them is to
#
kind of work with them and say i tell rachit okay i'm going to give you x y and z i need to take
#
care of other pieces for me and we figured a workflow and and and also kind of find people
#
who you will meet right so some of the like some of the guys who work on the audio are like x ibm
#
who kind of going so you kind of plug in and they're helping on that front find somebody else who's
#
just reached out and said okay i'm pulling out insights from episodes and someone once sent me
#
chapters right so you know you don't do timestamps on an episode someone was nice enough to email me
#
saying these are the timestamps for your episode and i said okay do you want to do this all the
#
time i can make it a paid gig so it's i think some of those things have organically evolved and we've
#
putting together a team of people who are naturally proactive and doing stuff
#
and we're finding our flow um my recording style is pretty straightforward um i actually you know
#
one of the first things you said is that i don't do prep which i always say my prep is not traditional
#
prep i do a 15 minute pre-chat with my guests a week before at least or whenever i can get a slot
#
so in that i scribble a few things on my ipad and that is my frame of reference in some cases
#
their pr teams or whoever will send me some stuff which i generally don't necessarily follow but i
#
do find a few pieces there as nuggets which i find interesting so i put them down there and
#
and then i let it flow that because a lot of my audience also i mean at least on advertising
#
these days is a lot more corporate so i get a lot more info there on the varun dukey show for me
#
i call it improv podcasting because i feel it's interesting kind of bring someone in
#
have a regular conversation um and let it evolve where it does and that's what i've been doing i've
#
been trying to find as widespread a set of guests as i can and just have a chat about stuff i'd want
#
to really talk to them about and i'm not really looking at this as being okay this is like a show
#
that's focused on x and y and z it's like you learn so much from conversation so that's how
#
i'm looking at that but going back to the other part about what i've learned as as actual hacks
#
and tools in creation what's been interesting is it's it's been an interesting three-way street
#
where i know the people in our team as well who'll follow some of those youtube channels like for
#
instance a large part of what we do is product so how do you shoot a product was traditionally
#
a very complex but still is complex process because to make it look the way you know you
#
use some of those things you need that texture you need you know those all of that stuff and
#
that's a very complicated process it's very expensive to do but there's so many of these
#
youtubers who have these hacks so i for instance i follow a few of them and i keep sending those
#
videos we have a few of those groups between people in the office right on one on instagram
#
one on whatsapp and we all keep sending stuff across and and those range from someone's
#
television commercial to someone's behind the scenes video of a youtube product shoot and and
#
somewhere in between we found things we will adopt so we do a lot of product stuff that looks
#
instagram worthy might not be at the same high endness of what is traditionally a product shot
#
for an ad but it's great for instagram it's great for e-commerce so also makes it seem like it's
#
content which you normally scroll past so we build that out and a lot of the techniques we
#
use to create that is what youtubers use and so i love when that happens right and when that's
#
happening and when someone reaches out simply you use something right what do you use as equipment
#
so i'll tell them this is what it is so there's times when i've actually sent across stuff which
#
i have bought as random small equipment and said try and use this so i remember when we were doing
#
stuff at fashion week or lack me you know there was a thing where you need to switch your mindset
#
where you would shoot something on a larger camera move it to an edit machine edit it and
#
upload it online when it had to be as live as possible we started shooting on an iphone
#
so every year the glitch office would have a brand new set of iphones come in and the old set sold
#
off best investment ever because through the year whenever you had to go to smaller events etc these
#
phones have fabulous cameras i shoot so i'm starting to work on a few vlog like or straight
#
up content like pieces for youtube i had a gopro i tried to use some other camera i eventually
#
came down to using my iphone i'm like once this is a great camera figured a way to you know get
#
the right kind of tripod and i use like i bought a light and all that stuff but a lot of these
#
techniques when i look at how people are shooting like when you mentioned the crew kind of coming
#
in 20 people now those shoots and also thanks to how shoots happened last year have become that
#
tiny you literally have two people come in i had to shoot something for a workshop piece i was
#
doing one guy came with one camera put the mic in and and had no light because he said can we just
#
shoot in the day so i finally come into that point of getting as many people as required in
#
india we have too many people on a set it's a problem we great in giving employment it's a
#
it's fabulous right you will have one guy walking around giving people bislarica bottles to drink
#
water on a set right traditionally you go abroad someone goes and takes around water they'll have
#
a guy to pick up one two boxes you'll have one more guy so for everything there is somebody's job
#
which is great in a larger context but also it makes it a very crowded space and makes it very
#
noisy whereas like and i think we finally come to that point it's i mean obviously we have to figure
#
how all those people are going to survive what they're going to do and and they've all and some
#
of those things have gone back to normal right shoots in many of those cases still happen the
#
same but we finally realizing especially from youtubers that this stuff can be short you don't
#
necessarily need 50 people for everything you can do it with five people it's just that we never
#
tried to do it because we thought it's simpler and more relaxed to have one person to do every
#
single thing and and that nuance is fabulous now and most of creators like i don't know want all
#
this because give me a phone and i'll go shoot that the way they shoot is interesting i've learned
#
so much from that they believe in archiving which is fabulous because they'll see something random
#
they'll shoot it they'll store it in their phone and they'll use it at a later date it's just there
#
in their stock of videos which we would never think of as stock footage yeah i mean you get
#
into the habit of you shoot b-roll all the time and you never know when you kind of might use it
#
so tell me about you know you're so beginning to explore the creator ecosystem like first of all
#
you know when do you start thinking of yourself as a creator in this sense is it when you start
#
doing advertising is dead or is it some way uh kind of into that you know on your newsletter
#
as well you shared plenty of insights about sort of the creator ecosystem you've spoken about how
#
do you build frameworks you've spoken about what you call the intimate content ecosystem
#
take me through you know your personal narrative of how you begin to think of yourself as a creator
#
and then about how you begin to set up those processes by which you kind of create and how
#
that conception of yourself is evolving to begin with before we actually get down to what the
#
ecosystem is like so i think i truly became a creator in my head while i've always dabbled in
#
these things since i started the podcast i think by the time i hit like 75 80 episodes of advertising
#
is dead i'm like one second this is actually a thing right because i think for the first 50 i
#
was still figuring out what i was like i it took me a while to even think about the fact that i was
#
a podcast host because i used to always mumble as a kid and through college so i was never clear
#
like i would be in meetings and i'd be told talk slow people aren't getting what you're saying
#
and to go from that to me doing this as like almost something which i do almost as half my job
#
and i'd say that in the nicest way possible and it has been an interesting transition for my own
#
headspace and i feel that i've become a lot more confident about the things i'll be able to do
#
i've always had confidence it's grown over the years since my days in banglore and everything
#
else but i've truly been able to okay i can actually do this happened around 75 episodes
#
around 50 i was happy around 75 i'm like and what next so i remember that when if when i
#
finished 50 episodes i made this note down saying notes post 50 and i one of the things okay what
#
are the things i need to now work on because till then it was about let's get the show in
#
that's when i really started looking at my programming a lot more i know but how do i
#
make the variance of my guess interesting how do i look at what's happening around the show
#
in that sense one day someone told me that why is your instagram account so boring i'm like what
#
do you mean i said if you go to it all you see are teal and and yellow posts because i wasn't
#
posting anything except for the episode creative every week i said people want more from you around
#
the show i'm like it seems like a lot of work and so i tried and i would then i started sharing
#
random stuff it wasn't there was no plan something i'd find interesting i would share i was still
#
not i think i became a creator fully in full fledgerness at when lockdown happened because
#
i was suddenly at home i had bought a mic because i wanted to dabble in recording some stuff myself
#
and also because i said sometimes you might need some patchwork i didn't want to travel all the
#
way back to the ibm studio to do it um let me just buy a mic so i bought a usb mic and it was there
#
and when i started to create this i started enjoying all the smaller pieces right because
#
sometimes when you're in a studio you you miss all the other stuff you could do around it and you
#
and i think the first couple of months of lockdown as well because there wasn't much you could do
#
work also wasn't as hectic for a lot of us because there was not as much happening on many fronts so
#
that's when useless information happened because i wanted to just not just talk about advertising
#
and marketing right now the world's in this space i want to talk about something that is utterly
#
utterly random which is why useless happened i was like this is going to be the like you need to have
#
that one hour of irreverence of any random conversation and this is what that show is
#
and the more i did it then i started looking at how other people post um i started looking at how
#
to create and slowly but surely i started enjoying many elements of it i also realized it doesn't
#
have to be that complicated i feel that that baggage you take from having short stuff and
#
create stuff with all that stuff around makes you not want to do it whereas i feel that that's what
#
the difference between generations is is that people now were born with a phone which they
#
could create with whereas when cell phones came into our lives a little later in life
#
right and and then the cameras and everything else so i discovered that in 2020 i think 2019
#
i was still dabbling and i wasn't committing to it i've had friends who in the space said okay why
#
don't you do more with this um and that you need to decide if this is a hobby or if this is something
#
you're doing seriously even me being a podcast host right so i said sometimes you're giving so
#
much time and effort and money money as being just like the time i spend on it is it going
#
somewhere or just doing it for fun so decide that and plan it that way and i have a few of these
#
friends who will always put these points in my ear and whenever i'm just because i tend to get
#
into a flow i enjoy the flow and not really think about how this could be in the future and i have
#
a few of them including puja who will sit me down and say think about why you're doing this and
#
think about and put that down and then move with that and that's what i've been doing
#
but uh yeah i'm just enjoying sharing more and more i found new formats i've um instagram was
#
something i started to do a lot more in 2020 then i started looking at the kind of content i want
#
to share so i start sharing stuff about books because um i've been terrible at remembering
#
pieces of books um i find it fascinating that you remember so many of these things
#
but i sometimes i don't remember anything so i found an app called readwise and readwise has
#
been fabulous for me because everything i would bookmark on my kindle would show up there
#
and i'm like and i'd keep going back to it give me like a few things every day or something i
#
bookmarked or something which i've marked up and so i started just sharing that and that started
#
to be something people really enjoy it my workout videos have were a random thing i just started to
#
do because it's a large part of how i've been able to push i need to find that one piece to anchor
#
my day which gives me like it's my form of meditation like that one what 45 minutes to one
#
hour i work out every day and i work out every single day i took a week off started again uh
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when we're recording this and it's been one of those things so i just started to share a bunch
#
of these things gone back to my love for formats so trying a live format try twitter spaces out
#
try a newsletter all of these things have come from single let's just try this out maybe i'll
#
enjoy doing it and and also some from time to time pull back as well pull back and say okay you're
#
doing too much now think about all the stuff you want to do and don't want to do and um and i can
#
recalibrate as well and kind of come back so that's been my creative journey it's been about what do
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i want to share with the world which i feel they'll get some value from which i also enjoy doing
#
while i am sharing it and i'm realized i have a lot of those and i still have many more which
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i still want to work on and share and so that's what's keeping me going as in this whole creator
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mindset of mine so i'm going to ramble a bit and also give my gentle disagreement with something
#
you said in one of your posts but first a ramble which is that you know when i was teaching a
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podcasting course and and people would ask you know what should i make a podcast about or where
#
are the gaps in the market and blah blah blah and i would always say that listen you know everything's
#
been done every idea is out there every format is out there there's nothing new even if you find a
#
gap in the market 50 other people will the only thing that makes your show unique is you so you
#
have to be authentic to yourself and in a sense that's also how i defined the scene and the unseen
#
is that this is a show that is documenting my intellectual curiosity i speak i have conversations
#
with people i want to have conversations with and like you correctly said you know you have
#
something to learn from everybody every single person on this planet knows something that you
#
don't so if you have the opportunity to have a conversation and learn some of that that's
#
incredible now as you were speaking it struck me that you know everything else that you're doing
#
whether it is sharing the things that you found interesting in the books you read
#
or whether it is your workout videos and so on also feeds into that same thing it feeds into
#
authenticity and who you are which is what will ultimately draw someone you know tomorrow if i
#
announced that hey the scene and the unseen i'm taking a break someone else will do the interviews
#
it's not the same show anymore it's completely different right and ditto with advertising is
#
dead or in fact any good show done by anybody in fact one of my editors who have shared with
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ivm till now was one day telling me how it's fascinating to him that the same guest will
#
come on my show and your show and say kartik show and it'll be a completely different conversation
#
which is one of the delights of it and the gentle disagreement is because i think at some point
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you were speaking about what you should keep in mind when you're starting a podcast and i think
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the second of your questions if i remember correctly was why you you know what do you
#
have that is special that is whatever and i think in a sense that is the wrong question in the sense
#
that one everyone is sort of you know unique in the way and secondly even if you're not an expert
#
in something the point is that you are on a journey which many other people are on at different
#
stages perhaps so there is value in your sharing that part of it anymore so someone who is for
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example watching one of your workout videos might aspire to work out like that might be a person
#
who works out himself and is looking at hey how someone else does it a fellow traveler does it so
#
to say i would imagine that people who listen to our respective podcasts have thought about many of
#
these things are interested in some of these things it doesn't matter if we per se as hosts
#
are not special it is our you know sort of journey that we share and to that extent it seems that
#
a lot of what makes creators stand out is that element of being true to themselves like when
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blogs came about people used to disparagingly say of blogs that hey who wants to know what you had
#
for breakfast and i'm like no actually you know in a sense many people want to know what you had
#
for breakfast what are your sort of thoughts on this so i want to clarify that the point you
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disagree on right is that so why i said that why you is because if you are not convinced as to why
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are you the person to do this you will not stick on to this for too long right because i feel a lot
#
of people start a podcast saying oh i want to do it because somebody else is doing it or somebody
#
else is doing this um that authentic part you spoke about is exactly the reasoning and i agree
#
because it's a journey right like i do this 25 episode thing every 25 episode sit down and say
#
why am i doing this so i revisit that saying why am i that so which is why at some point i said
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i can't only talk advertising and marketing let me talk about business as well for advertising is
#
dead the varun dugi show happened because i'm interested in personal development i'm interested
#
in in workflows and everything else and and productivity as such and so all of that is how
#
that happened but what i feel is interesting about the guests and the voice is that i agree with you
#
podcast for me the biggest revelation has been is that it's such a simple medium in that it's
#
voice and its conversation it is the kind which we do but it's also so liberating because you're
#
not constrained by studio set lights which is what a lot of us get constrained by in video which i
#
know that youtubers and real makers will disagree with me because they don't necessarily have any
#
constraints as well but i feel it's a medium where you can actually go deeper into things and really
#
get insights as you personally want to get out and people will find insights from that and what's
#
also kind of interesting is that i've had my own journey in the way i speak on the podcast over the
#
last two and a half years because i feel that i've evolved right i've evolved my learning i've evolved
#
with the kind of guests i want to bring on kind of conversations i want to have because also at
#
some point i agree with you that people come in for the host a lot more than the guests because
#
they want the the hosts way of having a conversation the way of digging into what the matter of that
#
episode is subject matter of the episode is is what interests them because they relate to that right
#
it's like so i speak to some people about some of the most popular podcasts globally right there
#
many people who don't like masses of scale i kind of agree with them in some contexts because i
#
find reid hoffman to be great in some conversations not so great in many i feel he uses sound design
#
to cover up for many of his own issues maybe in the way he does it similarly for i remember
#
listening to this podcast called inside voices which has been my find of last year and inside
#
voices was a podcast where the conversations are only with podcast hosts i forget the name of the
#
host of the podcast but he says that what does your voice sound like and i found that to be
#
such an interesting question because it has two and he takes it in both the angles right what
#
do you think it sounds like yet what does it really stand for in terms of what it sounds like
#
and he takes both those contexts and i found it and that podcast for me made me think so much about
#
who i am and what my own voice was and that's actually when i built this framework out of
#
thinking about how to make a podcast and and i realized that frameworks were a thing as the
#
deeper i went into the productivity youtube rabbit hole but uh i mean that that podcast taught me a
#
lot i i remember i went back to some uh there's a podcast was called mad golly uh mad golly does
#
what eight podcasts and last count which i've uh i've seen and i was like how does someone do
#
eight podcasts right i think even he's also on konan's podcast if i remember right i'm not sure
#
entirely and so his thing was interesting right because his thing was the curiosity of the
#
different realms he has of interest in how he works on it was intriguing to me so there is so
#
much there to unpack that at some point you're kind of sitting and you're learning and you're
#
reveling in it and you're letting it flow uh you're hoping people are along for the ride
#
and you're hoping that they learn something from it and you'll also very easily know people don't
#
like it i mean i've once in a while i've tried something slightly different someone will write
#
in and say okay i didn't like this and you learn from that not necessarily follow it but you'll
#
also learn from it fascinating and tell me about frameworks now like you know in your newsletter
#
in the november 7th edition to be precise you spoke about three ways to build a framework
#
which i found very relatable because uh that's almost exactly what i try to do not necessarily
#
what i do always and i feel that you know building a framework around something that you're doing
#
helps in two ways one it helps clarify exactly what you're doing and sometimes why and two then
#
it makes the process much easier then it's not a mishmash of stuff that you have to somehow get
#
through there's just an easy way you're sitting down and you're kind of getting the job done it
#
takes those sort of mechanical elements out of the way tell me a bit about how you're thinking of
#
frameworks evolved and how you developed your own workflows and and what are these three ways
#
so i actually got into frameworks very recently i never knew the term framework was the right term
#
to use for a lot of stuff so sometimes when someone would ask me to plan something i think
#
formats were my version of frameworks i know that that's a term i've used a lot through this episode
#
um and and at some point when i would do any form of work i try to come with my own system to do it
#
my own reasoning as to why it has to be a certain way um and there are few youtubers who have
#
actually learned a bunch of stuff from um Casey Neistat has been one of my long-time like favorites
#
for just like the the process of what he did but i knew that i love his episodes where he
#
he draws stuff out with the marker on paper to show how stuff happens i discovered Matt
#
Diavola at some point and Matt Diavola is deep into productivity and and everything else and very
#
again i learned something there is one youtuber who um his name is Nathaniel Drew and i discovered
#
him sometime i think uh late 2019 and i found his story fascinating he's a young guy uh from
#
i forget where in america who's who learns languages who travels the world and the way
#
he even shoots the way he narrates is so classical but he goes back into um he builds out frameworks
#
for his own life and just like talks about that so at some point as i start putting those down
#
and i came up and i came across the term framework i saw okay one second there are things you do in
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life and i feel that the reason why the only way you can do more in your day and yet be healthy
#
get enough rest etc is if you build routine into your life i think routine is the framework for
#
life right so for me my process in the morning in many ways is templatized like it's a standard
#
flow i will i will do x y and z right after each other and that's my framework for my morning
#
very rarely gets altered unless i'm traveling or something else is up
#
and i feel that as you build those things out you then can bring them into every single thing
#
every single thing you do can be brought down to a framework because every framework is also
#
adaptable it's not rigid in my mind it is fluid and that's how i came across it and then i started
#
reading more and more about frameworks and trying to see what people have used and i get more ideas
#
from that right so i sometimes try to adapt a framework sometimes i try to use literally
#
sometimes i come up with one in many cases what i've come up with so my newsletter sometimes i
#
experiment some of the frameworks i put across which i come up with are experiments or frameworks
#
i came up with while i was writing that newsletter it's not like i've thought about before when i'm
#
thinking about a certain topic i'm like what could the structure for this be what could the format
#
for this be and i came up with it and i put it down i have also had some very badly written
#
frameworks which when i read it after i write it i'm like this doesn't work so i'll scrap it
#
and i'll write something else but uh that's i think i love that but it's it's that i think
#
that love for formats has now come into this and it's just made me think about like the other day
#
i was talking to a friend of mine uh name is munjal kapadia right he runs he also does a podcast
#
is that he's also our doc we had layer with him and i was like is there a framework for being a dad
#
and uh because he and i talk a lot about being fathers because i think we we have modern fathers
#
of this generation are so different from how dads were like my dad was a certain way he and i have
#
a fabulous relationship but i think that a lot of what is part of my role as a father involves being
#
a lot more hands-on than it ever was for anybody before and and i enjoy so much of that right um
#
and so i said is there a framework for that and because i feel that everything in life can be
#
drilled down to a framework but that framework might not necessarily work for everyone it could
#
work for some not work for the others and the more i put it down at least in my head for a person
#
who's so unstructured it helps me bring some sort of structure into my own mind and i feel that's
#
why frameworks are important especially for unstructured to kind of keep putting down
#
so is there a framework for being a dad what's your framework my framework for being a dad is
#
a few things um i don't i haven't put it on paper but i feel that to be a dad you need to be
#
the balance of a person who has enough time and a set of interests so i i fell over the quadrant
#
right with me and leah there are things which only she and i do together so it's that one part
#
that's only her and my thing to do um and they'll be small things for the longest time it was me
#
just taking her to the loo when she had to do number two right it's it was our thing that dad
#
takes me that papa takes me to do that like mom doesn't take honey doesn't take um unless i was
#
in a meeting or whatever or it could be the fact that there's this book i read for very often
#
or of recent times i'm trying to get her into star wars because she is named leah and it's
#
wait as little princess but how i read it is that i don't read it literally we look at what's
#
happening in each page and i come up with stories i want to teach her how to imagine
#
right in having an imagination has helped me through life in boring classrooms in in boring
#
meetings in at times when i was just generally bored or didn't have anything to do or just kind
#
of imagine what life could be like um find your happy place and things like that so so some of
#
those things are stuff which she and i do together i'm also the person who who in her life will be
#
the most i think strict is a bad word but she knows that when i call something as a line i give her
#
a reason and and she she knows that i will not flinch from that if i if with that reason right so
#
everybody's surprised that i would be the strictest person with her because i'm not that person at all
#
in with anybody else um but i feel that you need to have one there's a line between being a parent
#
and being a friend i don't necessarily want to need to be her friend but i need to be her parent
#
and i feel that that's a distinction so while there's stuff we do together there is stuff which
#
are things that she knows i will have a say on and then beyond that is the fact that i'll always
#
have time for her for stuff that's important for her so she has a twice a week skating class so
#
i'm making this up while i'm talking to you but if i had to put on this i feel that as a parent
#
if i had to put on this i feel that as dads you miss a lot of things in the past when i look at
#
for many people's fathers my my my dad had had to miss stuff because he's a doctor i have a case
#
you can't come if it's sports day and then stuff i understand all of those things but for me it's
#
very important that there's some things that are part of leah's life which i know will be important
#
to her which if i am not a part of that's me not doing what i have to do as a father so stuff that
#
we do together stuff that's important to her and then stuff that's important to me rather which is
#
the stuff i'm strict on saying okay you need to like i want her to learn to take her own shoes
#
and put them in the shoe rack not leave them around it's a small thing but i think it teaches
#
you to keep things in their own place and and keep them organized um or rather keep them
#
how do i put it i have a thing about not letting things get spoiled because you don't take care of
#
them like i still have a lot of my toys from when i was a kid because i took care of them
#
um they're now with her and i'm trying to make sure she doesn't spoil them so some of those
#
gi joes have landed up with her now and so i said that it's it's the triangle of those three things
#
is what being a dad is and and you're just around for the ride i feel that fathers and daughters
#
and fathers and uh and their kids have a very interesting relationship but it doesn't have to
#
be a disjointed relationship and i don't have a disjointed one with my father and i don't want her
#
to have one with us how much does conscious thinking about frameworks affect whatever the
#
framework is a framework of for example uh you know in um that episode of advertising is dead
#
with puja she speaks about how you guys have a relationship which is almost not like a conventional
#
couple you look at it more as a partnership and uh you know obviously you're very good friends
#
and all of that and i think you also spoke in that one of you spoke in that about how
#
in the early parts of the marriage it was a kind of most standard and then it evolved to becoming
#
this so do you think that at and we all all our relationships are kind of in a sense driven by
#
inertia that it falls into a particular groove and then it stays in that groove unless it is forced
#
out of that group by an external event so do you think there is something to be gained from all of
#
us in just sitting back and reconsidering the things that we take for granted and the grooves
#
that are running and thinking of what is the framework here and is that the right framework
#
what should be the framework here because a change in framework it seems to me can be profound it can
#
affect you know not just both people but everyone around them like a very charming picture of your
#
daughter that i saw on puja's instagram page was where she's cooking something and she's sitting
#
on the platform itself and she's making some bread and cheese or whatever and a lovely photograph
#
of course but it also strikes me that you know almost sort of a symbolic image of what you'd
#
expect a young girl to be when both her parents are strong independent professionals and you know
#
relate to each other with a certain kind of respect and not you know which many frameworks
#
of traditional indian marriages actually don't have even within privileged households so do
#
you think there is something to be said about figuring out the framework for everything that
#
one does i feel it's all about balance right it's about so what puja and i found over the
#
years that we've been married is that there are certain things that are important to me certain
#
important to her and there's some things which bother each of us about each other and in the
#
same way it goes it goes with leya it goes with anything else and and there are some things you
#
can work on some things you can't it could be as simple as i'm a person who when he's sitting keep
#
shaking his leg i have that i have that nervous stick of you know that person who shakes his leg
#
it irritates the hell out of puja i have still not been able to do sort that out in all the years
#
we've married it's been over like what eight odd years that we've been married but i know for a
#
fact that she knows that i i like my things a certain way so for me my morning time when i
#
brew my coffee and i go do my business are very important my my my mood for the day gravitates
#
around me doing my business in the morning and i feel that's i've put it as nicely and less graphic
#
as possible whereas puja likes the house arranged in a way that it's lovely to look at and so when
#
i before i go to bed i make sure stuff is put in its place it's my thing to do i would not have
#
done that before we were married i would leave things as they are but i know it's important to
#
her and i don't mind doing it i i'm a person who enjoys washing dishes i find it it lets me zone
#
out of the world and it's weirdly therapeutic in some cases so early lockdown was not a problem
#
so the way i look at it but i think you find those pieces and the more you find those pieces
#
you also then figure out what those grooves are that you spoke of right sometimes you find
#
something you know neither of you will want to budge from and then you need to have that
#
condition to find that new groove that kind of comes in because and that's what early periods
#
of any relationship are that you're trying to find those what are the non-negotiables what are the
#
negotiables and the non-negotiables i feel in most cases you either come to terms with
#
but if you don't that's just going to be stuff that sticks for a long time and create issues
#
we've luckily found very few non-negotiables where one of us is going to come to terms with it
#
and i think that's how you evolve it so it is in a way a framework but i feel it's something that
#
also evolves with how we evolve as people like when i met puja and she met me i feel we were
#
also very different people than we are now eight years later we were both grown so it's still an
#
evolving piece what could be like i was not as ambitious a person as i am now when she met me
#
even though i was an entrepreneur and i had glitch going on everything else i'm a lot more ambitious
#
now because i suddenly see there's so much more i could do with what i've been able to build and
#
do in life and and similarly for when i look at her i've always seen puja as a certain way with
#
her career but i'm seeing the stuff she's doing just like beyond the workplace and the stuff she's
#
focused on from a purpose standpoint etc which were always there but i feel that she's found
#
that voice so i feel that we evolve as people so you evolve those grooves in those frameworks as
#
well but it's also it's conversation it's important in any relationship to not let and i believe that
#
the biggest the biggest problems in the world can be solved by a conversation and i feel that we
#
don't have conversations where you're trying to listen to the other person i think conversations
#
are a lot people think it's a lot more about speaking i think as a podcast source you realize
#
it's a lot more about listening than it is about speaking and and i feel that we don't listen
#
enough but in any relation if you as long as you listen enough you find some nuance to what the
#
other person's point of view is and you work around it and as long as you do that you'll figure a way
#
to evolve it into and to make it work you know like you correctly said you know one of the things
#
you learn as a podcaster if you're paying attention is how much you need to listen like
#
you know stephen covey once said that we don't listen to understand we listen to respond which
#
is a really bad habit that you actually and and i think you know and this is something i discussed
#
with the great podcaster russ roberts when he was on my show is about how there is actually a moral
#
component to having a good conversation and to actually listening like you know immanuel
#
cant famously spoke of the categorical imperative that you don't want to treat you know another
#
human being as a means to an end but as an end in themselves and very often when we are in conversation
#
we are doing exactly that we are treating other people as a means to an end either we want to show
#
off how smart we are so you'll find you know hosts interrupting all the time and you know just to do
#
one-upmanship or looking for gotcha moments and all of that which is horrible and i think that
#
once as a podcaster you know you start realizing that you need to get the ego out of the way get
#
the self out of the way and just sit back and listen then you know it would strike me that at
#
some level that's then going to percolate through to the rest of your behavior with people where
#
inevitably you will also be in some situations treating some people as a means to an end
#
so could becoming a better podcaster make you a better human being 100 i'm a better human
#
being as a podcaster now than i was before i was a terrible listener i was openly called out for
#
being a terrible listener because i have a tendency which my daughter has gotten from me i believe
#
which is that i can zone out very easily so i could be talking to you right now and my eyes
#
will glaze a little bit and be looking into the horizon and i'm imagining something which is more
#
interesting to me than what is going on right now people have let it go people have called it out
#
through my life but being a podcast host you don't have a choice you have to listen have you been
#
guilty of sometimes owning out of course you will sometimes have those instances in every every so
#
often in an episode where you're like yeah it's okay it's an autopilot i can glaze off for a few
#
minutes it's happened but it's made me a better human being because i feel like the when you're
#
really trying to drive a conversation you're really trying to understand the other person
#
right you're trying to understand what makes them tick which is why i think i do a podcast
#
is because i talk to like advertising is that is a lot of the people are corporate people
#
but i found such interesting people with such interesting interests and and thought processes
#
and and lives that many times that part excites me so much more than the actual business part of
#
it this is great it's great to get into when you understand all of that but the nuances of being
#
human is so interesting because i feel people's driving forces people even what interests them
#
is has always been something which i always looked at which i've found interesting and it gives me a
#
way to kind of dig deeper into that yeah and actually do you know the most rewarding parts
#
of some of my recent conversations are the sort of you know where you're not talking about the
#
subject per se but just about the person in their journey which like many people were very very
#
moved by uh you know my episode with gazala vahab especially the first 90 minutes where we spoke
#
about a personal journey or i had the grizzled financial journalist tamil bondopathy on my show
#
and he started of the show by chatting about how during the lockdown it was so heartbreaking for
#
him to go out on the streets of bandra and see people who had earlier been vendors now begging
#
and one of them you know held his hand and took him to a biryani stall and said please buy me
#
something and you know those glimpses of a person's humanity are i think kind of what make many of
#
these conversations so rewarding to get back to frameworks for just a moment and for the very
#
last time if you are to sort of give advice to creators like if there is someone out there
#
who's thinking that hey i want to do a podcast or i want to do a youtube show or i want to create
#
whatever you know and can you give me an easy framework which will which i don't necessarily
#
have to follow all the way around i can discover my own thing but can you give me an easy framework
#
which will help me get started and think about this and i think in your newsletter in fact you
#
had actually done this so so what would you say how should one begin to then approach that problem
#
where you've got a ton of ideas and creativity and all of that but you want to actually you know do
#
something with it and bring it together i feel that in today's time to be a creator you need to
#
be able to play the long game saying how long can you do this and it's by choosing what you do
#
as a creator so important it could be that you write it could be that you do a podcast could be
#
that you just make fun videos on on on instagram could be that you tweet i feel that i've offlaid
#
i've rediscovered twitter in many ways because i feel that somewhere the algorithm for me has
#
changed and i've gotten this set of people who are giving me a lot of insights in many things
#
right so you need to find what your medium which you can do very easily is and i say easily because
#
it should be natural to you right there's a learning curve then you have to take your time
#
to do it and i remember when i had tanmay on my podcast he had said two things and i found both
#
of them very insightful one is he said that there are two kinds of youtubers one are people who are
#
supreme experts who will do one to two videos a month who are really working on it pulling
#
it together and stuff and those guys they work on every single one the other kinds of people
#
are doing stuff every day there's almost every day something coming out it's just that you're
#
hitting you with so much volume that you will find something that you enjoy and at some point
#
you're almost like waiting to see what you will do tomorrow and the other thing he said was he said
#
what would you do for no money who should be what you should be as a creator because at some point
#
you are a creator not because you want to make money or want to be a star but you're a creator
#
because you really enjoy doing it in like i follow this guy called Ali Abdal on youtube
#
Ali Abdal i discovered him very recently in between i think like late last year i find his
#
journey so fascinating right for a guy who was putting up youtube videos on how to prepare for
#
medical exams which i thought was interesting because he was doing it anywhere so very easily
#
could make it but he was interested in this to now being this person who's not he's taken a break
#
from medicine and doing all the productivity stuff he's doing because of all the content he's made
#
um such a journey but i think at every stage he was doing something that he would naturally be
#
able to do would love to do and it just being so like that flow of authentic content coming out
#
is so important because this you can't manufacture this for too long and whenever you try to
#
manufacture it because oh somebody is because you will find like for instance you'll find many
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Gary Vee clones out there right people will watch Gary Vee content you will find five people who
#
are doing exactly what Gary Vee does i have actually dug into Gary Vee's framework which
#
he shares openly about how to create content i think they're fabulous frameworks like there's
#
so much to learn from how he says how one piece of content can give you 10 000 pieces or whatever
#
6000 pieces of content and i think that's that's a great insight do i agree with most of his
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offices no i find him entertaining in some find him insightful in some find him repetitive in most
#
but doesn't mean i have to become him i can learn something from him to make what i would come to me
#
naturally do because i will never speak like that even if i ever speak about business or speak
#
about entrepreneurship but i look at again certain nuances of it so i feel what's most important is
#
to find what you can naturally do all day every day do it quickly so my newsletter for something
#
i write like in one flow get done with it on a thursday night or a friday night sometimes
#
on a saturday morning about half an hour or about an hour and a half before it actually has to go
#
to people's inboxes i've been guilty of that a few times but it's something that i know i can
#
naturally write and if you can't be honest about it and find that once you find that then don't
#
think about okay is it going to make me money am i going to get too many listeners or viewers etc
#
for the first many many episodes you know you might do a year two years before you get enough
#
listeners or viewers you might do about 100 200 like i didn't even look at what my listener
#
count was till i was like what 60 70 episodes then because i didn't it didn't strike me that i should
#
look at it i used to always gauge it by who would respond to me on a linkedin and instagram because
#
i'd have someone write in and ask me a question or give me a point of view or give me something
#
they liked about it i'm like people are listening enough validation for the show i'm doing but find
#
that find that level of feedback um find that feedback loop for yourself find that thing you
#
would love to do and while you do that also explore other avenues and you might find something you
#
enjoy as much like for me now why do i make workout videos which is an interesting story right
#
so i was grew up a scrawny kid um i don't put on weight easily which people tell me is a blessing
#
which i for me was always okay i'm i'm this um i can very easily become this scrawny uh person so
#
i've always tried to put on weight try to do all that and at some point decided to be fit because
#
i'm a father because i wanted to carry layer around i want to do all that i just get tired
#
very easily because also i quit smoking what 11 years ago now but i don't think that's
#
still in the system so i i for fun was doing stuff but i actually make my videos because
#
i enjoy the fact that i'm trying to find the right track for it and i make everything into a meme
#
so all my videos are literally be using workouts as a visual for what is a workplace meme and so
#
that's what keeps me going i'm doing it not a for a what do i find as an interesting visual
#
not necessarily interesting exercise i do a lot of other stuff which doesn't look great on camera
#
so i don't even show them i think this is fun this is a great funny meme to do with it and finally
#
i get to collect enough audio music tracks which i would not normally listen to and use them in
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these videos so you will over time find stuff beyond what you normally do focus on that's
#
because you keep exploring other formats but don't ignore the prime one which you started with
#
let that go and then find another one so now go on that journey keep discovering and keep evolving
#
the the first one you built out this is really great advice and i'll kind of double down on four
#
of the things you said like one i am a big fan of ali abdal as well in fact in my podcasting course
#
i have this slide where i show ali abdal and there's a graph in front of him which is something that
#
he shared during a video he made when he reached a million subscribers and that graph shows an
#
exponential curve and he's talking about how when he uh you know he made two videos a week for about
#
half a year so he had around 50 videos and when he reached the 50th video he hit 1000 subscribers
#
and i'm just thinking most young people i know they're not going to get to a video 50 to hit a
#
thousand the moment they see the numbers aren't high you know they are going to drop out in fact
#
you know what is often said about science fiction writers or forecasters is what i think is true of
#
a lot of creators that they tend to overestimate the short term and try to overestimate the
#
long term and underestimate the long term so they'll create something and they'll think oh i'll get
#
you know so many followers and so many millions or whatever and that simply isn't true in fact
#
abdal's own sort of advice to young creators in a subsequent video was that you know if you want to
#
be a youtube person make two videos a week for two years so that's like 200 videos and only then see
#
how many subscribers you've got so it is actually in that sense playing the long game so the advice
#
play the long game advice number two flows from this which is that do it if you love it because
#
if you don't love it you won't be able to do it you won't be able to do two videos a week for two
#
years unless you really care and you're really sort of into it and that love again comes from
#
authenticity where you know you're being true to yourself in everything you do and not trying to
#
copy a gary v or someone else and not trying to fill a niche or whatever you would do it anyway
#
and then good things happen because you do underestimate the long term as well the third
#
one is iterate endlessly like out of the you know the two models that you spoke about you know what
#
tanmay told you about i really prefer the second model so much where you're doing something every
#
day because i think what that model does is that like you shouldn't let perfection be the enemy
#
of production as one of my guests said in a previous episode if you just do something every
#
like what makes for excellence what makes for excellence is iteration you do something again
#
and again and again you get better and better at it you know virat coli does not become a great
#
batsman by planning how to bat he plays thousands and tens of thousands of balls in the nets
#
so you got to do that with whatever format it is you are kind of creating in and finally the
#
fourth one which you know perhaps even i should implement in some way is be open you know you
#
might find a groove in doing a particular kind of content and you might think that huh i've got this
#
sorted i've learned this we here but the point is that your content is coming from a particular
#
place and there are other kinds of content which can come from a particular place so you know just
#
because something is working doesn't mean you should kind of get stuck there you know think
#
about different ways of sort of doing that and then you know these are things i've you know thought
#
a lot about and i just feel it's important to kind of let you know drive it home to creators
#
especially the bit about the long game which i feel is so true in another of your newsletter
#
editions on december 19th you in fact wrote about what you call the intimate content ecosystem
#
and you spoke about how there are like different layers to this so tell me what you mean by intimate
#
content and what these sort of layers kind of are because i find that it's a very clear way of
#
sort of giving direction to what a young creator might you know then be able to envisage himself
#
doing so the whole evolution of how creators even function right is that i feel that many times you
#
look at from the outside you look at it and i think for me it was because i came from advertising and
#
still am the idea was okay you make money off ads but i feel the real thing is that and again this
#
is a learning from from gary because i think he gives everything away for free but then as i saw
#
more and more youtubers and more and more creators i realized that some things they would make people
#
pay for and i said okay what do they make people pay for and i realized that they were all building
#
communities and they were building different kinds of communities there is this i was listening to
#
uh pivot which is my favorite podcast um and and i remember that uh i think between scott and and
#
kara sushi they were saying something and said that every person right now be it a journalist
#
be it a content creator is building multiple channels of distribution and the more channels
#
of distribution they have the more stuff they kind of own right because that adds back to what the
#
earlier point about trying out newer things is right like imagine every creator who was only
#
putting stuff on tiktok in india suddenly lost all of that um which is why most of them now are also
#
on reels also on moj and everything else and chingari and all the others um so going back to
#
this i feel that what ends up happening is there's certain things that people are willing to pay for
#
but for them to be willing to pay for it you also have to then kind of build that community of
#
people so it's layers right you have your general audience who's listening to it happy with that
#
going ahead some people who want to have more interactions who then kind of build that community
#
with um where you might give some extra pieces there and then you'll really find this whole
#
concept of super fans and i look at super fans is an interesting thing right one is when i look at
#
the only fans model not necessarily in the patreon model right i think only fans has a bad name
#
globally because of it's used now as a almost a supplement for soft porn but what it traditionally
#
is is the fact that i'm giving you exclusive content for you to pay me something and what's
#
also happening now with every like look at sub stack sub stack for me why i started writing a
#
newsletter was for two reasons um i saw this as an opportunity for me to write again as something
#
which i've always been wanting to do for the longest time and secondly let me put out an audio
#
version of a newsletter which i thought was interesting to try out so i said okay it's a
#
it's a private podcast i sent you it felt so interestingly intimate because that's the word
#
i use and eventually at some point would someone pay for that i don't know what i'm writing right
#
now is something to be paid for but it started off as me experimenting with models which had
#
possible pay walls i know twitter's coming up with a model like that i know everybody will come to
#
that and eventually you would subscribe to tiers of stuff that you would want from someone who
#
really relate to and that's actually the way creators will eventually make the most amount
#
of their money you know i know they all i know the creators already do make a large amount of
#
the money through that but if you build that system where a set of people are coming to you
#
for a very specific kind of content and it doesn't have to be a thousand people or 10,000 people it
#
could even be a hundred people 50 people but it's intimate because it's made for you it is exclusive
#
because this is what you really enjoy and you're going deeper into it versus the general stuff
#
that you would get which everybody else can get as well and the ability to do that is something
#
which we finally have because of the internet because of the creative ecosystem and that's
#
something which you can always use so you don't necessarily have to be general entertainment
#
right i remember on television there used to be this thing about the general entertainment channel
#
and the niche channel now it's great to be that niche channel because people want niches so if
#
you are niche even if you are a person making a movie for netflix you're for a niche movie maker
#
i feel that you might get a deal faster than if you're a masi movie maker because they need to
#
fill those gaps of all those niches versus kind of giving them that a big general entertainment
#
thing so if you have a specific niche and you can go deep into that get a captive audience
#
you will find a paying audience and people are willing to pay for stuff i feel that we sometimes
#
don't give people enough credit that they would pay for things i think people will they just need
#
to see enough value in it which is why the the broader part the general part is so important
#
because that's what gives them that level of trust that them paying you some money will give them
#
something of value so the general stuff is very important then you kind of drill it down
#
drill it down yeah and that's fascinating and also the other thing is you know in a country
#
like india with you know more than a billion people even a niche can be huge and for a creator you
#
don't really need to think of scale like you know like i think of the sort of the two things
#
creators need to take into account as being you know reach and revenue and you need to think
#
about what you're doing for each and what you're doing for revenue and you know how that kind of
#
uh balances out and and what i would also say is that one when you think of niche a niche doesn't
#
need to be like an existing uh niche recognized by everyone else like say sci-fi is a niche or
#
this is a niche or that is a niche it can just be a niche that you can build around yourself like
#
you know kevin kelly wrote this essay a decade ago about a thousand true fans which is a great
#
phrase and which is coming through today on substrack where his argument was if you find a
#
a thousand fans who are willing to pay a moderate amount for you that's enough you don't need more
#
scale than that and on substrack you actually find you know where your standard subscription
#
is a hundred dollars a year you get a thousand people you are actually sort of doing well enough
#
and there are tons of creators on substrack who are using that the other point that i would kind
#
of put out there as i've discovered from my own experience is that you don't necessarily need to
#
make something subscription or put it behind a paywall to make people pay for it like even the
#
voluntary model can really work where if people appreciate certain kinds of content they'll be
#
kind of perfectly happy to sort of pay voluntarily now i've taken tons of your time this is already
#
like three advertising is dead episode just in quantity not quality mind you so i'm going to
#
sort of end with a couple of final questions so my penultimate question is really about you know
#
what do you wake up in the morning looking forward to like one of the benchmarks that i
#
set for myself the simple question is that every morning when i wake up i want to look forward to
#
the rest of the day so therefore i want to fill up my tomorrow with something that i know i will look
#
forward to when i wake up in the morning which doesn't always happen but i'll just then you know
#
maybe order a biryani or something and that'll do for them but so what is and you are obviously
#
someone who you know has been reflective has thought about all of this has built frameworks
#
even redefined your podcast just by thinking about it rather than going with the groove that
#
it was going on quite well so what excites you when you wake up in the morning what are
#
you looking forward to so if you'd ask me this question pre-covid my answer would have been a
#
lot simpler i've i've always been this enthused person to wake up on a monday morning really
#
excited about going to work which people tell me is the most irritating thing to have around you
#
uh because i'm like yeah tomorrow's monday i'm that person right i used to be rather
#
i still but now i'm this person who's waking up every morning saying okay how many things can i
#
actually do today i tried writing a journal and i realized i have terrible at writing a journal
#
because i stopped at one question saying why do you do what you do and i feel that it changes
#
every day for me so i couldn't define that and i and i and i bought um this journal by ryan holiday
#
and i and i couldn't go beyond that page and i still have it's been stuck there for like
#
three months now but so i wake up every day saying a set of things i really want to do
#
and and it it no longer is one thing and that's what keeps me excited is that in a day if i only
#
did work for glitch or if i only did advertising is dead or only a newsletter i would not be a
#
happy person if in a day i'm doing five really different things five different audiences
#
and i say audiences because uh and i speak about this uh to many people these days is
#
when my first episode with ranveer came out for varmduki show there was a commenter guy who said
#
even though it's your first podcast you've done a great job it's really exciting i'm waiting for
#
more right and i wrote to him i actually was smiling because i was like it's great it's a
#
very different audience and i have a fresh set of people to kind of get um and and so that's what
#
excites me what excites me every morning is okay so much to do i've also learned to wind down by
#
evening because that at some point gets exhausting and i have had like weekends weeks where i've just
#
crashed and my brain stops to function but so which is why i have a wind down system every night
#
where post 8 9 p.m i slowly it's actually i am doing a ton of stuff which is that my pace is
#
slower and i drink turmeric tea which is my way to wind down i messed up your wind down system
#
tonight apologies for that this has been a wind down right and okay so i'll break my final question
#
into two because something that you said as usual made uh further sparks go off which is that you
#
know you're doing multiple things and what it seems to me is that you were doing a set number
#
of things and those expanded so you were doing the glitch and then you were doing glitch plus
#
advertising is dead and then you add newsletter and then you add the varun duggie show and then
#
you have the working out videos and all of that and it's expanding what do you do for like are
#
there any hacks you'd like to share in terms of a knowledge management and b productivity my way of
#
knowledge management is that i scribble stuff down and i used to do it on paper now i do it on the
#
phone or the ipad because you lose paper and that's my thing so i have a bunch of these snippets
#
either like screenshots or just like stuff i've written down which i keep and i feel that's
#
invaluable because we all believe that ideas will stick in our head but they come to us in
#
the worst possible time right just when you're going to go to sleep sometimes when you're half
#
asleep when you're in the shower always note them down they'll help you in the future that's how i
#
write my newsletter half the time my newsletter stuff is from some random piece which i wrote
#
a one line somewhere and i go back to that and that's how i write every week so that's really
#
you know one way of doing it the other way is to constantly i mean i find apps that really help me
#
i found readwise like i mentioned earlier which keeps that i found this fabulous app called next
#
big idea which i think has been one of the revelations of of my reading life because many
#
times it's not just about finishing a book i i sometimes don't end up finishing books
#
but sometimes also about finding the right books and next big idea was started by malcolm gladwell
#
adam grunt and daniel pink and a few others they give you a curation of different non-fiction books
#
and they have the author talk about five insights from their book and if you like the five insights
#
you might and they're given amazon link to go buy it and their subscription also has modes where
#
they'll even send you a couple of books every month which i haven't done but i subscribe to
#
this part of it it lets me a kind of get a bunch of ideas for stuff that's happening people are
#
writing about it's also made me buy a bunch of those books but not every book has to be read
#
fully in many cases every book some books you just need want to get the main insight out of it so
#
that's been one big driver because for me i have this need to get as much information about every
#
random thing into my head but i also realize you only have a certain amount of time and with a
#
mind like mine you will zone out of a book very easily so don't end up finishing a lot of books
#
and i tend to try and go back to them over time and just find different people to follow in the
#
same way right so i'm a huge um geek culture fan and fanboy of all things marvel dc everything
#
right so like i spent four hours watching the snider cut i watched it straight up and i watched
#
it the next day again because puja had only seen one hour and she had gone into sleep and um but
#
then i after read that and post that i'll then run through all the youtube videos of people
#
discussing smaller nuances smaller easter eggs i'll do that which means i've easily spent a good six
#
to eight hours around the snider cut if not more um in the span of like say a week but that for me
#
is great information like it's some i'll store that somewhere it'll help in some conversation
#
somewhere and weirdly enough those are things i never have had to scribble it's the most serious
#
stuff which is frameworks or like information or book stuff you ask me something about a random
#
thing that happened in a zack snider movie i will remember it verbatim like you asked me what happens
#
in in a scene in tridev i will tell you what happens um so i guess some things never change
#
yeah and in you know one of your newsletters feb 6th you spoke about what you called quote
#
the balanced information diet stop code where you spoke about how you need to satisfy your heart
#
your mind and your belly so obviously some of the going down rabbit holes as it were are you know
#
satisfying different aspects of that and another penultimate question before i get to the final
#
question because this came out of that you mentioned somewhere else that uh you know that that
#
because of being a father you're consuming a lot of content you want otherwise for example you've
#
seen frozen many many times and you absolutely love it you read her books and all of that so
#
does that help that does having this sort of new window into content build a new appreciation and
#
therefore make you a sort of a different person as well because you're consuming stuff differently
#
and looking at content differently yeah for sure i want to do a dad podcast at some point i will
#
definitely do it i feel um i feel dads don't have information uh out there but the stuff i consume
#
with leah um and i find some of it beautiful and i've discovered some really interesting things
#
um because i feel a lot of the books that are available for kids now talk about empathy they
#
talk about like she has a book which the the main focus is we're all the same but we're different
#
right and i find the fact that these are books available now which i don't think we had when we
#
were growing up right which is which is amazing so even if we were to talk to her about the color
#
of someone's skin or to talk to her about some people have privilege and some people don't at
#
the age where she is three and a half um she's able to understand some of those concepts because
#
of the stuff she consumes like even when i look at frozen and we've seen it like some 50,000 times
#
or if not more in this house it's a simple thing right you're not having when you talk about love
#
you're not talking about love just between a man and a woman you're talking about the love between
#
two sisters and so just some concepts which you can get out of that and i think she understands
#
and she's like she's understood what death is because of frozen which i feel is as a darker
#
subject but because she asked us that will at some point everyone go to the dark sea which is what
#
you know Elsa and Anna say the parents have kind of gone to and so some concepts are understood
#
and it makes me understand also understand human beings right and how certain pieces kind of come
#
to them how you can teach and this side of content for me has really opened up just like
#
like the possibilities of how someone as young could be taught concepts which you might feel
#
are very evolved and you also find some really random stuff like there's a book Jimmy Fallon
#
wrote where he was trying to get his daughter's first words i think daughter was son's first
#
words to be papa and he wrote a fun book where it's basically um all the animals saying move
#
and papa so basically papa was all over it daughter's first words were mama but um and
#
you also find stuff like that it's just like a random book it has nothing in it but it's so
#
enjoyable and i get to play with lego again after a long time so i'm back to that so yeah it's
#
amazing you suddenly discover different sides of interest which engineer can resist playing with
#
lego and that's a lovely quote by your dads don't have information that could be the title of your
#
podcast if you ever do one okay so now my final final question which is that you know listeners
#
of the scene and the unseen are always asking for recommendations what should i read what should i
#
watch you know and you of course are in a sense an omnivore of great content but if you had to
#
pick a handful of things i won't put a number on it but a handful of things which
#
you feel were life-changing for you or you recommend to everyone whether they watch it
#
or they read it or whatever uh you know what would they be so i've been interested in stoicism a lot
#
in the last year or so year or two and ryan holiday opened it up for me because he normalized
#
that whole thing for anyone who's struggling with the way the world is there's a book called
#
stillness is the key it's a fabulous book it takes into age-old philosophy but it's just something
#
which i think for the way the world is right now um with everything that's going on around you that
#
book has like it's helped me like i go back to that many times stillness is the key is fabulous
#
to kind of go to in the other ones that i've read in recent times i'm just kind of thinking
#
so if no one's read the ride of a lifetime by bob iger right again a fabulous book just like
#
because i feel arguably one of the best ceos of this time and just the fact that um and i
#
was listening to him on masters of scale with reed offman it's a two-part uh conversation
#
he talks about how you can actually make so many acquisitions as a conglomerate like disney when
#
imagine they acquired marvel acquired uh lucasfilm and acquired pixar but let them still have that
#
identity and that exist as those brands it's so separate from disney so it's so much to learn
#
from his journey and the stuff he's kind of been through so ride of a lifetime one of more business
#
side of things if i had to recommend a podcast in the last couple of years i've listened to i'd say
#
two of them one is inside voice which i mentioned earlier there's something called inside voice which
#
is not what this is i sometimes i've said this some months and someone posted the other one so
#
i realized there was another one inside voices it's a head gum podcast so in case the thing comes in
#
fabulous way to kind of dig into the mindsets of podcast hosts and my favorite fictionish podcast
#
in recent times is something called blockbuster season one is a story of how george lucas and
#
steven swielberg came up with the blockbuster genre of cinema season two is james cameron i'm
#
not a james cameron fan but i love that season because it just made me like him a little bit
#
more than because i didn't i don't necessarily i didn't like avatar that maybe i'm biased in that
#
front of things so that would be my podcast in terms of shows i don't watch as much content as
#
i should on streaming but if you haven't watched wonder vision watch wonder vision i feel it's the
#
riskiest thing anyone can do to make a show like that considering it was marvel making it because
#
every episode is almost like a different genre and they've imagined taking a marvel property
#
and making it into a sitcom which sounds really bizarre so that so even people who don't necessarily
#
subscribe to superhero stuff have enjoyed it because it just feels so different but in a non
#
geek side of things there's this docu series with dr dre and jimmy ivy called the defiant ones
#
arguably one of my favorite docu series to go back to i go back to it many times i think the
#
stories is generally so interesting i'm not even getting into do i am i pro dr dre not but i think
#
the story of just how that piece worked is is just fabulous to look at and and i've always kind of
#
one of those places i kind of go back to um and i kind of re-watch it sometimes and can get some
#
nuances from it so that and and there's the last one is um there's this guy's called the minimalist
#
they do a podcast they've done a documentary called minimalism they have a youtube channel as
#
well they have a new documentary which is on netflix which i think is called less is more
#
or something like that as a person who is not a minimalist and everybody laughs when i say i'm
#
watching something around minimalism because i'm the opposite of it i'm a holder in many ways
#
i find that the way they talk about it to be so interesting that it makes me want to watch it
#
to watch it and i feel that that says something for the fact that someone who is never going to
#
be a minimalist i know that i'm not going to but i'm so fascinated by it because of how they speak
#
about it so it's a i i think that's an interesting one to watch well you know even if lives aren't
#
minimalistic frameworks can be in fact the best frameworks are uh the most stripped down and basic
#
ones i suppose varun thanks thanks so much for you know uh gracing me with your presence and giving
#
me so much of your time no guest has ever given you as much time as you've given me today so
#
thanks a lot for that and thank you so much this is fabulous i never thought i could i could have
#
actually do this longer conversation on a podcast so i i've finally uh this is the longest i've ever
#
done an episode so great thanks again if you enjoyed listening to this episode head on over
#
to the show notes where i've given a bunch of links about all the things we spoke of including
#
all of varun's work you can also check out his website varun dugi.com and follow him on twitter
#
at varun dugi you can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past
#
episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
#
did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the
#
production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any
#
amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking thank you
