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2021 is behind us, and 2022 is here. The end of a year, the beginning of another. How much
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significance does it have? A date is arbitrary, after all, and there should be no difference
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between January 1 and, say, September 4. But sometimes in our lives, the milestone of a
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date can be useful. Mentally, it can help us leave the past behind and start again.
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The last couple of years have been tough for most of us. I've experienced personal loss,
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seen my friends and family and everyone around me suffer, and at times, it felt endless.
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The pandemic was more of a shared trauma for this country than even the horrors of partition.
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That was restricted to a few areas, while Covid entered every corner of this nation.
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I think every single Indian must know someone personally who died in this time. That is
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such a terrifying thought. But we have to move ahead. If we cannot live in hope, we
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cannot live at all. And one of the things that gives me hope is technology. I'm not
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just referring to medical science, which came up with so many effective vaccines and made
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this nightmare shorter than it would have been 10 years ago. I'm also referring to
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everyday tech, which has empowered individuals, especially individual creators. Creators today
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have the means of production in their own hands. They don't need intermediaries to
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reach their audiences. And there are no gatekeepers to tell them what they may not do. I've experienced
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this myself as a creator, and it's been a blessing. Now, along with the hope this may
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give us, we also need the willpower to do something about it. Do not languish anymore,
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but snap out of our funk and get down to using our time in productive ways. I'm still figuring
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out how to do this. But I will learn and I will move forward. And I hope you do as well.
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen. My guest today is Deepak Gopalakrishnan, also known
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as Chuck Gopal. Now, I cannot introduce him in one sentence. He's a creator, humorous,
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cartoonist, an ex-advertising man, a digital marketing guru, a prolific podcaster, a prolific
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writer, a music maven, and a teacher and mentor to many. He's also learned a lot about productivity,
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especially through the latest of his podcasts, Getting Meta. So I thought it would be great
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to have Chuck on the show to share some of his insights on productivity so that people
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like me could get cracking on our new year resolutions right away. He came home to my
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home studio. We started talking and we couldn't stop. We spoke for more than four hours on
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a bunch of subjects, including music, the creator economy, comedy in India, advertising
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and digital marketing, and much, much more. Our conversation contained multitudes. In
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fact, this episode is probably too short because despite being podcasters ourselves, we did
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not speak at all about podcasting, maybe later in 2022. Before we begin this conversation
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though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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One of the things I've learned most over the last year and a half is sharing my insights
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on my two greatest passions, writing and podcasting. And I'd love to invite you to be a part of
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this journey. Registration is now open for the January cohort of the art of clear writing
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where over four webinars on four Saturdays, I teach all I know about the art and craft
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of writing compelling prose, much interaction, many exercises. And at the end of it, you
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get to join the clear writing community, an online community formed by the 18 previous
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cohorts of this course. In that community, we have book clubs, workshops, writing prompts
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with feedback and much else. I am also doing a special cohort of my podcasting course,
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the art of podcasting, which I had conducted for three cohorts last year before I took
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a break. All my learnings from five years of the seen and the unseen in three webinars
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over three Sundays. For more details and to sign up for my writing course, head on over
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to indianca.com slash clear writing to sign up for my podcasting course, go to scene unseen
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dot i n slash learn. These links will also be at the bottom of the show notes. These
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are exciting times for the creator economy and I'd love to help you be a part of it.
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Chuck, welcome to the scene and the unseen. Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure to be
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here. I'll let my listeners know that when Chuck came here, he did be recording this
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at my home studio. So he was offered two chairs. One is a lazy boy. One is a gaming chair.
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He took the lazy boy and he was offered a free foot massage, not by any interns I have
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around for I have none, but by this lovely machine that I have picked up, which my editor,
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the great Gaurav Chintamani of Advaita fame has actually sampled in such a way that he
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told me that, listen, you want to do an episode with the foot massager on. I'll just edit
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the sound clean out. I've sampled that thing, but Chuck wasn't keen to get his foot massage
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right at the moment. We'll come to it later, but let's start as I start all my episodes
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by asking the guest about the Beatles, which is slight googly there, but just before the
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recording we were talking about the, you know, get back the new documentary on the Beatles
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by Peter Jackson and the unseen footage and, and you had an interesting point to make about
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Sergeant Peppers and I wanted to hear more of it, but it was time to start the recording.
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So we've combined the two. So let's go. Perfect. So Sergeant Peppers is probably
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the Beatles most well-known album. Jury is still out as to whether it's the best album.
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That's up for debate, of course, and most influential probably. And because it changed
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the direction of music and their careers in many ways. What I find interesting about it
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when, and I love analyzing things like this, reading about rock history and just, you know,
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doing what ifs with respect to the history and all that, is that if the Beatles started
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off that way, you know, super experimental and all that, I'm not sure whether rock history
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would be the same, whether the Beatles would be the same and all that before Sergeant Peppers
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and perhaps even the two albums that preceded that, they built up a massive following on
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the back of doing safe music, very good music, but still fairly safe music. And then built
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up a huge following, which meant that an experiment album like Sergeant Peppers had a wide audience
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to go with rather than say somebody like King Crimson, who comes right off the bat with
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the weirdest possible stuff, which doesn't find that much of an audience and they never
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went mainstream. So I always think, what if Sergeant Peppers was a forerunner? What if
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the Beatles discography was actually reversed in some way? So I think about things like
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It's actually fascinating because like first up, it's a great thought experiment, but it
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also leads me to the thought that it could not have been that way, that they needed to
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go to Hamburg and play those months and then come back and do that safe music. They needed
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Please Please Me as their first number one and all of that interface to evolve to the
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point where Sergeant Peppers was even possible. And obviously I think you're right, if Sergeant
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Peppers was their first album for some freak reason, I think the history of music would
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But to counter one point you made, Amit, which is the evolution from safe music and by the
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way, we use safe music in air quotes over here. So please don't troll both of us over
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here. The first few albums sounded simple, but there's actually a fair bit happening
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over there with respect to chord changes and all that. We set even the early Beatles apart.
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But if you look at even bands like say Genesis, yes, to some extent, they started off complex
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and then they became more poppy, if I may. It's a travesty that a progressive band like
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Yes, their most famous song is actually a fairly poppy number. And same with many of
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the others. Whether now that's whether they're getting old or whether that's giving into
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commercial mandates, whatever the case may be, the Beatles could have started off the
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same way. What if they came off the bat with a weird album like Sergeant Pepper before
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George Martin and the executors at EMI sat them down and said, please make something
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that moves units. So, you know, again, all thought experiments, all the things that make
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sense when there's. I mean, Yes is a good example. Even Fleetwood Mac started off bluesy
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with Peter Green and all, and then they go into a more poppy direction. I'm not dissing
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the later direction. I always treat it as two completely different ears. To me, they
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are not the same band before and after the Buckingham Knicks thing. To me, they're completely
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two different bands. And the other thing to consider is if the Beatles came with Sergeant
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Pepper's first, would they have been allowed to record and release their damn thing? Absolutely.
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So that's another thing, right, Amit? And I like, let's jump from there into the modern
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days. One of the things like, so I'm listening to a lot of Floyd right now because I've got
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a lovely new pair of headphones and what better band than Floyd to explore that on. And one
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of the facts that always blows me away is that the album that made Floyd the Dark Side
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of the Moon was actually their eighth album, which is bang in the middle of the discography.
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Especially if you look, chart the discography is actually false in the second half of their
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career. Which band today would have the luxury of mucking around for seven albums before
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finding quote unquote their sound? So I mean, bands today are expected to be great from
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the word go. Whereas if you look at some of the greatest bands in history, they took a
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good three, four albums before eventually finding their sound, be it the Deep Purples
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of the World or be it many of the progressive bands. Floyd is the best example of it. They
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needed to muck around for all that time before finding the sound. So again, all just thought
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experiments, all just what ifs in the world of music and that would just rock music, not
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even the broader scene of pop and all that. So yeah, I just love thinking about things
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like this. Yeah. I mean, a couple of threats come up from what you just said. And one of
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them goes back to something that Steve Van Zandt said, the East Street band guitarist
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for Bruce Springsteen in an interview some time back where he said that rock is no longer
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mainstream. It was mainstream for like 30 years, mid sixties to perhaps when Nirvana
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came out with Spans Like Teen Spirit. After that, it's no longer part of the mainstream.
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And I look at entertainment today, it seems to me that one of the things that has happened
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in the last 30 years, and I don't think that rock not being mainstream is necessarily part
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of this phenomenon. I mean, the whole music industry is a separate thing with many other
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forces. But I think one of the things that has happened is that there is less and less
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that is actually mainstream. Like there's a fragmentation of taste, there's a fragmentation
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of genres. You know, like I was mentioning on one of my earlier shows to someone that
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on YouTube, you know, we think YouTube is one thing, right? It has what it has and everybody
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can access all of it. But it's interesting. So on YouTube, I have an algorithm, which
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I mean, I love the default algorithm, because it kind of gives me whatever stuff that I
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enjoy. But I wanted to enter some right wing rabbit holes to see what the hell is happening
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there. And I didn't want it to mess up my algorithm. So I opened incognito window another
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Gmail account and entered that and now that's a different algorithm. That's the same algorithm
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but it's serving up a completely different fee for me. And I realized that everybody
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actually gets completely different YouTube because of the algo and that starts with the
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first choice you make. And then you go off in random directions. And similarly, I think
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in popular culture, there is this fragmentation of taste. And I wonder if that means either
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the death of the mainstream or the winnowing down of the mainstream to something that is
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very safe and cuts across like the whole Marvel movies kind of thread that's come down. I
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mean, most of Hollywood mainstream cinema is you just following those franchises. And
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otherwise, I think it's a golden age of cinema. Because if you look at independent cinema
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and what's happening across the world is mind blowing. The tools of production are open
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to independent filmmakers is great work happening out there. So in the context of music, which
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you follow closely, do you think that there's something to this? Like do you look back and
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say that like, when we grew up, there was a mainstream, you knew who the big bands were.
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And they were damn successful, even if they weren't like your Michael Jackson or Madonna.
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And you also knew your Michael Jackson and Madonna and big pop artists who dominated
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the charts were. And it was really clear. Do you feel that in some way that landscape
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has changed? And not it's not necessarily a bad thing. You know, there are many more
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niches, there'll be much more scope for different kinds of art. Yeah. But what's your sense?
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No, I completely agree. So even if okay, let's take the micro example of say rock music,
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right? And then you can pretty much extrapolate that to any other form of art, really. And
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there are several reasons for this in the early in the 70s, 80s and 90s, right, which
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is where a lot of bands were built. They were built. And I think the word has to be used.
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They were marketed by record executives who had who had to put more eggs in fewer baskets.
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So you had bands like Kiss or even not Nirvana, really, but even before that Van Halen, all
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the bands of the 80s like Bon Jovi, etc. Def Leppard, all of these were incessantly marketed
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and hyped up by the record labels because they needed to succeed because they needed
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to move volumes of physical product. And that of course started changing with respect to
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the internet and all that changing tastes and everything. But what you're seeing now
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is fewer big artists across the board, right? You may have some huge names like say a Taylor
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Swift or Beyonce or whoever the, you know, Ed Sheeran's of the world who are guaranteed
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to sell out stadiums, etc, wherever they go, but everywhere else you are likely to have
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very tribal and for once on this podcast, we may use tribal in a positive sense, in
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a good way, very, very passionate followings for very niche genres. For example, I am a
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huge fan of a genre called progressive metal. I'm wearing the T-shirt of a band called
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Knee Oblivisaris. And my objective of coming onto the show, by the way, Amit was just to
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say Knee Oblivisaris on air, which is a progressive metal band from Australia that uses a violin,
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right? So now people who like that genre absolutely adore what they do. And when I say adore what
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do I mean? It's not just about buying their music. Yes, buying their musics, buying the
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music. I have friends of mine who are Patreons of these guys and actually order vinyls and
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make it viable for a band to make a living, maybe not become superstars. I think that
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era is over unless of course you're aiming for the Ed Sheeran kind of music, but make
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enough of a living to continue doing what they are touring to say audiences of 200,
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300 across the world. That happens. And I think that's happening across the board. There
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are platforms like say Bandcamp, which allow musicians to put up their album for sale so
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that fans who connect with them enough can actually buy the album so that artists get
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more of the money. All these kinds of things are happening. And I believe the same is true
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of not just other genres of music, but across art, for instance, there are so many platforms
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for things like anime and specific followers of certain kinds of visual design. For example,
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I think it's fascinating the way this fragmentation is happening. Like you said, it is absolutely
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true. So and it's a lot of factors, right? It's because of the changing imperatives of
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record labels, the economics of streaming. One resource that I can give immediately for
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anyone who's interested in this topic is this a fantastic podcast called The Ongoing History
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of New Music. It's by a Canadian journalist called music journalist called Alan Cross.
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And he delves into a lot of this. Why are there no big superstars anymore in the space
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of music? Because of streaming? What are the it's very interesting. What are the second
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order effects of things like that? So absolutely fascinating, you know, very analytical look
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at music and its evolution in a broader context and with the context of say an individual
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band like say a Pearl Jam or the Beatles or something like that. Even doing thought experiments
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like OK, if we take this band out of music history, how do things change? And those things
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are fascinating because in the world of music is usually something very small or seemingly
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small in the larger scheme of things that's led to a whole chain of things later. Like
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for example, and heavy metal fans will know this. What if Tony Iommi never had that finger
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accident? He would have never detuned his guitar. Heavy metal would have sounded completely
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different if at all birthed at all. So yeah, all these butterfly effects sort of things,
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I think, work in the space of art more than anything else. The seen in the unseen. Tony
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Iommi's finger. I'm also struck by what you said about the metal band you adore. What
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is this name? I'll also take the name and make your day. Yeah, it's a band called Knee
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Oblivisaris. Knee Oblivisaris. Yeah, they're a band from birth, I think. Knee Oblivisaris.
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So we'll link, we'll put relevant links in the show notes to Knee Oblivisaris. And something
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you said about them sparked off another thought where you said that their fans absolutely
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adore them. And now I find that very interesting because the other thing that I think has happened
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and tell me if you agree with this is that earlier you had these few big names would
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make it and nothing for the long tail. And those few big names would, yes, they would
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be worshipped by some at a distance, but for a lot of people, the engagement would be kind
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of shallow. You listen to them in the background and that's it, you know. And what I find today
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is that when you go deeper and deeper into these kind of different niches, the absolute
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numbers go down, but the level of engagement goes up a lot. Like just in podcasting, you
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know, if you, if I was to try to sell this podcast as a radio show back in 1995, obviously
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there are no takers for a four hour conversation. Now today, and thankfully the absolute numbers
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are also fairly decent right now, but the level of engagement is crazy, right? Which
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is something I notice more and more with like a lot of the consume that I follow, the vlogs
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I watch or the music I listen to or whatever. I'm just way more engaged than I was at an
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earlier point in time. And this also leads me to thinking about, you know, your music
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about how Dark Side of the Moon was their eighth album and they were already more than
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mid-career and in today's day and age would they have got seven albums to do what they
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were doing. Now, I think one thing about music back in the day was that it was very record
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label dependent. It was dependent on big business, right? So tell me a bit about whether that
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has changed because my sense of the creator economy in general is that these intermediaries
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and these platforms are now irrelevant. Creators can directly reach users. They can directly
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build their community. They can directly monetize it. Monetize seems like a very cold word,
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but in the sense, every community values the creators and you know, that exchange can happen.
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Is that also true for music? Like how do musicians make their money? Like if Roger Waters and
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Dave Gilmour are sitting today and they're forming Pink Floyd, are they going to reach
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an eighth album if record labels aren't interested?
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That's an interesting question and I won't speak on behalf of the music industry because
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I am not completely sure how that entire dynamic sort of works. But one thing is absolutely
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certain what you said. Okay, let's take the hypothetical situation that the Pink Floyd
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is and I used the Pink Floyd. They are an unknown entity right now. They've just got
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out of wherever Cambridge and all that and they have just started. They have just started
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say mucking around. So what do they do? They create say a SoundCloud or they put up stuff
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on YouTube and things like that. There will be and even if you take Gilmour out of the
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equation and go all the way back to early Floyd, Sid Barrett and all that. And by the
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way, if there's anyone who has no clue about what you're talking about, just know that
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the early Floyd albums were extremely experimental and definitely not everyone's cup of tea
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or saucer full of secrets. Just had to work that nicely done. I'm very proud of myself
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for that. No, the thing is, I think even that weirdness would have found a niche. I think
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they would have found an audience as long as it stuck to what they were doing and they
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did it with some level of conviction. I think the I think weirdness has a way of finding
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an audience in this day and age as long as they continue doing it. There's all sorts
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of amazing content out there. Just a few weeks back, my wife introduced me to a channel hosted
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by a Nepali graphic designer whose entire schtick is creating mock book covers and giving
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random commentary while doing it. It is insanely compelling content. And one of the things
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that we are binging right now is a pet groomer giving the most colorful, in the good way,
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commentary while grooming pets. It's amazing to imagine that this is actually content.
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If you take a step back and think about it, groomers have been doing this for years, for
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centuries, maybe. And now she's crossed a million subscribers recently and there's nothing
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outstanding about what she does. She's just very good at what she does and it's weirdly
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compelling content. So to go back to our hypothetical situation, as long as Gilmore and Waters or
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Barrett, whatever that combination was, as long as they stuck to what they were doing
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and they had conviction in it and they found another bunch of weirdos to sort of go along
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with the ride, that would definitely happen. I think, again, the community wouldn't be
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all that huge, but it would be there. And given the internet, it's unlikely that they
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would stick to just doing music. They may do something else that branches off into,
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they may do a weird podcast, for instance, or create weird reels or whatever the compulsions
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of the day are for them to maintain themselves. They would do something like that. And you
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can also be sure, Amit, that the moment they start becoming quote unquote popular with
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echoes, dark side of the moon, et cetera, you'll have many of those same guys saying,
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oh, you guys have sold out and all that. So I'm very sure they would be able to make it.
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But again, to what scale? Not very sure. They may be a much smaller brand. They may be like
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how I'm talking about this band that possibly nobody else has heard of, for example. So
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it's very interesting to think about how these things could happen. But one thing's for sure.
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I don't think a record label would give them such a long leash of seven albums to find
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their sound. And even the sound that we're talking about is dark side of the moon. I
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don't think dark side of the moon would have been, would have made it as an album standalone
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today to somebody who hasn't heard. Have you seen this movie called Yesterday, by any chance,
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the hypothetical? I meant to see it, but I haven't. No, it's it's it's a good watch
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purely for the concept, right? It's one of those movies that I would recommend any Beatles
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fan watches not expecting too much of the plot, but purely for the concept of what if
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you woke up in a world where you remember all the Beatles songs, but the Beatles never
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existed just to see what plays out with that fairly fascinating thought process. This one
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scene in which, and this is not a spoiler, where he plays yesterday, right? And his friends
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are around him and everybody's jaws are dropping like, wow, did you write that? And it's like,
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yeah, I mean, but no, I mean, it's a, it's a Paul McCartney song. Like who? And you know,
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and then it's like, it's one of the greatest songs ever written. It's a good song, but
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it's not all that great. I mean, it's not, it's not cold play great. And then this guy's
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not rich, but then you just step back for a moment. Yesterday is very huge because not
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just because of the quality of the song, but also what it means culturally, popularly and
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all that. When somebody listens to Dark Side of the Moon today, they are going to have
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a recommendation from somebody says, bro, you're listening to one of the greatest albums
#
of all time. So you're already coming in with some bias, right? What if you listen to Dark
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Side of the Moon, not knowing it was one of the greatest albums of all time? How would
#
your experience be different? I genuinely do not know. One of the things I used to do
#
while listening to music, and I have this habit of listening to bands chronologically,
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I used to bias myself by reading a lot of reviews before jumping into the album. So
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I knew what to expect. And I realized that colored my experience a lot and like, Oh,
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the song that everyone says is great. I didn't think it was all that great. So now my new
#
approach is listening to it first and then going back and seeing whether, and many of
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the times like, wow, what a great song this is. Didn't even get a passing mention on the
#
review. So I don't know where we started from over here, but could Gilmore and Waters continue
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making music if they started off today? I think they would, but I don't think they would
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be selling stadiums for sure. They would have a very strong Patreon base, but that's it.
#
I don't think I think too much has changed the way music is the also the era, right?
#
I don't think that that acid fueled kind of music, which was so 60s, 70s would have worked
#
in this sort of era. So many things put together. So you learn that these thought experiments,
#
there are several, there's a lot of context behind success at one point of time. I guess
#
No, it does. And you know, like, I think the good part about these thought experiments
#
is that one, of course, they're entertaining to talk about and argue about, but the other
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good part is they make you examine these contexts deeper. You know, I just think that maybe
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they would have made a different kind of music today. Maybe they would have made hip hop,
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you don't know, because they had a palette of sounds in their consciousness to work with.
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And from that palette, they create the particular music that they do. But today they would have
#
had a completely different palette of sounds to work with and would have worked with that.
#
So you don't know where they're going. Like, you know, in one of the webinars from my writing
#
course, I talk about Shakespeare. And the point I make is that that guy was a dude. If he
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was alive today, you know, he would have blown everybody out of the water. Because not only
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is it great art, but he was a box office superstar of his day. He was Yash Chopra plus Steven
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Spielberg plus Ed Sheeran, as you just mentioned him, who I think is a really fine songwriter.
#
I won't diss him just because he's popular. There's this great video I came across where
#
he's talking about his Van Morrison influence. Right. And Van Morrison is like my all time
#
whatever, just adore Van Morrison, as it were. So Sheeran's talking about the Van Morrison
#
influence. And it's like a 10-12 minute video, I'll play it. Then he talks about how he gets
#
the idea for a song and his initial chords are very Van Morrison when he plays them.
#
But then he says how he changes it around a little bit to make it more Massey. And it's
#
one of his big hits, Thinking Out Loud, right, which is such a poppy song. But once you get
#
that Van Morrison connection, you're like, wow. And then you think that, wow, this guy
#
is serious. You know, he took that and he made it into this. I'll link that long video
#
from the show notes is really interesting.
#
But just to finish that, that thought experiment of Gilmore and Waters making hip hop today,
#
it wouldn't be amazing to think, say, Kanye West might have been a great guitarist back
#
Yeah, yeah. Like in my, in the webinar where I talk about Shakespeare, right at the end,
#
I play Pink Floyd performing Shakespeare, which is actually not Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd is
#
Dave Gilmer singing Shakespeare Sonnet 18. Wow. And it's great. Right. And I point them
#
to another video, which is on YouTube, I think, by this guy called Akala, where he's giving
#
a lecture on hip hop. And at about the five minute mark there, he performed Sonnet 18
#
to hip hop. Wow. Right. So you realize a universality to what Shakespeare wrote, because he really
#
wrote the hardcore simple language of his time. He really, you know, took the rhythms
#
of everyday speech and wrote in that. And that's why he's so great. And this is like,
#
I don't know if you've thought about this, you must have. While sort of thinking about
#
all of this, I realized that, like, number one, one of the points I try to underscore
#
to my writing students, and I realized this, as I was putting together the course, I realized
#
it even harder, is that words, of course, have a music of their own, right? Yeah. People
#
are reading from a book, they think it's only visual, but they always have vocalizing without
#
realizing it, reading it out in their head. So words have a music of their own. Now, when
#
it comes to songwriting, it's actually really interesting, because the words have a music
#
of their own, and then on top of that, you put music. Right. And it's really interesting
#
to then look at the great songwriters and see how they are doing their stuff and how
#
the two come together. Like, when Dylan is saying, the answer, my friend is blowing in
#
the wind, right? And everything there works so perfectly. It's not like Dylan thought
#
consciously about it, but you know, blowing in the wind, you know, it's ending with that
#
mute sound. He doesn't say, the response comrade is wafting in the breeze. You know, which
#
is the example I give of bad writing, because all of those words we don't use in our everyday
#
speech, but he's keeping it simple and having a powerful impact. The answer, my friend is
#
blowing in the wind and all the music just go together and enhance. Absolutely. Yeah,
#
absolutely. Because you also realize how different songwriters approach music differently. Like,
#
there are some musicians who write the lyrics first. I'm assuming Bob Dylan is one of those.
#
You have others who think of the melody first and then fit in words later. And sometimes
#
those words could be absolute nonsense because they don't care about the lyrics all that
#
much for them is more about the music. Noel Gallagher of Oasis, one of my favorite bands
#
is notorious for doing that. The lyrics don't mean too much, but it's really about the music,
#
the cadence and all that. And then you even, when you start digging even deeper, one of
#
the things that sets another one of my favorite bands, Iron Maiden apart is they don't, they
#
don't sound like any other heavy metal band. And that's because their primary songwriter
#
happens to be a bassist, which is something that's very unique in the world of rock and
#
heavy metal. So you kind of realize how different songwriters approach, you know, approach these
#
things differently. And it's kind of, it's kind of fascinating to think about this. Actually,
#
you grow up listening to this music and then, then once you're older and more mature and
#
you open up lyrics, you open up song meanings and genius.com for everything that you do
#
for everything that you listen to. And then you say, Oh, oh, wow. Okay. Now this makes
#
sense. Okay. Because it's happened. Okay. Fine. If knowing this little tidbits, I think
#
just adds more to music. So anyone who is looking to rediscover music or something of
#
that sort, one thing I highly recommend is just open, just opening up the lyrics, even
#
if you're not a lyrics person or opening up sites that give you what the meanings of the
#
lyrics are. And for me, those go-to places are song meanings and genius. There's usually
#
a lot of song facts and all that, which adds a lot of color to the music, especially for
#
bands like the Beatles. One thing I love about the Beatles is how all their songs are pretty
#
much just based on everyday, ordinary, uh, ordinary incidents. And knowing that just
#
adds a lot more enjoyment to the music. You can almost, you know, feel John channeling
#
that story of, you know, whatever X person and translating that into word. Uh, it's kind
#
of, uh, it's, it's sort of like being in the studio with them and you put two and two together,
#
which in fact you are with get back because one of the things that I was enjoying about
#
the one and a half episodes I've watched so far, I'll watch the full thing is that they're
#
constantly breaking into song playing old songs that are out during the Hamburg days
#
or a song they're doing random covers and on that. And there'll be some Beatles song
#
where you can make out at one point, John is imitating Dylan. And the interesting thing
#
is all of these takes would have actually been released had they been creators today
#
because they would have released everything. Whereas back in the day, the label is telling
#
you, Hey, album has X number of songs. You've got to do those. Everything else goes out
#
of the window, which is just such a great loss in the creative process. And Dylan, by
#
the way, did write his lyrics first. I don't know if, have you heard this album called
#
the New Basement Tapes? No, I haven't. I must admit I'm not that much of a Dylan fan, not
#
because I dislike just that I never went there. Yeah. So the New Basement Tapes is basically
#
these guys found Dylan lyrics that had never been turned into songs. So he'd written the
#
lyrics first, like you correctly said, but he hadn't actually turned them into songs.
#
So they gave it to contemporary songwriters and said, what can you do with this? Like
#
Marcus Mumford did a lovely rendition of something called Kansas City. And it's really beautiful.
#
You have, you can actually, in some of those videos, you can see the words on the original
#
paper where Dylan has written them. And these guys were brought together and they were given
#
three, four days or whatever. And they were cooped up and told, Chalo Likho, you know,
#
and you can see the different things they do with it where, and obviously a Marcus Mumford
#
song is a Marcus Mumford song, but with Dylan's lyrics, it's really interesting. Yeah. And
#
I just wanted to add one more thing over here. This is one thing that you're, I've heard
#
you say several times, which is the form often dictates the content. Right. And music is
#
a great example of that. There is this, there are several studies showing that because of
#
the Spotify era, right now, how does Spotify pay artists? I mean, whatever they pay, it
#
is after 30 seconds of streaming. So I actually came across a band recently that makes music,
#
which is between 30 and 35 seconds each. So they just released a Beatles tribute album,
#
which has a hundred songs, all of which are between 30 and 35 seconds. Wow. And the logic
#
for that, Hey, if Spotify is paying us for 30 seconds, why bother making more? And it's
#
hard to argue with that logic because you may say, Oh, back in the day, people used
#
to make 10 hour long Sona or whatever, but back then the Imperators were different. Like
#
even, I mean, you will find some equivalent of some heresy like this happening back then
#
itself because they needed to fit it on an LP. We're going to be like, Oh, why fit it
#
on a recorded music? Actual music should be experienced live where you can play forever.
#
So yeah, I think this is another fascinating layer to add on top of that. I think we should
#
stop the discussion on music over there. Otherwise we'll go on talking about music itself, which
#
is how the form dictates content. No, and this brings another thought to mind that, you
#
know, there'll be these snobbish people who'll say that back in the day, we used to listen
#
to concept albums and now people are just releasing singles and putting it out there.
#
And what you pointed out is what you think of as an album and what you romanticize was
#
dictated by how many songs you can actually stick on that damn thing called an LP. And
#
each of the songs therefore is also dictated by, you know, what radios will play and all
#
of that. So ultimately 10 songs or four minutes each or whatever it is, is dictated by physical
#
constraints. Why do we think of those old forms? Like even writers, I remember, you
#
know, so I've kind of wanted to write books on my life, right? And not written any except
#
one shitty one, but I'll redeem myself for that soon. But now when I think about it,
#
I think why books? Why put that on a pedestal? Like if you're a writer, you had, you have
#
800 word articles you can think of today, 10,000 word long forms, short stories have
#
Setcoding sends out a daily newsletter, which is 200 words. And I find that fascinating.
#
Yeah. I mean, one of the things I realized while blogging is you can be, you know, 100
#
words, you can be 8,000 words. It doesn't matter. Why do we think in terms of format
#
and what you just pointed out about music is, you know, 30, why not 35 seconds? Though
#
I would hesitate myself. I mean, I'm not dissing it, but that particular incentive that this
#
is where we get paid, why doesn't sit well with me? But I get the point they're making.
#
Yeah, I think it's more to make a point. And just one further thing on this music and changing
#
the formats and all that. The biggest platform for music discovery these days, at least for
#
artist discovery for record executives in the US right now is actually TikTok. And I'm
#
guessing this is something that you know, it's very interesting how a song goes viral.
#
For example, it may be because somebody converts into a meme or it has meme ability. So now
#
just imagine songwriters not just now have to change incentives from, okay, will it sound
#
good on radio to, okay, does it have a section in the lyrics where people can do some silly
#
dance or something so that it can go viral on TikTok so that et cetera, et cetera. So
#
again, a form dictates a content. And the second thing, which this I find really fascinating
#
while we can sit and argue about whether rock is mainstream, hip hop is mainstream, electronic
#
is mainstream, music itself is getting its behind kicked by this new thing called gaming,
#
which is what people, youngsters are spending more and more of their time on. So there's
#
a lovely article headline I saw somewhere, I forget which website this was on, probably
#
Wired or Fast Company or one of those, which is something like gaming is the new hip hop
#
or gaming. Gaming is basically this generation's rock music in terms of cultural relevance.
#
It has occupied cultural relevance. And I think with all this metaverse things that's
#
going to happen, it's just going to become even more, especially since we have a generation
#
now that's being bred on platforms like Roblox. So absolutely fascinating. And then where
#
does music come into this? I think the future of music is more likely to be interactive
#
experiences like say that Marshmello or Travis Scott doing a virtual concert inside Fortnite.
#
I think the future is going to be something like that and which just rips apart the concept
#
of music as an audio format by itself. Who said it needs to be just an audio format?
#
In some sense, it's going back to the time when music was performed live and there was
#
always a visual element along with the audio and then came along Edison with his ideas
#
and stripped out the video part of it. This is mind blowing. I'm in my mid to late 40s.
#
This is the first time in my life I heard the term Roblox but instead of panicking as
#
other people my age might do, I feel so fucking excited because what a time to be alive, right?
#
Everything is changing. We'll segue from music because you're right, that wasn't part of
#
the plan to talk so much about music and maybe in some future date, who knows. I want to
#
go back to the Beatles to use that to segue from it which is I think of the Beatles Hamburg
#
years and what they did in Hamburg as you would know is that they went there as a young
#
band and Ringo wasn't part of the group then so they had Stuart Sutcliffe I think playing
#
bass and they had Pete Best on drums and so it was a five-man outfit as far as I recall
#
and they just played every freaking night. They would play multiple times a day. They
#
just played and played and played and played and it was iteration, iteration, iteration
#
all before they had their first song.
#
10,000 hours to the max and so I'll segue from this. It's a good theme for me because
#
I think one of the big lessons I learned and this must be something I'm sure that you share
#
is that you know people often think that you learn a craft and fine you practice it but
#
then once you're in the public eye you just you put out only your best work and whatever
#
and one of the things I've realized is that the road to excellence is through constant
#
freaking iteration. Like one insight I like to sort of talk about I might even have spoken
#
about it on episode one of Getting Meta is from that Ali Abdaal video.
#
Well I mean the basic lesson is and Ali Abdaal did this video when he reached a hundred million
#
subs and he shared the graph of how his subs went up and it was an exponential graph and
#
at episode 50 he pointed out when he did two episodes a week for 26 weeks for half a year
#
he reached a thousand subs which is nothing right and his advice to creators was that
#
just make two videos a week for two years with 200 videos and don't look at your subs
#
count and just do it just iterate and that's exactly what the Beatles did and people discovered
#
that I think by accident when they're just kind of doing something doing something and
#
because they love it you know karna hai you know like when you when anyone takes up a
#
guitar for example they're not playing it because on day one they think they're going
#
to be Eddie Van Halen on day one if you listen to yourself you know you can't you know but
#
then on day 8000 you get there.
#
So let's kind of talk about the creator economy in the sense that like what are your big sort
#
of learnings from being a creator because I think all the learnings I've got from being
#
a creator are really in the last three or four years even sooner than that during the
#
podcasting journey like I wasn't actually taking a step back and getting meta as it
#
were and thinking about this stuff you know I was just doing things and gradually things
#
happened and I and at some point I took a step back and I said this is interesting and
#
let's kind of connect all the threads tell me about that sort of compressed journey of
#
yours of being a creator and thinking deeply about.
#
Sure so one it's only recently that I've that this term of creator has come up yeah
#
come around right have you been doing this oh is that what it's called okay I'm guess
#
I'm a creator now if you put out a podcast or.
#
But I actually love the term because while it seems to put you in a box it's a much bigger
#
box and other boxes like writer musician filmmaker yeah that's yeah that's true I guess and there's
#
also the connotation that you're doing something related to the internet I don't think a journalist
#
would be called as in a an old school journalist would be called a creator in that sense although
#
arguably they are doing way more meaningful creation in that sense.
#
So with respect to quote unquote content creation I used to do random articles and cartoons
#
even from 2010 onwards always freelance in some capacity or the other and just trying
#
out various kind of things and then podcasting came along the way right where I used to listen
#
to a lot of the bugle at that point of time which is a hilarious show hosted by Andy Zaltzman
#
primarily it used to be co-hosted by John Oliver and now of course there's a rotating
#
cast of comedians from around the world including a couple of our own including Anu Appal etc.
#
So I had this idea of doing a podcast but had no clue as to what I wanted to do and
#
through a series of accidents which I'll spare listeners I started ended up starting Simplified
#
with Narain which again we didn't have too much of an idea of what we wanted we didn't
#
have too much of an ambition and for us it was just okay let's try this out and see what
#
happens because I was always keen on doing something with Narain and then it stuck IBM
#
through us a lifeline and and I say lifeline because we desperately needed discipline more
#
than recording equipment at that time we were putting out episodes which were like weeks
#
months apart and finally we managed to get some sort of a cadence going and then from
#
there two more podcasts came in came along the way which are both individual shows one
#
is The Origin of Things which is a short format show and the other of course is Getting Meta
#
for which you are of course very kindly the first guest and the name of the show of course
#
came about during that first interview and this was pre-Facebook doing whatever they
#
did so kindly people yeah what is it somebody that heard the show yeah and along the way
#
a couple of other experiments happened as well I started a newsletter I created a course
#
of my own I'm not sure whether it counts as content creation as such so here's the thing
#
so to answer your question that was just to give you context to answer the question that
#
you had asked I think all of these I had absolutely no clue what I was doing as I was going in
#
and I genuinely did not I had no idea what the end outcome would be I had a reasonable
#
idea of what my second and third podcast would be but I did that I can say that only because
#
I had the confidence of having done 150 episodes from my previous show right so otherwise everything
#
I started like the newsletter for the first time absolutely no idea how this is going
#
to turn out course zero idea Amit when I started that course it was an idea that a friend gave
#
me saying that will you take will you teach a few of us digital marketing I said yeah
#
sure I'll put some structure together and send it out to you guys and see if it works
#
for you I expected 10 people and in that first batch there were I think 130 or 140 people
#
who signed up for it and this was this was in 2020 mid for all of these I just learned
#
along the way and I think that is the only way to go as long as you're genuine as long
#
as you are willing as long as you are transparent about the fact that hey I might make mistakes
#
but I will make up for it and I will make sure that you get your money or times worth
#
whatever the case may be I think you're good right I think as long as you don't over promise
#
whether you're selling or whether you're asking people for their time which let's face it
#
is probably way more valuable I think you will be fine I think you will be fine I think
#
that's my one lesson of you know you call me a creator of being a creator just just
#
start out as you you yourself said on the first episode of getting better just start
#
and let and iterate along the way and as long as you are you are either enjoying it or learning
#
something or ideally both you will be fine and six give yourself a period of about six
#
months or something like that to figure out whether it's all working out whether audiences
#
are reacting whether you're getting what you wanted out of it and it should be okay because
#
what another thing I've also realized is that content creation in and of itself doesn't
#
necessarily need to be the end goal like that could act as signaling for something else
#
for example I have a paid digital marketing newsletter it's not exactly a digital marketing
#
newsletter but on the periphery now the fact that I run a newsletter is on something related
#
to marketing is enough for some people to think that I might be able to help them out
#
with respect to consulting right so doesn't matter whether they read what I write or not
#
it acts as signaling in some sense for the fact that hey okay if you are able to take
#
a course on marketing then you should be able to help me out of the problem my startup is
#
having got many people write in to me for that I've got many people write in take the
#
course and said yeah your course and all is fine but here's the stuff that I actually
#
need your help for that's happened a lot so that's another learning for me that the content
#
creation yeah it's nice if you get to a million subscribers or you know whatever number of
#
views listens whatever but what but what does it play for your life or your if I may use
#
the oft abuse phrase personal brand in the long run I always think that these content
#
pieces that somebody creates is just one part of you know something larger so that I think
#
these two would be broadly some lessons that I have learned everything else is just a little
#
too raw I guess for me to share but I'm just having fun trying out various kinds of things
#
and I think it's an extremely exciting time to have ideas and just put them out to the
#
world really if there was advice that I would give anyone I'll just build on what you said
#
which was very succinctly just start take something that you are good at doing and mix it with
#
something that you are interested in or learning about or curious etc so for example you might
#
be a good writer you might be interested in say finance or you might want to learn more
#
about something right or you might have experience doing something right so suddenly when you
#
put these equations together you'll find that there are lots of permutations and permutations
#
and combinations and on top of this if you add a layer of what I like to call treatment
#
funny serious long form whatever it is right analyze some of your own favorite content
#
creators and the stuff that they're doing and see where do they fall in this are they
#
the this one phrase that I love I don't know whether I heard it on your podcast or whether
#
it was on somebody else's but figure out what your role is in the story I absolutely love
#
that line it's not mine but I love the line yeah it's great and I think it was it was
#
said in the context of journalism right when you are a journalist or when you're a writer
#
who are you are you the peer of the reader who is trying to figure out the story along
#
the way which a lot of podcasts say like Freakonomics would be that way Dubner is not an expert he
#
is learning as he interviews his guests and I think that's a lovely way of going going
#
at it or are you the expert are you say a Reid Hoffman who has spent years cutting his
#
teeth and now is pontificating to the world if you have that who am I in the story merge
#
that with the skill that you have and the possible treatment that you want to take you
#
can come out with all kinds of ideas the internet is full of crazy ideas that work but on paper
#
they look like they shouldn't make sense a few a few months back my wife introduced
#
me to this Instagram account called Miss Excel M-I-S-S-E-X-C-E-L it is and I kid you not
#
a Instagrammer who teaches Excel hacks while dancing to EDM nothing in that sentence sounds
#
like it should make sense she recently made six figures in one day in US dollars wow on
#
the because this created enough of a signal for her I'm guessing nobody follows her for
#
her oh I should learn Excel from this person what they do follow her for is super quirky
#
is funny you're signaling the fact that yeah I'm a cool person who knows Excel so you're
#
part of that thing but what she does do is because she's built herself up in this way
#
she has a serious course for 299 dollars on learning Excel I'm guessing that's not taught
#
through EDM I'm guessing that's a proper thing but what a great way to market a course
#
even if that wasn't the end outcome and as a result of that and her fame has led to workshops
#
and all that and she can charge a premium now that she's well known and she has a personality
#
and all that that's helped her make money so just think about it Ramit the somebody
#
who's creating funny content around TikTok funny treatment Excel being the space that
#
you are familiar familiar with and dancing which you are good at all three of those look
#
like a combination that shouldn't make sense but somehow in the digital age it just does
#
think about all the other combinations that are out there you may be great at cricket
#
now you may be very interested in cricket what is your skill are you good on screen
#
are you a good writer are you great at tweets tick tock whatever the case may be and then
#
think about treatments funny serious etcetera etcetera there are just so many combinations
#
to be made so when you look at it from this perspective the sheer spectrum of things that
#
could be created it's an insanely good time to have an idea or just get started that's
#
number one now on the other side of things and this is something I've very often thought
#
about so many we say right so many things have changed right the platforms have changed
#
the opportunities have changed the monetization career options have changed people become
#
millionaires streaming themselves playing video games so crying out loud we live in
#
an era like that for example but what has not changed fundamentally is the amount of
#
time people have right it's not like 24 hours has magically become something else if anything
#
because of hustle culture and all that the time to consume content has become lower smaller
#
and smaller no matter whether it's coming from a network no matter whether it's something
#
that the tick tock famed tick tock algorithm throws up whether it's something your friend
#
said whether it's a podcast that your friend has started whatever the case may be all this
#
burgeoning amount of content that's out there because you know thriving hashtag thriving
#
hashtag content creator economy all that there is increasingly less time to consume all of
#
it and somehow in a weird kind of way I feel it's going to go back to some form of gatekeeper
#
at some point of time we always say oh content creator creator economy is awesome because
#
we're like no no longer are we in the strangled stranglehold of the gatekeeper like going
#
back to our conversation how we started this musicians are free to explore themselves creatively
#
creatively without worrying about what the record label says we are free of the tyranny
#
of the of the middleman of the gatekeeper as it were but what do you do when there are
#
now five thousand bands vying for your attention instead of two you need some filter right
#
over there before that used to be a record label who would do the job of that but now
#
it could be some somebody else now might might be the spotify top 20 metal songs playlist
#
or it could be your trusted friend who is the who is inadvertently acting as a gatekeeper
#
or it could be a publication one very interesting thing I saw recently I follow this some author
#
called Charlie Varzel he writes this beautiful newsletter called galaxy brain on the intersection
#
of technology culture business and and all that he had a thriving newsletter for a while
#
and recently he got quote unquote acquired by the Atlantic right I think we're going
#
to see a lot more of this happening like even if you see the New York Times look at the
#
number amount of talent that they're just swooping up right Kara Swisher or you know
#
lots of those podcasts and all I think somehow this so much content creation and creators
#
that's happening it's become sort of like a wild west which is romantic to some extent
#
until you realize that boss you have only 24 hours in a day and there's only so much
#
content you can create I need somebody to curate this for me curate equal to middleman
#
in some way or the other now whether that goes back to being the traditional gatekeepers
#
with all their pros and cons or whether it is a new era I think that's inevitable I think
#
that's a cycle that is going to happen so yeah so number of points I mean this is so
#
fascinating the last 10 minutes when you were sorry I'm going to listen to it again and
#
again no no I'm thanking you don't say sorry it's like thank you sorry is the most weird
#
so threat number one is gatekeepers like I both agree and disagree I agree that we need
#
a way to filter the universe of content out there but what I do think is that the gatekeepers
#
of old have become irrelevant and I think that's a great thing now for example back
#
in the day would miss Excel who wants to dance to ADM while doing Excel ever have got a gig
#
for whatever any TV channel any you know wherever that kind of content would feature and the
#
answer is clearly no yeah she would be laughed out the door but today you have acted as a
#
gatekeeper like let's say you are someone whose words that take really seriously on
#
new content to follow right you have acted as a gatekeeper for me and I'm going to go
#
there and I'm going to listen to it and people who are listening to this episode of the scene
#
in the unseen are going to click there from the show notes so in a sense we are gatekeepers
#
so what's happening is that you don't have that one hide bound gatekeeper who thinks
#
in a particular way and follows convention you have many many gatekeepers to choose from
#
anyways and I would therefore say that they are not really gatekeepers they are arbiters
#
of taste in a way in the sense that they are helping you and you choose your arbiter of
#
taste or gatekeeper or whatever term you kind of want to use and I think that's fantastic
#
because the point is she can get her work out there today that would not have been possible
#
20 years ago I can do a 5 hour conversation today not have been possible 20 years ago
#
of course my doing a 5 hour conversation today depends on your willingness as well and your
#
stamina have you had your energy bars but the other interesting thought that kind of
#
struck me about content is you know when again you were talking about miss excel and it's
#
fascinating because in a number of ways she's following actually what I would consider principles
#
that creators should follow that are not radical right her work is radical but what are those
#
principles to me and I'm kind of thinking aloud and I'm getting a little meta here
#
but one of those principles is authenticity that you got to be true to yourself if you
#
try too hard to fill a particular gap in the market or to be somebody else whatever doesn't
#
work you got to be true to yourself she's been true to herself because she knows excel
#
she loves dancing I presume she loves EDM which is where this comes from and it works
#
because she's having a great time doing it number 2 is that you don't have to be a spectacular
#
expert in something to do content on it like I taught a podcasting course briefly and you
#
know students would ask me that why should somebody listen to my podcast I'm not an expert
#
in anything and I'm like no but the point is that you are on some kind of journey maybe
#
an intellectual journey maybe a journey through life which many other people have in common
#
so it makes your journey so relatable as long as you're you know true to yourself again
#
that being the primary condition it makes it so relatable and interesting and entertaining
#
and it's a similar thing with this lady who may not be the best excel teacher in the world
#
but is I'm sure is perhaps a more successful now from what you say possibly possibly because
#
she wasn't shy of going out there and you know putting herself out there she didn't
#
say am I the greatest excel expert no no self-doubt they just go out there and do it and the third
#
one which comes from that is intimacy that all the creators are like I feel like I know
#
these people right I just released an episode with Abhinandan Sekri and somebody wrote into
#
me to say that I felt I was I felt so much like I was sitting at a sofa in a drawing
#
room with you guys that at one point I interrupted before I realized that wait a minute I'm not
#
actually there right and that's such a lovely comment that's what creators want and that's
#
what all creators kind of get that you build those sort of intimate spaces where you feel
#
you know the person so you know miss excel ticking the box on all of those and even you
#
know NYT going to big creators and taking them and all of that I get where that comes
#
from but at the same time you have say Yasha Monk starting persuasion on substrack and
#
saying I'll do my own thing and many many people just kind of doing their own thing
#
like miss excel will never feel the need to join a conglomerate because if she's made
#
six figures in one day fuck you I'll do my thing you know why should I let someone else
#
dictate content tomorrow instead of dancing to EDM she might want to do something else
#
but her boss will say no that worked for us dance to EDM that's all pretty fascinating
#
that role in the story bit is also interesting so tell me something while you were telling
#
me about how you would advocate to people that think about your role in the story and
#
you said that look at content create look at your favorite content creators and break
#
it down did you at any point reverse engineer what other content creators are doing and
#
you know get insights from that interesting question and I have to say no you know I think
#
this is something that I realized post facto I sort of took some lessons away from some
#
of the shows that I listen to always and like apart from the content itself what makes this
#
work that's something I always think about right which is like like what you said right
#
now yeah sure this Miss Excel's content work works because she enjoys one two three whatever
#
but how can I take a lesson out from there and apply it to an other field which is completely
#
unrelated how do I break these things down to to use one of our favorite phrases first
#
principles how do I go back to what is the meta lesson that I can take away from here
#
which I can apply to something else which could be completely different and I think
#
that's a sort of skill I acquired if I may use the phrase while I was working in advertising
#
for some time extracting why this example works and then transposing that to another
#
brand in another category etc but no to answer your question not really I never thought of
#
it that way I guess now that you know we are sitting and thinking of content I if I were
#
to give advice to somebody today they have the thing is this I think everybody today
#
has enough of a frame of reference from their own life in order to draw enough of an example
#
for for themselves to create content when I teach students for instance since you always
#
say students of my course let me be another person who says that on the show as well so
#
one of the things I start off and I teach a bunch of undergraduate kids at a university
#
I tell them see listen even if you sleep through all my classes all you need to do is this
#
you are subject to a lot of advertising on a daily basis have an opinion on them ask
#
at the other end of that ad which I blocked or email that I deleted there was some brand
#
manager who paid somebody a lot of money for that to reach you right you may not be an
#
expert in advertising yet or marketing yet or whatever but you are an expert as cheesy
#
as it may sound at being you right somebody did something in order for this ad email whatever
#
it is to reach you you be the ultimate you are the ultimate judge of whether that works
#
for you or not if it does not work or even if it works why just ask yourself that reflect
#
on that and then you automatically will feel yourself becoming a better marketer or start
#
thinking that way why didn't you swipe up on that Instagram ad why did you delete that
#
email HDFC bank desperately wanted you to open an FD with them but you deleted it why
#
did you delete did they target the wrong person did they use the wrong kind of message did
#
are you tired of them incessantly spamming are you don't you trust them you just got
#
four great points that the CMO of HDFC bank would love to know thinking like this I think
#
always works similarly it works kind of similar with content I think everyone consumes enough
#
content to just reflect on them enough why do I like these pieces of content like what
#
makes this content tick like why do I like some content that is entertaining something
#
that's useful something that's close to my heart etc etc take all these sort of lessons
#
and then you'll like mishmash them make your own framework and then you'll realize that
#
there is hey okay if I look at it this way I can create X content in this way on this
#
platform around English football for instance you know because I am passionate about it
#
nobody else is doing it or whatever so that's the way I look at it now but I have to admit
#
a lot of this is very post facto and not exactly something that I thought of when I was you
#
know getting into it which is why my other piece of advice is just jump into it and figure
#
it out figure it out later there are a lot of things that I don't like about Mark Zuckerberg
#
but the one thing that he did say that I thought made absolute sense was and I actually not
#
quite sure whether he said this if you shipped a perfect product you waited too long and
#
I thought there was a lovely way to some I mean he said in the context of a product but
#
I think that works for content as well if you if your first episode is really really
#
good either you're very good but then even you being really good is possibly because
#
you've done so many things before Faye Duzusa's first Instagram thing would have been great
#
because she's kind of familiar with doing that yes the format is different the orientations
#
different and all that but she's comfortable she's a journalist for so long and she's comfortable
#
speaking in front of a camera it's not like she's gone off and started a fiction novel
#
or something that would be you know something different so yeah I think that's the way I
#
think about these things yeah and the image that came to my mind and it's not a very good
#
metaphor but I'll say it anyway is like you and I are kind of like we are learning to
#
run while a tiger is chasing us yeah so of course there's no tiger chasing us per se
#
but the point is that if you just try to intellectually figure out what is a perfect way to run you'll
#
just sit there and become fat but in the context of product you could say tiger capital is
#
chasing you yeah yeah so at the other point from your wonderful 10 minute monologue before
#
this another point that I wanted to pick up on was creator where you said that I teach
#
a course and I don't know if that would be called creating so again I'm kind of thinking
#
aloud because we're making up the rules as we go along there's a tiger chasing us we're
#
learning to run is that if I might take a shot at trying to define a creator just for
#
myself you know whether others agree with that I would say a creator is someone who
#
has some knowledge or skill which they share with the world by creating something right
#
and to distinguish it from products and all I'll just say that something isn't a physical
#
thing but that they share with the world in some way so whether you're putting out music
#
whether you're doing a podcast whether you're teaching a course there's something inside
#
you that you have that can be of value to others and you put it out there and you're
#
automatically in that sense a creator and this brings me to another thought like this
#
dear filmmaker friend of mine and he was sitting right where you're sitting on this lazy boy
#
not getting a foot massage also because I didn't have the foot massager then and he's
#
around my age and I felt kind of bad for him and he was kind of low because he made a short
#
film once which won a lot of film festival awards and got him offers from Bollywood big
#
big so he became friends with and they said do this for us do that for us he said no no
#
I have one dream film I want to make that first I want that to be my entry we know how
#
the story normally goes right guy grows old film never happens or he gives in well guess
#
what he made the freaking film he made the film eight years ago but after making it for
#
all kinds of reasons it never got released so he's made his dream movie he likes the
#
way he made it everything has happened 8 saal kuch nahi hua and so he was sitting here bemoaning
#
that and telling me and every we meet about once a year where he'll kind of come to Andheri
#
and he'll call me up and he'll say aaja ho kya aaja yaar so and it's kind of the same
#
lament and this time I told him that boss this won't do the point is if you think about
#
yourself and this is kind of me talking to him that if you think about yourself you're
#
in your late 40s you probably have 15 years of productive life to go when your cognitive
#
energies are functioning properly for you to do something right after that you're gone
#
it's a waste I mean of course I know life is meaningless we all die but apart from that
#
if you want to make something of it after that is gone so my thing was ki abhi reconfigure
#
the way you think about creation and the way you think about films and the way you think
#
about art you know you have tons of and he's an FTII grad also so you have tons of knowledge
#
about how to make a film how to write a film he's written a book on script writing which
#
hasn't yet gotten released how to make a film how to write a film got all of that knowledge
#
freaking do something start a YouTube channel it'll cost you nothing yeah you don't need
#
gatekeepers you don't need many a producer saying nahi ye hai wo hai ye hai wo hai you
#
know just make something every freaking day because otherwise what you have is going waste
#
like I'm sure every single person listening to this has something that other people can
#
benefit from absolutely what are you doing with it right and so this is just something
#
that I felt so strongly about I felt I have to share it because it broke my heart to see
#
the guy once a year he comes every time he's coming ki mera film release nahi ho raha
#
and I'm like abhi chhor de yaar you know hoga toh hoga wo tumare haath mein nahi hai but
#
you can't let the next 15 years go in a lament and then you say nahi I'll start a YouTube
#
channel and then you realize you're fucking senile and your brain cells aren't working
#
right so my next question is about since you have kindly allowed me without contradicting
#
me to put teaching as part of creating which makes sense by the way I think on many levels
#
you can there are also a lot of lessons from the world of entertainment I suppose that
#
teachers could utilize but yeah I think I will agree with you on on that teacher yeah
#
at least to some extent it can be called creators I guess a lot of baijus and all they're searching
#
for I mean the same sort of I mean the same challenge that Netflix has you can say that
#
baijus also has they are also searching for quote unquote creators and compelling content
#
you know like what are you and I doing when you and I teach our course we are actually
#
telling stories around micro stories around the concepts you want to teach and we're not
#
literally telling story stories but you're building a certain narrative when you're doing
#
all of that my next question for you kind of regards that do you feel that that act
#
of teaching in a sense forced you to get meta and think conceptually about the stuff you're
#
teaching in the sense did teaching make you a better practitioner oh absolutely like there
#
is no doubt about that you know so I have taught at various levels and this is not really
#
a flex as much as it is just you know happy accidents there's all these these teaching
#
things ended up ended up being I've taught at an MBA level I've taught at an undergraduate
#
level and I have taught at a working professional level which is a course I ran for myself out
#
of these three which one do you think was the toughest to teach tell me the undergraduate
#
one yeah right because kids have an annoying habit of getting to the root of the problem
#
and asking very very fundamental questions right so you're saying oh okay you should
#
do X kind of branding and not or whatever the case may be their question why bother
#
doing branding at all so you know they ask very very fundamental questions which forces
#
you to so this happened to me a couple of times and then I said okay I can't fluff around
#
with these guys fluff flies in the boardroom I can faff around with my client or my this
#
thing because that's the way the industry works and we can rant about advertising later
#
the entire industry survives on gas and this is a joke that you have to get an MBA is just
#
to understand other MBAs and there's a lot of truth in that but when you're teaching
#
undergraduate students you suddenly have to or even younger that would be even more challenging
#
you really need to ask fundamental questions you not only need to simplify your content
#
but that's the thing simplifying your content is actually tougher because now you need to
#
really get down to the roots of things and you need to ask yourself okay is this really
#
needed what is the framework that will cover all of this so to answer your question yes
#
absolutely I think that whole process of teaching and again now this is irrespective of which
#
level it was it forces me to become a better practitioner because it is also a subject
#
I teach marketing so it's not it's it's not a theoretical subject in many ways at least
#
I try not to make it I try to use as many real examples as possible it forces you not
#
just to brush up on the basics but get better but constantly evaluate and like if I come
#
across an example today right if I like on the way to your house if I see a billboard
#
or something like is that consistent with what I am teaching is that consistent with
#
how I think about marketing again breaking down to first principles pretty much over
#
there if something contradicts now do I need to change something or this is an exception
#
or should I add something else to the framework this happens all the time and I like where
#
the stuff that I'm teaching at is at right now I feel reasonably confident of presenting
#
it to a bunch of 16 year olds and let me tell you I mean there's nothing scarier than going
#
to a bunch of 16 year olds and telling them I'm going to teach you how to use Instagram
#
there's nothing scarier than that uncle sit down oh seriously and that's the thing it
#
constantly forces you to to get better I think it's become more fulfilling because because
#
of that I think both feed off each other the teaching helps the because when you teach
#
you one this is another thing I've realized when I put that course and all that together
#
a lot of it it's not like I had these models and frameworks and all that and immediately
#
it was just a matter of spilling them out onto slides if I want to take say a session on
#
say the like how video is being used in marketing for example I'll have a broad idea of like
#
what are the end points that I want to get to and I'll have say hundreds of examples
#
in the middle but to make sense of all of it you need to simplify it down somewhere
#
to a framework and then bingo you find yourself creating a framework that didn't exist at
#
least in your slides five hours back and you know that sort of thing is fascinating and
#
then you say oh if I'm using this for video I can apply the same thing to something else
#
and something else and then suddenly you find more of these frameworks getting together
#
which becomes an even larger framework so I think this whole it's it's discovery and
#
it's for me it's been extremely fulfilling doing something like that I totally understand
#
now why teachers my mom's a teacher so like when they say that teaching is extremely fulfilling
#
not just is it like the selfless part of it I suppose which I always found to be honest
#
a little overrated the giving back part of it but it just forces you to become better
#
so yeah absolutely to answer your question like I did an episode with our mutual friend
#
Krish Ashok who's also been on your show by the way another terrific episode and one of
#
the things Ashok kind of said was about the pyramid of learning yeah right that your learning
#
is fairly shallow if you know you're just reading something it's a little deeper if
#
someone's telling you about it but it is the deepest when you have to teach it yes and I
#
would say in a sense writing about it is also pretty deep yes and like I keep telling my students
#
that don't think that the connection between clear writing and clear thinking is a one-way
#
connection like obviously everyone who's a clear thinker will have a better chance of being a
#
clear writer but forcing yourself to write clearly in simple language that everyone can understand
#
not being able to hide behind vague jargon or abstract generalizations you're forced to
#
understand your subject so much better absolutely I would say my aim in some way is can people who
#
study from me teach exactly what I do wow can they take at least I mean the examples and all that
#
might be different but the broad takeaways right they're always three or four takeaways at the end
#
of each presentation can I be reasonably confident that these guys will go and say that to their
#
future bosses or their colleagues who mix the mr class or whatever I try to work towards a name
#
like that and it's worked well for me I don't know if it's a universal would be a universal practice
#
but yeah that's something I think would take that pyramid like one step it gives a foundation I
#
suppose to that pyramid basement pyramids uh l1 pyramid l1 well you know at some point I'll take
#
you back to your personal journey because I really want to know about your childhood and all of that
#
but we'll save it for after the break as we are sort of on teaching digital marketing I thought
#
let me also ask a little bit about digital marketing because I am basically your digital
#
creator right but I do zero digital marketing and my sort of waffling excuse for not doing it is I
#
will often say hey the product is the best marketing which I kind of believe it's not the
#
full story but I kind of believe in it because I've been fortunate enough that whatever little
#
success I've had is kind of organic but we don't know the counterfactual now the thing about
#
advertising is when you're an advertising man so you know the famous quote by John Wanamaker when
#
he says half the money I spend on advertising is wasted I don't know which half and Ambi Parmeswaran
#
was on my show a year back and he used the phrase spray and pray for digital marketing yeah and my
#
sense like I did little marketing things once in a while like created audiograms with a minute of a
#
snippet from my show and all that and realized that it was basically just solving no purpose at all
#
and what other people who have tried digital marketing on you know Facebook and blah blah blah
#
say that it's just no point it's a waste so here you are successful practitioner teaches a course
#
on it what's your perspective on this like what are amateurs like me missing like how should I
#
think differently say about digital marketing even if I were inclined to do yeah so I think
#
it all starts with a very fundamental what do you want to do right like are you looking to reach a
#
new audience are you looking to deepen engagement if I may use that phrase with people who you're
#
connected to I think it all starts from there I think a lot of the mistakes that happen in
#
marketing today are just because of unclear objectives like I want to use Instagram it's
#
not a strategy right it's right that's that's that's uh that's a CMO reading about Instagram
#
in uh some publication and then making that some some poor sods care it's a box to tick
#
if it's a box to tick then it won't work it might lead to a pretty looking ppt slide at the end of
#
it but it's not going to solve a problem so then you think about okay let's assume that you want
#
to reach a new audience for example okay what would be a good way to reach that audience what
#
would be a medium to reach that audience on what would be a uh what would be a message that will
#
resonate with them right I'm being extremely broad over here because I can't do ad hoc consultancy
#
on on air but I think it all starts with asking extremely fundamental questions like that and
#
having logic behind everything that you do right and giving everything enough time like everything
#
that you said about content creation give it enough time to breathe etc a lot of marketing
#
is also that way you are very unlikely to click a product's banner at the first time you see it
#
it's usually after say three or four uh attempts at reaching you that you end up clicking that and
#
maybe the context has changed or whatever it is uh so that amount of repetition is needed like
#
Zomato didn't become a funny company of a funny brand on Instagram overnight they've been doing
#
this for years before they have got that solid reputation you have guys who do flash in the pan
#
sort of tweets that get popular once in a while but unless you make a habit of it you will not
#
be known for it and brand perception etc will not change right and of course that's a long
#
story by a long story by itself I think I mean it all starts with understanding what the objectives
#
are how um what you can do to change the um or or let me okay let me let me break it down this way
#
I think this is a simpler way of looking at it look at all the look at all the obstacles that
#
are in your way towards your ideal goal and break them down I think that's honestly the simplest way
#
to think about marketing because what is marketing it's something is solving at the end of the day
#
product needs to be sold right whether you're doing sales led advertising or whether you're
#
doing brand building led advertising the end objective is to put sales on the put get money
#
into the company's bank account right think about all the reasons why that's not happening right now
#
or why your objective is not being achieved like in your case suppose you suppose it's just this
#
this elite audience that is listening to your show which means that a huge chunk isn't what
#
are those reasons you can't start marketing without knowing what those reasons are because
#
you can't just again in ambi's words pray and pray throw an ad at them and hope that they will
#
convert the ad that works for say the lokandwala crowd might not work for a raipur audience might
#
not work for a trivandrum audience so on and so forth understanding why people are not clicking
#
that ad or consuming account forget clicking the ad why they're not then it could be many other
#
problems they don't know what a podcast is they don't like you they have never heard a podcast
#
before and the idea of a four-hour long podcast scares them and then you realize it's not a
#
marketing problem it might even be a product problem the the usb of the product that works
#
for one audience is actually a non-usb for another audience when you start breaking things down this
#
way you will eventually get to a point which can be solved by advertising which is oh ah okay this
#
message needs to be communicated to that audience and they are on mx tk tk great got it now that's
#
a brief but if you try to solve a problem with only advertising i don't think it works i think
#
you need to understand why it doesn't work so everything you see has a role to play over your
#
product has a role to play research has a role to play it's simple yet complicated at the same time
#
but i have always found the easiest way of approaching marketing just ask yourself what
#
is the goal that you want to achieve right for in your case it could be get more listeners in
#
somebody else's case it could be sell this new product in somebody else's case it could be i've
#
started a new course i need to get people for it great you got your objective which is honestly
#
half the battle battle one what is stopping that ideal objective from happening right now
#
start from there keep asking why why why why till you have enough actionables i think that's the way
#
to go about marketing that that's fantastic people now don't need to do your course anymore
#
because you have just kind of given all the gan right here no no it's it's it's fantastic like
#
when you know when i did my podcast course i remember someone asked me that what about the
#
marketing aspect of it and i said listen just focus on getting a good product first because
#
you know if marketing a shitty product just doesn't help people will just kind of sample it and
#
yeah and the thing with podcasting is you also want to become somebody's habit and i think this
#
is true of all creators which is why you got to keep on doing keep on doing keep on doing you know
#
that's when you're given the privilege of somebody making you their habit you know that's kind of
#
what you aim for so let's now take a quick commercial break and in case you're feeling
#
really bad because you've prepared these copious notes on your childhood and got these old family
#
albums with you to show me don't feel bad we'll talk about that after the break
#
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 india uncut dot subtract dot 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 india uncut dot substrack dot com and subscribe it is free
#
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 india uncut dot substrack dot
#
com thank you welcome back to the scene of the unseen i'm chatting with deepak chak guppala
#
krishnan or chak gopal or how do you how do you like to be known yeah that's a that's a very good
#
question i think let's just go with chak for now because that's what most people apart from the
#
income tax department know me as in fact my email id at my last two jobs actually had my nickname
#
rather than my name because everyone there was just calling me that so chakgopal at pmo.com
#
no let's just keep it to chak for now yeah hello this is mr ambani's office can i speak to chak
#
please yeah that's that's a dream isn't it okay so tell me about you know let's go back in the
#
hori past you know where were you born where did you grow up what was your childhood like so on so
#
yeah so i was born in a small country called barin which i guess many people consider the
#
middle east just an ex of kerala spent 15 years of my life over there then came back to kerala
#
for two years but i think those 15 years in barin they were very unmanful didn't have too many
#
friends as such over there and that wasn't necessarily because i was anti-social or anything it was
#
that the sheer heat and the distances between houses meant that you needed and and zero public
#
transport i must add meant that you needed your dad to ferry you around everywhere in any case
#
so i didn't have too many close friendships growing up which is something like i missed
#
uh really and i used to read a lot when i was a kid but then most of that reading was
#
um you know your enit blightens arches that sort of thing and we had a few nice local magazines
#
over there so if any gulf kids are over there they'll definitely have heard of young times
#
and that was a gateway to a completely different kind of world in fact that magazine was responsible
#
for my initial music knowledge my initial technology knowledge a whole bunch of things
#
it was like a dream for me to get published in a young time i think that happened once or twice so
#
uh following my 10th i came back to india or rather i came to india it's not i came back to india
#
i did my 11th and 12th in kochi and then you know went along with the herd and into an engineering
#
college uh because that was the thing to do uh i think those four years in engineering college
#
really changed everything um i mean i didn't become a great engineer or anything like that
#
chemical engineering for anyone who's keeping score uh but i think a lot of what i ended up
#
becoming later and all that um i think those are the formative years in many many ways which
#
looking back now i can say and i don't think it was very apparent at the time from musical taste
#
to what i want uh out of life and all those sort of things um somewhere along the way in uh college
#
uh typically around the third semester of engineering you figure out what you really
#
want to do with life and for me that ended up being advertising i remember there was this
#
there was this old magazine i don't know if you remember the summit there was an old magazine
#
called a and m advertising and marketing i believe i think it was started by the same guy who ended
#
up starting afax uh shrikant kandikar if i'm not mistaken so i read that magazine and i was
#
fascinated like oh wow thought goes behind all this advertising stuff and all that um and i
#
became obsessed i somehow i mean i had friends of mine who said that they wanted to do an mba
#
and that seemed a little too distant for me i wasn't too keen on uh following the herd that
#
much also i like had enough of that i want to make my own choices right now and suddenly this
#
intersection of mba and marketing sorry mba and advertising came up and then i was obsessed with
#
this college called mica really wanted to get through to it learned everything about it read
#
up everything whatever didn't get through the first attempt realized why fixed it and got through
#
to got through the second uh second uh attempt spent two years in amdabad over there and been
#
in mumbai ever since post that been working in various advertising marketing roles etc and been
#
freelancing since 2019 early 2019 or so um i've always done some sort of freelancing on the side
#
to keep the creative side going ironic right you're working in an industry that's supposed
#
to be creative yet you're searching for more creative fulfillment somewhere else uh let's
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just say that the love for advertising died out uh fairly quickly but that was that's another
#
story by itself so that's really where it was i genuinely think i ended up trying more things
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after the age when people typically stop trying things uh be it with respect to work be it even
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with respect to the kind of music i uh or you know going outside the comfort zone with respect to
#
music or just generally trying stuff uh so yeah that's life in a nutshell i guess it's kind of
#
fascinating that earlier we were speaking about form determining content in like a different kind
#
of context over here when you talk about barren it seems that just the geographical form of the
#
place where the houses are so far apart is in a sense dictating the content of who you are at
#
that point in time now you said your engineering years were formative and you left it at that with
#
that intriguing cliffhanger of a sentence which should really come at like if this was a serial
#
that would be the end of an episode my engineering years changed who i was i listened to your show
#
enough times to know that you would have made a note and gone back to it so i didn't lose the same
#
train of thought yeah so so so yeah so this is a moment to kind of elaborate on that yeah yeah so
#
again when i went into engineering i didn't have too much of an idea let's face it of what even
#
engineering was right um just i just genuinely didn't know that there were other options out
#
there and i didn't lament that too much later because i do believe that you know some things
#
worked out worked out for the best a few things i think i got more confident in terms of what i
#
what my strengths were i realized that okay slightly more on the creative side of things
#
etc etc in terms of the music i consume like it i went in listening to a Backstreet Boys and i
#
got out pretty much nerding out over Dream Theater and that whole thing so i figured out so it was
#
so here's the thing about Kerala Engineering College this is a very interesting set of people
#
who come together right especially a government college because being a government college fees
#
are extremely low so you have a lot of people let's face it wouldn't otherwise have had the
#
chance to access high quality education lots of reservations lots of people from across the country
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even though of course 95 would be largely malayalis so among this so-called local crowd and i please
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don't mistake i do not say that with any like malice or anything like some of my best friends
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who i made during engineering were people who i you know i had difficulty speaking to because
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i don't speak malayalam very well and they don't speak english very well so you had these set of
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guys at the same time you had a fair bunch of people from the gulf so people who i had
#
enough cultural context with could talk about the cartoons and things that happened and again
#
young times and all that and then you had that demographic from india as well so you had the
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convent educated guys as well who used to hang out with us all that purely because the you know the
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type of music and all that we consumed were similar and they were interesting overlaps so i
#
thought this was so all in all you had guys who you knew were destined to say get into an IIM
#
someday and then you had you you had a mix of things and i think that was very very enriching
#
because you were forced to interact with a lot of people get i spent most of my life extremely
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sheltered in bar in forcibly so and in 11th and 12th because again in 11th and 12th you're just
#
focusing on your boards and you know getting into a good college or whatever i think college was
#
the first time i actually did things you know expanded outside book i mean outside school books
#
and into more other kinds of books develop extra courage for the first time learned a little bit
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of music ironically i actually like every good south indian boy growing up in the gulf i learned
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carnatic but i never was really too passionate about that it was when i picked up the guitar and
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started learning music that i actually liked that i started paying more of an attention to
#
things including ironically enough back carnatic and like oh yeah that is what is happening over
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there except i never paid attention to it it's amazing how perspective changes it's it's kind
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of weird so this is this is weird little story that uh that i have which i think i want to say
#
kind of changed everything it's it's it's kind of weird maybe i'm hyping it up more than it actually
#
is um so there was this um i in my first year of college i was staying in a uh in a hostel just
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predominantly from predominantly the local guys right and i was an extremely shy i was an outsider
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for all practical purposes because my malayalam was very bad i don't get cultural references
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and because i grew up in the gulf i don't even get the hindi references so like sholey all these
#
things just went over my head like these guys are talking about shows in the dd ads of the 90s
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completely over my head so i was in my room silently reading michael cricton or something
#
like that and just whiling the time away recently started discovering some sort of music etc
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and i was pretty much an unknown entity in the hostel and college at around that time i was kind
#
of happy with that uh but i always had a sense of humor or what i'd like to think was a sense of
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humor uh growing up like i said i was uh i used to read a lot of archie but the one mag but the
#
one publication that actually i would say impacted the content i ended up creating was mad magazine
#
there was something about that slightly surreal sort of humor that really really appealed to me
#
and when i was in 11th and 12th i tried making mad magazine style comics when i was in uh school
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but they would be based on people around you know uh that was my first attempt at content creation
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if you want to now that we are using that term which would it would be like a series of how
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me and a bunch of friends stole uh the samosas from the canteen and then the superheroes were
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the professors would come and save the day all sorts of things with all sorts of in-jokes here
#
and there um i don't know how much of an archie fan you are but one of my favorite artists uh was
#
a guy called sam squats and what i used to love about him apart from his style his art itself
#
is that while the main story is happening in the foreground in the background some random thing
#
would be happening he was delightful at doing that very similar to mad's those little things
#
that they draw on the sides i was highly inspired by all this randomness that somehow seemed to make
#
sense together right and this was a time long before i discovered monty python or sergeant
#
peppers or even hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy so my idea of randomness came from a completely
#
different angle and somehow i worked all of this and then i realized i enjoyed doing stuff like
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this um so but again this was to a english-speaking convent educated audience etc when i came to
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college all of that uh obviously there was no audience for something like that so something
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very interesting happened so it was the term exams for our first and second terms combined is the
#
first uh stressful time for the entire hostel so they decided to do um uh and i'm not making
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this up a pj competition okay in malayalam pj is called chali so it was a chali competition
#
and the way it worked was it was extremely sophisticated for if anyone who thinks that
#
this is a frivolous activity is very well thought through there were two jury members who anyone who
#
wanted to submit a joke or a chali rather to the competition had to go and say to these guys and
#
they would update it in their ledger and every day the score would be updated at the front of
#
their door they were roommates so there was some like like seedings uh already basis reputation so
#
some guys had like 10 points already because of the reputation i obviously had zero because
#
nobody knew who i was then i like but i was good at coming out with funds especially engineering
#
college funds because you have so many terms to work around with so i would make random things
#
like what do you call the temperature of 15th of august 1947 the answer would be degree of freedom
#
so i would make things like this and um i just got the balls one day to go to these guys and
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submit my humble entry and at first they were like you of all people are coming to them okay
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let's hear your submission and uh they were surprised that i could do this and then that
#
encouraged me to do more more more and i think i was the top most person who didn't have a seeding
#
in that competition so over a period two months my reputation if i may use that phrase transformed
#
a little bit i know it seems like a very very weird story amit and like i'm probably making out
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a silly hostile thing to be more than what it actually is but the amount of confidence that
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that little thing gave me that i could do this in front of an audience that wasn't my so-called
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you know quote unquote target audience as we might say that these are like people who i wouldn't have
#
never spoken to otherwise who suddenly now know me because of this there are people who from other
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departments coming up and saying oh do you have a joke on our department so that felt strange
#
weird scary all at once um and i didn't quite know what to make of it but what one thing i
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didn't let go was my love for jokes or chalice as they are enough for a very good friend of mine
#
at the time to say we are not calling you deepak anymore we are calling you chali plus deepak and
#
that's really how the name comes what an origin story yeah that's really how the name came about
#
and it's stuck since then a random idea it was uh in 2004 i guess and it's uh stuck ever since
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you know i think everyone has those little moments that changed life in some way or the other and i
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think that was it for me the fact that i decided to go up to these guys and actually say that silly
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little thing because i think that gave me the confidence then to i was learning the guitar a
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little bit at that time say okay what if i take this to stage like i mean not that i blew the
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crowds away we were very bad but going up and getting booed on stages and other experience
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altogether because once that happens you can take anything else that comes your way and we
#
embrace that we actually took on the mantle of being that one act that tries very hard is always
#
going to get booed and we absolutely had a veil of a time you know that's what i said when i said
#
discovering myself in college i think that was you know incidents like this were instrumental in
#
in doing that figuring out what kind of music i liked what my role in my friends group in some
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sense was as the years progressed in college my hobbies became more and more you know i started
#
doing more and more things like there was a certain like a friend like there were three of us who were
#
obsessed with doing the hindu crossword on a daily basis and that was a time when every mobile
#
operator was offering free sms and you know while whatsapp has made things super convenient growing
#
up in an age where age of sms has a different vibe altogether as the kids might say these days
#
so we used to sit at the back and we used to and all of us had mastered the art of typing on a t9
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mobile phone nokia 1100 without looking at the screens right and we would solve the crossword
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and the challenge was we get the crossword each of us had the hindu subscription we would get it
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and we would all try to solve it the challenge was to see whether we could nail it by the end of the
#
day more more often than not we didn't but on the 10 odd occasions that we did it was it was a cause
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for celebration so you know we would do things like that and then somewhere along the way since
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i realized okay my future is not in engineering it's going to be more in advertising an mba in
#
any case so the attention that we paid i mean and it kind of felt bad in some sense because i knew
#
i was taking up a seat which i was never going to actually utilize but i was also extremely
#
practical i was very meticulous about maintaining 75% attendance to the point where we had a
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so-called cut-o-meter where we would you know actually track how much percentage of attendance
#
we had and everything else i just utilized towards anything that could get me towards
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the institute that i wanted to because to me that was you know the larger thing in any case so it's
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not like i was going off and playing hooky on the side so yeah that was that was about it i think a
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combination of all these things together the kind of things that i read also changed the kind of
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music i listened to changed the discovering what my strengths weaknesses all that were also sort
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of changed i discovered a few skills that i had that i knew i had which i never thought i would
#
actually put out you know a combination of all these things i think if you look at it from a
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delta point of view now i'm being an engineer over here in terms of the change that happened i don't
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think any other experience has changed me as much like mica was great but you know the change that
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happened when i went in in 2007 and when i got on 2009 wasn't as much as the delta that happened
#
when i went into engineering and out and i think the i think the thing i had no plan when i went
#
in again it goes back to our first conversation they just get into it learn lessons along the way
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many many of them will be post facto like for example only now 10 years later am i realizing the
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worth of a mica education when i got out it wasn't instantly apparent to me so yeah that was all
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these things put together i think was why i said that college was really i think those four years
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made in me in many ways i don't think i have changed all that much from like 2006 when i
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graduated to where i am right now in terms of thinking in terms of yeah i mean what i used to
#
call logic then has become first principles now so it's become more sophisticated maybe i have
#
but here's the thing i still listen to music the same way how i did back then the kind of music
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might have changed but my approach to certain things have haven't changed so yeah i think all
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that is i'm again probably romanticizing those four years more than i should have but yeah that's
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what i think yeah i mean some things you realize only in hindsight and the thing about you know
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that that joke competition being important because it gave you the confidence is it makes so much
#
sense because what is important to one person it might seem very well outside the other angle i
#
want to explore is that when i look back on my childhood and when i look back on my own growing
#
up years and going through college and all of that you realize that there are sort of two
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simultaneous processes working on you yeah and one is you're figuring out who you are in terms of
#
what you like what kind of person you are what your tastes are and all of that but the other
#
comes from the anxiety of fitting in yeah because obviously you want your peers to like you you want
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to be seen at school you don't want to do uncool things all of that and there's a tug of war there
#
and with many people i think this can be a lifelong process like in on both these margins
#
for example i think there are many people who perhaps don't introspect enough or are self-reflective
#
enough and their personhood who they really are is kind of determined in many ways by accident and
#
serendipity and they let things happen to them and they don't perhaps sit back and think and of
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course one extreme argument could be made that there is no personhood you're acting even to
#
yourself but apart from that and the other aspect is that anxiety of what other people think of you
#
i think is a lifelong anxiety that you have to learn to lose and i actually started thinking
#
about it in a mindful way really i think probably only in my 40s where you know you realize that
#
first of all that anxiety is pointless because nobody's thinking of you everybody's got their
#
head up their own ass nobody gives a shit so you just you just do what you do so is this something
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that you've thought about because i imagine both these processes would have happened during those
#
engineering years because just in terms of age how old you are that is a formative period in
#
everybody's life that one you're figuring out who you are in terms of maybe your humor maybe
#
the kind of music you're discovering the kind of books you're enjoying reading and at the same time
#
you're trying to fit in you're trying to get that validation from the people around you in a sense
#
you're asking yourself even then what is my role in the story right and maybe trying to form that
#
role for yourself yeah and it seems that humor in some ways is also a way of fitting in of you know
#
yeah gaining that guy so yeah is this something you've thought about yeah oh absolutely in fact
#
more than engineering i think this hit me a lot when i was in 11th and 12th and for many reasons
#
because one i was coming into a school that i was coming in at 11th and 12th i was one of like three
#
people who didn't study in that institute before so which meant i was going into one of the top
#
schools in the city with very smart people i grew up in barin and barin for like has many things
#
going for it but there are only so many people and your frame of reference in terms of your peer
#
group and all that is only there just to give you context i scored 92.x in my 10th and that made me
#
third in the country right again we're talking about a country which is roughly the size of
#
the suburb that we are recording this in right now that's that's one of the finest humble brags in
#
my podcast i became third in the country yeah but i'm saying that for context and now that 92.6
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became some eighth in the class that i was in right so just to give you a context of the peer
#
group that i had along with this all these guys were really good at playing cricket they somebody
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played guitar really well which i never thought was a thing there was somebody else who was a
#
great dancer all of these guys were studying by day and organizing events at night i was in awe
#
of my peer group because i've never been exposed to something like this before and those two years
#
the amount of imposter syndrome that i had the amount of trying to fit in plus i didn't speak
#
the language all that well all those things and i think in some way i told you about that first
#
content creation exercise which was the comics and all that that was born out of a desperation to
#
i wouldn't say fit in but to almost say i am eligible to be part of this group of people
#
sure i may not be able to play cricket terrible at it i may not be able to play sport or learn
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something i mean let's face it by 11th if you don't play some of these things in your formative years
#
you're never going to get there in any case so drawing was one thing i was decent at i thought
#
okay let's try to convert some of that and i was very happy when people were actually asking me
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when are you going to do the next one for example so i would say that whatever you spoke about this
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wantingness to fit in and all that was more true for me in my 11th and 12th because of the new
#
change in circumstances and all that strangely enough college was a little easier because i
#
stopped worrying about that at one level a second level i had a very tight group of friends when i
#
was in college so i didn't and it was a very small group right so i didn't need to impress the whole
#
college just needed to impress three people all of whom had the same sort of interest etc and we
#
were very very tight a lot of this pressure that you're talking about it's very interesting you
#
ask this question it just seems like a very natural question and when you were saying that
#
flashes of how insecure i was in 11th and 12th came but engineering not at all i didn't feel
#
the need to do that at all also because i knew that i will always be an outsider over here
#
because here you have a college that is entire let's face it 95 malayalam there frame of reference
#
completely different i will always be a niche out here right i will niche in the sense i don't say
#
that in a positive way i will always be an outsider over here i'm okay with that i know what i want
#
from this place i will get it make a few friends and screw off from here right and i thought i
#
think i got that so i think in some sense that pressure was off to some extent it came back
#
when i went to mica and i had that you know again need to impress everyone all over again but i
#
think by then things had changed gotten older had some skills etc did enough online authority for
#
myself to have some sort of a reputation going in and all that so yeah i'm not quite sure if i
#
answered your question but i didn't face that anxiety when i was in uh when i was in college
#
in any case and have they changed in interesting ways for example one thing that you know when i
#
look back on the past i look back on myself and i think hey i'm a completely different person
#
yeah completely but i look back on others and many of them seem to be the same guy they put on weight
#
and all of that but it's almost like there is an essentialness that is there yeah and they are that
#
thing all their lives whatever it is oh yeah uh so what what's your sense of this of that essentialness
#
and the complete change i think this is true from say the two three people from school i'm in touch
#
with the five six people in from college i'm in touch with and maybe the many people from
#
posts that i'm in touch with very few people have surprised me uh of you know going off another path
#
altogether this could also be amit because of the uh nature of the places where i studied
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i studied in a kerala college i studied in yes i studied in gujarat but mica is extremely not
#
like the rest of gujarat uh you know if if you know what i mean and in that sense those people
#
always had some principles or some grounding etc which was never likely to change yeah you're
#
right they put on weight they've taken career paths that i never thought they would like so
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some people from my batch at mica who became entrepreneurs who i never thought that would
#
happen that aspect changed the professional aspect changed but yeah as a person i don't think
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that many people have surprised me in that i'm not quite sure why that is uh but i guess some
#
people some part of it yeah just remains the same uh as you say and you also mentioned that you know
#
there were all these people who were good at so many things yeah and some of the stuff you
#
realized that if you don't have it by the 11th standard you're gonna get good at it what did
#
you mean uh sport mostly mostly sport because yeah sure a drawing or music or something you
#
can pick up later but if you haven't been through the rough and tumble of uh playing cricket when
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you are say eight years old right 15 and 16 is a very very difficult time to pick up a team sport
#
let me make that clear like i cycle and i think i'm decent at it but that's something i picked
#
up in my late 20s uh but something like a team sport not just because of skill itself i think
#
it also involves a lot of interpersonal communications and all those little nuances
#
which you miss i still remember whenever basketball game was on i felt very out of place
#
playing as part of a team uh so i me and a couple of others would always just play by ourselves or
#
would play solo i don't know whether that's sad or whether that's uh whether that's uh resourceful
#
but uh yeah that's that's basically what i meant uh i realized that okay yeah i am too old to start
#
playing uh these kind of games so yeah yeah and i i think that's true of non-team sports also like
#
chess for example if you're not at a certain level by 11 or 12 you're simply not going to make it
#
which you know one of the when i talk to my writing uh students again the word students when i talk
#
to participants of my writing course one of the things that i take pains to emphasize and again
#
is something i feel really strongly about so i take pains to emphasize is that in certain things
#
i mean hard work is required for everything but in certain things you also need some raw talent
#
like if you're a batsman you need your hand eye coordination if you're a fast bowler you'll need
#
your fast twitch muscles certain things you have to be born with but for writing as i keep saying
#
you don't need to be born with anything anyone can learn to write great prose right it's just a
#
question of putting in the work you can start at any point in time and you can pick it up and it's
#
important to say this because there are too many people who are perhaps at an early stage in their
#
learning yeah and they have the imposter syndrome and they don't have the confidence and they they
#
just beat themselves up yeah and you cannot do that it's just a question of putting in the 10,000
#
hours and and and by corollary there are some people who probably got an undeserved 80 out of
#
100 for their english exam in the ninth who think they are great writers but no they're just good at
#
cracking an exam system so yeah i think it works both ways works both ways so i want to ask you
#
this about music where does music fall in that like you try to be a musician you learn the guitar
#
and all of that yeah you know from your college years and which is okay not that early you're not
#
a child prodigy but it's pretty much when most people learn i think yeah yeah so how was that
#
journey for you and you know and where would you say music falls on that spectrum for example i
#
know you're a big fan of say warren mendoza yeah a great guitarist so what's the difference between
#
a you and a him is there also a certain difference in a lot of talent or is it just that he's put in
#
many more hours from an earlier stage so to a budding musician what would you say where does it
#
fall on the spectrum i don't think you should use the word musician with me at any point of time yes
#
there was a time i tried to learn how to play the guitar made a fool of myself on stage enough
#
number of times but i don't think that is enough to qualify as a musician possess so i'll like there
#
were multiple questions you are so i'll try to answer them together so one you could say i had
#
a grounding in music because i was put through the karnatic thing enjoyed it for what it was but
#
wasn't like i would definitely not want to go through that again because i didn't see myself
#
doing that beyond a point i honestly went more for the company of friends rather than for the art
#
itself in college it was just something i wanted to try i didn't start off with oh i'm going to
#
become a great musician one day right for me it was just something i wanted to try it looks like
#
it looked like an interesting time pass sort of activity i've used the word time pass activity
#
and it was also the time i started listening to slightly more challenging music than the
#
you know backstreet boys bon jovis of the world with all due respect to said artists now what
#
happens is when you play an instrument you start gaining immense amount of respect for the recorded
#
music as well so i thought both of those fed off nicely of each other and learned enough to be
#
able to perform a few songs on stage and that i think really is where my my journey as a quote
#
unquote musician should should come into play it taught me a lot though it taught me being in a
#
band is a different experience altogether you experience a lot of highs and lows together it's
#
it's a logistically very difficult game because you have to lug instruments all over the place
#
you have to practice a lot before you can even make a very basic four chord song sound decent
#
there are lots of fights that happen you want to perform one song another person wants to
#
perform another and other wasn't wants to perform an original so um yeah the number of fights we
#
have had in bands and we're just talking about two college bands over here let alone you know
#
i wonder what happened now we go back goes back to Beatles right imagine what those conversations
#
were like and now i understand what creative differences mean you know when they when bands
#
break up um that was really it with respect to performing you know just to use you accuse me
#
of being a musician so i'll leave it at that in terms of how i might be different from a
#
warren purely from that perspective one of course he's put in the hours and all that but i think
#
you know i think he also so that obviously changes you like the we may both have an
#
interesting idea for a melody in our heads but purely he but he's able to translate that into
#
final output better because he's got the skills for it which you can argue have been built over
#
a over a over a period of time but then what happens because you know the basics is that
#
you're able to form those melodies in the first place better you know what's going to work better
#
you know what audiences are going to react to better so it's not just a matter of you sitting
#
on the pot and coming out of the tune and saying hey this might be a hit song right in order to
#
get to that stage you need to have done a whole lot of other things studied music put two and two
#
together and i think that i think is more important right i think and i don't think that is something
#
that you can be born with by itself i think stuff like that comes from having learned music study
#
music having tried a lot of things no okay this is oh this sounds good but it's actually derived
#
from something else it sounds exciting now but in final version output it won't be great or
#
you know whatever the whatever the case may be and finally just the doggedness to pursue
#
and get it out you know i think that's the that's a very very big thing even if you have a very
#
simple melody in your head as any content creator will know an idea sounds great until you need to
#
start execution right and then the difficult job begins of putting it together getting a band
#
together recording it and all that so it's a scandalous question to ask Amit but i think those
#
are the i think the few ways in which i humble Deepak Gopalakrishnan i'm different from the
#
finest guitarist of the country no no i think i think the moment i kind of phrased the question
#
and i was thinking aloud i realized it's sort of absurdly phrased because i think obviously if
#
two different people put in an equal number of hours and hard work they can reach something
#
like an equal number an equal amount of proficiency but in actually having you know that extra spark
#
that takes it to the place like you know there might be people who can play the guitar technically
#
as well as warren for example can they write on uva sky yeah right so that's kind of what takes it
#
to the other level and this also reminds me about a conversation i had perhaps circa 2001 or maybe
#
even in the late 90s about a friend with a band called orange street and what i mentioned about
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them was that i thought they had interesting ideas for songs and some of the originals were really
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good but you know there was something missing and my friend said you know what the problem is
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they're not good enough to play their own songs and yeah and if anyone from orange street is
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listening to this i'm sorry if it sounds harsh i'm i'm reporting what somebody else said to me
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but it's just something that came to mind when you spoke about how you can come up with a melody
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but then to actually execute it and take it out there maybe you need your 10 000 hours you know
#
maybe maybe an orange street today if they had persevered would have been like a whole different
#
level so let's kind of go back now you've you've done maika yeah and and i'm interested that here
#
also there are other creative urges playing out like you're doing your cartooning and your humor
#
and your little bits of thing out there you're going on the internet in in those times what was
#
that like you know how important was that for you did you ever at some point say that this is what
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i want to do because typically oh the creators don't really want to be marketing and advertising
#
people right yeah yeah no uh oh yeah i mean uh when i actually let me go back a little bit i
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think that's an important part of the story that i haven't mentioned which is this website called
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pagle guy not sure if you're familiar with this at all so for those who don't know pagle guy used
#
to be a thriving forum of mba aspirants from around the country built on very old forum
#
technology that you will find only uh certain hobbies communities using right now obviously
#
all those conversations have migrated to whatsapp group facebook groups and uh all that right now
#
but back in the day pagle guy was the community of all mba aspirants across the country and i think
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that by itself and i hate to sound elitist when i'm saying this is a great filter by itself because
#
now you have some very smart people scattered across the country different backgrounds
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um i think that entire experience of hanging out with those guys so again just to give context as
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to where i was i was studying in a small town in kerala i had my friends who i was hanging out with
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sure but and a couple of them were also keen on doing mba and all that um but nobody else had
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heard of mica yet no one wanted that to be the only b school that they were aspiring for
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and i suddenly and i went from that you know dearth of information to this place where not
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not only were there people like me but also you know with similar interests across the country
#
and all that i was addicted to pagle guy like and this was just the time when internet cafes and
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all that started becoming a little popular in small towns as well so i would still remember
#
and my college was on the outskirts of the town as most of these big colleges tend to be so i
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would take a bus right after college i would go to a what do you have what what is this thing reliance
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world somewhere web world reliance web world yeah i remember those i was such a fan of reliance
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web world i actually once wore their t-shirt like a salesman on stage while playing bass
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but that's but yeah that's no wonder your musical career didn't take off that's how cool i was back
#
in the day so um i used to go to reliance web world and i would spend hours and hours on pagle
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guy just absorbing everything i could about not just mica but oh wow these are the cultural
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references of these people like you know um and i spent a lot of time over there made a lot of and
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that was the first virtual community that was a part of you know orkut was all just taking off at
#
that point of time and from there parts of that community segued into twitter right um it's kind
#
of interesting so i'm not a big fan of my twitter handle by itself chuck underscore gopal i much
#
i prefer chuck of all trades which is cheesy in another different way but leave it at that the
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only reason is um because of character limit chuck of all is 16 and so i just carried forward the
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email the handle i had randomly made when i when i was on pagle guy so a lot of people from there
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suddenly identified me oh you're same guy over here okay cool whatever now the question that
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you asked was very interesting i uh the internet and in particular some certain creators played
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such a role for me growing i told you how mad magazine influenced me a lot when i was in
#
school and that took me on one type of humor there was another strand of humor that i discovered
#
when i was at mica uh which took me on a completely different path and that gentleman was anand ramachandran
#
aka big fat phoenix uh for those of you who are unaware he used to write one of india's funniest
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i want to say it's a blog but it's more like a it's more like a stream of consciousness uh personal
#
diary of sorts comes attire news sort of thing uh called son of bosi i think strands of that
#
are some remnants of that are still littered around the internet which anand uh with his
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munificence once in a while revives in fact i don't know chuck the first time you and i met
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we were at infinity mall and you were with anand i was with anand correct dear friend of mine at
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that time lived in mumbai also yeah yeah and that's when he kind of introduced us not too far from
#
where we are recording right now in fact so many times i'm not in place but anyway so i discovered
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i don't know how to be very honest because i was not into that south indian humor scene at all it
#
just randomly came up and from there to be very honest like exactly what you said i know you
#
through those guys a lot of twitter guys narin uh from that entire like that opened up a completely
#
different uh you know world to me getting onto twitter and discovering all this at the same time
#
so it's just a lot of uh you know happy accidents coming together uh really and that influenced me
#
a lot i think i i think i was so influenced by and inspired by that era of great humor writers
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very specifically anand narin uh krishashok for example a lot of people's tweets ramesh
#
revert's tweets for instance so i that was the you know that was the the a gang to me at that
#
point of time and i still think a lot of those guys are far funnier than many of the stand-up
#
comedians who we see right now with all due respect to even those set of uh with those set of talents
#
and yeah i think that influenced me a lot you know that entire uh that entire thing and i think and
#
you you i think you will agree with me on this that twitter from 2009 to say around 2012-13 was
#
sort of like a golden period like so many friends friendships really made from there so many
#
weddings of people who i met on twitter at that time uh still close friends right now so many
#
professional engagements have come up because of that so yeah i think all that i think it was a
#
perfect storm and i think it was a product of its time both pagle guy right now for example
#
something like that wouldn't happen uh and also that that it's just one of those golden periods
#
that tended to that happened and i'm just very very grateful to have been a part of both of these
#
at a time when that happened yeah i mean i was never too active on twitter but i do remember
#
it as being such a nice friendly warm place to hang out and it's just become like the most toxic
#
place in the world yeah yeah i mean that's a that's a that's a slippery slope which we should like
#
just avoid and not talk about but the other thing about that early twitter era is how how the humor
#
was sometimes just so random spontaneous and like i remember there was this one um you know we would
#
do random hashtags and people would get it you know i put out for example something like i try
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to make a hashtag that was um uh making puns on iron maiden songs with context of mumbai so iron
#
maiden has a song called power slave so i just said powai slave hashtag iron maiden mumbai that's it
#
i just left it at that with zero context five minutes later people understood and they were
#
riffing off it which is the finest definition of what a meme is uh and we would do random things
#
like this uh again anand or ramesh one of these troublemakers they had a hashtag called twitter
#
sounds and what twitter sounds was a person's handle said twice together what does that resemble
#
so for example and another come out with all sorts of things ramesh shrivastava shrivats was
#
the shuffling sound that students make in the back bench when they see the principal walking
#
down the hall you know to me that one tweet personified early twitter that you know that
#
era so i think yeah i think a lot of i was influenced by that a lot because i wanted to
#
get to that level you know in terms of humor in terms of acceptability in some sense in terms of
#
again imposter syndrome all those sort of things uh right um yeah i think and did you did you also
#
try stand-up and stuff when i did actually so it is very strange my story actually my um story of
#
stand-up is extremely different from the wave that's happening right now or arguably peaked
#
a couple of years back one of the early experiments i tried in um when i was you know just starting
#
off freelancing and all that was i used to draw comics for pagle guy in fact they were all based
#
on mba life and all that it was a idea that uh my editor at the time added a person who i've
#
unfortunately fall uh like um we've had our differences so we don't we are out of touch but
#
a person who i have deep respect for with respect to his professional capabilities and if he's
#
listening i want him to know that he encouraged me to try this sort of okay let's try making you
#
well actually the story goes before that have you do you remember this old website called fly you
#
fools by any chance yeah of course who weirdly thinking about you you resemble um he used to
#
so uh fly you fools was a short-lived cult webcomic where he had these photographs of his you'll
#
remember this he had those photo of some 10-15 photographs he'd taken and he would use those same
#
photographs in every comic and he would just change the text on the bubbles this was a standard
#
stick it was beautiful he put out a competition one day again it goes back to competitions again
#
i think my life is life changes when competitions like this happen he put out a fill in the whatever
#
your regular fill in the bubble sort of competition i won the audience this thing favorite so asad
#
selected somebody else but uh but some 15 people in the comments and oh no no deepak deserves like
#
he his was the funniest like areva that that actually uh that makes me feel happier so my editor
#
or who would go on to be my editor he saw this and said hey you want to try doing something like this
#
for pagle guy the initial idea was exactly the same he actually photographed some people in office
#
he sent them to me and see do what you can with these so i did something it worked out well at
#
least the first two got received well and then i said do you mind if i try drawing these and my
#
drawing skills had deteriorated greatly from the time i got to c plus for drawing a apple in uh in
#
higher kindergarten but that being said i did win a few drawing prizes and stuff along the way so i
#
tried doing it and it worked out well i think what worked more than the art honestly was the
#
fact that somebody was making mba related jokes it is extremely niche in terms of his audience
#
but that was the community that pagle guy was at that point of time you could make this is a little
#
bit like miss excel it is it very much is and i actually wanted to make that point and so like
#
i'll tell you a kind of jokes that jokes again quote unquote that would work and you will see
#
why they would bomb better say a comedy store or something like that there are some very subtle
#
differences between i am amdabad and i am bangalore which only people in the mba circuit know because
#
it doesn't matter to anybody else i am bangalore for instance at least it this was a scene ten
#
years back can't say whether it's the same thing right now i am bangalore used to be this place
#
where which was a wild card with respect to whether you would get a call or not you had people who
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would get a call from all other i am's and for some reason bangalore would not be there
#
and you would have people who will get a call only from bangalore even though they have only 92
#
percentile they put it down to whatever like some lemon and spoon race you must have one in fifth
#
standard therefore you've gotten this so also theory so you know bringing out humor in these
#
right so uh uh would be kind of things that we that these comics would play on and then i did
#
another series which i'm very proud of actually if you ask me for all the content random content
#
creation exercise i have done pre-podcast this would be the one i'm proudest of it's a series
#
for pagle guy called apla a pagle look at which was basically some 30 or 40 odd mba careers
#
but told in a comic format so i actually went and spoke to like an investment banker somebody
#
who does market research etc etc i would tell you don't be funny i will try to do that you
#
tell me what your job is and then i would somehow find humor in there do this thing and i like as i
#
did this i was realizing oh man here is where the mad influence comes in here is where the
#
anand ramachandran influence is coming in all those were like coming together very beautifully
#
eventually the series ran out of steam because one there are only so many times you can rehash
#
the fact that mba is faff a lot and two there are only so many mba careers there are so that
#
dider but is it is it online somewhere it is online it's not on pagle guy because the site
#
is restructured so what i have done is i've actually created because i'm too i i like those
#
comics enough to put them on a website so i've created a wordpress for this so obviously show
#
notes uh i've just put all of this and i've also picked my top 20 this is what i think are the
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best uh best of the lot and i was very proud of this i'm very proud of these uh the the comics
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that i've done so another thing happened along the way and this actually is going to answer your
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question which is pagle gay was such a strong community that we used to have meetups once in
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a while right um just imagine a forum where people all over the country would travel to pune every
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year in order to meet fly down uh about 100 150 odd people and they actually had to start take
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registrations because the venue could only hold so much wow just imagine a community of strangers
#
coming together knowing each other only by avatar and whatever it was beautiful i'm within its hey
#
day pagle guy was the most beautiful community i could have hoped to be a part of sadly of course
#
no longer a thing now but fair enough a product of its time i suppose the uh the editor he suggested
#
why don't you take some of these jokes and try to convert them into a stand-up set and see what
#
happens i thought all right fair enough what's the worst that could happen because see these are all
#
a bunch of mba related jokes you say you just say i am bangalore and people will start laughing
#
because that's the nature of it everyone's in a good spirit whatever that little set i did i was
#
10 15 minutes it went way better than i could have expected enough for me to think what if i
#
actually took this to b-schools because i wasn't and i must admit at this time i had no idea about
#
the indian stand-up scene i had no idea who veerdas was or tanmay whoever completely removed from that
#
scene because that twitter was very different from the twitter that i was hanging out on
#
and i tried it and it worked it kept working it kept working amit till people stopped understanding
#
iipm jokes okay yeah that was the time i realized so this is i think the last show i did was early
#
2017 or 2018 so i had a decent run from 2012 or so all the way to 2007 five years i milked that set
#
along the way i tried a lot of things um what the first stand-up show that i ever saw on um on uh
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on video i must admit pirated uh video was uh by an english comedian called david gorman and it's
#
called google vac uh google backing is the practice of finding or searching for two terms which yields
#
just one google result so that's called google backing and apparently it's a sport he had a
#
complete stand-up set about this which i will not get into but what fascinated me about that was
#
the fact that he was using a projector i've never seen any comedian before or since you do that i've
#
seen some attempts like when aib does like a show for something but that is for a show this was part
#
of his you know his material and i realized how much weight that added it wasn't just supporting
#
what he was saying it many times it was the joke sometimes he would stop he click his pointer
#
something would change on screen his expression would be the same and that that was the joke by
#
itself you can't hear an audio version of that and laugh because everything was in the visuals
#
i got highly inspired by that and for a couple of years i actually made a ppt version of this
#
because i thought hey what's the most mba thing that could happen if i'm making a set on mba
#
jokes might as well have a ppt accompanying it so i had a lot of fun with that in fact i think
#
there might still be one video that i did front i am kozhikode in 2016 or something floating around
#
on youtube somewhere please don't link that though uh you've said it so they'll find it
#
but i won't link it fair enough yeah no but i have but jokes apart uh literally um i had a lot of
#
fun with that and um again i went to a lot of b-schools just to do this and uh i had no
#
aspirations to make this a professional thing because i knew i would eventually get tired of
#
it i think i had enough self-awareness at that point of time to know that if this i need to take
#
to the next level the amount of work that i'll need to put in will be exponentially higher and
#
i was at a stage professionally where i didn't want to do that because i knew what i was doing
#
my day job was fine this thing let me have some nice memories while i was at it and i did i made
#
some great friends doing the whole thing the most beautiful thing and there are some people from
#
ximb batch of 2016 who might kill me for saying this on air i did a clandestine show at ximb
#
because i was flown down for an event where the rules i out of respect i will not say what the
#
event was but intrepid people will youtube enough to find out where strictly the rules were the
#
people who are being invited for this cannot do anything else no commercial discussions can happen
#
no guest lecture nothing of that kind they're coming only for this even have to fly back but
#
this kids over there knew hey you do the stand-up set no do you mind tomorrow if you do over here
#
we won't tell anyone you can't publicize but we'll let we'll spread it in the hostels and all that
#
i thought what how beautiful is that like doing a like clandestine show at uh at a b-school so
#
that's what i did all sorts of things like this one day one of the most memorable days for me and
#
i'm just reminiscing over here randomly i'm sorry for that in the morning i performed at iam amdabad
#
in front of the very person whoever's making fun of philip uh not philip kotler abraham kochi who
#
co-wrote the book with him the at least the version that's in india it felt so amazing to
#
get applause from professors and a filled hall of iam amdabad students and one of the things
#
that i would always do actually you know later that day i immediately took a flight and i performed
#
at iam uh raipur i think i am raipur are one of one of those so had a veil of a time doing this
#
one thing i would do is i would customize the jokes basis the institute so i would never take
#
the same set to every place i had some fillers where i would always speak to students beforehand
#
and tell me five things about your college that only the students know and people will make fun
#
of and these i realized over a point of time these could be a few standard things tell me one
#
committee for instance on your campus which nobody knows what they do and the moment it is
#
mentioned everybody laughs so you get in something over there one one b school over here for example
#
had uh actually uh let's not use that because we'll get into trouble but let's just say that
#
there were committees that everyone would laugh at then there would be some person with some quirk
#
or something there would be some subject that nobody understood you you are you have been a
#
b school student you know what makes your audience you know what makes these guys pick work that into
#
the set i think that level of customizing really really helped sometimes i would even take pictures
#
and put them into the slides with people's permissions of course and i think that was fun
#
i think that entire period taught me a lot again about myself content creation all that sort of
#
thing i had a veil of a time doing it on stage the anticipation of you i've done this set about
#
i guess about 30 times in all in b schools across the country and very proud of that but the
#
nervousness that you feel just as your name is being announced because the number of things that
#
can go wrong because now it's not just jokes it's also the fact that you're using a damn projector
#
that has to work laptop has to work everything needs to sync together what if something goes
#
wrong you know or what if nobody laughs which has also happened there have been times when
#
jokes have absolutely fell flat jokes that killed it at one b school people suddenly don't like in
#
another b school don't get at all and like i said the last show that i had my only regret is that
#
my last show was a bit of a downer because that's when i realized enough of this because the jokes
#
aren't working anymore because people don't understand the context i'm still making jokes
#
that are relevant in 2012-13 what is that iipm the worst thing to happen to my stand-up career was
#
somebody realizing to shut down iipm because that stopped being part of cultural consciousness
#
and had to end that entire thing but yeah i tried stand-up and yes on the side i had done
#
this gave me enough confidence to actually go and perform at your regular open nights where i made
#
the usual kind of jokes i won a couple as well in 2017 or something i had won an open mic and
#
stuff like that over here and again i don't want to sound like it's coming off as bragging or
#
anything like that because here's the one thing i've realized about the stand-up circuit having
#
been a outside participant then an inside participant then even working for oml which
#
is very much involved in the comedy circuit it's not just the jokes that you make it's also about
#
the tenacity to stick it out for that long it's about using the same jokes over and over again
#
having them bomb in some place having them succeed in some place come back night after night and by
#
then 2017 or so the circuit had become cut throat in terms of the slots for an open mic would go in
#
seconds that's how competitive the circuit was at least in bombay and i didn't have a stomach for
#
it anymore here i am pushing 30 have a day job that's paying me enough there are other things
#
to do i don't want to go and sit with a bunch of 20 year olds pretending to laugh at everybody's
#
jokes because that's not because i i know that's the only way to climb up this ladder organically
#
and i wasn't too keen on shortcutting it and and and going the other way once i realized that the
#
whole b-school thing that time was done i sort of like huh it's time to hang up the stand-up
#
boots as it were a very long answer i know but i hope that answers the question that was the sort
#
of there's no answer which is too long on the show yeah on the show that was fascinating in
#
many ways especially the fact that all these years like those are the years stand-up kind of
#
exploded right to many it was a question of timing yeah that you know many of the early guys weren't
#
really that good they were just there at the start and they made their names and made a lot
#
of money they will be the first ones to admit it by the way yeah i'm sure i'm sure they will
#
and some of them were good but many of them were yes yeah and it's just a kind of a sort of a
#
question of luck that's kudos to them for trying it out at a time when exactly yeah like right now
#
comics done the show on netflix oh sorry on amazon prime it's uh it's twitter bio is uh
#
convincing indian parents that comedy is a viable career or something of that sort but yeah we are
#
in an age right now where if you are a if you're thinking of being a comedian you have an agency
#
like oml or somebody else who will manage you professionally this was wild west back in 2011
#
12 whenever when all these guys started so kudos to them for having the gumption to pursue this
#
even if they weren't necessarily the best at and were you tempted to kind of then enter the fray
#
in that way you know the way that you know tempted to go out there with the aibs and the east india
#
companies you talk as if i could you talk as if so here's the thing i realized amit i think
#
i was very comfortable doing what i was doing right i knew i possibly could if i put in the
#
work if i it it honestly to me was really about the work it was about the work ethic to write
#
rewrite perform open mics again and again it's really about that not saying that i'm born with
#
talent or something but i wasn't linked to do the latter one because so much competition was there
#
two i had too many other things happening in life in any case and three and very importantly i had
#
a reasonably decent captive audience at the end of the day what do all these kids who want to do
#
stand-up want they want to perform in front of an audience of say a few hundred people every day
#
or not every day but a few times i had done that the here's a very weird thing about my this very
#
this very circuitous stand-up journey that i had i had gone to open mics performing to audiences of
#
the other open micers having performed to an audience of about 500 600 i am amdabad already
#
so when i put that in context i realized i mean if that was a kick i wonder i've already got it
#
i hope i'm not coming off as pretentious or like pompous when i say this the fact is i had i took
#
a niche at that point of time took a chance on it and then suddenly people like wait you're going to
#
say b-school related jokes we want to like tell me more about this and i just wanted to have fun i
#
didn't charge a lot of money for this i said cover the airfare give me a place to say give me some
#
amount of money i'm fine i really didn't make a lot of money doing this stuff for me it was all
#
about the experience going on meeting people trying out something new and i think that worked
#
for that period of period of time was i tempted to get into the space i was but when i look at
#
the amount of work that that would have entailed which it rightly should i wasn't willing to let
#
me put it that way purely because there were too many other things happening on the side including
#
my day job which was going decently at that point of time so yeah again thinking aloud you know
#
people will often look at counterfactuals and they'll compare the road taken with the road not taken
#
but it's not just the road not taken it's also the work not done you take the road not taken you
#
would have had to change everything do a lot of work in a particular direction yeah you can't just
#
view the romanticized aspects of the road not taken with the mundane aspects absolutely absolutely
#
and at the same time i think one thing's become very clear to me after speaking to a lot of
#
comedians having worked at oml etc the end product which is that one hour of seeing this guy living
#
his dream on stage and all that that is just that is the only happy hour that that person has in the
#
day otherwise it is traveling it is writing it is constant rejection it is paranoia it is everything
#
because it is completely a subjective craft and you are in the public eye and we only we all know
#
what can happen to people in the public eye these days in the you know something surfacing from
#
10 years back whatever the case may be these guys are in a state of constant like it may seem great
#
on stage wow he's living his dream telling jokes and for people who are able to do that then great
#
so that's the other thing that people tend to miss and this is true of anything stand-up comedy
#
music everything yeah podcasting so you know one final question on stand-up because i didn't know
#
all of this and i i didn't plan to have a section on stand-up i wasn't planning on saying this was
#
part of my youtube that i've hidden somewhere but i guess now yeah i'll have to just now interpret
#
listeners will discover it and etc etc so final question what do you think about the evolution
#
of stand-up comedy in the country like i'll briefly give you my views on it which are likely
#
to be outdated and which are also likely to be somewhat superficial because i haven't seen the
#
scene too deeply but my initial view when the early stand-up in english started happening
#
maybe a decade ago was that a lot of it was derivative of western comics a lot of it did
#
not really come from so much lived experience uh no fault of many of these guys because they
#
were so young a lot of it didn't have that authenticity the earthiness which comedians
#
in the languages uh could bring in but i saw the scene changing in the sense that recently i've
#
seen young guys who i think are just really really good and i would imagine that that's kind of
#
happening because the ecosystem is so much bigger and when you have a bigger ecosystem whoever
#
emerges to the top is likely to be good also the other aspect which i think will play out really
#
over 10 15 20 years is to see what it happens when they age because a lot of the best stand-up
#
comedy that i like from the west is stuff where people who are in their 40s 50s have been there
#
done that a lot of self-reflection in comedy anyway they've changed completely they look back
#
on their lives and that makes for the best work i mean even if it's not you know politically correct
#
to take his name louis ck's late work is just fantastic you know you see louis ck performing
#
at 25 it is shit there's nothing to laugh at you look at him at 50 it's just a whole new level
#
arguably i would say the same of carlin as well i wasn't a big fan of the early stuff that he
#
done i said what are you doing oh they're just being loud but then who can dispute the genius of
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the man later yeah so i think i think you know that's what i'm waiting for i'm waiting for
#
someone like uh like guys who are already very good now like varun grover rohan joshi what are
#
they going to be in 2030 right that really fascinates me because you have much more lived
#
experience you have and and artists are especially comics are given if they're good comics through
#
tons of self-reflection you know as a material of life gives a material to work with where does that
#
go yeah so what's your sense of how that scene has kind of evolved as you've seen it it's a it's a
#
very interesting question unfortunately i don't have asked nuanced an answer as i should have
#
because i stopped following and being interested as a whole in comedy about three four years back
#
and i think a lot has happened since but i can like definitely tell you what happened uh from
#
then i think it was interesting uh because bookending my so-called stand-up career was the
#
birth of open mics the way they were struggling to fill in slots like literally it had people like
#
rohan picking me and asking would you like to uh would you like we are doing an open mic tomorrow
#
can you come in and whatever to a time like i said is selling out like irctc tatkal tickets right
#
uh that are sort of like the bookending in terms of content itself yes you are right a lot of it
#
tends to be derivative from there and i think also that was purely because that was the reference
#
point that a lot of these guys had they would see the you know whatever the russell peters or the
#
carlins of the world and a lot of the pop culture that they consumed was also sort of like that i
#
think things started to change and of course i think we have a lot of that credit has to go to
#
zakir khan for that for making it cool to be vulnerable in another language one and also not
#
classically funny like if you see there aren't that many jokes that are littered around zakir's
#
comedy and uh again because my hindi is not all that great a lot of what he says goes completely
#
over my head but to me it's like what he was saying about shakespeare and sometimes it's poetry the
#
way he speaks the intonations you can even if you don't know the language you're able to understand
#
it because of the way that he talks and suddenly he gets you to a very serious point about a breakup
#
that's happening at the table where he said he's leaving the audience hanging and he's holding his
#
hand and said anything he's going to deliver a moment of shairi over here and then he berates
#
the waiter for putting elaichi in his biryani there was a punch line sorry for the spoiler
#
but you know his ability to do that and be relatable and all that i think he
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allowed people to i know a lot of people for example who come to open mics and do stuff in hindi
#
they look up to zakir right you can see you can see it and if you ask them they will definitely
#
say ha zakir bhai and the reverence that he is treated with it's it's it's sort of unmatched
#
at least from what i have seen what i've also seen is that people are trying other things i
#
think there are people trying to emerge with their own genres and styles to varying degrees
#
of success but that's fine right you need those varying degrees in order to have somebody like
#
i've seen people try surreal humor right i've seen people go to an open mic and stand for 20
#
seconds saying nothing and then saying something bizarre like i was a fly great i mean he bombed
#
but great that some people are trying stuff like this i see those kind of things emerging here and
#
there my guess is that the trend is continuing i saw two seasons of comics done and i think
#
the guys who won or at least the top five in each are easily like better than a lot of the
#
comics we saw back in the day in fact the comics themselves will be the first people to tell you
#
this they will say if you guys were back there i wouldn't have had a stand-up special on
#
netflix or whatever it is matter of timing like you said so that way i think the quality of comedy
#
will get better i think the content that they speak about also will get better all conditions
#
willing of course the other thing that will happen is i don't think the comedy is going to
#
be restricted to the traditional format of coming on stage and talking in front of a mic anymore i
#
think because the formats are so many more be it a podcast be it a web series the example that you
#
often like saying samay rayna's the stuff that he does with his chess casts for example or gaurav
#
kapoor's vlogs yes of course of course gaurav kapoor's vlogs i think people will start doing
#
things like this as well which is channel their humor into things that aren't you know going in
#
front of a stage and like i told you about my frustration of or rather being dissuaded from
#
getting into the scene because of the process that it entails the traditional you need to cut
#
your teeth at open mics and then get a slot somewhere and then this and then this and then
#
this and eventually something will happen right i think a lot of people are just bypassing that
#
gatekeeper if you can think of that and then just going and trying some experiment of their own on
#
youtube or something like that with a friend some of it might stick some of it may not stick so i
#
think that's the other thing that's happening if you're seeing how comedy is sort of is sort
#
of going and maybe on the basis of that fame they can get a shoe in in a open mic or something or
#
even a show itself so yeah that's very unstructured thoughts and to be honest there's a fascinating
#
topic to explore and you should really get somebody who is a part of the who's been part of the scene
#
on to the scene and yeah sure at some point and just just kind of taking off from there like
#
you know we spoke earlier of how creators should not restrict themselves by putting them in a box
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if you're a creator you can do so many things you don't just have to do one thing and that
#
speaks to also what you said about you know to do comedy you don't just have to go on a stage in
#
front of a mic and perform and what comedians do is you know tease out the little things in the
#
textures of everyday life that make you smile when you have a moment of recognition you know
#
and in a sense i look at someone like gaurav kapoor do his vlog and this is of course a delhi comedian
#
for listeners who might not be familiar doing his vlog and it's exactly that it's just daily
#
things his wife is shouting at him because he's left his bathroom door open yeah and he had a
#
frequent sponsor at one point which was mama earth so now when he goes to all his live shows
#
that's become a meme now and so it's really nice how it's not a different thing yeah it's the same
#
kind of thing where you know you're taking off from everyday life and kind of taking people on
#
a journey with you absolutely and uh that the segment i'm just going to end and i want to give
#
this as a recommendation actually so there are lots of these comedy based web series that are
#
doing the rounds on the net right and actually some of them are pretty good from whatever i've
#
seen there is this absolutely surreal show that 10 people in the country have seen
#
which is called star boys s-t-a-r-b-o-y-z okay it's starring kenny sebastian and navin richard both
#
of whom are mullus the whole thing is uh it's like a poor parody of any of the space based
#
shows so these guys have a spaceship of their own and they're going around having their own
#
adventures what are these adventures stealing chart from somewhere this thing that they all
#
silly things but the amount of surreal random humor that they're able to bring in the amount
#
of things that only people from bangalore will understand the things are only malayalis will
#
understand it is an other level of you know whatever all concerned have said that everyone
#
was completely sober during the making of that i'm not quite sure whether that was true of the
#
approval process because it is completely it is completely surreal highly highly recommended for
#
anyone who if anyone likes monty python and has any prediction for anything south indian including
#
food i would highly recommend it it's a short series which you'll find on youtube marvelous so
#
let's leave comedy for the moment and go to tragedy i mean it's not exactly tragedy but
#
about your corporate career so to say like you know you go in there trained for something
#
expecting something wanting to do something having a conception of what advertising and
#
marketing involve and then you know and then there is a reality of what is in front of you
#
how different was it did you have issues with you know working in corporate setups like that
#
did you find advertising workplaces toxic as many people have pointed out and i was in advertising
#
really briefly in the early 90s sure not in the early 90s mid 90s 94 but i i sensed at different
#
points in time that there is some truth through that so take me through your experiences and
#
how you looked at this work uh actually the shock came or the realization came a lot before even
#
advertising so um at mica i had all these dreams of wanting to get into an ad agency and uh all
#
that uh the however uh the good folks at wall street had uh other plans i graduated in 2009
#
so i don't need to set context i think basically clutching a straws and taking anything that we
#
could get long story short i went into a company which uh let's just say that uh we weren't a fit
#
for each other and left in about six months i went into a small agency far from my big dreams of
#
working at uh ogilvy or bernet or something two agencies that i did end up working in subsequently
#
so a couple of interesting things happened i never considered digital as a career because
#
again back in 2009 digital wasn't really a thing right if you told me that the website orkut or
#
whatever facebook was coming up at that time would be a serious marketing platform at one point of
#
time i would have like not just me anyone would have laughed anyone out of the room and today
#
uh as the statistic goes out of every advertising dollar that is spent 70 cents goes to either
#
facebook amazon or alphabet meta i should say anyway so what ended up happening was i found
#
a or rather a friend told me that one of his friends had joined a small company that did
#
social media marketing and he said hey you are digitally savvy right so would you like to check
#
this out and digitally savvy my credits were i wrote the mica blog for a couple of years was on
#
pagal guy all those sort of things which was apparently enough for a qualification at that
#
point of time and um i joined that little company and i actually did pretty decently over there it
#
wasn't what i had signed up for and when i say signed up i mean the whole advertising thing
#
including mica and all that but i turned out to be decent at what i was doing and i sort of enjoyed
#
it i cut my teeth over there and it's still the workplace that i have spent the maximum amount of
#
amount of time in subsequently i wanted i wanted more more not in terms of money but more in terms
#
of exposure small agency and all that the problem i knew i had maxed out that that place gave me a
#
lot of good learnings made i had a i had a lot of good times over there but i wanted to move on spend
#
two years at ogilby two years at leo bennett post that and i think a lot of good things and bad
#
things happen so i shouldn't come across as someone who's like super critical of you know
#
advertising as a as a whole there is to be fair there are lots of smart people in the industry
#
at all levels right at the junior level all the way up to the top i mean there's some genuinely
#
good work that that happens in these places that being said it didn't take long for the
#
tint in the rose tinted glasses to uh to wear off i think a few things happened i realized that or
#
let me put it this way if i may be slightly philosophical about this if i were to sum up all
#
problems about the way advertising is done right now not just in india but really around the world
#
the focus has shifted from using creativity to solve business problems which is really what
#
advertising was to figuring out how do i retain this client and that's a big shift right when you
#
when that the needle shifts from what can we do what is best for the brand to how do we keep this
#
guy and how do we keep this so when you start off with that as a fundamental problem it leads
#
to a lot of things what does it mean so one now we'll get down to the micro things what this
#
translates to one it means that a resource that is technically built as a full resource on one
#
account and being charged the client accordingly is actually a full resource on three different
#
accounts so you don't need to me to explain what that will do to moral creativity and productivity
#
right so that's at a fundamental level it's usually the bottom rung that tends to take that
#
two there is a vast disconnect in terms of mediums and all that creative agencies let's face it are
#
not very creative when it comes to updating their knowledge of mediums and all that and it
#
genuinely pains me to say this i feel no joy in trashing this industry that i was
#
dreaming to be a part of and genuinely it gave me some good moments and still has
#
a lot of smart people but the bigger agencies their default is how do we solve this with a tvc
#
which the world has moved on from that right the solution to every business problem is not
#
a 30 second spot on television anymore right especially if it is a digital brand i still
#
remember amit the day i decided to quit working in address not the day i decided to hand in my
#
papers but the day i decided i want out of this career it was when we were sitting in a bangalore
#
office at 2 a.m we had pitch three or four days later a very cocky client who had come into a
#
lot of money and had the gumption to say on a thursday that i want to pitch on monday so you
#
can imagine again what that does to everything and it was a digital brand for which everyone
#
was desperately trying to find a atl way or a tv way of solving the problem which was in my opinion
#
not the way to go about this i was supposed to be the quote unquote digital expert on that but
#
again digital has always been treated as the last two slides of the presentation ha you come along
#
you add some facebook ideas at the end that was generally the approach that pissed me off after
#
i mean i could take it to a point but you know i mean i had enough of that i don't
#
want the profession and i don't deserve this anymore i want out of this so that is like number
#
two like you are outdated and all that third is and this i mean this really cheesed me off
#
the gulf between what was being pitched and what was actually being executed was so vast
#
and both sides were okay with it it's almost like both client and agency know that the pitch is just
#
a song and dance and the song and dance was great we will change the world we will do this we will
#
change not just the people's perception of the brand but we will do good for society this thing
#
that thing everything like if the world was your oyster when it came to the pitch be as creative
#
as you want change everything right and we were genuinely excited when we got the chance to do
#
stuff like that and win accounts when the account was one it was more like ha tk that was the that
#
was for sure now get back to doing the same shit that any other agency would have done it's just a
#
matter of who has quoted the lowest amount of money or whoever the cmo likes or whatever the
#
case may be all these things after a point of time build up enough you have enough of your juniors
#
crying about everything you have enough of your bosses not understanding and because the emphasis
#
is more on you know it shifted to things like headcount revenue per headcount and things like
#
that and i personally think it's very difficult to do that in a creative business sure you might
#
arguably be able to do that in manufacturing or some something like that but definitely not in a
#
ideas ideas business because you can't you can't provide ideas per hour like how you can provide
#
say screws per hour once you have the process uh process nailed down screws nailed down never
#
might it's a unnecessary joke so yeah i think it was a combination of all these things that really
#
made me realize that this is not a place for creativity really it's a place for people who
#
can game the system to be fair there are people who game the system and they enjoy it power to
#
them if they have figured out how to master the system and go up the ranks generally good people
#
it's not like they were slimy or anything like that great for them if they get a kick out of
#
this entire system great whatever makes you happy as long as you're not uh you know killing anyone
#
in some cases that if you're selling tobacco you're literally then killing somebody so i
#
think it was a combination of all of these things i i was also fed up with this whole i don't know
#
if i don't remember if umbi had spoken about this on his show but it was the charade around awards
#
did he speak about this by any chance no i don't remember yeah so award functions are these
#
lovely things that happen in the field of advertising where they award oh this is the
#
best campaign that happened in this or this or whatever whatever the thing is all of this is
#
based on a submission that the agency themselves has to make right and if there is any respect i
#
have for anyone in an ad agency it is people who write those cases and amit i'm telling you
#
with all due respect to you your course you're writing india uncut 80 000 blogs whatever the
#
case may be nobody can spin fiction like these guys like goodness gracious i have seen what people
#
can do taking a simple twitter idea this we ran a hashtag contest suddenly becomes something that
#
changed the fortunes of the company i had enough of the deception for a while like it was fun at
#
the beginning saying okay let's see how much we can milk this let's see if we can have some fun
#
with this how much we can gas this up at some point of time you know uh reality catches up to
#
you and you start questioning like why am i doing this you know i think the other hilarious thing
#
about awards is um there are multiple award functions and all of them are super expensive
#
to enter by the way that's how basically all these publications make money like a facts and all that
#
by holding awards i am i whoever it is it's well known that some agencies are going to win certain
#
awards award functions and dominate that so some other agencies won't participate in those so you
#
basically have a system a circle jerk if you will where every agency is the best agency in the country
#
according to a different awards function you see all these things you laugh at first it plays on
#
your mind and then eventually all these things come together another brief from a client comes in
#
unreasonable request whatever whatever you have enough after a point of time and that really
#
combination of all these things is why i decided to leave advertising do i regret my years in
#
advertising absolutely not i think i learned a lot over there again about things that i was good at
#
i think i was reasonably good at what i was doing i wouldn't say i was great at it but i think i was
#
good at it enough to earn respect of my peers one thing i i learned a lot of things and i think
#
advertising made me extremely philosophical in that sense um one i realized that i was a different
#
kind of lazy and i don't mean wanting to avoid work i would get very good at preempting feedback
#
enough to do extra work in advance so that i wouldn't have to do it later right so i was
#
very good at figuring out okay the client will not like this approach i don't want to screw my
#
weekend over giving feedback on a friday so i'll tell you i'll give you two routes now itself
#
one crazy creative route that you want another safer route that i know is going to work and you
#
know will work which is what your cmo is going to select at the end of the day so i got very good at
#
doing that i also got very good at doing this inside the agency both to my seniors and my juniors i
#
would tell them take the time give me an extra creative the client might ask for the option so
#
i also realized that some things that i thought of as logical was apparently a nice thing to do
#
i would explain to the creative folks what the business was before asking them to create
#
in my mind i wasn't trying to be a nice person or anything i just thought boss the better you
#
understand this the better my the easier my job becomes because i don't need to spoon feed you
#
every time right apparently this is a good thing to do apparently i was a nice person to work with
#
because i would do things like this which tells you how low the bar is in the first place so i
#
would do things like this so that's why i said a different kind of lazy i would like work very
#
hard in one go to make my life easier in the future basically there was a time i going back
#
to childhood when i my dad always used to park in reverse and that had a like very lasting impact
#
on me at first i was like wondering why does he keep doing this why is he making it so difficult
#
for him to park away i just want to go to the garden and play or something then after the trip
#
i realized it becomes easier to deal okay while everyone else is struggling oh okay now i get it
#
i think that was a small lesson from childhood i don't think my dad even realizes that he had
#
this impact on me because of that small act a small thing but i inculcated that in somewhere
#
and i said listen i am in the zone right now for me to take out another 30 minutes and do
#
this will save me two hours of work later when i need to get to the zone again all that sort of
#
thing so that was one thing i think i was um reasonably good at uh when i was in advertising
#
i also i i think i also learned a lot about businesses i think i i i took a lot of effort
#
to understand clients businesses and the other thing i this this you might appreciate because
#
you always talk about joining dots one of the things that i always try to do is i would try
#
to take lessons from one category or one brand example and see how they could be applied somewhere
#
else right because there are meta lessons to be taken away from absolutely everything so you know
#
i would i would do things like that i would do things like that and i've always felt amid that
#
uh especially in advertising and i guess the guesses might be true everywhere gaining respect
#
of your seniors is one thing but i always was aiming for gaining respect of juniors because once
#
you have that i don't know for some reason i always i mean i don't have a like as a result
#
of doing that my life is great right now but i just feel that you know i have a solid base of
#
people who i can count on and who will vouch for me should i need something from them and it's
#
worked out brilliantly like when i got into freelance for the first time i had all these
#
people saying get this guy because he'll help out when i put out the codes a lot of them amplified
#
a lot of them signed up for it to me all of this was just again complete selfishness this was just
#
uh you know preempting and making my life easier in the future in some way if that sort of makes
#
sense so i don't regret my time in advertising i had i i think i did some good work we had some
#
good colleagues uh made some good friends over there learned a lot about what my actual skills
#
were i wouldn't be able to do what i'm doing today if i did not go through both the good things and
#
the bad things uh in uh in my career but i think one of the things that i was always perceptive of
#
was where i am right now in my career i think i was very good at zooming out at all points of
#
time this is something that a lot of guests on getting meta also said that like rohan joshi for
#
instance one of the most poignant parts of his interview was he was talking about when he got
#
into stand-up and aib became big it was sort of like a vacuum that just sucked his life so much
#
that he was just unable to gain he was unable to sit back and see what this is doing to him his
#
health his creativity everything and only once all that crap unfortunately happened and he was forced
#
to take a back seat that he allowed himself to be exhausted to use his words and put the last few
#
years and his own life in perspective and which is why deliberately now he is creating lesser
#
content and he has his own explanation for that for which the episode is there for you to listen
#
to but i think i was good at that i think i was always very aware of where i was in career where
#
i am right now when i need to make a shift when i should probably stick it with some more time
#
i had the simple philosophy like how do you justify every month of your job in your next interview
#
right so that was a simple heuristic that i had for myself at some point of time the moment you
#
find it difficult to justify it in your next job interview you should you should bounce that's why
#
i kind of left the last job that i was at insider i was enjoying what i was doing over there
#
reasonably good at it but the work i was doing was took me like almost a year or so back and
#
this is not disrespect to the company of people lovely people but because of restructures and
#
all those things i was doing things that i they didn't need to pay me what they were paying me
#
to do what i was doing let me put it that way and i kept asking myself this question right okay like
#
suppose i'm going for an interview tomorrow and he asked okay this is what you've done but you were
#
doing much more before how do you justify this last one year over here if i had an answer like
#
yeah there are you know esops or some great product is coming or whatever the case may be
#
but i couldn't find that answer and that's when i realized okay i need to take a step back from
#
you i think that's a decent piece of advice to keep like how do you justify your what you're
#
doing your last month how do you justify it to one potential interviewer and two to yourself
#
because it's a much more difficult question to answer i think a lot of what to do in career then
#
sort of makes itself apparent at that point of time yeah yeah lots of fascinating stands on this
#
like one of them in fact is the big scam that awards shows are like even even in podcasting
#
you know like a few months back there were some people who were boasting about being on the short
#
list of a particular podcast award so i went and i looked at the rules and the thing was
#
you had to pay a certain sum of money and everyone who paid that money was shortlisted
#
so you had a short list with whatever unlimited length and everyone who paid that money was
#
shortlisted and every podcast awards basically you have to pay a big money to enter so it's like a
#
circle jerk and i think the only the kind of people who would enter that would typically be
#
the kind of people who don't have a following anyway i mean i don't see if you have any self
#
respect why you should go in for that yeah absolutely so i always think that in these
#
creative spaces be it podcasting be it advertising whatever there is there is a respect that you see
#
on the trophy shelf and then there's a respect that's a word on the street in advertising i
#
remember in the 1990s it used to be common practice that like there was a whole genre
#
of advertising which was only for awards yeah in the sense agencies would go to a random ice cream
#
parlor which has one outlet somewhere on grant road and say that there is this random magazine
#
and we'll run a one page ad for you there which nobody reads and which costs nothing
#
and they would enter that for the awards and that would be where they would be so called creative
#
yeah absolutely in fact this problem has only got amplified with digital with things like
#
there so there are awards like the fe awards for good or the khans for good etc and it pains me
#
because there are some really creative campaigns that come out of that and i don't know whether
#
it actually changes lives or anything but whatever amitabh bachchan will retweet something and that
#
becomes okay we've got now millions of reach this cause has now reached so many people and whatever
#
it is and all activity stops right after the award has been won it kind of breaks my heart to see
#
things uh things like that so yeah so whether it is at a commercial level like what you were saying
#
which is your scam print ads they used to be called or be it things like this yeah it's uh
#
it's uh it's pretty rampant yeah and the other thing that struck me about what you were saying
#
was when you said that agencies focus shifted from doing the best possible work for their clients
#
on making their product sell or whatever to retaining the customer and i see this in many
#
NGOs and think tanks across the country where essentially your whole point is where are you
#
getting funding from yes right i know a candidate for CEO of a think tank i know who didn't
#
eventually take up the job because he was because he realized that the job was all going to be about
#
fundraising yeah it wasn't going to be about whatever the primary motive of the kind of NGO
#
and what you also said about the agency pitches and it's an incredible pitch and but afterwards
#
they don't deliver and both sides are okay with it yeah and that it struck me that there is a
#
principal agent kind of problem there which comes down to incentives like you are incentivized to
#
get the client by doing the best pitch possible those guys are incentivized to on the other side
#
to go through the charade and pick somebody yeah but after that there are no incentives to work
#
hard you go through the motions you pick the boxes yeah absolutely and the sad thing is the bigger
#
the company is the more likely likely this is to happen yeah the more likely this is to happen
#
i just wanted to add something to the previous point that you said this is about retaining the
#
client and when you was talking about NGOs and all the and funding it became clear to me many
#
times we had to sell services that we didn't think were in the right interest of the client
#
or rather let me not say it's going to harm the client that's but it's not going to add any value
#
and social media is a great example of that i'm an ardent critic of a lot of social media marketing
#
and that's a possible other five hours by itself but why does a mutual fund brand need to be on
#
instagram in the first place right in your heart of hearts you know that doesn't need to be but
#
your job is to convince the client that it needs to be done so that the agency can get another one
#
and a half lakhs of retainer or whatever the case maybe i'm not saying that this is this happens
#
across the board or something but this is the way you know incentives again are sort of structured
#
so at some point this breaks you down because the principles that you stand for not just your
#
your own moral principles but also marketing itself like all the things that you learned
#
you spend so much money to learn at an institute and uphold these are the two things of marketing
#
and all that suddenly everything all goes to pieces because of and the tragedy of it all amit
#
this i don't let yes sure you might let go of some business in the short run or something but i think
#
that's in the long run is going to be good just imagine i genuinely think that there is space for
#
an honest agency in the country and when i say honest agency i actually mean somebody who says
#
no we will not do this for you because we don't think it's in the best interest of the brand
#
it is not in our short-term interest to say this because we will potentially lose this project and
#
maybe even you as a client but we genuinely think that this is what is going to be better
#
for your brand in the long run stop doing this nonsense put your money in some google search
#
advertising this will help you achieve the objectives that you have right now i think in
#
the long run that agency is going to get a lot more calls from that cmo than somebody who just
#
goes along with the song and dance that is the scene right now yeah and you know i look across
#
media and i don't know advertising at all anymore sure but you know from what i know of media
#
mainstream media newspapers television it seems to me that the mainstream has changed completely
#
if there is such a thing that the way we discover content filter content consume content has changed
#
completely our media houses haven't figured this out something's got to give something's going to
#
give at some point either they change or they die that's the way of the world yeah is it something
#
similar in advertising is there radical disruption for which there is scope there it's already
#
happening by the way agencies are getting their lunch dinner snacks everything eaten by look at
#
who all the who are eating first of all there are small boutique agencies that are coming up and
#
saying we will do only this and they're taking that business a great example of this is influencer
#
marketing agencies now we can have another discussion of whether influencer marketing
#
itself is a good thing or not but the fact of the matter is this is stuff that creative agencies
#
should be driving and that's being eaten away by these guys and other similar specialists for
#
various other things right then you're having consultancies that are coming in increasingly
#
building their skill set the Accenture Accenture acquired Droga5 one of the most revered ad agencies
#
in the world modern ad agencies in the world right now all consultancy are stepping up their
#
digital skills or not digital skills sorry their advertising slash communication skills and they're
#
tying it to language that the CEO understands I was on this webinar last year one of these marketing
#
webinars and the global head of I think it was Citibank I forget his name Indian guy he was
#
saying something like the CMO is having less of a seat at the table because he is increasingly
#
speaking in language that is not relevant to the rest of the to the rest of the company he talks
#
about whatever the you know metric some impressions this thing that thing and all that but boss tell
#
me how that translates into revenue or revenue today or revenue tomorrow whatever the case may
#
be because what the rest of the sea suit wants to know which is why now the CMO's role is being
#
slowly eaten away by everything else I remember the title of that talk it was something like the
#
make the CMO's role relevant again or how can CMO stay relevant something like that it was I
#
think it was fascinating it's happening both of the client and and the agency and it's also being
#
eaten up by consultants freelancers for example who are who some companies are increasingly
#
finding hey let's just get some honest opinions from these guys and then we'll go out and execute
#
and all that I work with some clients who actually have me vet agency ideas for example right for
#
for example again I really don't want to take names or anything over here somebody I know
#
somebody very respected that from the space of advertising slash marketing etc that I know sat
#
in on a pitch that pitch a pitch for a client that he slash he was consulting with to listen
#
to agency and these were the top agencies in the country and the and he slash she came back to me
#
and said is this the way they are still thinking and it mirrored so many of my own thoughts like
#
why do they still the why do they think that a tvc is the answer to everything why does everything
#
have the same kind of build-up lead to here is our script not even saying that we are going to
#
we think a tvc is the best thing for this just directly jumping into script and then digital is
#
there somewhere later right so their lunch is already being eaten is its obsolescence to some
#
ways also comfort that these there are still legacy clients for legacy agencies that will keep the
#
coffers running something or the other will happen once in a while some bright spark will have some
#
idea and there are some genuinely good ideas which even dinosaur agencies will come up with
#
pure media might they will oh this is a great campaign this agency has won award etc it's that
#
whole cycle again the point is while the business somehow still seems to be surviving I don't see
#
talent surviving in that industry anymore and by that what I mean is increasingly people wanting
#
to leave I have spoken to so many people over okay so let me or rather let me put it this way
#
I don't know a single person who works in advertising that I have respect for at my level
#
or below who is happy with what they are doing right now or are in advertising anymore and that's
#
a blanket statement that I can confidently make right now everyone wants to leave everyone wants
#
to either move over to the client side of things everyone wants to move over to something like
#
there are so many more creative agencies creative opportunities now with content being a thing right
#
now people want to move to say spaces like OML or something that the Bangalore startup scene is
#
willing to absorb a lot of these many of them want to branch out as freelancers and control
#
their own destiny in some sense so talent I think is going to leave way before clients will because
#
clients like you said there's a certain comfort in running that hamster wheel there's inertia as
#
well there is apps oh there is so much inertia there is just so much inertia for this whole thing
#
to change they're very comfortable with the whole system it's unlikely that change is going to come
#
from that end startups have already figured this out startups have doing things themselves
#
right now and they will outsource for very specialist things and yeah that's that's the way
#
it is that's the way it is right now I think the entire it again I must say none of this gives me
#
a sense of schadenfreude to say this it genuinely pains me to see this industry that I grew up
#
wanting to desperately be a part of crumbling like this and it is crumbling let me make no bones
#
about I've been saying this is not feasible as a business model because your people are not happy
#
in this anymore you're losing your best talent to others advertising is no longer the dream
#
career that it once used to be there was a point of time when when I was arguably wanting to get
#
into mica and all that way people say oh I really want to work in agencies and all that I might still
#
be wrong by the way I'm still waiting for people to listen to this and then told me saying oh I'm
#
very happy with my job or whatever the case may be but generally in my circle I'm not seeing this
#
anymore I'm seeing more people whose eyes are being awakened or they've finally accepted the
#
fact that yeah okay I need out from here because there's also sense of inertia over there as well
#
right so yeah I don't see that much of a future for the traditional way in which advertising is
#
done which is not to say that it can't be repaired or fixed but then that's a different talk show
#
altogether I still genuinely think that there is a role there is a role for advertising to play
#
which is to use creativity to solve business problems the only thing is I don't think defaulting
#
to TVCs is the way to do it for any a book to recommend over here which again would be a
#
fascinating recommendation irrespective of advertising context or not is alchemy by Rory
#
Sutherland Rory Sutherland is actually an ogilvy guy himself a big name in behavioral science so
#
anyone who anyone who's managed to read Daniel Kahneman but wants a slightly more entertaining
#
version this is the place to go to it's a fascinating book which so the full title of
#
that the full christian name of that book is alchemy the surprising power of ideas that don't
#
make sense and it's exactly that it is a fascinating venn diagram intersection of creativity and
#
evolution it's basically how I are human beings drawn to ideas that shouldn't make sense let me
#
put it like the and some of the examples he uses I'll just use one example which I love citing
#
again and again suppose a sales guy wanted to establish contact with a prospect how would they
#
go about doing it the easiest way to do it the cheapest way to do it and in some sense the most
#
guaranteed to reach way of doing it is sending them a message on a platform like linkedin or email
#
right it's cheap it's easy I can do it now the person's over there I can send it immediately
#
what is the disadvantage of that that same advantage holds true for everybody else
#
that person is going to receive hundreds of emails like this how do you catch that person's
#
attention write him a letter he's going to remember that he she is going to remember that
#
for sure right there's a reason and he goes on to that analogy there's a reason why you don't
#
propose over text right you want to make a show and dance of something and then he goes and what
#
I love about the challenge a lot of what I think about advertising as well right in the day and
#
age where it is so easy to reach the exact audience that you want using all the powers of digital
#
advertising why do brands still want to advertise on tv because there's a certain prestige to do
#
that cred advertising on the ip l is not to reach cred's audience it is to signal to cred's audience
#
that hey we are now big enough to go on the ip l and it was a signal to everybody else that something
#
called cred exists you will never use cred we know but we are around over here so it is more
#
a signaling device than it is a strategic marketing communication sort of thing his book is filled
#
with examples like this and the reason I say that is some of those examples are not traditional
#
marketing ideas one of the solutions that some there was a business district somewhere in south
#
I think it was in Argentina that needed that needed to be promoted the ad agency refused to
#
run an ad they said divert the entire ad budget into building a bridge because the problem with
#
that is not it's not about lack of awareness is lack of access build a bridge that will solve
#
your business problems more than any ad campaign ever can fantastic right so exactly right and
#
it's littered with examples now the surprise now the thing is if you think about it these are not
#
very creative genius ideas these are things that should come naturally to us if you think about it
#
strip away see the problem is also also defaulting to communications as a way of solving this this
#
there is this business problem how do we solve this communications is one of the way to solve
#
that within that advertising is one way to solve that within that tvc is one very outdated way to
#
solve that when you put it in this perspective you see the role of ad agencies there is still
#
relevance for it it's just that there's a huge minds mindset shift that needs to happen the first
#
mindset shift will be how do we go back to solving business problems using creative communications
#
then getting out of the communications part and saying how do we solve business problems with
#
creativity and that really if you think about that as the space in which ad agencies are playing
#
with right now now look at who they are competing with suddenly an ogilvy is competing with an
#
accenture right a leo bennett is competing with a tcs for example who arguably think about these
#
things in a manner that the ceo understands more than anything else so yeah all that really is
#
distilled thoughts as to what i think the advertising industry state isn't right now at
#
least in india i might be completely wrong by the way i'd love to hear counterpoints to things like
#
this especially on the lack of happiness at a lower level if there's anyone out there who actually
#
enjoys what they're doing in an ad agency genuinely right and they still think that there is good in
#
advertising etc etc let me know because i am i have struggled to find you so far yeah and honestly if
#
anyone has contrary views to what deepak just expressed don't send a tweet don't send an email
#
make a fucking tvc that's how you can get your point across or a letter i was about to say
#
so you know someday if the history of advertising is written and you know people talk about the day
#
indian advertising died they can pin it down to really one event which is also a great album
#
title which is the day chuck left so so can you hear the guitars already yeah the opening riff
#
is coming on the day chuck left yeah so epic music possible so now tell me about freelancing
#
because you come to the stage where you are like this is not for me and you've lost faith in it and
#
you're freelancing and this is a bold step because it's a step into the unknown you're giving up
#
what is a regular income you don't know whether your brand personal brand as it means anything
#
outside of the context of working in one of these big places yeah so what's the thought process that
#
goes in and then you wrote a brilliant thread on twitter which of course i will link where you talk
#
about all the all your advice to would-be freelancers from all that you have learned
#
so take me through a bit of that journey yeah certainly but before that i just want to like
#
you missed out a little bit over there because right after i was frustrated with advertising
#
etc i actually i went to what was i went to oml technically and then i went to insider after that
#
actually it was part of the same company it just was a bit of a transition because patm had bought
#
over that unit etc etc uh i have a couple of there are a couple of fascinating thoughts uh points
#
over here so you uh jumping from advertising to what was events was a completely like completely
#
different shift by itself and i actually have some of the free freelance work i used to do
#
back in the day uh one of the one of my earliest for my first byline was doing gig reviews across
#
bombay i used to go to small venues and i just did it because i uh loved attending shows and i
#
wanted to write something so i used to write for a couple of magazines as a result of this i ended
#
up interviewing actually a lot of people from big names on the scene i guess that was somehow me
#
trying to again i guess it was the outsider trying to desperately fit in and shortcut very quickly i
#
think as i'm saying this i see the parallels with those comics i was drawing in uh 11th and 12th
#
trying to fit in and uh trying to infuse myself in there very quickly but is it hindsight or
#
were you thinking of it that way at the time no it was this is hindsight this is completely
#
hindsight at that point of time i just wanted to try something out i used to write for uh what was
#
then a blog called cod wine i interviewed uh warren i interviewed baiju from mother jane i
#
interviewed mother jane as a whole a lot so i actually interviewed a fair bit of people like
#
avial uh and it was interesting like um you know what a small thing i mean it's not enough cred to
#
you know get a writing gig at rolling stone or something but it was it was what it was and i
#
and people like knew ah you wrote that article whatever the scene is small enough for people to
#
know right i'd like to and then that led to another uh series of comics that i did i there was a point
#
of time when i was doing very specialist comics uh for pagal i was doing mba comics there was
#
another similar website called crazy engineers for which i was doing uh engineering comics and
#
for oml at the time oml had a website called indecision indecision it was a beautiful name
#
i was doing indian rock music scene based comics you can imagine now that's that is niche super
#
specialized super specific and like quirks of but i realized i was like decent at that i take one
#
vertical understand it fully what are the things within that that people care about uh or you know
#
can make a joke about or something like that and then make comics out of it i used to like enjoy
#
that little trifecta of comics that i was doing at that point and by the way i wasn't a great
#
cartoonist or anything i think i was just uh good at i i think i always consider myself a better
#
writer than uh than uh than an artist and even if you go back and see the pagal guy comics you'll
#
see that the comics by themselves just a panel it's like a big paragraph of text that was the
#
sort of format that i used to love doing but anyway the point being i think all those free
#
all those gigs and all that little cred that i had built up at that point of time eventually
#
translated into a job at oml because it was somebody who i had been in touch with at that
#
point of time was that hey listen we need somebody who has your skill set marketing events and it's
#
seven weekender would you like to like obviously i had enough of this i want something else
#
went to oml it had its own shares of pluses and minuses as any agent as any company does
#
i and the reason i'm putting the story in over here is because categorically i did not leave
#
it on a very frustrated note i was a little burnt out with what i was doing and i had sort of like
#
hit a wall at what i was doing but i left on extremely good terms with the team and the uh
#
and the industry as a whole definitely not it would it would be an industry that i would go
#
back to unlike advertising which i would not get anywhere close to with a ppe suit on as well
#
um so with that context yes i decided to jump into freelance in late 2018 again that question
#
i asked myself how am i justifying each month in my next interview and importantly to myself
#
like and i was struggling to find an answer to that i was wondering what i could do what i
#
wanted to do and all that and it is very poignant again i'm i'm going to probably romanticize this
#
more than i need to we were at an nh7 weekend where you remember that clandestine show that
#
i was talking about a while back so one of the guys from there he was at that gig yeah we had
#
stayed in touch partially at that point of time and i'm seeing him after four or five years
#
and he said hey what happened to all those comics and stuff that you used to draw and all that
#
he said yeah man stop that was a that was a era ago uh he said oh that's so bad that's so sad
#
because you know i enjoyed those and you were good at doing all those and you should try starting
#
those once in a while and all that i said yeah but no time work whatever this thing that thing
#
and then he left it at that but that like i kept lingering on there like he kept saying that like
#
what if what if and then the post-rock of goddess and astronaut started playing it's very melancholy
#
if you're not familiar with the music it's just very long instrumental that just makes you think
#
you know it's that's all that sort of thing even without needing any specialist chemicals for that
#
and you know it just i just couldn't get what he said out of my head which is like hey you should
#
be doing something like this and i said yeah probably like i was also panicking at that point
#
of time because of what he said because like this is the right time for me to try an experiment like
#
this because young enough to make a mistake fail and go back like what if you know things
#
circumstances change later uh next day i had uh breakfast with a very good friend of mine
#
sriketh who is also a co-host on simplified right now i think now we have mentioned all
#
the hosts all the hosts have been mentioned bingo the bingo that i promised them has been
#
uh has has been done so we talked over it so next morning breakfast i said hey do you have like
#
20 minutes or something i want to chat about something with you and basically he validated
#
whatever i was thinking and said yeah you should like hundred percent jump into this right now
#
and that's what i did the the speed at which my plan got accelerated got executed surprised me
#
because when leaving weekender which was december 2000 uh early december 2018 i said okay we i will
#
put in my papers in or i will think about this seriously again around june july or something
#
like that a reason being uh the ip l was a huge event for insider ticketing etc work on that
#
starts two three months in advance right so you it would be a fairly dick move to quit in the
#
middle of all that uh so it had to be either before or after i didn't i wasn't really thinking
#
about before i was only thinking about let this thing get over i will quit after that this anyway
#
lull period of two three months before the festival season rather the music festival season kicks up
#
kicks in again suddenly then i thought okay what if i do that before oh but if i say april that'd
#
be damn bad because then i'm leaving just before they appear so what if it and then what was july
#
became april became this became that and before you know it i put in my papers i put in my papers i
#
think about a week week and a half after that gig happened and i think i was in a mode where
#
listen you need to do this mitos will do it right now because you're giving the company enough time
#
to find a replacement so you know i i genuinely am fond of the company about it i did not want to
#
leave them in a lurch so i thought it's the best thing to do for everyone bent ahead did it what
#
i did do was not fight over my notice period they said two months i said i will happily serve out
#
two months the reason being one i wanted to make sure that everything that i did got translated
#
down and two i knew they wouldn't give me enough they wouldn't give me that much amount of work
#
and i could use that amount of time to do sort of work for i mean put out feelers and all that
#
for myself and they were very supportive i have to mention that everybody like my boss tulika
#
shreyas who is now part of the product team at paytm all of them were extremely supportive
#
in me doing doing this so i have to thank them for you know uh for that and yeah that's that's
#
really how it worked out i think so a few things happened i think here's thing i got into freelancing
#
already having a fair bit of work to do because i had done enough homework before that had enough
#
i also had the massive insurance that i had a wife who was working and earned enough for the both of
#
us should my income for a few months be nothing right thankfully that was not the case and that
#
really was how it how the transition happened and because there was so much work from the word go
#
i really didn't have a time to pause and think too much and i did not want to because i had
#
a big vacation coming up in any case uh where i went to europe and actually saw the band that
#
i was that i'm wearing a t-shirt of now uh so i just slogged for uh six months and came back
#
and i actually have been slogging ever since i haven't actually taken a break but that is not
#
out of choice and that is mostly because of this ruddy virus that's doing the rounds
#
so yeah that's how it started but i'm but i'm guessing you'll have some specific question
#
within that or even something that i didn't answer no i mean one of the things i'm intrigued by is
#
like one beginning the cartooning again did you do that in in sports but i never really did it
#
professionally i think i'd reached a point where i realized that okay there's nothing new for me
#
to do right in the sense everybody who's doing say cartoons on politics etc i mean assuming that
#
that's a sort of like a safe space anymore is already doing it way better than i have no new
#
angle to add to this right at one point of time i would do it because i needed the money at that
#
point of time and i've done some things by the way which i'm not proud of as well i realized hey i
#
don't need to do this because i am good at something or i'm reasonably good at something
#
i should focus my energies on that there are some ideas that i have in terms of cartoons but again
#
i want it to be if i do it it has to be in that sort of niche again you know like how b-school
#
specific comics it has to speak to a community let me speak let me put it that way it has to
#
speak to a particular audience with its particular quirks i need to be a part of that community or
#
learn enough about it to make things specific to them and useless to everybody else almost i
#
always feel that the best targeted ad is something that is so specific to the audience that is
#
received by that it is goes completely over the heads of everybody else who is not part of that
#
part of that group i feel the same way about this sometimes so yeah cartooning no not really no
#
plans as of now although i do have that tablet tablet with me no plans to get back to it immediately
#
though yeah no that's very interesting because just thinking aloud it strikes me that as a creator
#
you can either aim for mass reach or high engagement yeah and uh you'd know that people
#
like us aren't really going to get mass reach we are too uh like non-massive so therefore high
#
engagement and aiming for a particular community like that is high engagement like what you got
#
with pagle guy and mps and all of that i guess now in your story itself that actually it's it's
#
it's lovely to you know if someone is listening to you in the last 10 minutes and they opened
#
that twitter thread of yours a lot of those points are really encapsulated in that like be
#
your point one was be clear about why you're taking the step your point two was the pull has
#
to be more important than the push you want to do something that's where you're going it's not
#
because you hate your current job that is not that yeah that is especially true i would say of
#
just forget freelancing but even switching jobs many times you this is saying right you quit a
#
boss and not your job but the that's the thing if you are leaving a job because you hate the job
#
or boss or whatever it is what's to say the same thing won't happen in the next job and i've seen
#
enough of this happen so yeah the pull i think has to definitely be more than the push whether
#
it's another job whether it's freelancing whatever it is yeah and then your other points all fall
#
into place uh plan for it figure out finances biz dev etc hustle sell yourself in specific terms
#
hustle is very interesting because you know that's one thing i can never get myself to do
#
i just feel embarrassed hustling i so you know or selling myself or whatever i'm just kind of
#
happier doing the uh doing what i do and hoping that the work speaks for itself over time and i
#
know that at some level my mindset is on one extreme that i have to do justice to my work by
#
trying to make it reach more people right but i just just can't get that kind of hustle how does
#
that work for you like to what extent do you feel is there such a thing as too much hustle do you
#
sometimes pull back a little bit do you some like is there a pull and a push there and oh yeah
#
absolutely so when i say hustle it's a word that's thrown around a lot these days and maybe i didn't
#
phrase it very properly in that thread i i think by hustle what i really meant in the context of
#
this is that listen boss you're on your own right now right everything that you had an office and
#
its various departments for you need to do you have to do your own finances you need to have
#
somebody going out i mean you used to have another team going out and getting business for you guess
#
what you need to do that now you're making fun of your hr before guess what now you need to plan
#
your own journey and make your own excels and all that so what i meant by hustle really was more
#
that that you need to be comfortable doing all of these kind of things you don't need to be an
#
always on sales mode i don't think that sort of hustle is something that's needed it is i think
#
also completely okay if you're not doing full justice to the work that you're doing right now
#
because again i think it all goes back to objectives i think it all goes back to what do you want out
#
of this if you create a piece of content and you feel yeah this has got only thousand listens i
#
know in my heart of heart that this can get 10 000 people if that is enough motivation for you you
#
will find the hustle for it let me put it that way right if it's if if the work that is needed to
#
go from thousand to ten thousand seems like too much work for you it's plain and simple you don't
#
want those 9 000 listens enough to put in that amount of work it is simple and it is okay it is
#
completely okay to it is completely okay to do that so yes we all want if if you were to ask a
#
podcast so do you want thousands listens do you want 10 000 listens obviously they'll say 10 000
#
listens but then what goes behind getting to thousand what goes behind getting to 10 000
#
two completely different parts and you may realize you're happier with thousand two thousand whatever
#
it is and i'm assuming that is what might be the case for you as well right or yeah i mean there
#
are many different parts from thousand to ten thousand and i would say the path i took will
#
just keep working on the product and just keep exactly exactly exactly right which is fair enough
#
which is fair enough to choose the other way and say that i'll just do enough marketing in yeah
#
can i get a wider reach yeah no and i think that's a completely legit way of doing and to be honest
#
that's kind of like what i have been doing which i haven't been actually putting out any and also i
#
think the context in which both of us are talking with respect to hustling slash working is different
#
you are a podcaster pretty much and for me podcast is just a side thing and i make most of my money
#
through whatever teaching or consulting or whatever or whatever i have over time grown to loathe the
#
word consulting less and less for a long time i was trying to find i i can't stand that word i need
#
to find another alternative to this but it's okay i have made my peace with the with the so-called
#
c word so that's what i mean by hustle in some sense again i'll go back to one of the things i
#
said before about advertising which is what do you what is your objective what is the ideal end goal
#
that you want or or even like medium term goal that you want what is stopping you right now okay
#
so i think that's the simplest way of looking at even freelancing for example okay let's say
#
that somebody listening to the show wants to eventually for example i'll take my own the
#
space that i have sort of uh worked in a little bit which is they want to write for a renowned
#
music publication like pitchfork or a rolling stone that that is their goal now is that going
#
to happen immediately absolutely not right unless you are very famous or whatever it is which let's
#
face it may not be so now ask yourself a very simple question and this is a very uncomplicated
#
way of going about it what is stopping that editor from opening my email or for or whatever
#
the case may be and then list down the reasons why one nobody knows who i am two i don't have
#
a published body of work in the publication that is second rung to pitchfork or whatever or i don't
#
have published work anywhere for that matter like if i don't even have stuff that i've vomited out
#
onto a blog who am i to go and submit a pitch to pitchfork for that matter or three could be
#
that i don't have enough nuance to be able to pitch a topic of some substance whatever it is
#
when you list down these four five things then take those and see okay what is stopping each of these
#
and then you will break when you do this exercise you will eventually say okay i need to start
#
writing somewhere wherever it is whether it is on my blog for free whether it is finding
#
whatever your equivalent of cod wine for me was put something out because that byline that you
#
have over there i am there are some people who are opposed to doing free freelance work i think there
#
is a role for that as long as you look at it in the context not from exposure i think this is
#
doing things for exposure i think that's rubbish and that should never be done it's not about
#
exposure i think those bylines mean something for you later you are looking at it slightly
#
more strategically because that fits into your journey because of that article that you've
#
written for somebody for free acts as credibility for you when you are pitching yourself to say
#
a small music publication that might pay you 500 rupees that acts as credibility for the next step
#
next step next step pitchfork similarly everything else falls into place exactly that you figure out
#
what your objective is either medium term long term whatever it is figure out what is stopping
#
that from happening right now break that down go all the way down to things that you can do right
#
now what the the beauty of this is you pretty much have a plan from zero content all the way to
#
pitching to a rolling stone pretty much drawn out over a period of time along the way you'll
#
figure out other things are needed okay he's not going to take me seriously because i don't have
#
say for a designer that would be a bihans profile or something of that sort okay i need to build on
#
that oh okay i don't have a website oh i don't have this i don't have this i don't have this
#
see see i'm in a stage i'm actually in a stage like that right now because i'm i'm at a point
#
where i'm actually trying to do less of some kind of work and more of some other kind of work
#
and i ask myself see for me i'll contextualize for me like many other people i don't want to
#
make a lot of money i want to work fewer hours and use the remaining free time to pursue other
#
things like create more content or consume more content honestly right i'll be happy working half
#
of the day and listening and just listening to music for the rest of it that would be my dream
#
in like about two years time that is genuinely my dream i don't want to fancy yacht or a house in
#
malibu or anything like that now that's a fairly achievable dream i need to ask myself okay for
#
that what do i need to do okay if i'm making 2000 bucks an hour right now it needs to become 4000
#
bucks an hour to compensate for this how is a client going to pay me 4000 bucks an hour right
#
now okay i need to have this and then work backwards and then very tangibly you have what
#
you need to do in jan 2022 that's the way i think about it and i think that i have i mean there are
#
lots of frameworks and all this and all but this is the way i think is the easiest way for anyone
#
to approach because it's super flexible and it puts your objectives at the end of it yeah i mean
#
i think one thing that goes beyond all frameworks is that what you're really talking about is asking
#
yourself questions all the way you know take the why to the last level and really figure out why
#
you're doing and many people don't often know why they're doing what they're doing and just asking
#
their question can help clarify their mind and realize that yes that's not actually what i want
#
what i want is this yeah another interesting moment in my life i don't remember when this
#
happened but it was the time i realized what kind of life i wanted to lead this is a time when
#
the i guess it was around 15 16 or so when the starter boom was in all its glory and you had
#
uh you know all like insane amounts of money coming into the ecosystem and stuff like that
#
and i remember reading this newspaper article about somebody i i might be getting the company
#
wrong over here got promoted to the head of marketing or a very senior role in marketing
#
at a very young age like some 32 or something like that at a fairly big e-commerce company
#
i'm not mentioning it because i'm not sure if i have a name of the company right it was a
#
celebratory piece i read it and i thought poor fuck like yeah he's gonna make a lot of money but
#
what is he going to do with that money and i've spoken to enough investment bankers and all that
#
to know that these guys have like whatever eight nine figure uh bank accounts but they can't do
#
anything with that money i don't want to be in that sort of situation so when i had that reaction
#
is a very visceral reaction like i do not want that at all i do not want a promotion that is
#
going to have to make me work 50 harder even if i'm going to be uh paid 100 more that's when i
#
realize how it's very clear now in my head as to which path to pursue and i think that is important
#
i think uh asking the why is very very important we live in a day and age where like everyone's
#
like there's so much around oh you need to build a personal brand for yourself and all that no you
#
don't you don't need to build a personal brand it all depends on what your objective is the medium
#
should never supersede the objective this is true of marketing and like there is no like oh we were
#
the first brand to use virtual reality so what what did that end up changing similarly oh i have a
#
fully filled out linkedin profile or i'm a linkedin whatever top fighter there are people who show
#
off you know i have 40 000 connections and or followed by narendra modi is a popular thing on
#
twitter like okay fair enough that i can see an answer for but for everybody else so what like
#
what does this lead to what do you like what do you want to do and uh is this the right way to
#
solve that for somebody who just wants a regular career grow up the ladder once in a while and
#
have some fun go to an international uh vacation and have enough savings have a good family and
#
all that which is a nice aspirational career you don't need to ruin their lives by telling them
#
build a personal brand for yourself you should put out constant content constantly this thing
#
that thing uh you should constantly uh upskill this thing no you don't need to you genuinely
#
don't need to as long as you're happy doing what you're doing as long as you have confidence that
#
you can continue doing that and not being replaced by robots or new technology or whatever it is
#
please by all means stay off social media my first boss in ogilvi one of the smartest people i know
#
from a digital thinking perspective was famously off social media and i and at the same time he had
#
a great digital brain so there's nothing like oh you need to constantly create content and i think
#
we live in a day and age amit where especially youngsters especially those scary 16 year olds
#
that i teach they are great at sniffing out fluff they are great at sniffing out when somebody
#
actually means it and when somebody is actually being either paid for it or putting on a persona
#
or avatar to to showcase themselves in some sense on on so yeah that's that's how i think about
#
these things you know it's just a few very simple things it all i i like one of the lessons that
#
came out from getting meta for me and multiple people said this in different contexts uh starting
#
with rohan joshi uh is just zoom out like like it's very very difficult to gain perspective of
#
your career yourself your goals everything when you're in the midst of doing this on a
#
you know very daily basis step out even if it's for a few hours even if for a week but spend
#
that amount of time without the uh without worrying what monday is going to be like or
#
which client has mailed you over the weekend or whatever it is take a step back and just evaluate
#
what is it that you want is this thing that you're doing if you continue doing it where are you going
#
to head to is that the logical endpoint of what you want uh and i guess that's the reason why a
#
lot of people who you know go on vipassana or meditate or something they suddenly find meaning
#
which is completely different i completely like understand what they're what they're doing right
#
now by the way a lot of this gyan that i might have given over the last couple of hours or so
#
is a lot of it is post-facto a lot of it is makes sense now that i am out of the system yes i had a
#
good sense of where career was going but the larger picture and all that comes only when you allow
#
yourself to disconnect from the day to day so yeah that's another thing i would encourage anybody
#
to do whether or not it's somebody who's looking to be a creator get into freelance even if it's
#
somebody who's extremely happy with what they're doing right now just step out evaluate i think
#
that little exercise can lead to a lot it leads to like possibly what content should i create or
#
uh you know what should i get into are there other fields that i can possibly get into
#
adjacencies that i can get into and all that so yeah wise words and you mentioned your boss
#
at a gilby who was a so great at digital marketing but wasn't on social media himself and that
#
reminded me of the superb book by adam alter called irresistible which is about the addictions of
#
social media and i've written an essay on that which also i linked from the show notes and alter
#
speaks about early in the book he mentions that steve jobs once in 2007 or 2008 revealed that his
#
kids weren't allowed to use an ipad yeah for example so he caught it himself so i'm i'm going
#
to not dwell on sort of the freelancing lessons more i'll just link your thread and uh yeah because
#
there's nothing more to add over there because i look at it and i think okay uh year three
#
anniversary is coming do i need to add anything to this not really i think it's the same advice
#
and i especially liked 0.7 which was about the matrix between love and money which is something
#
i'll just encourage everyone to go and look at because i think it gives a very clear frame of
#
looking at it now one of your points was calendarize everything and i want to move on from that to
#
what is really when i first thought of this episode i thought let's we can do an episode around
#
productivity from all your lessons from getting meta because this is of course releasing on
#
jan third though we are recording this at this uh in the first week of december but it's releasing
#
on jan third and i figured okay productivity new year resolution it'll inspire everybody
#
and now anyone listening to this is thinking that bastard you made us listen to three hours
#
before you got to productivity but here we are so this is something i struggled with because you
#
know like sure and just to kind of go back for a moment to what you said earlier about asking
#
yourself questions about what you want to do and is what you're doing uh getting you there and i've
#
kind of been through those phases of questioning myself and thinking about that what i realized
#
at some point just asking myself the question of what does happiness mean for me and at some
#
point you realized that all your youthful ambition was pointless you know many of the big dreams you
#
had if they actually came true they won't really make you happy and and they're probably not going
#
to happen because you were just going too far what really gives us happiness if you think about it
#
are those small moments the small joys so you want to build your life around the small joys in in
#
your case it can be half a day of listening to music every day right and in my case like at one
#
point i kind of tried to define uh happiness for myself and i came up with three parameters
#
which was that i want to be in a room which is a air-conditioned b full of books and c i want to
#
sit on a lazy boy while i'm yeah and i got all of them and then i thought that fuck it now i can't
#
complain i've got everything and you are on that lazy boy right now so i'm living your dream yeah
#
you're living my dream so where i kind of see myself is that you know enjoy the process of
#
working yes take happiness in the small things but within that process of working i have a major
#
major major discipline problem like people think i get a lot done because weekly podcast course and
#
all that but outside of that if you look at me i spend hours at my laptop every day wanting to
#
work but not being able to either i'm following rabbit holes on youtube or i'm playing online
#
chess or whatever so discipline is a big issue the podcast means enough to me that i'm intense
#
enough about it that i put in the work because i know how much it means to a lot of other people
#
you know sentimental as it might sound i i know what it means to so i i you know i'm driven to do
#
that but that whole aspect of being self-driven to do things doesn't come easily with other stuff
#
for me like writing books or all the other things i might want to do so how do you manage that like
#
in a thread at one point when you spoke about calendarizing you said that you can't go to sleep
#
on sunday night without knowing what you're doing for the entirety of the rest of the week
#
yeah and i'm like boss i aspire to that but how that's actually like what's your journey towards
#
that yeah i'll tell you actually i just wanted to i actually had made uh notes of a couple of
#
lines from getting what i wanted to say that i wanted to say and i loved how you uh described
#
when you were a child you wanted one two three four five six things and utsav uh who i interviewed
#
uh on getting meta and as the host of the excellent postcards from nowhere uh he had this beautiful
#
line which is uh if you're ever in the situation describe your ideal day don't describe ideal
#
moments describe what your ideal day looks like wow yeah because then you'll see okay i want to
#
wake up in the morning at this time spend an hour reading i would then want to exercise this thing
#
and then you'll see oh that's pretty achievable if you aim for ideal moments then you're shooting
#
for the moon year i want india's best podcast or i want to win this award or whatever whatever
#
the case may be or win india's best podcast award if we may tie a lot of things together
#
nothing with an entry fee will have me in it yeah so those become difficult those become aspiration
#
super aspiration may be difficult and if you don't reach them you become super sad and you
#
beat yourself down but an ideal day this is describe a day you wouldn't mind leading for
#
the rest of your life think of it that way right and i think that's really what he was going to
#
do so he doesn't answer the question that he was but i just remembered which is why i took my
#
notebook and i was scrambling to find a similar question that i put to my writing students to
#
take a digression sorry for the interruption uh similar sort of thought that i share with
#
my writing students when we talk about process in my last webinar is what is your perfect self
#
yeah think of your perfect self and think about the difference between what that perfect self
#
does and you don't do yeah and what that perfect self doesn't do and you do yeah amit in fact you
#
had given this advice to me approximately a year back when we had recorded the first episode of
#
what ended up being getting better uh and i actually have to thank you for that because
#
i've actually been utilizing that uh especially on my fitness journey which i've been like pretty
#
conscious of in the last year uh there would be times when i would snack or something but i had
#
already pictured this avatar in my head of a super fit me not even a super fit me a fit me
#
what would that person say about this little snack that you're having right now or whatever the case
#
may be right and i find that is extremely disciplining for myself so one thank you for
#
that and there's a nice call back to that uh what is happening on the calendaring thing i think
#
again as weird as this may sound i think it was born out of a couple of things it was born out of
#
one laziness of having to figure out what to do on a day-to-day basis and two anxiety i wouldn't
#
say i'm a very anxious person but i feel very at calm knowing what i've realized is over a period
#
of time it's not uh it's not something that i woke up one day to obviously when you're at work you
#
have to calendarize because there's so much happening and then i realize if i just add
#
everything else to that it just makes life a lot easier because what was happening at one point
#
of time was i was doing i was doing there was work and there was of course multiple things that are
#
happening within work itself and then you have other things that are happening like sometimes
#
i'd go on weekends to teach sometimes there'd be a gig for which i had to attend and i had to go
#
from goring out to lower per rail to watch it etc so instead of having to maintain i just found
#
myself using google calendar more and more and over a period from i got good at using google
#
calendar what i mean by using google calendar well is if a gig is starting at eight in lower per
#
l you know that you need to leave goring out x amount of time so i got good at factoring that in
#
the other thing that i got good at factoring in is potential rework etc that might be needed right if
#
you think that a job is going to take you four hours to do account for another two hours for it
#
for some rework or something to happen uh so so building up little things like this is what i
#
mean by getting better at calendaring over a period of time i think it's a combination of
#
these things which is a sense of anxiety of not knowing what the next day holds because i genuinely
#
have problems going to sleep sometimes if i don't know what the next day is i need to know
#
purely to fulfill my own anxiety sort of thing it's not a i actually think it's less of a
#
productivity thing and more of a dealing with anxiety sort of thing again i don't want to use
#
the word too flippantly because you know it's not like i have a big problem with that or something
#
but it's i'm using it in the in the semi-casual sense in which it's a you know i was using it
#
right now here's what i do so i have a sense of okay so actually let me tell you the extent to
#
which i do my uh calendaring there is and this again if anyone who wants to riff off this and
#
make your own versions of it please go ahead i haven't i just use it for myself maybe i should
#
make a version of it or something like that and put it up i use two sheets one is google calendar
#
and the other is what i call my sanity maintainer the sanity maintainer is every week from
#
where we are right now the week of december's december 5th all the way for the next six months
#
is every week so december 5th to 12th whatever whatever all the way to that i have all my clients
#
marked out right and i have by now a reasonable sense of how much time i'm spending on each of
#
them actually there are three sheets i'll get to that you know because all of it needs to make
#
sense together so for every client i put in okay this summer this client i'm going to spend five
#
hours a week working on you put it in for the amount of time you know you're definitely going
#
to work for them on sheet number three which is my expenses and finance sheet i put in how much
#
money that is going to make me okay and where this work is done is done on google calendar again i
#
know this seems like a bit of work but do it for a couple of weeks and this becomes second nature
#
replicate this everywhere and at the end of spending two hours for the first time doing
#
this entire process what you end up having is this apart from the peace of mind and all that
#
you have a decent sense of how your next few months look this works for me because i work
#
on a freelance level i must mention this may not work at a office level or something this is how
#
i do it please contextualize for your own situations etc so this includes the clients
#
that i'm working on etc so i've i try to keep a limit of x like 40 hours a week i'm going to
#
actively work right that 40 hours needs to be split across so many clients this might come later
#
this is likely to happen yeah i do all those permutations and combinations what this gives
#
you is you have a decent sense of how much you're going to be working over the next few months
#
right it gives you how much that work is going to translate to in terms of income which let's face
#
it is the basis of life itself right there is a subsequent sheet where i break down month by month
#
how much what are the expenses that are going to happen next year this thing that i think vacation
#
contingency fund and all that google sheet is where this meets week on week every week on sunday or
#
whatever it is i adjust i actually have some clients are recurring so i have like a sort of
#
a recurring block which every week i just drag and drop into various places so at the end of
#
this exercise again i know it sounds like a lot but again this just becomes second nature after
#
a point of time i have excellent visibility over what the next couple of weeks look like
#
i have decent visibility over what the next few i have good visibility rather over what the next
#
two months look like and i have decent visibility over the next six months look like what do i mean
#
by decent visibility again all this stems from me wanting to reduce stress anxiety all that
#
one of the things i realized in 2020 that gives me a lot of stress is being unable to commit to a
#
project because i don't know whether i'll be able to take it on and i have been in situations where
#
i've taken things on because they sound interesting and then i realize i'm scrambling to do this and
#
suddenly again what seemed like an interesting project has ended up becoming how do i get this
#
damn thing done and finished with right so i've realized i need to stop doing that no matter how
#
interesting the project sounds i have realized that i will take up a project only have x number
#
of free hours per week right like if i said i'm working 40 hours after i deduct my existing
#
clients right now suppose there are 35 hours right so that means i have five hours free
#
now i have a choice either i can assume that that five hours is not going to go into rework
#
or whatever it is or other admin work that i might need to take care of or something like that
#
or i can take on a client for five hours per week right now that's a call i will decide to take
#
for now i've just kept i find that imposing artificial policies on yourself are a great
#
way of just cutting to decisions right for me right now that is if it is less than 10 hours i'm
#
not going to take it i can i will not take on a project if that if the available time is less
#
than 10 because it will get subsumed into something else or the other worst case scenario if i am in a
#
situation where those 10 hours are there great use them for learning or there will be some client
#
or the other who wants something done immediately which i'll be able to turn on whatever so all this
#
analysis etc etc i've done i have also then factored in when exercise is going to happen
#
give yourself as few variables as possible one thing i realized when i used to do exercise last
#
year is that i used to do it at my own time i used to do cult workouts or whatever and i was
#
terrible at that make one decision less join an online class where you have to join at 7 a.m or
#
6 p.m whatever the case may be commit to that reduce the variables again i cannot believe i
#
am espousing mark zuckerberg a second time on a podcast but that thing that he once said that i
#
wear only great shirts because it's one decision i need to make less it's a little extreme but i
#
see where he's coming from he got that from steve jobs black turtle neck and jeans and jobs got
#
that from einstein who wore the same suit every day so yeah again a little extreme but i see where
#
they're coming from with respect to that give yourself as few variables for these things as
#
possible and yeah that's really where it is i think this obsessive calendaring that i have
#
stems from me needing to deal with anxiety in some sense it also makes life very easy for me
#
because now if somebody pings me and says hey do you have time for a project i can say no before
#
i would do the whole song and dance huh let us talk we'll figure i'll try to whatever before
#
you know it three four hours have gone in the whole song and dance i can just say no right now
#
sorry i don't have the time to do this right now the earliest i will be able to do this is april
#
2022 i know it sounds absurd but that is really when i'll be able to do it free you tell me whether
#
it works for you or not and i will contact you in march it's reached a point where i can do that now
#
to the point where i've actually written this out in a google doc somewhere again make life easier
#
for yourself in the future customize it to whatever said person has said etc and push it out so
#
uh all these things together as you can see i live on g suite as you can see it's a combination of
#
sheets is a combination of calendar nothing is geeky i think over here i think everything over
#
here is manageable by everybody however unlike many of the other things i wouldn't say this is
#
something that i would necessarily recommend for everybody this works for me i know that
#
calendaring doesn't work for a lot of people for example again one of the folks i had interviewed
#
who was dimant dimant parekh who is the ceo and founder of the better india and their excellent
#
publication the better home the sustainable home cleaning products he said he can't work
#
by calendar he needs randomness in his life great then my advice would be figure out what works for
#
you the other things to figure out what works for you is when do you work the best like when are you
#
good with creative ideas when are you good with strategy planning that sort of thing and when are
#
you good at doing the admin sort of work is that a time in the day is that a day in the week all
#
these sort of things again being a freelancer allows you to the flexibility to chart all these
#
things out maybe won't be possible in a in a you know day job situation but even then i think it
#
is possible to some extent i was notorious at work for not replying on slack immediately because i
#
would keep slack off it was such a distraction for me that i always rationalize if it's that
#
urgent people will come over to my desk and tell me otherwise if it's just i need an updated
#
piece of copy over here i will get to it and i will deliver it properly when i get to it the sort of
#
message that i was trying to send across and i hope i was successful at this is that i will not get to
#
your work right now because i'm focusing on something else but what that i will guarantee
#
is when i get to your work i will focus on that and i won't be distracted by something else and
#
you will get it at the time i have promised you i think i managed to build that up over a period
#
of time it's very difficult to do in this day and age where everybody is on slack and assume to
#
or whatsapp which has now very tragically devolved into being work communication
#
but you know if you set boundaries for yourself like i think again going back to advertising
#
there is this you know sometimes people are mocked if they leave on time you know it's a it's a way
#
and i'm pretty sure this is true of many startups as well but as long as work is being delivered
#
i don't think anyone should feel shy of leaving office at 6 pm or whatever as long as work is
#
being done for me sometimes that was needed because i valued my free time so much and
#
sometimes out of desperation because i had to travel on weekends to conduct classes and all
#
that so i knew i needed to slog my ass off on the weekdays so that i wouldn't get interrupted on
#
weekends if there is one advice i have for working professionals it is guard your free time zealously
#
like krishashok had this beautiful line that he gave in his ted deck stock long back which was
#
i work very hard for my free time and i use that as my favorite quotes on facebook for a long
#
period of time so do you calendarize your free time in terms of this is my reading time this is
#
spending time with wife this is when i'm allowed to surf youtube and all of that yeah i think it
#
gets a little ridiculous if you go down to that level because i think then that takes spontaneity
#
out of what could happen right if i go down to the level of i have a broad idea like in a week
#
okay broadly this is what happens and i think over a period of time i have adjusted and figured out
#
there are some things that i need to calendarize like tomorrow for instance i'm recording a
#
simplified a series i'm doing for three hours which ironically we are going to do three episodes on
#
and this will likely be much longer than this one episode so that i will factor in right even
#
though technically that falls under the ambit of so-called free time because it falls outside
#
work work as such i don't go down to that level i i think i've reached a routine for reading and
#
all that i think it averages out over a week right i wake up in the morning i do a little
#
bit of reading before working out etc and again that is it's it sounds it sounds like i've got it
#
all super sorted because i wake up at six and read for an hour before getting into exercise
#
but mostly that waking up happens because i have a cat that won't stop making noise after six
#
unless she's fed so as a result of that i need to go to sleep at 11 so that i can get the required
#
seven hours or whatever it is so that yada yada all that so some of this is by circumstance make
#
the best of the situation i always say so i don't go down to the level of doing it that way there
#
are so there are times like a good chunk of weekend mornings are purely for reading
#
and reading certain kinds of things like wired fast company i thoroughly enjoy that sort of
#
uh uh that sort of thing the consumption of politics related content has gone down a fair
#
bit over the last year or so and a lot of stuff around not so much around marketing really a lot
#
of stuff around me i still have a lot of getting there to do i mean i'm still like figuring a lot
#
of things out i still don't think i'm at that ideal schedule just yet but i think one of the
#
things of growing old is figuring out that they will never be a perfect day i think you have to
#
let go of this fantasy that you're going to be able to do everything read every book listen to
#
every band etc and just make the most out of you know whatever it is that you are doing at any
#
point of time so i've cut down on there used to point to be a point of time i used to save
#
everything that i wanted to read and obsess over it and get very disappointed if i didn't manage
#
to read 20 articles a day or whatever it is i've let that go because i've realized that if i just
#
manage to read one of them and have managed to take an import from there that is more than enough
#
what i do now is i wait for for every month i purge i purge a to read pocket everything
#
start from a fresh slate it's okay if it is that mind-changing or whatever it will resurface at
#
some point of time great content has a way of coming back the book i'm reading right now
#
singularities near reed course wheel is the result of that i've always wanted to read it
#
and i like hi we will get rid eventually but it just kept coming up so many times i couldn't
#
ignore it anymore so that's the way i think about some of these things as you can see a lot of this
#
is extremely wip i don't think i am there yet and i just wanted to put one note on productivity
#
because that's also somehow become a bad word right now it really depends on what your definition
#
of productivity is and what you want to do again all goes back to what do i want to do if you're
#
the kind of person who wants to work for every single hour or maximize every moment great go
#
for it right may not be the definition for everybody and take any success story that you see with
#
their context in mind right if you go on to medium and you see a vc writing about how i made fifteen
#
thousand dollars a day in my first job or something that one might not be something that you want to
#
do and to remember his or her context there's a difference you sitting in trivandrum doing
#
something and that person having a lot of white privilege or whatever is going to stanford having
#
parents who are also vcs there's a difference in all this so contextualize everything and figure
#
out really what productivity happiness everything means for you i think it all boils down to that
#
fantastic so you know you when you started off it was very inspiring but now it's fucking scary the
#
level of now it's a scary no but that's that's the thing if if okay let me put it this way amit if
#
no i'm kind of kidding i mean i know you are i know you are but for those who might be taking
#
that seriously if calendarizing this is another thing i've realized if the process to make your
#
stress less is adding more stress get rid of that process i've done that there are things i try to
#
mic i mean the process that i'm laying down right now there were two three other things that i used
#
to do managing that became a headache by itself i realized i don't need to go to that level
#
right and i've let that go and life has been a lot simpler less and sure i don't know every
#
fractional second how much i'm working i used to actually tabulate five hours a week am i actually
#
spending five so i used to do that but i realize that is too much i mean that's adding another
#
stress layer level of process that is not needed at all in fact there's something i say in a writing
#
context which is now relevant here and in a writing context what i say is you know my students are
#
talking about all the choices that they make during a piece and all of that and what i keep
#
pointing out is that every choice that you make in a particular piece you write has to have a purpose
#
and if you're not mindful of it choices are being made anyway yeah but they're being made in random
#
ways for example just the sound of the piece you know people say that do i do i really need to care
#
about the sound and my point is look your piece has a sound sound everything you write has a music
#
to it yes either it is noise or it is not noise at the very least yes and the point is that if
#
you don't think about it chances are it will be noise yeah it's so it's up to you so similarly
#
when it comes to the texture of your that's a lovely observation and similarly i agree with
#
a reference to what you said you know the perfect me could assuage the scared me by saying that look
#
every day has a schedule anyway either it is a random chaotic schedule that you don't think
#
about and which just happens and you're a victim your passive thing the world life is happening to
#
you or you take charge of it and you make your own schedule and what's a better option and it's
#
obviously make your own schedule absolutely but i just want to address couple of the things that
#
you said i don't know whether this will help you or not but if i were in your situation and i had
#
that the one thing i would genuinely do is if i felt like i needed to go off on youtube or something
#
or whatever i would actually give into that temptation rather than feel bad about it because
#
what ends up happening over there is neither do i enjoy the content neither do i end up getting
#
work done right so i would actually if again now i'm saying this for me because i am that kind of
#
calendarizing kind of person i would work one hour of random youtubing into my schedule yeah i
#
would say i will work from 10 to 12 after that i am going to reward myself with one hour of
#
i don't want any productivity to come out of it if i just sit and do nothing or if i watch mindless
#
content at the end of it i am happy with that i don't want the scene in the unseen episode to
#
come out of this i don't want dots to join in my head this is completely guilty pleasure that i
#
have earned but after that i will get back to work i think if you compartmentalize it that way at
#
least that's the way it's worked for me it's it's certainly helped me because it john lennon has a
#
great saying right time that you enjoyed wasting was not time wasted something of that sort
#
and i feel that is very very true because you are neither doing justice to the art that you're
#
consuming let's face it it is art at some way neither are you doing justice to the work that
#
you're doing it is inefficient around the board you have two choices either you can give in and
#
binge like this without guilt or to go the other way say okay let me just get rid of this for now
#
i'll save all these let me slog and finish this thing off and then reward myself by watching this
#
i think either approach would work that's the way i do it another thing that i do which has worked
#
for me in in my profession at least the kind of work that i do a lot is i do a lot of my thinking
#
away from the computer actually i actually use a lot of notebook and paper i all the thinking
#
typically happens when there is no device around me and i find that extremely liberating because
#
you are giving you are one of course distraction free two you are also forced to think without the
#
internet which is actually a great training ground especially when you're working marketing
#
i deliberately put in some questions okay i need to verify this like if i say okay augmented reality
#
can be used in this way suppose the point i'm making okay just check whether this is possible
#
when you go back to computer just check this yeah and uh and i go back and i do just execution on
#
the computer at least that's the way i try to work and this worked out reasonably well for me
#
so you know what you said about sort of scheduling my guilty pleasure whether it's youtube online
#
chess makes a lot of sense and the next question i come to is handling social media like one of my
#
close friends uh shout out to gautam john has this habit where there's a particular hour in a day
#
where he will do social media yeah uh the rest of the time his phone is only for calls that's it
#
and he's also by the way intermittent fasting one meal a day kind of person so incredibly
#
disciplined and accomplished in other ways and i find that very inspiring but in general how does
#
one tackle social media because with all of these like when he was speaking of calendarization while
#
it was scary there was a part of me that said that i am actually obsessive and geeky enough to
#
calendarize everything but will i do it because then i will sit down in front of the computer and
#
i will say hey let me play one game of chess and then time just gets kind of sucked away and the
#
biggest time sink really there is kind of social media so what are your sort of ways of dealing
#
with that also i think it starts again i hate to say this for everything but i think it goes back
#
to objectives like what are you using social media for i think different people use it for
#
different reasons right some people would want to see what their friends are up to some people
#
want to just give in to what is happening on twitter these days and be you know roll up their
#
sleeves for a good fight sort of thing other people might actually go there to seek inspiration and
#
or to give inspiration whatever the case may be and other people might just need a five minute
#
break once in a while and just see some stories whatever whatever and go back it is that last
#
mentioned thing that tends to spiral out of control and that five minutes ends up becoming
#
10 minutes becomes 15 minutes whatever whatever whatever maybe leads to some sort of anxiety
#
because you read some news from somewhere whatever it is i try to avoid that as much as possible
#
genuinely speaking and i have gotten to the point where i pretty much open up social media only when
#
i go to the loo or something like that and of course during free time i keep it open just to
#
see what happens i think my usage of social media has gone down and has become extremely inconsistent
#
and i don't mind that at all because i think the conversations with people that i really care about
#
happen on whatsapp and other medium that i'm extremely asynchronous on i think and i don't
#
regret that at all when i go on to twitter it's usually just see what's happening on the timeline
#
maybe and the timeline at any point of time gives me a sense of okay should i is there anything over
#
here worth replying to or whatever and now i've like realized to leave trolls alone this thing
#
like whatever sometimes somebody is nice enough to write in and say the podcast was nice whatever
#
so engage in a conversation with them or reply to them come back later whatever the case maybe
#
sometimes something random happens today something beautiful happened tony was complaining about his
#
fan or something like that turns out i had the exact same thing but i didn't know whether there
#
was a fan issue he said i was confused he said paging your wife for help whatever whatever all
#
that sort of thing so it ended up being this delightful very random twitter golden era ish thread
#
that that just randomly happened so this i think would happen for some total of about
#
30 minutes a day which i think is okay i don't think i'm social media addicted uh one thing i
#
do do is i actually log out and i feel that is extremely liberating uh log out and don't
#
remember password and keep a very long complicated password here's what i've realized happens when
#
you open up by instinct control t and put t into the chrome or whatever browser use bar twitter
#
loads up it is astonishing at least for me how much i have like i say oh i need to enter my long
#
email id and my long complicated password screw it yeah let's just like whatever close it and move
#
on like for me i have been shocked by how much this has worked for me and if you do it on phone
#
another level because typing out a password on even swift key is infinite time more difficult
#
than on a keyboard for me that's how i control it genuinely speaking that's how i that's that's how i
#
control it but i think honestly the biggest thing is i've just been dissociated from the for me let
#
me put it this way i think the appeal of social media has gone away for me in many ways right
#
once in a while get onto twitter see something's happening great if that happens some people reply
#
reply to them asynchronous as and when it happens great sometimes once in a while i might put out
#
a thread or something that warrants some sort of reaction maybe i mean we are all content creators
#
we want validation you go back see where people have retweeted like commented whatever it is like
#
that freelance thread i wrote i was very active on twitter for those two like last last week i
#
put out a thread about my headphone journey something was completely random how i graduated
#
from say 500 rupee headphones that i had in college to a very expensive pair that i just
#
bought right now which was my dream for a few years and all that i just put it out because i
#
just wanted to put it out over there but i didn't realize the amount of love that it got because
#
people contextualize that into their own dreams that they had for me it was headphones or somebody
#
else it was a bike or whatever it is great so i spent a lot of time replying to that and all
#
that this happens maybe once a month or or so so as you can see it's fairly inconsistent i'd like
#
to think that i'm not very distracted by social media because i i think i've built that discipline
#
in over a period of time also i have get my kicks more out of other things now if i need a dopamine
#
rush i'd rather listen to a good song which happens very very often rather than just get onto
#
social or something i have genuinely gotten the habit now more of listening to if i need a
#
distraction i'll either listen to something on my system or load up something on youtube maybe even
#
listen to a cover or something like that got into that habit get those five minutes out of the way
#
get back to work so rather than get that fix from social genuinely don't know what the when i logged
#
on to facebook for the last time was linkedin though i don't use too much in any case to be
#
honest that's really about it i think i'm uh it makes me feel bad in some way because there are
#
a lot of friends out there putting up i feel like i want to go back to the good old times on social
#
where it was really about friends and less about posturing and content creation in that sense and
#
i'm extremely guilty of it because i have so much content which i keep spamming so to so apologies
#
to all my followers for these double standards that i have right now but yeah i think overall
#
just to answer your question i i think i'm lucky enough to have somehow managed to de-addict myself
#
from uh social yeah while you were speaking i thought oh shit he's he's going to judge
#
my audio technica headphones so not at all these are great headphones these are studio
#
headphones mx the m20 m20 yeah i mean whatever yeah yeah the entire family is great that entire
#
family because i just you know monitor headphones and you don't want anything and but uh amit i will
#
not let you forget this you scolded me during the first episode of getting meta for recording with
#
open back headphones and i remember the look on your face it was aghast i could have said i
#
uh you know i i i joined a ex brigade or something and you would have said okay do
#
what live whatever experience you want but using open back headphones while recording my first
#
podcast episode i saw like no no go and get go and get your closed no no i think so what happened
#
was that when he was recording the first episode of getting meta last year uh in december though
#
it released much later uh i could hear uh sound bleeding from his uh uh i mean the reason podcasters
#
use headphones is if you're using speakers sound bleeds from the speaker to the mic and you have
#
an echo so all podcasters know you have to use headphones he was using headphones but sound was
#
still bleeding so it was a natural uh like elementary my dear whatson kind of moment that
#
oh okay you must be using open back headphones so nothing there but i i i have i think a resting
#
face that is between a resting sad face and a resting angry face so people often misunderstand
#
and whatever so i wasn't angry if that's what you look stern more than angry which i think is a
#
better okay let's move on resting stern face yeah no i mean i appreciate these hacks you shared i
#
must try this logout hack like one hack i tried three years ago when uh you know i i had a really
#
good routine i would get up at in the morning at 5 30 go running for a while go to work go to a
#
starbucks at 7 right between 7 and 12 and then come back and do prakriti work i was editing it
#
at that time and what i would do between 7 and 12 is i didn't take my regular laptop i took a laptop
#
i got for 9000 rupees an eyeball laptop which did which did not have wi-fi or wi-fi didn't work so
#
it couldn't connect to the internet so you get it so i what can i get distracted by it was a pure
#
writing machine there is nothing else to be distracted by it's like it's like what makes
#
reading on a kindle great apart from features and all that is the fact that there is no distraction
#
there's nothing else that that bug is a feature yeah that bug is absolutely a feature and if you
#
have ever used the the experimental browser on a kindle you will not want to browse the internet
#
again anyway that's that's you don't even have to log out of social media there's no way you're
#
getting on that thing yeah no so i i wrote half a novel during that period which i have to get
#
back to and complete at some point and perhaps all this advice will help but kind of speaking
#
of that earlier before this and this is really the last strand after this i let you go but
#
it's a it's a strand that it's kind of important to me in the sense that you spoke about how
#
you'll give yourself time off the computer and if you're reading a book you'll just sit with
#
pen and paper and you'll write stuff down and that's great and what i sort of find a dilemma
#
for me is when i'm reading fiction that's fine i don't even need to take any notes i'm just
#
enjoying and i'm reading the book but when i'm reading non-fiction i find it important to take
#
notes and i use rome research with all its nested entries and bi-directional linking and it's just
#
so useful and so powerful and i kind of like to kind of take notes in that and that just clarifies
#
my thinking there's a dual side to that one side is that every time you take a note you are mentally
#
taking yourself out you know you were in a concentrated state reading the book you take
#
yourself out of that take a note go back and i have to do a lot of reading for research so
#
i've kind of gotten used to it and i can manage that but the other thing is that if i was to get
#
away with the pen and paper while reading a book i would not be able to take those kind of notes
#
that's true so but regardless of that i mean i'm not asking for a solution to that i'm actually
#
really happy with rome research but what are your systems of knowledge management because one you
#
are taking in a lot of knowledge on various subjects and it's almost part of what you do
#
because getting meta about those things makes you better as a creator and also you teach some of
#
that stuff so how do you do your knowledge management how do you what do you think about
#
information retention and all of all of those sort of processes this is again a phrase that
#
i have come to love after speaking to you and ashok for such a long time we just go back to
#
first principles right have a few pieces of knowledge from which you know even if you wake
#
up 10 years later will still be the same in a sense strip away everything else right i and it's
#
amazing how useful that piece of advice has been for everything uh including like say marketing
#
right i think that for example a good marketing strategy will be the same in 2010 2020 1950
#
whatever the mediums might change right the mediums will change but the objective of what
#
those things are going to be and the strategy etc will remain the same i find stripping these
#
things away very very useful i retain those few things so firstly i don't use a system i tried
#
roam research for a while and maybe it's my fault because i didn't give it enough time and i was
#
impatient and all that so that's my mistake it seems like a great tool i've seen great things
#
written about etc so including from you of course so i think that's one of the things i will try in
#
2022 for sure so i don't have a system as such but i'll tell you what works for me i constantly
#
validate or invalidate anything that i have read or listened to etc against what i already know
#
for example if i come across in the field of marketing if i come across a new example i'll
#
say yeah okay it fits with that with this angle added to it so i don't know exactly how to call
#
this but it's it's led to a system now where i can okay you if you need an example of how instagram
#
was used in a creative way for this particular industry i'll just uh yeah okay got it yeah okay
#
here's the example it's not like i don't think i have a great memory or something it's just that
#
i retain a few very relevant examples constantly validate if i find a better example chuck the old
#
one out replace it in that's sort of like how i manage it in my head by just retaining as
#
few pieces of information as possible honestly and having enough examples to buttress those
#
however what i try to retain are memorable lines and things that make i mean that have a lot more
#
weight than just the five or six words that that they may convey those when i come across those
#
in a book or in a podcast or whatever it is i immediately stop what i'm doing and make a note
#
of it so i don't make a habit of this it's not like i have if i'm reading non-fiction for example
#
i it's like i recently read a great book i read was um farid zakaria's 10 lessons for a post
#
pandemic world for example i didn't make notes right i was very tempted to on the kindle so i
#
was highlighting and i got very good at figuring out whether i'm going to use something for later
#
or whether it is just a impulse oh i must save this right now like ha no yeah like i'm not going
#
to sit and worry about the reasons why the cold war whatever whatever so i'm not going to bother
#
highlighting this because i'm never going to refer back to this i always look for reusability in that
#
sense but on the other hand there was this um i'm a big big fan of scott galloway the marketing
#
professor and also a very outspoken i mean i just love the way he thinks one of the beautiful lines
#
one of the best lines about branding in general that i have heard he it was a very throwaway line
#
for him that he said during some i guess uh on a pivot with uh cara swisher and he said he was
#
talking about how google facebook etc are taking over our lives marketing and the decisions that
#
we take we you know we remember we retain fewer brands in our heads because google and facebook
#
are where we go to figure out what our favorite brand etc is and the line that he used was so
#
brilliant um i've made part of my marketing presentation at least for me it was it was
#
what is a brand a brand is just a shortcut for taking a purchase decision and i thought and i
#
just stopped when i heard that because it just resonated so much i'm like yeah absolutely like
#
if i haven't seen a nike ad in the last two years and if i need to buy a shoe i will still think
#
nike first because why all the branding work that they've done what is the result of all that
#
branding work they don't need to sell they don't want me to buy a shoe today but eventually this
#
fucker is going to want a shoe at that point of time he should remember us similarly volvo safe
#
car whatever these are classic examples but then it goes down to it goes down to even individuals
#
right i know for example there are some people in my friends circle who i will reach out to
#
for a particular kind of design that needs to be done so whatever personal branding they have done
#
for themselves inadvertently or whatever it is it is a shortcut for me taking a purchase decision
#
of utilizing them for my project or for a client's project or whatever it is so these kind of lines i
#
will retain and the way i try to make sure i don't forget it is by putting it in a place where i will
#
reuse it again which works in my case in terms of presentations etc the other thing that i do is i
#
run a newsletter called things of internet which is a pseudo marketing plus i just call it just
#
general fun internet things that happen around the internet and and all that this becomes an
#
excellent place for me to save stuff and put in and retain that level of information once you put
#
it down you tend to remember it a little more these are not like fully fleshed out processes
#
or anything like that but these are these are these are what have worked for me really at least
#
in the spaces that i that i that i work in which is primarily marketing and all that everything else
#
right i take a call like there are some things that i might read on politics is a very nice line
#
or something but then i ask myself okay am i going to reuse this again is there a point in me
#
remembering this or should i just enjoy it in the moment let it go maybe add it to one of your
#
principles or like does it validate or invalidate anything you're thinking and then i let it go
#
that's it i don't fall under the tension that's another thing that used to give me a lot of
#
anxiety oh i must remember each and every fact and all that that bullshit i realized doesn't
#
work anymore i don't need to what is important for me at least is some of the marketing things
#
and all that so that's really how i think about this right now it's not a very satisfactory
#
answer i know because it's not a knowledge management system as such but it's what works
#
for me and i'm happy with that yeah no it's a lovely answer and also you know just as when i
#
was on episode one of getting meta we got the title of the show from there so i can give you a title
#
for your book on branding if you ever write one and that title is eventually the fucker will want
#
to buy a shoe yes yes that's a great title so you know i think we've already gone over four hours
#
of talk talk times so apologies no apologies to you because i know you sleep at 11 30 and it's
#
11 09 over here and you got to get home and all of that and you have a 7 a.m class and you probably
#
your your calendarization for the year yeah it's all it's a cascade effect now cascade effect now
#
so i just may in may something's going to screw up because of this yeah and you'll say how amit
#
amit yeah but this is the other thing amit i know you meant it as a joke but this is the other thing
#
you learn to account for things like this you learn to account for again like don't think that
#
because a job you think is going to take four hours per week account for those two hours extra
#
because you will need it if not for that job for something else so you know it's a constant
#
process of trying to improve this whole thing whole thing the idea is not to get bogged down
#
by the process and just think about something that you know works for you whatever swishes
#
enough dopamine around in your head man whatever whatever makes you happy or whatever reduces
#
stress i think at the end of the day that's what really matters even more than bank balance or
#
whatever so whatever your definition of dopamine is optimize for it optimize for dopamine check
#
facebook every minute for likes check twitter every minute for notifications okay okay fair enough
#
optimize for dopamine and think of second-order effects fair enough now i know yeah okay so my
#
final question which i ask all my guests on the show that if you had to recommend books to my
#
listeners yeah books that have either changed the way you think about the world made a profound
#
impact on you or which you just love so much that you want to tell everyone hey read this you know
#
sure what would you recommend so i'm going to go a little uh i'm going to go a little different
#
over here because uh i'm going to recommend a couple of things that are not exactly books
#
as such uh but are still great reading in my mind uh one is this astonishingly good uh website
#
called rest of world rest of world.org it's a website it's a non-profit website actually
#
the content is great though reported stories on technology from around the world from markets
#
that are not silicon valley uh it was actually started by eric schmidt's daughter and the and
#
the logic is great because a lot of the tech journalism that we consume even here in india
#
happens to be from silicon valley and the impact that the alphabets metas etc etc the world are
#
doing whereas there is a lot of stuff happening everywhere else as well be it the uh how the
#
favelas in brazil are using uh gaming to get out of poverty or how m commerce in africa is
#
transforming something else be it the way live streamed commerce is happening in china and
#
southeast asia to how some islands are using ai to preserve their ancient technologies fascinating
#
world of technology out there so if anyone's interested in tech and the internet in general
#
rest of world.org is one of my uh one of my very top recommenders coming to books i think alchemy
#
is a great book not just for anyone who works in marketing but for anyone who just thinks about
#
the you know the whole thing of evolution and all that my my guess is if you enjoyed uh sapiens you
#
will enjoy this uh book as well related to that there's another great book called this is your
#
brain on music again you don't need to be a music person to enjoy this it's a fascinating look at
#
why humans are drawn towards music because if you think about it music is evolution what role does
#
music play from an evolutionary point of view it's everything that if you've learned anything
#
about evolution is that everything that we do is for the sake of procreation of the species
#
and music seems to be a distraction from that why do we engage in music or indeed any art at all
#
so that's another ready recommendation that i have the other book that i have is a not is
#
not yes i'm actually going to give a fiction book it's a book called some by david eaglemann
#
if i've got his name right set of short little short stories little short stories yeah it's a
#
beautiful book and it's uh it's a set of about 20 short stories on what the afterlife could be like
#
what happens after you die uh some are poignant some are surreal and funny some are uh absolutely
#
silly uh but yeah that i think uh i think that sort of like that's sort of it and the last
#
recommendation i have is actually i'm going to cheat over here i'm going to do that genie
#
rubbing thing oh i i want more wishes that sort of thing you have as many wishes recommendations
#
as you know i'm going to recommend the entire asterix series and i think they are a great re
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re re re read for anyone of any age i think one of the great things about asterix and i uh and uh
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this i remember seeing somewhere asterix can be enjoyed as a child for the slapstick humor
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and as an adult for all the puns and all that now you might be a seasoned asterix fan thinking why
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is this noob coming on to seen on the unseen and recommending asterix in that case i would recommend
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the ultimate guide to asterix which is an astonishing book only meant for asterix fans
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which breaks down the asterix universe it breaks down the character histories and all that and even
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goes into some of the challenges for example the original asterix is written in and conceptualized
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and written in french of course so one of the challenges that translators have is not only
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translating the words but also the spirit and now this becomes doubly difficult when you're doing
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puns right because now the pun needs to remain the same and it needs to translate into another
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language so it actually has interviews with anthea bell and derek hawkeridge who translated the
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books from french to english and talk about and it needs to be in that certain space that's the
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biggest challenge it needs to you can't make the speech bubble bigger so the amount of challenges
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the times that they took a little liberty the times they had to let a pun go all those sort of
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things plus other absolute gems like what goes inside the magic potion and this how they do
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is by scoring all the asterix books and figuring out what get a fix has asked for like mistletoe
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over here strawberry at one point of time this thing i think whatever so this is what we know
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goes into the magic potion these are the ingredients whatever it is so it's an absolute delight for
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anyone who enjoys asterix so yeah those would be my i guess recommendations for now i did read
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farid zakaria's this year i one of my favorite books was ten lessons for a post-pandemic world
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which i think was nice it was a very sobering read it was also very neutral read it was a
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strangely uplifting lead read given the gravitas and the bleak subject matter it was also poignant
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because farid lost his mom to covid and it's also great history refresher right it was the history
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refresher that i didn't know that i needed like oh that's what actually happened in the cold war
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great thanks for clarifying before i sounded like an idiot you know all those nice things all put
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together so yeah i guess these are all the things that i would recommend if you have read sapiens
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and i would highly recommend the graphic novel version of sapiens which takes it to another level
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all together i think i should stop right now before i recommend archie comics for now fabulous
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recommendations and i can't wait to dig into asterix and these sparked off a couple of thoughts so a
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couple of sideways recommendations when you spoke about this is your brain on music that question
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that from an evolutionary point of view why is art important it's one that stephen pinker addresses
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in a chapter on art in his book the blank slate which is a masterpiece which is a desert island
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book for me and that's probably at the time i first read the blank slate i found it was a
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weakest chapter in the book the rest of the book was mind-blowing but nevertheless that's in
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comparison to what is an incredible book and also you mentioned some by david eaglemann
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and i'd like to recommend a book called cosmic comics by italo calvino which again is a set
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of delightful little short stories like there's one story which is a first person account of an
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amoeba about life and there's another one where these people decide that the moon is made of
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cheese so they take a boat to the middle of the river and they try to build a ladder to the moon
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to get cheese it's got these lovely charming incredible stories by one of the great writers
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of the last century and oh sorry one final thing i have often been asked for podcasts
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and newsletter recommendations because i guess uh because i consume a few uh do a few so i've
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actually because i got tired of answering this question so many times i've actually written out
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an entire medium post of an updated on a monthly basis so we'll link that as well that i guess
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would be the last link of the episode which is just podcasts and newsletters that i recommend and
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it's just a whole bunch of shows and newsletters yeah so go to the bottom of the show notes right
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that will be the last link out there and you know and this just reminded me that we missed
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an entire section i was going to ask you about podcasting and your lessons and all of that
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because you've done different kinds of podcasts yeah you know you know and in a sense you're my
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podcast daddy uh because of an origin story that people can listen to the narain chanoy episode 4
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but for now boss chuck thank you so much for you know coming on the show this is fun i had i had
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no idea this much time had passed and and there were times i forgot that there was a recording
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equipment between us thank you that's exactly the kind of conversation i want this is your brain on
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podcast thanks guys if you enjoyed listening to this episode head on over to the show notes
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where i think there are a record number of links enter rabbit holes at will and also listen to some
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great music while you're at it you can follow chuck on twitter at chuck underscore gopal you
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can follow me on twitter at amitwarma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene
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and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the
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scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the production of the show you can go
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over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast
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alive and kicking thank you you
