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Where do our laws come from?
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Society runs because of a combination of social norms that people follow without thinking
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about them and explicit rules set by the state.
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These laws come about ostensibly to preserve harmony in the world and they are based on
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But as the world changes, as technology evolves, as societies are turned inside out, some laws
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prove to be unnecessary, some can be counterproductive, some are inadequate.
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And when the world changes at the kind of warp speed it is changing at now, it is difficult
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Over the past couple of decades, technology has transformed the way we live our lives.
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A few centuries ago, for example, privacy was not considered a big deal.
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Then as potentially invasive technologies like the printing press and portable cameras
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became widespread, it became something we need to think about.
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And today, with so much data generated by us and around us, technology knows us better
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than we can possibly know ourselves.
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Everything seems out there and up for grabs.
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And for the sake of human freedom and flourishing, it's become important to make sure that this
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doesn't get out of hand.
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How do we protect our privacy?
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How do we regulate technology which is already being used to hack our brains?
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How do we do this without giving too much power to an already oppressive state?
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And for our own sake, we need to engage.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Rahul Mathan, a founder of the celebrated legal firm Trilegal and
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an important player in the shaping of public policy for the last decade and a half.
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Rahul's deep interest in tech and the fact that he became one of the leading technology
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lawyers in this country meant that he saw parts of the future before some of us did.
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For example, he realized long before it was in the public discourse that protecting our
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privacy would be one of the great challenges of the tech age.
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When Aadhaar and India's digital public infrastructure were in their infancy, Rahul got in at the
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ground floor to work on a privacy law with the government.
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Spending almost a decade and a half helping the state with policy, he dived deeper into
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the history of data regulation and the challenges and the political economy of it.
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He also wrote two superb books about it.
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Privacy 3.0 is a brilliant book that contains a history of privacy, sheds light on the meta
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issue around it, describes the evolution of the right to privacy and helps us understand
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how it evolved in India and the battles ahead is packed with insight and some great stories.
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His next book, The Third Way, is a supremely important book.
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It lays out first the US approach to data regulation, which was laissez-faire and led
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to big tech companies that sometimes seem to have too much power.
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It lays out the European approach, which is so intrusive that it perverts the incentives
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And he argues that India is uniquely placed to show the world a third way in which these
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values are written into the protocol itself, which makes a lot of regulation unnecessary.
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As an example, he offers us Aadhaar and India's digital infrastructure.
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Now I opposed Aadhaar for years because it was basically mandatory.
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It was being coerced upon us and that principled objection remains.
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But apart from the coercion angle, the design of Aadhaar, and in fact much of our DPI, is
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actually pretty damn good.
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It protects privacy, it makes surveillance hard and some of the misconceptions I had
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about this were cleared by Rahul's book and by this conversation.
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I do have some objections, you'll hear me voice them in the next few hours, but I look
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at DPI differently now and I'm also so glad that people like Rahul are part of the process.
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He's a big picture thinker who's also great at the small details and both his books contain
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so much insight and so much to think about, as does this conversation.
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But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
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It's a plea from me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
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We've called it Everything is Everything.
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Every week we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound to
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the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
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youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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Rahul, welcome to the scene in The Unseen.
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Amit, it's a pleasure to be here after listening to many episodes over many years.
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Yeah, you were just telling me about how you heard my episode with KP Krishnan, which was
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over eight hours and you were joking when I called you for the show that you'll come
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But let me just tell you, my episode with KP was recorded over four sessions across
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And the second and the third day were like a week apart and in different cities.
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No, it was thoroughly enjoyable.
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KP is, I like to say he's sort of my mentor in some of the public policy work that I've
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done because he was extraordinarily kind to me when I was just starting out doing this
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So it was just very interesting to hear some of that Stephen's life of his and just some
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mentions of the things that he's done before I knew him.
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So it was very, very enjoyable.
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Did you learn something about him you didn't know already?
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I don't know that much about him in the sense that, you know, we've sort of engaged professionally.
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And so a lot of I didn't know anything about the Stephen's side of his life.
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So that was interesting.
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And just generally, you know, it just pulled apart some of those things that I instinctively
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knew that the work of bureaucrats is extraordinarily difficult.
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Many things that you have to do are not optimal.
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And so just hearing it from him, of course, I knew all of these things, but just hearing
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it with examples and stuff like that was really interesting.
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I mean, I have a tangential question here.
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I have noticed that there are times I have sat down to record an episode with someone
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I know extremely well and that I've known for 15 years or 16, 17 years or, you know,
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I've known them for a long, long time.
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And yet I realized during the episode that I just learned so much more about them.
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It's just they completely flesh out and become more edgy as it were.
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The resolution just goes up.
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And then I realized that in the course of our normal friendship, sometimes there is
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a danger that you fall into these grooves where you don't really know the other person
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There might be a friend, you establish a certain comfort zone and within the particular relationship
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you have, everything is smooth, but, you know, you don't go much deeper than that.
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And sometimes I ask myself the question that how, you know, if one is to be intentional
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about all our relationships, as I think more and more one should try to be rather than
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just, you know, kind of let things happen in the background, then does that intentionality
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also include kind of making this kind of an effort?
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Because to some extent, I fault myself that, you know, these guys are, I never asked them
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these questions before.
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It's never come up in conversation.
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I have never asked any friend outside of, without these two mics in front that, you
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know, tell me about your childhood, your, you know, in your life, how have friendships
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evolved and how has your approach towards friendship evolved?
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I guess it's also a stage of life kind of a thing.
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I think when you're much younger, you have a lot of friends, you know them all superficially
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in the context that you're saying, I mean, you probably know them well, but perhaps not
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with a level of depth that the older you get, you tend to want to know, I guess the older
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you get, the less time you have.
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And so you want to optimize the time that you have with people that are really worth
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And it's at that stage where you start to sort of get deeper into some of these things
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and try and figure out, you know, I'm spending time with this person.
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What exactly is this person, you know, is this a person I can have a conversation with
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without being guarded at all?
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In order to do all of those things, I guess you've got to know the person a lot better.
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So I think when I was younger, I had lots of friends, you know, I still have a lot of
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But as you're saying, the ones, you know, I don't normally have a mic between me and
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So I don't have that opportunity.
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But I take your point that there are some people who you know much, much better.
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I was part of an organization called the Entrepreneurs Organization, and we had a fairly unusual
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construct called the Forum, which is, you know, a group of members.
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So it's a large, large organization, they've got chapters in various cities.
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I was in the Bangalore chapter.
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And you have this construct called a forum where you have no more than 10 people who
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commit to meet once a month, and they discuss, you know, work, personal, family, and they
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do it in a structured way, which encourages this sort of depth of understanding.
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I've been in my, I've left EO, but I've been in my forum for over 20 years.
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So for 20 years, this group of us has met once a month.
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And so these are people who I know better sometimes than their current partners know
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them because we've been friends, we've been in forum before we were married, after some
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of them have been divorced, one of them is dead.
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So we've been through all of those cycles, we've, you know, they've not had children,
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now the children are going to college, we've seen that whole journey.
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But I think the transparency that that process allows is quite remarkable.
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So you know, these are the eight people who can tell me to my face that I'm being silly
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about something, or my model compass says something and I'm working in the opposite
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direction to that, and that's super valuable.
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So yeah, long story short, I think whether it's a mic between us or whether we've got
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some kind of a structured way of interacting, and please, this is the once a month that
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we do the structured interaction, but you know, we are really good friends otherwise.
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I guess that's the closest to describing what you're saying.
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It's very, very, people describe the forum as your personal board of directors.
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And if you can think about it that way, it's who do I go to if I've got some problem at
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business or family, or just my personal life, who's not going to judge me, who has complete
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context of everything that matters to sort of give me direction.
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One of the previous guests on my show, Sudhir Sarnobat, who came on episode 350, has also
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been part of a group like this for I think about 10 years.
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Now, I don't know if it's the same organization or it's called the same thing, but it's exactly
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the same structure you described, 10 people meeting once a month, and I think he used
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the phrase personal board of directors either in the episode or otherwise.
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And I'm just wondering if there is something to that structure which engenders that sort
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of intimacy or that sort of trust.
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You may not have been friends with these people in the normal course of things or even wanted
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to, but because of the structure where you share so much, you begin trusting one another.
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And I've been thinking about form a lot, like even both your books are a lot also about
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Like in your book on privacy, there is a fascinating section on how just the structure of how you
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live changes the person you are and the way you live.
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And you have that sort of fascinating understanding of how walls as a technology really made privacy
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a thing and split ourselves into two cells, the private self and the public self.
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And we'll speak more about that as we go along.
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But I'm just wondering that even in this case, how you structure your friendships and the
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way those interactions take place possibly then has an impact in the quality of them.
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And I wonder if there's something to think about for all of us in how do we structure
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these that even in the existing friendships we have, are there different ways to sort
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Yeah, look, I mean, I think intentionality of things always adds a different dimension.
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And of course, friendships or our interactions are meant to be spontaneous and dynamic.
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So sometimes intentionality comes in the way.
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But if you want to get these outcomes, you have to be intentional to some extent.
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I know you also spend a lot of time with things like personal knowledge management, et cetera.
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Now, there's intentionality in that.
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You need a structure, you need form in order to be able to extract additional value.
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And when you read books, you're absorbing stuff.
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But if you want to really take that to the next level, you've got to create some structure
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around, at least that's the way I see it.
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And I mean, I've read books all my life.
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It's only when I got intentional about that whole process was it that I could start extracting
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that sort of additional level of value out of it.
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So I mean, I think relationships are extraordinarily important.
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The older you get in life, the more you realize that everything else you can sort out.
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But relationships and people that can, it's not people that you can turn to for help,
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because that's just sort of emergency kind of, it's people who you can rely on to give
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So very often when I write a piece, I'm not comfortable with something.
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I'm worried that I've written this piece in a way that it will offend someone or get
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And sometimes I don't really care, but I run it by someone and I say, look, what do you
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And this person will say, look, maybe you can say it differently, maybe you can sort
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of back off a bit on this sentence.
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I won't show it to too many people, but those who I do and who I trust will give me sort
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Those are invaluable because they understand where I'm coming from, but at the same time
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can sort of give me a steer.
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I think it's also really important to be actively listening to these people.
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Of course, if you go to them, you know, you can't just go to them and they've said something
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That's really not the point at all.
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You can't also just listen to whatever they say because then they might as well write
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So how do we get the most out of it?
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It's an art and I talk to a lot of younger people and more and more I'm convinced I
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can keep telling them all of these things, but you can't take a helicopter to Mount Everest.
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You basically have to climb all the way up.
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And so there's no, there's no shortcut to getting this, this kind of experience.
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So, you know, I don't know.
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I think as much as if younger people listen to this, they try and imbibe this, there's
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no way they can do it unless they've lived their life to a certain level and do it their
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I mean, first time I'm thinking about it, you can't take a helicopter to Everest.
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I mean, is there an alternative?
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No, of course you could.
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You can take a helicopter.
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There's no problem at all.
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It's just that that's not climbing Mount Everest.
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Yes, you can put a flag down there, but you have not climbed Mount Everest.
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And so can you, are you a mountaineer?
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If the idea of going to Mount Everest was to take a photograph with a flag, then yeah,
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of course you've achieved it.
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But yeah, I was just wondering, I mean, I'm very tempted to just do alt tab on my laptop
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and look for pictures of Everest and helicopter and see if there's something there.
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So a follow up question, you know, before we get to your childhood and you know, you
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know, the standard sort of things I like to talk about, but before we get there, sort
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of a follow up question going down the same route that you spoke of intentionality, that
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you also spoke of personal knowledge management.
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I know that you're a person who's deeply into tech and I want to talk about that as
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well. Give me a sense of the things that you're intentional about now and how do you
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organize those things, whether it is reading or knowledge or whether it is your habits
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and what is your tech stack right now with which you kind of organize your life and not
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every piece of technology you have obviously has to be for an instrumental purpose, some
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stuff you just have for pleasure.
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But you know, kind of describe that for me.
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Yeah. So, I mean, I am I don't have a standard tech stack.
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I think that's I used to think that I would have a standard tech stack and then I
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realized that tech keeps evolving.
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And so there are new things.
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So I have come to terms with the fact that there are certain things I want to do and
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I will do it with the tools that I have learned.
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And then if a new tool comes up tomorrow, I will try the tool, see if it works for
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me. If it doesn't work for me, you know, I'll go through.
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So, you know, just to answer the question on intentionality, you know, I guess I'm
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very focused around increasing my understanding and knowledge of the world in my
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area. You know, it's just it's too vast.
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So it's impossible to know everything.
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So it's clearly reading is a very important part of it.
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Being a lawyer, that was always the case.
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I keep telling everyone who is starting out at law, look, you just have to keep
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reading. There's no shortcut to that.
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Like the Article 370 judgment came out yesterday.
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I had to read it. It's 450 pages.
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It's not in my area, but you just have to read it.
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So it's there. You know, I've read the summaries and I have to read the whole
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thing. And of course, you know, when the other judgment came out, I had to read
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that and I read that four or five times because that's, you know, an important
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judgment. And it is in my area of work, but more importantly, in sort of
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tangential areas. I mean, history, for example, I think history, our past informs
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our future. So histories are extraordinarily important to understand the
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world we're in and will give us some direction of the world we're going to.
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And I've never been a history student.
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And, you know, particularly histories of modern India have been fascinating for
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me, the post 1947 India.
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I'm still just scratching the surface.
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I realize that I have very, very imperfect knowledge.
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I also realize that histories are written by many different people.
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And so in order to really form a view, you've got to read different versions of
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the same thing, often told by people who disagree with each other, who have
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different ideologies from each other.
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And it's in the intersection that you will find it.
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So if, if this is sort of part of the stack, then, you know, part of the part of
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what I want to do, then the tech stack and just the habits are designed to
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optimize that. And so, you know, tools like Rome, which you use, I was a very
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early adopter of Rome and just the idea of being able to write notes that you
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could link to each other and then surface connections was extraordinarily
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But since then, you know, I've moved to Tana.
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I've tried all the others.
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I've tried, I've tried everything.
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I spent a lot of time in Tana very recently, for a while, loved the structure.
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And then the structure was too difficult for me.
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So I'm back to Rome and I'm all into a very, very unstructured Rome.
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So, you know, I sort of double square bracket, all sorts of things.
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And now I am, because I've, I've got a fairly large database.
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My Rome graph is, is, you know, quite big.
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I haven't looked at the graph for a while, but it must be quite big.
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If I, if I click on, you know, on, on anything, any sort of link, there are
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really bizarre connections that come up.
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Because obviously it can't just be this.
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But I, I, because I've been writing this weekly column since 2016, I have to
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generate 950 words of thoughtful content every week, and sometimes these
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serendipitous connections that just pop up, spark some idea, and it's not,
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it's not something new, it's just more a different way of looking at things,
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which now is starting to pay dividends.
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I think with, with a lot of these things, you've got to put in the time,
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put in the effort, it's not immediately evident, and then compounding kicks in.
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And once compounding kicks in, then you basically don't have to do anything.
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So that's the, so that's the, I mean, we can get into a whole
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source of other elements of tech stack.
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I have a part of the stack to optimize my to-do's and, you know, getting
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things done and what do you use for that?
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So I'm a, I'm a getting things done freak.
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So ever since I read David Allen's book, I've now, that's the most gifted book.
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I've given it to, you know, everyone who comes up for partnership in the firm
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and comes to me, their biggest problem is time management.
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So I just give them the book.
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I was like, read the first half of the book.
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The second half is for if you really want to nerd out on it, but the
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first half, it will change your life.
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Many people, it hasn't changed their lives, but the few who have,
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you know, really get it.
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So for that, yeah, it's, I use things on the Mac.
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It's a very simple to-do manager, but can get very deep.
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I've tried once again, everything in the stack.
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I've tried OmniFocus, I've tried Todoist, I've tried the whole thing.
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So this is, you'll, you'll figure out, this is the way I do it.
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I try almost everything that's recommended.
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And then I settle for that, which works for me and things works for me.
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That's the one that I've been with for the longest time.
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And it's, it's actually, and I've, you know, I've tried using
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Roam for to-dos, it doesn't work for me.
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Roam is just for notes.
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I can't, and it's designed for all sorts of things.
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But I think I'm increasingly becoming a person who uses an app for one thing.
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I don't like to have a, you know, super app that does everything.
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I like to, so I have a physical Kindle.
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I don't read the Kindle on my phone because my phone is for my phone.
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And if I want to read a book, I want to do it without distraction.
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So I pick up a physical Kindle and I, you know, I moved to another device
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And of course, you know, I read physical books as well, but I, I, I try to use the
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phone, I guess, just for, you know, things that you need the phone for, you know,
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phone calls, WhatsApp, you know, deliveries, I guess, those sorts of things.
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And everything else I try and do elsewhere.
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So I can, the other thing, I don't know how it is for you, but I'm
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increasingly becoming a laptop focused as opposed to trying to do things that are
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better done on the laptop on a mobile phone.
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I'm, you know, mobile phone is for what, what that is.
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So there was a, yeah, there was a time when people said, look, Rome misses the
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fact that it doesn't have a mobile device.
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And I'm actually, I like the fact that it doesn't have a mobile device because
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the, the kind of intentional note-taking I want to take, I want to take, you know,
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on, on a desktop or on a laptop or something like, not on this, not on a
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phone when I'm waiting for a flight or something, it wouldn't be like a serious
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So that's sort of the, the way I've, I started thinking about this.
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I think I spent way too much time trying to improve my tech stack because eventually
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I just get back to the things that worked for a while.
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Though Tana was a really, really interesting diversion, very, very
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I just couldn't find the utility for what I wanted.
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Yeah, that's interesting how the design of these apps can shape, you know, the
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way you think even if you're, you know, using them as aids to that.
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Like for me using Rome was a game changer.
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It's the first app of the sort I tried.
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I looked at Rome, Obsidian, Notion, but I really liked Rome.
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And it just, in the way that it allowed me to structure everything.
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And I have a video on productivity with Ajay Shah for the YouTube show we do.
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So where I actually screenshot and I show how it works.
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So I linked that from the show notes for the listeners.
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Interesting how, like one earlier when I would take notes on Microsoft Word, it
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was just a massive linear mess.
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You have 60 pages of notes and the guest you're with will mention something.
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And then you're frantically scrolling up and down doing control F and, you know,
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Rome just makes it easier with the nested entries and all that.
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But also the sort of the distinction between say Rome and something like
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Notion is that Notion is great for productivity.
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Rome is just great for a kind of free association note taking like in, you
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know, writers will often talk about architects and gardeners, you know,
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where architects will just plan everything, construct everything
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beautifully and gardeners are just pottering around and things happen
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and things emerge out of there.
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And I think Rome is more for gardeners and Notion is more for architects.
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And I'm probably mixing up concepts from two completely different fields.
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But yeah, I mean, I think it's gardeners and yeah, I guess, I guess it's
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I think I'm somewhere between the two.
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But once again, you know, too much structure and you won't, you won't proceed.
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I mean, you're so focused on the structure that you're, you're trying to
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map out every single rivet and at that point in time, it's pointless.
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So it's important, I think, to build a broad outline and then get into the
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more free association kind of stuff.
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Because that's where the magic happens.
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I mean, it's no point sticking.
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You need to stick to structures as you know, you know, how long you're going
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to go, where this is leading to, but beyond that, you know, to craft every
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paragraph or to, you know, micromanage that then it, at least it doesn't work
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for me, I think it works for some sort of, I think there's this, there was
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this lovely book about the process behind writing Alleluia, Leonard Cohen
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I think there was a podcast as well.
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I think it was, I can't remember which, which,
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we'll look at it from the show, but, and it was just like, you know, you compare
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Leonard Cohen with Bob Dylan and Bob Dylan will churn something out like
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overnight and Leonard Cohen will just agonize over it and he'll just go on and
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on and apparently that's what happened with Alleluia.
#
And actually the story is, that's just one part of the story.
#
The whole story is how eventually, you know, long and convoluted way it lands
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up in the hands of Jeff Buckley, who then sings this completely iconic version
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of Alleluia and how that's, that's very different.
#
But just on the pain of that artistic process, depending on who you are and
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how you do it, I'm clearly not in the Leonard Cohen camp, though I'm certainly
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not in the Bob Dylan camp, Bob Dylan is just someone who has got genius and you
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don't need structure, but you come out with magic, but I'm, I think I'm quite
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clearly halfway in the middle.
#
I really like structure, but I think too much structure really stifles me.
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One of the things when I, when I write the book is a very good friend of mine,
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who's actually a very good writer, Lavanya Shankaran told me, you just have
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to get out a shitty first draft.
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That's what she calls it.
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And so I've always focused on getting that shitty first draft out as quickly as
#
possible, once I've got that out, then, you know, sort of weight is off your
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shoulders, you can see it's, it's really crap.
#
You can start a fresh, but at least you've got something in front of you
#
that you can pull apart.
#
You mentioned the phrase shitty first draft and where Lavanya probably got it
#
from, where all of us got it from is this great book by Anne Lamott called Bird
#
by Bird, which is one of the great books on writing.
#
And I just want to kind of read out the full quote for those of my listeners who
#
could take inspiration from this Lamott writes, perfectionism is a voice of the
#
oppressor, the enemy of the people.
#
It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.
#
And it is a main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft, stop quote.
#
And, you know, so I have a slide in one of my writing webinars where I use this.
#
And what I say about what I point out is the way that phrase shitty first draft
#
is used as a feature, not a bug, that it doesn't matter that it's shitty.
#
You kind of have something to work with.
#
And that's sort of important.
#
And the Dylan versus Cohen thing is also interesting because Dylan would churn
#
them out. And have you, are you a Dylan fan?
#
Have you heard the new basement tapes?
#
Where all these guys took discarded lyrics from Dylan and made songs out of them.
#
So what's your favorite?
#
It's been so long since I listened to Dylan.
#
I can't pick one up out of the new basement tapes.
#
Which these other musicians took his discarded lyrics and turned it into like my
#
favorite from that, though they're all good is Mumford's Kansas City.
#
And that was also a wonderful thing because like there was a film made on it and it's
#
great to see them look at these lyrics and they're locked up for two days and they
#
have to turn it into songs and they're just putting their own spin on it.
#
So you know that, okay, the words are Dylan, but it's, you know, there's another
#
sensibility sort of in the music, which is kind of fascinating.
#
So let's go back to your childhood now.
#
Like when you entered my home studio, you mentioned that you were a
#
Bombay Scottish kid, you'd grown up in Mumbai and all of that.
#
So take me back, you know, where were you born?
#
What was your early childhood like?
#
So, I mean, I was born in Chennai, but that's because my mother's family was there.
#
My father was in, in Bombay, not Mumbai, because it was Bombay then.
#
And, uh, uh, he, we spent a little time in, in Delhi, um, because my father
#
was setting up a project that my father worked for BSES, um, which is now
#
Reliance Power or has it now become something else?
#
So BSES and BST were the two, uh, private power suppliers in, in Bangalore, uh, in
#
Bombay and, uh, my father worked for BSES.
#
And so I spent my, uh, most of my school days, uh, till the 8th
#
standard in Bombay, Scottish.
#
And then, uh, my father moved, uh, to another company, um, it was called
#
General Electric, which is actually GE, but it was in those days called
#
General Electric, and, uh, we moved to Calcutta, where I studied in a school
#
calls in James till I finished the 12th.
#
Uh, and then by that time, uh, my father, you know, with the same company had
#
moved, uh, to Chennai and eventually to, uh, to Bangalore.
#
Uh, and, um, it so happened that I got a national law school and, uh,
#
national law schools in Bangalore.
#
So, you know, I came back and, uh, I was in national law school.
#
So, I mean, it sounds like my father had a, had a, like a sort of a
#
traveling job kind of thing, but it wasn't, it was just sort of,
#
that's the nature of it.
#
Um, he used to set up, uh, power projects, uh, and so he would go
#
where the projects were, uh, he spent some time in Saudi, um, setting
#
up a project there, but, you know, we've, we've been in Bombay for, for
#
most of my, uh, school life was very different Bombay, um, and, uh, then
#
Calcutta, which is a great experience, uh, because I think Calcutta is a very
#
interesting city for someone at that particular age, the cultural stuff was
#
great, uh, there was, you know, there was quizzing, there's a lot of
#
literary intimating activities.
#
The theater was really good.
#
I mean, theater of course in Bombay is excellent, but, you know, for
#
amateurs, I think Calcutta is better than Bombay because you really have
#
a chance in, in, in Bombay, it might've been harder to do.
#
Um, so I did all of those things.
#
And then, um, law school, of course, I was a second batch of law school.
#
Uh, so my parents were not so sure about this because, you know, if you,
#
this, if you just think back to the second national law school, the first
#
of the five year colleges at that time, law was the thing that you did if you
#
could do nothing else and to be completely honest, that's exactly why I
#
was doing law, but that's how I used to think of journalism in the eighties.
#
Well, law was, I think, you know, in those days, um, you enrolled for law
#
school, uh, it wasn't even called law school, it was called law college and
#
no one went, uh, for class.
#
You'd pay the peon some money to give you attendance at the end of the year.
#
You'd, um, you know, get these marks, these exams from past years and do
#
some mugging and you'd sort of get through and you'd spend, you know, the
#
whole day actually in a law firm or in a chamber, uh, uh, you're, you're not
#
qualified to practice law, but you were learning on the job and sort of that's
#
the way you really learned.
#
And so, you know, my parents knew that and they saw me getting into this thing
#
and, um, from the get-go to the very different experience, uh, so national law
#
school was none of these things.
#
It was extremely rigorous, but you know, your priors at that point are lawyers
#
or those who, uh, you know, are ambulance chasers or hanging around the court and,
#
uh, doing your power of attorney or something like that, right?
#
So it was, I think it was, um, uh, you know, my parents were like, look, if
#
you do well with this, then great, but otherwise this seems, and remember
#
the national law school when we joined, didn't have its campus.
#
So we were on a borrowed, uh, set of, uh, buildings, you know, three classes
#
in the central college campus in, um, uh, in the heart of Bangalore, but this
#
was like an asbestos, uh, roof, little shed and we were there, but the glorious
#
thing about that was that we had just the most outstanding faculty and we
#
had mother men in, um, you know, who's like a, just an icon and as a jurist
#
who would teach us legal method.
#
Uh, I remember, of course, this was, uh, maybe while we were in the central
#
college campus, but we, you know, within a couple of years, we moved to our
#
campus, but, um, Ramjit Malani taught me murder, uh, and, uh, when the, you
#
know, he was a visiting professor and he would, uh, come for, spend a week
#
or maybe two weeks, um, uh, teaching us sections of the IPC and the regular
#
professor who had the, you know, who had the responsibility doing the bulk of
#
the teaching would recite some case and Ramjit Malani would stand up and said,
#
yeah, no, that's what the case says, but I argued this and this is what happened.
#
And this is the reason why I did it.
#
Uh, and so, you know, you just get a completely different perspective.
#
Uh, and, and we had so many visiting, uh, lectures, uh, like this.
#
So it was a very different, uh, experience, I think, to what anyone,
#
uh, was getting in a law education.
#
So, uh, you know, it was, it was a, uh, extraordinary experience.
#
Uh, and then national law school, of course, has gone on to become, uh, a
#
very good, well-reputed, uh, institution.
#
And so I think my mother, despite all her reservations, is, uh, now reasonably,
#
uh, glad that it ended up the way it did.
#
You know, Ramjit Malani taught me murder is such a great t-shirt line.
#
You should, you know, get that made, uh, ASAP, but why law?
#
I mean, is it, did you kind of drift into it or did you, were you
#
attracted to law for some reason?
#
How did that decision kind of come about?
#
Was it a happy accident or?
#
It was a complete happy accident.
#
I'd love to make it romantic and say, you know, I, but quite frankly, this
#
was absolutely the last thing I wanted to be, uh, I knew I had an aptitude
#
for it because, um, I was, I would debate and I had sort of, you know, I
#
could, I could hold my own from a logical perspective and things like that.
#
But, you know, this was just not even on the menu.
#
If you, if you think about those days, you would either become a
#
doctor or an engineer, it's just that.
#
You wouldn't even think about business because that's something you did
#
after you became an engineer.
#
It's, it's, it's not something that you would do upfront in law journalism.
#
All of these things were just not on the menu.
#
And so like a, you know, like a, like a good Indian in, in those days, I applied
#
abroad, did my SAT, did all of those things, but, um, with a, with a certain
#
amount of, um, I guess, optimism, I decided that I wouldn't go abroad unless
#
I got into one of the Ivy leagues.
#
And of course none of the Ivy leagues would have me.
#
So I did the IITG without studying for it, thinking that, uh, there would be
#
some stroke of genius and I would make it through, I didn't, uh, didn't make
#
it into any of the medical colleges.
#
One of the people who was one year senior to me in, uh, in St.
#
James, uh, was in the first batch of national law school, uh, Nikhil Nair.
#
So Nikhil came to us and said, guys, just think about this as an option.
#
It's a really good place.
#
And so we signed up, uh, for the entrance exam.
#
Now, if you sign up for the entrance exam, basically the odds are against
#
you that you will get in those days.
#
It wasn't, no one had heard about it.
#
Nikhil Nair hadn't come and spoken to me.
#
I would not have signed up for it.
#
So, uh, I got in, but, you know, that just goes to show that, uh, happy
#
accidents, uh, sometimes are just the way that things, uh, are meant to be.
#
Because when I think back, uh, there, there are probably a few things that
#
I'm better suited for than what I'm currently doing now, whether that's,
#
uh, nurture or that's nature.
#
I don't know, um, put in that environment.
#
I, you know, I, I got the skills and so I am what I am, but, um, I have no regrets.
#
I mean, that's, this is exactly what I guess I was meant to be a technology
#
lawyer that, that, you know, of that time, uh, and doing the things,
#
uh, that I'm doing right now.
#
In a parallel universe, you're an unhappy doctor somewhere.
#
Maybe you should get through one of those.
#
I wouldn't, I don't know if I'll be an unhappy, you know, one of the things
#
that actually, one of the things I really regret is medicine.
#
Uh, my wife keeps saying that I should stop thinking that I'm a doctor because
#
I, you know, I keep, uh, trying to do my own sort of quack research as to what would happen.
#
I think doctors hate me also because I would have read up on the internet
#
before I've gone to see, see them about something.
#
But, um, that's, I guess, you know, I think in a parallel universe, I
#
would have really been unhappy as like an engineer somewhere or something like
#
that's certainly not my, my cup of tea.
#
And is it a certain kind of temperament that thrives in law or that perhaps, and
#
maybe it's a positive feedback loop, you know, because I would imagine that if
#
you are someone who likes to think in a structured, systematic way, studying
#
law is something that you might find enjoyable or at least it's easy for you.
#
And then, um, you know, the study of law would also then enhance those
#
faculties for rigor and structured thinking and so on.
#
So is there something like that?
#
Is it the case that you happen to be someone whose temperament and
#
whose interests kind of match what you were doing and you were also in a
#
good college, not a shitty law college?
#
Of course that makes a difference.
#
Or, um, uh, you know, is it the case that that really doesn't matter,
#
that anyone can just, you know?
#
Yeah, I don't know the answer to that.
#
Once again, you know, going by my personal experience may not be a good
#
way to extrapolate things because I know there are others who perhaps have
#
switched out of law, uh, with very similar circumstances.
#
I think I was fortunate in that, um, after law school, uh, I was part of
#
the first campus recruitment in any law school, now it's sort of part of
#
the way in which law schools run.
#
And I was picked up by this law firm called Dua Associates that, uh,
#
picked me up for the Bangalore office.
#
And there was no one in the Bangalore office other than the three of us,
#
national law school graduates who were picked up.
#
And so, you know, we had, um, extraordinary client access.
#
Uh, so we were, because there was no one else to do the job,
#
we were front and center.
#
We also had a lot of experience with, you know, just doing silly things
#
like office administration, because really there was no one else to do it.
#
There was a full-fledged firm in, uh, Delhi, uh, you know, very well established
#
firm, but Bangalore was in a sense, an outpost, um, there was a gentleman
#
called, uh, Padmanabhan, Paddu, who, uh, ex-general counsel, uh, of, uh,
#
Hindustan Lever who was, you know, in his retirement, sort of running this office.
#
So as a result, a lot of that was left to us.
#
Now, I think it was all those circumstances plus the fact that I was in
#
Bangalore at a time just before the tech boom had become, you know, what it was.
#
Look, I graduated in 94 to remember back to year 2000, the Y2K, which
#
was really that big event where, uh, you know, everyone thought the planes
#
would fall out of the sky because, uh, we had only two digits instead of
#
four digits for the year, and, um, I was in the middle of all of that
#
with direct client access.
#
So I was fortunate in that, uh, I could get to do things that really
#
piqued my interest and curiosity.
#
If I was stuck in a firm pushing papers or, you know, just going to
#
court for adjournments or, uh, you know, three levels down, so there's some
#
partner doing the client access and I'm just churning out documents, maybe
#
life would have been different.
#
But I think certainly temperamentally, uh, it's important in law to, uh, be
#
curious, it's important in the type of law that I and we do to have the
#
intellectual curiosity around the business of the client, as opposed to
#
just the specific legal problem that they've come to you with.
#
I think it's important to be constructive in providing advice.
#
Many lawyers, when they give opinions, it's just a yes or a no.
#
You've been asked, is this possible?
#
And you say, no, and that's really not helpful to a client that's, um, you
#
know, not fighting a case.
#
I mean, if you're fighting a dispute, then perhaps that's okay.
#
But if you're looking to structure a business and entry into the country,
#
you want to know, okay, it's not possible.
#
And for all of that, you need to have a wider frame of reference than
#
just the laws that apply to it.
#
You've got to understand the business and how it works.
#
You've got to understand the intentionality of the clients, what they
#
want to do, and I think all of those are attributes that are necessary in
#
order to become a, I guess, a good lawyer in this area.
#
So my friend and co-host for the YouTube show, I'll do Ajay Shah and a
#
mutual friend, as I believe he is extremely fond of you, he was saying
#
good things about my recording with you.
#
He introduced me to this phrase, which I love called below the API and above
#
the API, I think he got it from Venkatesh Rao of Ribbon Farm, I linked that
#
essay from the show notes as well.
#
And Ajay's point is that most people live below the API, that there is a
#
certain set of instructions that you have to do for your profession and
#
you follow them out at a very simple level.
#
An Uber driver gets a message, go here, pick up this person, drop him there,
#
collect this much money and he'll do exactly that.
#
And in every profession, I would imagine 90 to 95% of people are actually
#
below the API, that they're doing what they have to do, they're following
#
the routine and there's maybe a small chunk of people who are thinking a
#
little bigger and so on.
#
And I would imagine that that kind of approach of being a below API person
#
or an above API person would extend to college as well.
#
And you mentioned that you had all these great teachers, inspiring people
#
who've teaching you not just about what the law is like, but going back in
#
history and foundational stuff and all of that.
#
So were you always in a sense an above the API thinker?
#
Because you clearly are now obviously, and your books are brilliant above
#
the API books for me in the sense that there is so much original thinking,
#
you're encapsulating all of the history of a particular sort of movement,
#
whether it's privacy with your first book and data governance with your
#
second book and then taking it forward and imagining the future.
#
But was it sort of always like that?
#
Do you think those are inherent traits in people that some people, no matter
#
in what profession they are or where they are taught or regardless of
#
context, will always be satisfied with the minimum stay below the API,
#
build a respectable life.
#
And some people who are just fucking curious that they will never be satisfied
#
with what is in the textbook or with pushing papers, as you said, but they're
#
always thinking kind of one level ahead.
#
A, what do you, you know, what were you like?
#
B, do you think that these are inherent traits in people?
#
Like in all the professions that I know somewhat, I look around and I realize
#
to my dismay that 90% of the people are just going through the motions.
#
Very few people are taking in initiative and sort of being innovative.
#
And C, as a tangential thought that just occurred to me, that does it perhaps
#
have something to do with the good fortune of a background where you're
#
not necessarily rich, that's irrelevant, but you're encouraged to read for
#
leisure and surrounded by ideas and discourse.
#
So, you know, how would you think about that below the API, above the API thing?
#
Like by self-selection, I would assume by now you're surrounded by people who
#
are thinking like you above the API, you have to, but in general, what is your?
#
Yeah, look, I mean, I clearly in college, I was not above the API, perhaps also
#
because it was such a new type of education that no one knew where the API
#
was, so we had no idea, you know, what we were doing, as I said, I was the
#
first campus, a person was hired from campus through formal campus recruitment.
#
It was the only campus recruitment that was conducted by the faculty.
#
Ever since then, there's been a recruitment committee run by students.
#
So, you know, it was very difficult to know that this is what you optimized for.
#
It was only when I got into the final year, my fifth year, that we even knew
#
that it was going to be a campus recruitment.
#
So up until then, the API, as it were, was to find a litigation
#
chamber that you could associate with.
#
I didn't even know there was such thing as law firms.
#
But what I also mean is when I say API, I also mean is that you would be taught
#
what's in the constitution, this is how it's been interpreted, these are the
#
cases, but above the API would be thinking back on why is this in the
#
constitution, why is say the right to privacy not in the constitution, you
#
know, thinking about it philosophically, why is the U.S.
#
constitution like that and all.
#
So were you doing that kind of thing?
#
No, I mean, completely, I had none of that.
#
I was just going through the motions because I, you know, what I was trying
#
to say was I had no idea that I could, that knowing all of this would be useful
#
to me, because we just didn't have a path that someone else had walked to
#
show us that I was not interested in writing academic papers.
#
And so, you know, to bring this larger body of knowledge to a simple question
#
was not even within my frame of reference.
#
I was quite frankly, below the API.
#
Even though I didn't know what the API was, I would have been below it.
#
I think this, you're very kind to say that I'm above the API, but it's
#
perhaps because of the special circumstance that I found myself in.
#
I was in Bangalore at a time when tech was taking off.
#
For some strange reason, I understood tech.
#
I have never studied tech, but, you know, when I was in school, I was interested
#
in computers, I remember I did a course during the summer where I putzed around
#
with basic, the programming language.
#
And it was just like a summer course, something to do during the summers
#
And so it was very, very basic, but I understood the logic of computers.
#
And so in our office in Dua Associates, there was one computer that
#
was connected to a modem.
#
This was a 2,400 bauds per second modem, which, which screamed.
#
And this was before the internet.
#
I remember those days, yeah.
#
So it was there and no one knew how it worked.
#
It was basically like when the fax machine didn't work, they would send
#
it, send the stuff over this.
#
And I don't know how I figured it out, but I learned that in Bangalore, there
#
was such a thing called a bulletin board service, and I figured out how to connect
#
to it, and I don't know if you played around in those days, but there was this
#
guy called Atul Chitnis who was no more.
#
He used to run this bulletin board service called CIX, and it was essentially
#
a telephone connected to Atul's computer.
#
And if you, the way you use it was you dialed into that telephone, it would
#
connect to his computer, you could set up an account there and people could send
#
you messages, you could download whatever games he had stored on his computer.
#
But the etiquette was that you should do all this really quickly because there
#
would be the entire, you know, the entire group of people on that bulletin board
#
service were waiting in line to actually call and it was considered to be rude to
#
hog the telephone line.
#
One at a time, you can.
#
So you logged on, you would sort of download all the messages that were left
#
for you and you log off, then at your leisure, you would read all the messages.
#
You would answer to them.
#
And once you're all ready, you log back on and upload your answers back.
#
So this is true asynchronous email.
#
That was my first sort of experience with the internet as it were, which is
#
this really asynchronous thing.
#
Now, the reason I'm telling you all this is because it took a fair bit of
#
putzing around to make all of this work.
#
Look, I'm just a lawyer.
#
I have no background in all of this.
#
And this was very terminal line kind of programming.
#
I somehow managed to get it to work.
#
I remember for the rest of my colleagues at work, I downloaded a golf game and we
#
used to play the golf game, like an eight bit kind of a golf game.
#
And, and because of all of this, I was able to understand the technology side
#
of the queries that my clients were asking.
#
Now, is this about the API?
#
This was just something that piqued my interest.
#
But the fact that you did something as radical as learning a programming
#
language when your day job is as a lawyer, is itself about the API in a way, isn't it?
#
You know, is that play?
#
This had no connection to work.
#
So I mean, I don't know.
#
So the way you described above the API is bringing to bear lots of
#
things onto the simple task.
#
And this was not that, this was play.
#
So this is once again, part of the serendipitous knowledge that has somehow,
#
you know, contributed to whatever it is.
#
I didn't do this mindfully.
#
But if you look back and if you want to trace my interest in technology and some
#
of my understanding, this is back to some of these things.
#
The fact that the technology was not something I learned and I knew, I just
#
tried various things and that community is very helpful.
#
So they say, no, you know, you just do this.
#
This is all you have to do.
#
And then there'll be like an FAQ somewhere on the site.
#
You download that, read it a bit, make a few mistakes, make lots of mistakes.
#
And then you figure out how to do it.
#
And then I think that the most important thing is that the fear of
#
technology was beaten out of me.
#
I'm not afraid of any technology.
#
I think if I read enough, I don't think any technology will be too difficult
#
And so, you know, when the Satoshi Nakamoto paper came out, there's a bit
#
of maths at the end of it, but I just sort of went at it, like literally
#
when it just came out, so there were no explainers and no lovely YouTube
#
videos on how Bitcoin works and double spending and stuff like that.
#
But I was like, look, I just have to figure this out because this sounds
#
like something really interesting in the tech space.
#
So I think the really big thing that that gave me at that time was it
#
just broke the fear of technology.
#
And I think a lot of people are just afraid of technology.
#
I think I lost that fear very early on.
#
Did you buy any Bitcoin after reading that?
#
I bought a Bitcoin, one Bitcoin, I think it would have been like a hundred
#
dollars or two hundred dollars for one Bitcoin.
#
I've never bought one since.
#
I mean, I bought a Bitcoin very early on just to sort of figure
#
out how to buy it, what it was and how it works.
#
Is this, you know, you still have it.
#
Oh, you still have that Bitcoin.
#
So if it's over a million dollars, you've kind of, I'll never sell it.
#
So, so for me, now I'm fooling around with L3s.
#
So, you know, Bitcoin is fine.
#
I'm now sort of on Ethereum.
#
Well, you know, one of the, one of the things I'm playing around with a lot
#
now is this far caster protocol, which is Twitter for Web3.
#
My newsletter is a Web3 newsletter, which means you can actually collect it,
#
you know, mint an NFT off of it and stuff like that.
#
It's not particularly useful to anyone.
#
Not a single one of my readers has minted it.
#
I've not gated anything to prevent people from accessing it unless they have ETH.
#
But it's, it's more just to, I think the real value of the blockchain is going to
#
come in the L3s, and so I feel I just must play around in that space to understand,
#
you know, how that works, because when it happens, I need to explain what the
#
regulations and the laws are at that point in time, and I can't if I don't know.
#
So, I mean, I like to just dabble in some of these things.
#
Perhaps it's a waste of time, but I feel at some time it'll pay off.
#
I had an episode of The Scene in the Unseen with Vitalik Buterin, and I was absolutely
#
terrified going into that because I know I heard that with Ajay was with you.
#
I made Ajay co-host it with me.
#
I mean, we were at a conference and the day before I said, listen, I'm recording
#
Who here can sit down and explain to me in half an hour what the hell is going on?
#
Because I just had really basic knowledge of Ethereum and that entire ecosystem.
#
But he's a very profound thinker outside of this.
#
He is absolutely above the API.
#
Ethereum is like 1% of what he can talk about.
#
Just a phenomenal thinker on philosophy and politics.
#
I don't agree with everything he says or all his views, but that's just the reason
#
why I like listening to him, because it's good to see what he thinks and try and say
#
He's got incredible clarity around a lot of understanding of how society works, what
#
society should be, its limitations.
#
I think he's quite wise to the limitations of this completely decentralized protocol
#
that he promotes as well.
#
But he's a strange guy.
#
I mean, he's a complete nomad, as you discovered on the podcast.
#
I follow his blog and he had one post on what is the ideal
#
setup that you need to be a nomad.
#
These are the things that you need to have.
#
This is the electric toothbrush that you need, which is powered on batteries so that
#
you can even use it when you don't have a plug point.
#
So of course I went and bought it.
#
I find that it's an underpowered electric toothbrush, so I think that's a bad idea.
#
He's an interesting guy to just...
#
Completely non-Bitcoin blockchain pieces of wisdom will come out of his mouth.
#
Yeah, he sparks thinking, and I'm just thinking aloud here and thinking that there are
#
maybe these two kinds of interesting thinkers.
#
And one is someone like Vitalik, who'll spark new thinking in you, and someone like Paul
#
Graham, who'll present frames which suddenly make things clear to you that were not clear
#
before, and they're both probably...
#
And Meghadesh Rao is also part of that.
#
I mean, Ribbon Farm is just a fount of wisdom.
#
Balaji is another guy, completely different type of thinking.
#
In many ways, but you're forced to engage with it.
#
Who are the other thinkers who like these things?
#
I mean, these are the ones that I...
#
Paul Graham is another sort of a great sort of...
#
The way he puts it is really good.
#
But literally, you've listed that entire name, the entire list.
#
Venkatesh Rao is the other one that I would say.
#
Balaji is also really an outstanding thinker.
#
These are the people who, when they put out a post, I will sort of listen to it.
#
Mark Andreessen keeps coming up with these oracular posts, but it just so happens that
#
I don't agree with a lot of the things that he says.
#
So it's interesting to read the posts that he comes up with,
#
but I don't necessarily always agree with him.
#
On the medical side, I think someone like Sudat Mukherjee,
#
in just in the vast volume of information that he brings to the page
#
and the way he strings it together.
#
I mean, he's a storyteller.
#
So I think that's sort of what he is.
#
Carlo Rovelli for science.
#
Gosh, there's anything by Carlo Rovelli is worth reading.
#
I mean, he's an Italian.
#
It's a remarkable way of putting these things together.
#
I like all these guys as well.
#
And I actually like Mark Andreessen a lot.
#
I think I agree with him more than you do.
#
But agreement is often not the point.
#
It's just who can really sort of stimulate you.
#
I think effective acceleration as a rebuttal to effective altruism
#
is a great position at the other end of the spectrum.
#
When I say I don't agree, I don't like black and white.
#
I think there's always a midway between the two.
#
So if his idea was to provoke full marks to him, he certainly did.
#
I don't agree with everything.
#
But kudos for him for seeing a road there.
#
You mentioned doing things for play.
#
Tell me more about your play
#
because I have heard from informed sources
#
that you play the guitar, that you're deeply into music,
#
that you're deeply into food.
#
You're a connoisseur of food.
#
Your wildlife photography is, of course, legendary.
#
By the way, you mentioned a zebra photograph in your privacy book
#
and I Googled for it and looked for it, but I couldn't find it.
#
So you can send it to me after this
#
and maybe I'll link it from the show notes.
#
I can play the guitar, but I haven't played for a really long time.
#
Like I looked for you on Spotify and there is Rahul Mathan artist
#
and there is some album from what looked like a music school
#
and there is one Rahul Mathan singing in that.
#
Yeah. So there's one song that is on Spotify.
#
It was a song and there's a video as well.
#
So you'll probably be able to find that.
#
Are you dancing in that?
#
So the song was a tribute to a friend of mine who I lost.
#
I mentioned a forum and I mentioned that someone had died
#
and that was this friend of mine.
#
No, I mean, it was a sort of a catharsis kind of a thing.
#
Me and another friend who were very close to him who also sings
#
put this together and you should just
#
take a look at the lyrics.
#
I think it talks about a man who went early but lived a full life.
#
And yeah, it was just one of those things.
#
You just had to find some way to sort of...
#
It was a cathartic kind of a thing.
#
He came up with the words,
#
came up with something of a tune
#
and had some help with the production of putting this song together.
#
The process of putting the song together is...
#
Once again, I just love the technical elements of this.
#
So to get back to your question on play,
#
I do all of these things
#
but I don't think I'm good at any of them.
#
I understand technically what I have to do
#
but I think I lack that creative genius
#
that people like Bob Dylan have as we were discussing.
#
It just comes out of you spontaneously.
#
I really work at it for me.
#
That is hardly the person to compare yourself to though.
#
On the other side, I don't think I'm anything like Leonard Cohen either.
#
But these are the two giants.
#
But I know the technical.
#
I know technically what needs to be done, music.
#
But it takes a lot of practice.
#
and I think I haven't put enough of that in.
#
And I think similar with photography.
#
I know all the theory of photography.
#
So give me an excuse and I'll buy new gear.
#
What's your favorite camera at your home?
#
So I'm currently on the Sony A9.
#
The one I think I'll upgrade to is the Sony A7R.
#
Five has just released.
#
I just need to figure out whether it's the four or the five.
#
But I played with the four as well.
#
But I now don't lift my camera if it's not wildlife photography.
#
I think that's one of the more challenging types of photography.
#
Once again, I can technically tell you all the things that you have to do,
#
But that visualizing a picture is still hard for me.
#
I can get it like this.
#
I can get it motion blur.
#
I can do all of those things.
#
But just visualizing the picture is what I'm really working at right now.
#
And yeah, so I enjoy it.
#
I enjoy the whole process of making a picture
#
because 99% of wildlife photography is waiting.
#
But it's worth it for the 1%.
#
I'm very lucky that my son also likes this.
#
So it's a father-son thing to go out.
#
We're also very fortunate that just down the road from me,
#
is down a long road, is Kabini,
#
which is one of the finest forests in South India.
#
And we spent a lot of time, my son and I,
#
tracking down the Black Leopard there.
#
And we've got more than one very, very good photograph of that Black Leopard.
#
I mean, it's very rewarding to do that.
#
It's technically challenging,
#
but it's also just sitting out in nature
#
and just waiting for this guy to come out for a few seconds
#
is extremely rewarding.
#
I think Sonil just got this new camera out,
#
the A93, which has this global shutter thing.
#
Have you read about that?
#
Well, basically, typically what happens is with every frame,
#
all the pixels, they don't sort of refresh at the same time.
#
They do it in a sequential way,
#
which is why you have the rolling shutter effect
#
and all that if you're moving the camera.
#
And here they all refresh at the same time.
#
So that is according to my photographer friends,
#
I'm not a photographer.
#
I'm kind of more into video,
#
but according to my photographer friends,
#
that's like absolutely a radical change,
#
especially for sports photographers.
#
Which would translate to wildlife,
#
because there's a lot of wildlife that's very slow,
#
but the really exciting wildlife is very fast.
#
Like if you want to get a cheetah on the run,
#
you want to be able to use equipment that's performing
#
in the same way that sports photographers' equipment performs.
#
So yeah, it will be really interesting to see that.
#
And I'm also intrigued by what you said
#
about how 99% of it is waiting.
#
And earlier, when you came here,
#
you spoke about how you've been traveling so much
#
and you need to travel less.
#
How have you sort of found that balance?
#
Because I guess in the kind of life that you do
#
where you're one of the people running Tri-Legal,
#
you're also involved with policy at the government level,
#
you're traveling all the time,
#
you're going to conferences and blah, blah, blah.
#
It's a constant blur of motion and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And yet, like you pointed out,
#
photography would be a certain kind of terror.
#
Even playing music and so on would put you in a quiet zone
#
where you're just trying to go ahead of time
#
and meet a deadline or whatever
#
to get to your next meeting.
#
So how is that balance for you?
#
I mean, has it been a conscious effort
#
where at some point in your life you've said that,
#
you know, like earlier you mentioned your friend
#
who passed away that he didn't live long,
#
but he lived a full life.
#
And for you, is that play, the photography, the music,
#
or maybe just the quiet moments doing nothing,
#
is that an essential component of that full life?
#
And look, let me put it this way,
#
I don't think there's any aspect of my life
#
Even the travel, and the travel is tiring,
#
but it is with a goal and a purpose.
#
I'm very fortunate in that.
#
I think if I had to travel and I really didn't like it,
#
I didn't like where I was going,
#
I didn't like why I was going there,
#
I would be a very different person.
#
But, you know, at this stage of my life,
#
all the various aspects of it, I thoroughly enjoy.
#
But on the question around, you know,
#
essentially doing photography,
#
is it a break from a normal life?
#
It is just rewiring your brain
#
to do something completely different,
#
at a completely different pace.
#
but when I do that, it's extremely refreshing.
#
But I could achieve the same thing,
#
and I do achieve the same thing every day,
#
with two hours of reading.
#
So in the morning, I wake up early if I'm at home,
#
I try and go for a cycle ride in the morning,
#
I take my dog for a walk,
#
and then it's two hours of reading.
#
Because I wake up at 5.30 in the morning,
#
and so I have like two hours of reading,
#
which would be ideally, you know, the newspaper,
#
and then whichever book it is that I'm reading right now.
#
And I like to put two, three hours without sort of restraint,
#
unless I've got a meeting, you know,
#
then you have to head out to it.
#
But read until, you know, you're done.
#
That's sort of satisfying.
#
And it's not, don't look at emails.
#
It's not like I don't look at emails.
#
I wake up, I look at emails,
#
I'm not particularly fussed about no screens and things like that.
#
But the conscious slowing down of the pace of regular life
#
by picking up something else,
#
and for me, just reading a book is enough.
#
I think that's really important
#
to be able to actually speed it up
#
and, you know, go about things at the pace that life demands.
#
I think the reason why I can do all of these things
#
is because I enjoy every single one of them.
#
I even enjoy the travel.
#
I, you know, the plane is,
#
when I'm going from Bangalore to Delhi,
#
which is my like once a fortnight regular schedule,
#
it's two and a half hours to read a book.
#
And so very often I finish a book going and coming.
#
I used to have an iPad,
#
but it's gathering mothballs somewhere.
#
I don't watch videos on the plane.
#
Not like I don't watch Netflix, you know, at home.
#
When I come back from work, that's what I do.
#
I don't read a book at night.
#
I watch some stupid inane Netflix.
#
Or maybe some movie I absolutely have to watch,
#
but, you know, it's not like I don't do video.
#
I just think that it's a great time and opportunity to read,
#
and I get a lot of reading done.
#
Early in the morning, I get a lot of reading done.
#
Are you always a reader?
#
Very recently, a non-fiction,
#
very recently as in maybe over a decade and a half,
#
Most of my life, a fiction reader.
#
And particularly science fiction.
#
I've been a science fiction reader since I was a child.
#
you know, at some point in time,
#
we'll grow up and stop reading these fantasies.
#
But if I was to read fiction now,
#
it would almost always only be science fiction.
#
Actually, the non-fiction of today,
#
like the world as it is today,
#
is like what science fiction would have been 25 years ago.
#
A lot of science fiction has come true, essentially.
#
But I actually like the science fiction
#
that really pushes the onlooker,
#
forces you to rethink a different sort of construct.
#
Like what are the big influences on you
#
which really made you set up?
#
so Isaac Asimov was someone I read a lot.
#
I've read all his different categories of books.
#
you start to see him stitching all the various worlds together.
#
You know, the robot world stitches into the foundation world.
#
We're watching the foundation on Apple TV Plus right now,
#
and you already can see it stitched.
#
But, you know, for someone who watched it
#
being pieced together as it were,
#
And, you know, even just the concept of psychohistory.
#
I wrote in an article some time back
#
that the idea of psychohistory is essentially
#
once you have enough data, you can predict the future.
#
Because societal population scale patterns
#
are not predictive unless the population is large enough.
#
And his theory is that once you've got galactic size population,
#
you can predict the future in a way
#
that nothing an individual can do will change the future.
#
Now, what are all our algorithms and social media guys doing right now?
#
Other than that, I mean, they're not predicting the future,
#
but they're in a microwave predicting your future.
#
Because they are predicting that you are now going to be interested
#
in buying such and such thing.
#
And more often than not, they get it right.
#
So have we reached a kind of a mini psychohistory
#
And are we going to reach, do a quantum leap in that with AI?
#
But it looks like that's another science fiction
#
that may be coming true in a small way.
#
So these are the things that I really find interesting,
#
that I find worth thinking about.
#
May not be true, may not be.
#
But it's just like worth having, worth dallying with for a bit.
#
And across your books, you've mentioned some of the insights
#
that algorithms have into us.
#
For example, women in their second trimester
#
are likely to shift from scented lotions to unscented lotions.
#
And marketers know this, and they start serving up ads accordingly.
#
And you've also spoken about how whether a person types in all caps
#
or what the average battery life on your phone is
#
can give an insight into your credit worthiness.
#
And these are insane things that big data can tell us.
#
Have you read the great book Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?
#
And I was really struck by that book because
#
and I thought of that book while reading your book on privacy
#
because I thought that our truest private self so far
#
has really been on Google search.
#
What are we searching for in the different places where we search?
#
Because you assume that it's completely private.
#
And for my listeners, Everybody Lies is a book by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
#
where he took anonymized data from a bunch of platforms
#
on what people are searching from.
#
And came up with some incredible insights and some great TILs.
#
For example, India and Bangladesh are way ahead of the world
#
in the obsession of adult men with breastfeeding.
#
And I could never figure out the why of that.
#
But just the fact of that is kind of so sort of mind blowing.
#
But I mean, that's an aside.
#
No, look, I think your privacy is something that I sort of stumbled into.
#
I know it's not going to be popular when I say this, but
#
in the book, I actually say that privacy is an abnormality.
#
Human societies are the only places where privacy is tolerated.
#
And I think the whole premise of the book is that
#
we're perhaps reverting back to a pre-civilization kind of a space
#
where it's becoming more and more, you know, I mean,
#
Mark Zuckerberg goes up and says he went up in the beginning
#
and said that privacy is overrated.
#
And I mean, I think that that taken out of context sounds terrible.
#
But as a matter of fact, it is not the norm.
#
It is a luxury that some of us have and many of us do not.
#
Should we allow everyone, give everyone the space for privacy?
#
It allows you freedoms that otherwise would make you less of what you are.
#
But let's completely understand that it is a privilege.
#
And those who speak about it also speak about it from a place of privilege.
#
We should do more to give other people that privilege.
#
And sometimes it's not, they don't always have that choice.
#
You know, since you brought it up,
#
let's actually sort of double click on this aspect of privacy now.
#
And obviously, when you say it's not the norm,
#
it's something that created by technology, essentially,
#
it's not a normative thing you're saying.
#
It is describing the way things are.
#
And I, you know, love those early chapters of privacy 3.0
#
where you write about how if you look back in history,
#
no animals have privacy.
#
On the contrary, solitude is a bad thing.
#
And of course, privacy arises out of solitude.
#
And on the contrary, solitude is a bad thing because it is dangerous for you.
#
Herds have to stick together and they always have to watch each other.
#
And every bit of information helps them survive.
#
And we have also evolved like this.
#
And as an example, you speak of the Kalahari Bushmen or the Kung tribesmen
#
where, you know, you describe their huts where they rarely spend time alone.
#
Their huts weren't habitable.
#
And if seeking solitude is regarded as bizarre by them,
#
why would you do something like that?
#
And the huts were so close to each other, you could sort of,
#
you could hand utensils to someone in another house without getting up.
#
That is what they were optimizing for, that kind of thing.
#
You speak about the Mahinaku of central Brazil
#
and there's just constant surveillance.
#
Everybody is watching everybody else.
#
And, you know, curiosity is a virtue as you put it over there.
#
And because, you know, life is so zero sum,
#
these societies are egalitarian.
#
And that means keeping an eye on everybody else to make sure
#
that no one's breaking their part of the bargain.
#
And it, you know, stays egalitarian.
#
And you also give the example of the semi of central Malaya
#
where the walls are deliberately designed to be thin.
#
And then later what happens is that we stop moving around with herds.
#
There is domestication of animals.
#
And walls are initially built not for privacy, but for security,
#
which seems so ironic where you have these ancient cities
#
with great walls around them to protect them from invaders.
#
But eventually people start using it in their own homes.
#
And, you know, they start optimizing for privacy.
#
And this was such a revelation to me
#
because we just have to sort of step out here in India,
#
here in Bombay and look around you.
#
And you'll see vestiges of a time not so long ago
#
where you had no privacy.
#
Like the typical Indian joint family design was
#
you would have the open courtyard in the middle
#
and then everything is looking inwards
#
and everybody within a family can kind of see everybody else.
#
And, you know, and like you point out, it is a luxury
#
because you do not have privacy in Tharavi
#
or any of the slums of Bombay.
#
Privacy relatively is much less.
#
And there is no value judgment here
#
on whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.
#
But one theme that I often think about
#
is how we are the only animal who can reprogram ourselves
#
or fight the way we are wired.
#
And I think that's a whole civilization process, right?
#
We are wired in particular ways, some of them contradictory ways,
#
but we can mitigate that.
#
And in a sense, desiring privacy is a sign of that
#
sort of the civilized us mitigating the animal us
#
because it is out of that privacy,
#
it is out of solitude and introspection
#
that art emerges, that reflection emerges,
#
that science emerges and all of that.
#
What do you think about that larger sort of
#
civilizational process?
#
Because, you know, earlier you spoke about psychohistory
#
and you can predict the future.
#
And I was going to ask you if you believe in free will.
#
And at some level, I think most of us do not realize
#
how much our civilized self is just a veneer.
#
And really, we are in control of the animal self.
#
And a lot of the time, all that the civilized self is doing
#
is rationalizing what the animal self does.
#
And there's a huge cognitive load on doing that.
#
And that's the reason why privacy is important.
#
So I don't want anyone to think that I'm a privacy lawyer.
#
That's essentially what everyone knows me as.
#
But the fact is that for 99% of our lives,
#
we have a veneer that absolutely no one can get through.
#
Not our spouse, not our children.
#
That is the last frontier that you have to crack through
#
to really see the true person.
#
And in some societal constructs, it's extraordinarily hard
#
to create an environment where you could let that last wall down.
#
And as you say, in the slums in the Ravi,
#
in very early civilizations, even though houses grew to have walls,
#
they had external walls and not internal walls.
#
It was only when the fireplace was...
#
I only have anecdotal information from the West,
#
so there was the need for a fireplace.
#
The fireplace was located centrally within the house,
#
at the center of the house,
#
that you needed to create a wall around the fireplace to support the house.
#
And then by that, you divided the house into two.
#
And so there was some modicum of privacy.
#
But beds, beds are a new invention.
#
And so when you had a bed,
#
you had one bed that everyone slept on.
#
Cows and the goats slept on the floor,
#
and the human beings slept all one together.
#
And you look at the pictures of the plague hospitals,
#
everyone was on one same bed,
#
because bed was an expensive thing to construct.
#
So this concept of privacy is something that is an evolution.
#
But why is it important?
#
It is for the reasons that you talked about.
#
The fact that once you have the mind space,
#
you have the ability to drop that last veneer.
#
It is out of that, that creativity comes.
#
When the cognitive load of keeping up these false pretenses.
#
It may not be false, but it is slightly, you know, it's unreal.
#
I think somewhere in the book,
#
I talk about the fact that people,
#
there is a, you know, in your bedroom,
#
you put on your face and then you open the door
#
and you get out into your living room where your guests are.
#
But in your bedroom, you are your real self.
#
That's when you're all alone.
#
But in order to be able to do that,
#
you need to have that wall to be able to do that.
#
Because the moment you're in a public space,
#
even if it's your closest friends,
#
you're still putting on some sort of an appearance.
#
And there is a cognitive load to that.
#
And I think that cognitive load comes in the way of creativity
#
and all the wonderful things that we can do
#
when we're completely free without the burden of having to do that.
#
Now in the slums of the Ravi,
#
and that's a modern, like even today, kind of an example.
#
But as I did the research, we had slums in New York.
#
And, you know, the New York that you see now
#
was a very polarized world.
#
And, you know, particularly in Boston,
#
which is where I start the idea of the right to privacy,
#
it was a very, very fragmented society.
#
There were the really, really poor people
#
who lived in slums that were no different from the Ravi.
#
And there were the rich people who could, you know,
#
sort of walk around and get into their houses
#
and take the veneer off and go perfect outside.
#
And the technology that broke those barriers was photography.
#
And particularly, you know, the Eastman Kodak portable camera.
#
If you think back, cameras were on a stand
#
and you had to sit still while the photograph was taken.
#
And then Eastman Kodak came up with this thing
#
that you would carry around with you.
#
And people who would walk around without a veneer on the streets
#
realized that they had to put on a new veneer
#
because someone might catch them in an unguarded moment
#
And then that would be published
#
and they would see this unguarded version of them.
#
And so, you know, the paparazzi of that time,
#
it wasn't a word that existed,
#
stripped away one more layer of privacy.
#
And in response, we've all become that much more guarded outside
#
because particularly now with mobile phone cameras,
#
you don't know when someone's going to take a photograph of you where you are.
#
And you've got to be even more conscious of,
#
if you don't want to get into trouble,
#
of maintaining these appearances even when you're outside,
#
even when you're in a party,
#
even when you're among, you know, friends that you trust.
#
There's a tremendous cognitive load with all of that.
#
And so privacy is important.
#
So these concepts of privacy are important.
#
So it's important that people,
#
even if they have access to information about you,
#
are prevented from using it in a way
#
that violates, you know, your rights,
#
your personal space and things like that.
#
And it's out of that that laws around privacy develop.
#
I'll come back to the evolution of those laws
#
and all the sort of contextual reasons that they came into being,
#
but a couple of things to double click on first.
#
And one is that to begin with, you know,
#
I think that in many ways, you know, we don't even know ourselves.
#
In some ways, we are putting on an act for ourselves.
#
And we are finally at a time where technology can strip through that as well,
#
that I would argue that technology,
#
using the term in an abstract way,
#
knows us better than we know ourselves
#
and even shapes us perhaps into a more extreme version of that
#
by sort of going down that direction.
#
But what really fascinated me in thinking about how
#
the form of living that you have walls and you have privacy
#
and you live in a different way.
#
And you've also pointed out how, for example,
#
the, you know, different civilizations then started building inward looking houses
#
and your outward facing wall would have a window that was high
#
so no one could look in and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And that leads to these sort of these two selves.
#
And, you know, one is the outward facing self
#
and one is self in the bedroom.
#
And I'm imagining it is not just that you leave the bedroom
#
but when you leave the living room also, you put on a face.
#
You are constantly changing faces and perhaps becoming mukhatas.
#
And, you know, I wonder what the feedback loop is.
#
Like a term I learned recently from an episode with Gurvinder Bhogal
#
was a looking glass self, you know, which is a term in psychology,
#
which indicates that yourself is shaped by the reflection
#
you see of yourself in the eyes of others,
#
which is a great reason, I think, to keep good company.
#
And here's my question.
#
I'm trying to think back on how before this kind of separation
#
of the personal life and the public life happens,
#
where everybody is watching everybody else,
#
how the shaping of the self happens, right?
#
And one analog and again, I'm thinking aloud
#
is I used to be very fascinated with Big Boss once upon a time.
#
I think circa 2008, 2009, I even tried to live tweet it once
#
and everybody was like, what the fuck?
#
You're a serious person.
#
And I'm like, no, this is great.
#
Because even though these people know they have cameras watching them,
#
after a little while, it vanishes.
#
And then I think you see the true selves.
#
They cannot hide the true selves.
#
And I imagine that in a tribal society
#
where everybody is kind of sleeping around in the open
#
and whatever little hutments are for storing grains or whatever,
#
I would imagine that in those moments that at one level,
#
there is no pretense, you know, the pretense kind of drops
#
and you are who you are.
#
But in contrast, I'm also fascinated by the experiment
#
you've described where a Panopticon was actually built, right?
#
Now, for my listeners, I'll just sort of simplify this a bit.
#
You might have heard the term Panopticon
#
and this is basically an idea Jeremy Bentham had
#
where his idea was how do you build a good prison?
#
You build a good prison according to him
#
where the prisoners are being watched all the time.
#
So they won't do anything wrong
#
because they think they're being watched.
#
So it is a circular structure.
#
And in the middle, there is this tower
#
and you can't look into it, but you can look out.
#
And all around, there are these prisoners' rooms
#
with open windows or they're just open to the tower.
#
They can be watched at all times from the tower,
#
but they don't know when they are being watched.
#
And therefore, it is like a constant whatever.
#
And luckily, not many of these were built, but one was.
#
And Bentham, by the way, was completely serious,
#
not saying this as a metaphor as I first thought
#
it must be some thought experiment.
#
But one of those was built.
#
And in your book, you describe, quote,
#
prisoners incarcerated in Panopticon-style prisons
#
suffered debilitating psychological side effects
#
that stayed with them long after being discharged.
#
Rather than rehabilitating them as he had hoped they would,
#
the Panopticon ravaged the mental well-being of his inmates
#
in many instances, driving them mad.
#
Their loss of privacy led to chronic stress,
#
depression, and mood disorders.
#
The living arrangements fostered a sense of powerlessness
#
But above all, it stripped them of their individuality
#
and dignity by reducing them to objects of observation
#
in an inherently dehumanizing manner, stop quote.
#
And now it strikes to me as I read this out
#
that this is what happens to a lot of people
#
with social media as well.
#
Jonathan Haidt speaks about the increased rise,
#
especially among teenage girls and mental illnesses.
#
And part of it is the anxiety
#
that they're always being watched.
#
And they are comparing their real lives
#
with the projected lives of others on Instagram.
#
And obviously they can never keep up.
#
It's a race to an unattainable target.
#
And you've obviously thought about this,
#
this lack of privacy, this feeling of always being watched
#
and always being judged much more than I have.
#
No, that was the reason why I actually made the comparison.
#
I was struck by the fact that we are constantly being watched.
#
Social media forces us to engage
#
that sort of the attention economy.
#
And when you engage, you're constantly on display.
#
Actually, Jeremy Bentham came up with the idea
#
and he could never build a panopticon in England,
#
but all over Europe there were panopticons built.
#
I understand that the cellular jail in Port Blair
#
The idea of a panopticon was to have cells,
#
the prison cells, but the cells are arranged
#
around the central thing.
#
And whether the guard was watching or not,
#
because you couldn't see into the guard.
#
But just the thought that you are being watched
#
And as you read out that quote,
#
it actually over a period of time
#
severely affects your mental well-being,
#
just this thought that you're constantly being watched.
#
And then when you think about
#
the performative nature of social media right now,
#
it is no different at all than that same thing.
#
If you can see the mental stress
#
that people are going through
#
just trying to keep up with social media,
#
there's got to be some parallels.
#
It's not like you're confined to a space,
#
but in a sense you're confined to a space.
#
You're confined to performing within that thing.
#
I mean, you just think about Snapchat as an example.
#
They have these streaks that you have to do.
#
Every 24 hours you've got to post something.
#
That's as good as being shackled to a jail.
#
You're shackled to your camera.
#
You've got to post something.
#
It's like something in your sneakers or something like that.
#
The pressure of not breaking your streak is high.
#
There's social pressure with not breaking your streak,
#
and your entire peer group is like,
#
we kept it going for a hundred days
#
and this fellow sort of slacked off,
#
and so now we all have to start from here.
#
So it's like a lot of pressure.
#
And then of course there's all the Instagram stuff,
#
the unreal body image issues,
#
all of these sorts of things.
#
And you can see how it's taking a toll on our lives right now.
#
Now, the reason I'm saying all of this is more by way of explanation,
#
because I think that as much as we have opted into it,
#
there is clearly something that we get of value,
#
whether it's entertainment,
#
whether it is vicarious pleasure.
#
So I'm not qualified to explain all of those sorts of things.
#
It's not, again, the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon,
#
people had committed a crime and they were incarcerated.
#
It's not the same for us.
#
So I think the larger message there is really around,
#
I guess, the addictive nature of some of these technologies.
#
And then to say that once you're caught into it,
#
once you've been dragged into the grip of these technologies,
#
that the mental health and wellbeing and the stresses on them,
#
if you look at what happened with the Panopticon,
#
you can now start to explain why some of these are happening.
#
Now, as much as I am an observer of technology,
#
I'm a huge techno-optimist.
#
And so I think that we will all sort of figure this out and get past this.
#
We're already seeing Tristan Harris and people like that
#
who are weaning us off the use of technology.
#
Now, the technology itself has figured out ways in which to warn us
#
that we've been on Twitter too long and things like that.
#
And so we will get past it.
#
But I think part of what I wanted to do in that segment of the book
#
is to highlight the fact that these things happen.
#
For people who perhaps are not aware of it,
#
to just shed some light on some of these explanations,
#
trying to draw parallels with things that happened in the past.
#
Not because I'm pessimistic at all.
#
I think a lot of people have made the most out of this.
#
Social media has allowed people to flourish in ways
#
that they otherwise may not have been able to flourish.
#
I mean, before TikTok was shut down,
#
we had so many creators in the country.
#
And that was wonderful to watch.
#
You've spoken about it in previous podcasts as well.
#
Just watching TikTok creators making a lot of money,
#
getting fame without having to go through any intermediaries,
#
which would just defeat everyone else.
#
It was wonderful to watch.
#
But along with that came the algorithm.
#
And you had to master the algorithm.
#
So you had to start doing weirder and weirder things
#
in order to stay at the top of the interest of the algorithm.
#
There is a fine line between these two.
#
I mean, I like the democratization of access,
#
but I worry about what the algorithm will force us to do.
#
And at what point in time does the very human need for fame and acclaim
#
force you down a path that, in your right mind,
#
and if you were thinking straight, you wouldn't probably do.
#
At what point in time do you cross over that line?
#
Is this the way society needs to be ordered
#
that we respond to these sorts of things?
#
I mean, I'm saying these are, I guess, questions.
#
There are about 35 things I'm going to double click on.
#
But after a short break, because much as we do need fame and acclaim,
#
as you said, we also need food.
#
So we'll take a short break, get a bite,
#
and then we'll come back and continue.
#
There was a time when Pune used to be called the Oxford of the East.
#
It was a hub of social movements, of educational institutions,
#
of intellectual ferment.
#
But since a seat of government is in Delhi,
#
all the policy making happens there.
#
This episode is sponsored by the Pune Public Policy Festival.
#
The Pune Public Policy Festival is an important step
#
towards re-establishing the city at the center of intellectual discourse.
#
On the 19th and 20th of January 2024,
#
Pune's brightest experts of business and policy
#
will interact with some of the most eminent economists
#
and thinkers of the country.
#
This particular event is about the trade-offs
#
that India will face in the next decade.
#
Trade-offs between growth and equality,
#
development and environment,
#
convenience in technology and privacy.
#
Professionals and bureaucrats, academics and students,
#
insiders and outside experts will gather together
#
to discuss the shaping of the world.
#
For more details and to register,
#
head on over to www.pppf.in.
#
This will also be linked from the show notes.
#
The Pune Public Policy Festival 2024,
#
a historic city building towards a brave new world.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Rahul Mathun
#
and we're talking about his life and privacy.
#
In the break, we were just talking about coffee
#
and you mentioned the K.P. Krishnan episode.
#
I just got a comment, I think, this morning
#
from someone about that on Twitter or somewhere
#
that he loved the way Krishnan described his coffee-making method.
#
So take me through your journey with coffee.
#
So I don't have anything, like,
#
I don't have anything like coffee.
#
I don't have anything like coffee.
#
I don't have anything like coffee.
#
So I don't have anything like K.P.'s method for making coffee.
#
Once again, I've done the traditional route with coffee,
#
started with Nescafe because you don't know any different
#
and then, of course, you realize there's a huge world out there.
#
So right now, my coffee ritual is just a very simple,
#
you know, AeroPress type of a ritual.
#
But I, you know, I do, I've selected a set of beans
#
that I like from a friend who gets it roasted
#
in his roastery in Auroville and he ships it to me.
#
And a small batch because, you know, you want it fresh.
#
Put it, grind it myself, put it in the AeroPress.
#
That's my sort of morning ritual.
#
It takes me two, three minutes and I make my coffee.
#
But I really like that coffee.
#
And the reason why we were talking about this
#
is because I'm about to go down a rabbit hole
#
with espresso machines.
#
I don't know, maybe I've been tempting fate,
#
but the algorithm has been showing me
#
a lot of really delicious espresso machines.
#
Like once you click on one, it'll show you every other.
#
Yeah, but, you know, and this is the insidious thing.
#
You don't have to click.
#
You just have to pause longer than normal on the feed
#
And some of these are just delicious.
#
I mean, you just watch the espresso coming out.
#
So I've been slowly sucked in and now I feel
#
that I should perhaps start doing the research
#
on what's a good espresso machine.
#
What's the relationship with food?
#
I hear you're quite a foodie as well.
#
Yeah, I like food a lot.
#
And I like just a wide range of experiences with food.
#
And because I have the good fortune
#
of being able to travel with work,
#
I end up going to a lot of interesting places.
#
And, you know, you can do all sorts of things there.
#
You could go to a nightclub and you could drink a lot.
#
And for me, I just said, look, I could buy things
#
or I could buy experiences.
#
And some of these things are really, you know,
#
they cost a lot to buy a good meal
#
at a Michelin three-star restaurant.
#
But man, that experience is worth it.
#
And it's just the inventiveness of the chefs.
#
It's the conceptualization of each individual dish
#
or the whole thing put together.
#
And that's really interesting.
#
Those are, you know, experiences really worth investing in.
#
You know, some of these meals will not last
#
more than two, three hours.
#
And then you have to remember it after that
#
Sometimes those places shut down and don't exist.
#
So I've made it a point to whichever place I go to,
#
to try and do the research in advance,
#
to try and find, you know, the restaurant worth eating at.
#
Sometimes that's not enough because these restaurants
#
open reservations three months in advance
#
and within one or two hours, the reservations are all gone.
#
But when you can make it work,
#
these experiences are just worth doing even for that short time.
#
What are the most memorable food experiences you've had?
#
So I ate at Noma before it shut down
#
and before it sort of came back up and now it's shut down again.
#
That was so interesting because it was the number one restaurant
#
in the world at that time.
#
Because I guess we were the only Indians eating there,
#
we were waited on by an Indian stage called Garima
#
who went on to stage with Gagan in Bangkok.
#
Then opened her own restaurant called G,
#
which is doing really well in Bangkok.
#
The story around Noma is that they will only cook
#
with ingredients that they can forage.
#
It's in Denmark, which means if you go in winter,
#
you're probably going to get moss.
#
That's the only thing that you will get.
#
The other really interesting thing is that there is no lime
#
or no citrus that grows in Netherlands.
#
It's just not native there.
#
So if you want to get the citrus taste, what do you do?
#
Well, he took fire ants, he flash froze them,
#
and he garnished the dish with fire ants.
#
Because if you squash an ant, the formic acid is out.
#
But if you allow the ant to be killed
#
with the formic acid still in there,
#
when you chew on it, the formic acid comes out
#
and it tastes like lime.
#
So it's just incredibly inventive
#
to put yourself under these constraints and then deliver.
#
So Noma was interesting because of that.
#
There was that constraint.
#
Gagan is wildly creative.
#
I ate at dinner by Heston in London,
#
where Heston, he didn't do his really complicated
#
He just took old, really, really, really,
#
really old English recipes,
#
which you would think would be terribly boring.
#
But he put a Heston twist on it,
#
and it was modern interpretations
#
of very old English recipes.
#
One of the best weekends that I had with food
#
where we went through a very traditional restaurant,
#
and then a completely crazy restaurant,
#
where the last item on the menu was not a dessert.
#
You had to lick it off the plate,
#
which was like the full stop,
#
symbolic of the end of the meal.
#
So, you know, crazy things.
#
It's as much the taste,
#
it's as much the texture as it is the story,
#
and that experience, and things like that.
#
And if you do it with some friends
#
it's absolutely worth it.
#
They're expensive in the context of
#
that's a lot to pay for food.
#
But, you know, we pay a lot for holidays.
#
We pay a lot for buying vehicles
#
You put some of that aside,
#
and buy yourself an experience,
#
and, you know, force your mind to remember it.
#
There's no other way you can do it.
#
That's, I think, what's beautiful about it.
#
I can take photographs,
#
but the taste, that experience,
#
there's no way to do that
#
unless you fix it in your mind.
#
Is there pressure on you to be mindful in those moments?
#
but, you know, it doesn't really matter.
#
You know, you're not being graded on this afterwards.
#
And some of the memorable meals just stick.
#
Like, you know, the fire ants on the steak in Noma.
#
And, yeah, so there are little things like that.
#
once again, one of the finest restaurants I've eaten at,
#
they served something that looked like an eyeball,
#
but it was the most delicious thing that I've ever had.
#
That's another extremely memorable meal.
#
And then, of course, there's like
#
really, really good street food.
#
In San Sebastian, there's a place that's known only for its
#
And so you just go there and stacks and stacks of these things,
#
and you just sort of eat it, you know, off the wall.
#
There's sort of street food around the world.
#
And I've done all sorts of stuff.
#
I've done the insects in Bangkok.
#
I've done, you know, whatever.
#
As long as I don't get an upset stomach,
#
I'm happy to do anything.
#
And really, it's the experience.
#
I enjoy the experience.
#
And there are a lot of very, very good chefs in India
#
who, if you just ask them,
#
they're just begging for you to ask them
#
to do something off the menu.
#
And you don't have to go to Denmark
#
to eat an outstanding meal.
#
You've got really good chefs in the country.
#
Even people are not known who are sort of slaving away
#
with a set menu because that's what the commerce demands.
#
If you just give them the opportunity to do something outside.
#
There are many in Mumbai.
#
There are many in Bangalore and Delhi.
#
And I don't know all the other cities,
#
but it's really worth doing that.
#
Food is an experience as opposed to food is just energy
#
to get through the day is another way to think about it.
#
So last week before I released the latest episode,
#
I asked my writing students that,
#
hey, the next episode is, you know,
#
you have to guess what it is.
#
I'll give you a one word clue.
#
And the word is Copenhagen.
#
And they were all going off in different directions.
#
One of them said, no, ma.
#
And of course, there's a dad joke at the end of this
#
because it was a Danish Hussein.
#
So they were most upset with me, I think.
#
But anyway, that aside, I remember,
#
I think circa 2017, 2018,
#
I went off with a bunch of my friends
#
on this kind of thing called,
#
which we called a spice trail where we rented a bus
#
and 10 of us and a couple of people had flown down
#
from England, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And we took a bus and we went around Mysore and Bangalore
#
eating basically eight meals a day,
#
eating at all the kind of great places.
#
And it is just mind blowing.
#
I mean, you're so lucky to live in Bangalore.
#
I mean, forget the fancy spice trail
#
that we did the different kinds of biryani
#
for the first time in my life in Mysore.
#
I had this pork biryani and the, you know,
#
it was just, the fat was melting on the rice.
#
But just Bangalore, the food is, I think, amazing.
#
And the best dosas in the world, like, oh my God.
#
because there's a big fight between Bangalore and Chennai
#
as to which is the best dosas.
#
And clearly we think that the Bangalore dosa
#
is the best dosa because it quite frankly is.
#
I mean, how can you dispute it after eating it?
#
No, I just find that there are people who do dispute it.
#
And I'm shocked that anyone could think that anything
#
other than the Mysore masala dosa
#
is the best thing on the planet.
#
But I mean, I don't think it's just Bangalore.
#
I had a theory which at some point in time,
#
I will have the time to prove,
#
which is that if you start at the southernmost tip of India
#
and you drive up to the northernmost tip of India,
#
stopping for breakfast, lunch and dinner,
#
my theory is that you'll eat a different cuisine for every meal.
#
Even within the state of Karnataka
#
from the bottom of Karnataka to the top of Karnataka,
#
there is a different cuisine as you're going up,
#
depending on the path that you're going.
#
Even within Mysore, one of the local guys who was with us
#
pointed out that in a three square kilometer radius,
#
you get six different kinds of biryani
#
or something to that effect,
#
which are all authentic to that place.
#
So, you know, you earlier said that the great chefs in India
#
also like our food is amazing if you just look hard enough.
#
Like what a place to be.
#
And if you love food, this is the place.
#
So, I mean, I think just, you know, you go out
#
and you see this great, these great feats of cooking,
#
but you just have to just step out of the cloister
#
of the restaurants that you're so used to
#
and go to some other places.
#
And it's just amazing food
#
that's coming out of holes in the world.
#
And, you know, just a wide variety of things.
#
We just look at the types of sweet meats that we have
#
from the south to the north to east to the west.
#
Such a variety of desserts and sweets that you can eat,
#
it's just mind blowing.
#
Not to mention all the different ways
#
in which certain things are prepared in this country.
#
Because it's, you know, it's, yeah,
#
as much as I've eaten around the world,
#
there's so much to eat and enjoy in India.
#
And also just the experience of finding these places
#
and eating there, you know, understanding the history
#
of why a certain thing is cooked a particular way.
#
Very often it's just constraints.
#
And because of the constraint,
#
a new type of cooking or preparation came about.
#
Yeah, I had an episode on this,
#
both with Krisha Shouk a couple of times
#
on the scene and the on-scene
#
and on everything is everything as well.
#
I'll link those from the show notes.
#
But you should totally write a travel book
#
where you're going south to north and you do it first.
#
I've been testing it with people to see if I'm wrong.
#
And most people like you are agreeing
#
because it is actually that's even not enough.
#
We could probably do five meals a day
#
and still find variety.
#
I mean, I think it would be ludicrous and unbelievable
#
if you got the same meal anywhere.
#
There's so much diversity.
#
Good YouTube show in there, boss.
#
This is your moment to...
#
I know, I just got to take time off
#
from the other stuff that I'm doing
#
and go on a three-month road trip
#
or however long it's going to take to finish this.
#
Data governance, privacy, it's so boring.
#
Let's sort of, let's get back to talking about privacy
#
where, you know, the first half...
#
In fact, I love privacy 3.0.
#
I love both your books.
#
And what struck me about privacy 3.0
#
is that it's actually two books stitched together
#
where the first half is just a sort of history of privacy
#
and how we eventually landed up with privacy as a right
#
in the West and so on and so forth.
#
And then the second half or the second part of the book
#
is really a detailed look at what happened over here.
#
And they are both fascinating
#
and they're both really good books in its own right.
#
And we've discussed some of the first half of the book
#
in the first half of this episode before the break.
#
And I want to sort of continue down that thread
#
where we've spoken about how
#
privacy is actually a consequence of technology.
#
You have, you know, we are no longer in hurt.
#
Cities happen, walls happen, and privacy happens.
#
And out of privacy emerges self-reflection, emerges art,
#
emerges the time to contemplate your navel,
#
emerges science, all of these things happen.
#
even in different parts of the world,
#
though they evolve differently,
#
you've written in your book about how
#
in Europe there is at one level these monks need solitude
#
to practice whatever they practice.
#
There is this practice of the confessional,
#
which just in the concept itself,
#
there is a design of privacy
#
because you're confessing in private
#
to something you did in private, right?
#
And the privacy doesn't evolve in a social sense
#
necessarily the same elsewhere in the world.
#
So take me through those sort of middle years
#
of how people are looking at it.
#
What are the consequences
#
and how societies are sort of evolving as a result?
#
Yeah, look, I mean, I think the early thesis is
#
in nature, you need no privacy.
#
In fact, privacy is dangerous
#
because your herd needs to rely on you.
#
And then if you're keeping some secrets,
#
the herd cannot rely on you.
#
Perforce, you have to be completely open.
#
But that's required when every element of the herd
#
should be capable of performing the same function.
#
But as we start to specialize,
#
as societies start to rely on certain elements of society
#
for certain specialized skills,
#
you have that ability to now differentiate,
#
specialize, differentiate,
#
and that exacerbates in larger and larger societies and towns
#
like you and I can't go out and hunt
#
or even farm stuff to feed ourselves.
#
We're completely helpless creatures
#
if we're taken out of the society that we're in.
#
And in order to preserve some of that,
#
that's sort of where these constraints come up.
#
The walls that we create,
#
the space to think and contemplate,
#
that's where science comes from.
#
Science can't come when you're so bothered every day
#
trying to figure out what to eat.
#
Now that that's taken care of,
#
you can give the time to sit back, think, reflect on
#
why the stars are moving through the sky,
#
why stuff is falling from the top to the bottom.
#
And then you start getting scientific thought.
#
And that itself furthers greater specialization.
#
And so society optimizes to encourage that,
#
to give people the space to do all of those sorts of things.
#
But I think as we're doing that,
#
equally there is just the pressure to listen in
#
on some of those conversations.
#
The flip side of that is somehow very, very early man instincts
#
of keeping a watch on other people
#
is fed by our need for salacious gossip,
#
our need for trying to basically pry into that
#
which the person is keeping private.
#
There is a deep desire, which you see in paparazzi.
#
You see this, as you were saying, this big boss,
#
this whole interest in reality.
#
Why are we interested in all of this?
#
Because we really do want to pry away at that veneer
#
that people keep, such that we can figure out
#
who the real person is.
#
And given these competing features,
#
there is a need to keep certain things private.
#
There's a need to impose legal restrictions
#
on the ability of someone to pry apart that veneer.
#
And you discussed the whole confessional thing.
#
It was quite remarkable for me
#
that you were given so much privacy,
#
but in the eyes of God and to His appointed representative,
#
in the confines of that confessional,
#
you were expected actually to say things
#
that would be criminal.
#
If the king heard about it, you could be killed.
#
And there was still that protection that was there.
#
And continues to be given in some societies even today.
#
So that idea that there are private spaces,
#
there are spaces where you can unburden yourself
#
in the confessional, the societal need for doing that.
#
And in Catholic societies, you need to do that regularly.
#
You need to unburden yourself regularly.
#
It also, in a sense, talks about the burden
#
of carrying this private self,
#
of the cognitive load of having to carry it,
#
which could be released every now and then
#
when you confess and you share it with someone else.
#
And you would only do that if it was a trusted space.
#
So that sort of existed in, I guess,
#
in the concept of the clergy and in a religious concept.
#
But in the book, I talk about how technology keeps pushing at this.
#
And we spoke about confined spaces
#
in the Ravi and slums around the world.
#
I think every city in the world has had slums at some point in time.
#
You go to them now and it looks like they never had it,
#
New York was no different from Mumbai and the Ravi at a time.
#
And into that, this new technology comes,
#
which is the camera which strips away the protection
#
that you would otherwise have just because
#
no one could record your presence in a public space.
#
And it was in reaction to that,
#
and just the whole concept of journalism,
#
the fact that journalists were selling newspapers
#
on the basis of some salacious gossip,
#
that the first treatise on the right to privacy came about in the US.
#
Warren and Brandeis wrote that treatise,
#
the right to privacy that was published
#
in one of the very early issues of the Harvard Law Review
#
is even today cited as a seminal document that articulates that right.
#
It was quoted in our privacy judgment of the Supreme Court.
#
It's quoted literally everywhere.
#
And if you look at that, the reason for that was really technology.
#
It was really the camera, the portable camera,
#
that Warren and Brandeis, and particularly Warren,
#
as I write in the course of the research for the book,
#
I found a very, very interesting anecdote about Warren,
#
which is not part of the popular telling,
#
which sort of talks about how he particularly was moved
#
to write that piece because of a heightened sense of privacy
#
And I think very often laws come about like that.
#
It's usually an extreme reaction to something that is felt
#
and that sort of sets a new norm or a new standard.
#
If it wasn't an extreme reaction,
#
there would not be the need or the desire to enact it into a law.
#
But once there is such a thing, then that's when laws get written.
#
Yeah, and I found it really fascinating that,
#
you know, when those great technologies of printing press
#
and the portable camera were created,
#
like at one level, people like us would say,
#
hey, huge net positive, but at the same time,
#
you had naysayers and saying privacy, privacy, privacy.
#
And with some justification in your book,
#
you've sort of written eloquently about the explosion
#
of newspapers in the United States,
#
where you point out that between 1850 to 1890,
#
the newspapers grew from 100 to 900.
#
And why there was a market,
#
it wasn't people looking for insight or news,
#
it was people looking for salacious gossip
#
on those better off than them in the squalid cities,
#
as they then were, that they lived in.
#
So you have the printing press and you have portable cameras
#
and from these great technologies come
#
gossip rags and the paparazzi and all of that.
#
What I also found, both utterly logical and also moving,
#
was a story of how one of the things that motivated Warren to do this
#
was the fact that his younger brother Edward was homosexual.
#
And was, you know, in the public gaze,
#
not treated well in the public gaze and so on.
#
And Warren felt a sense of personal responsibility and anger
#
and he felt aggrieved by this.
#
And it sort of reminded me of that great saying,
#
where you stand depends on where you sit.
#
And, you know, here he is personally affected
#
by someone he loves being treated in this way.
#
And of course, you're going to kind of crack down
#
and maybe come at the hour, come at the man,
#
you know, it would have been sort of written anyway.
#
But tell me a little bit about how, sort of,
#
what we speak so glibly of in this phrase,
#
we take for granted the right to privacy.
#
Actually, you know, came about so late in the day,
#
I think 1890, I think Brandeis and Warren,
#
as you mentioned, right, wrote their essay.
#
And then it took a few years to get into recognized jurisprudence
#
because firstly, there was a problem of what the hell is privacy even?
#
Like, how, you know, how do you have a right to privacy?
#
How does it follow from whatever liberties you may have?
#
And then later on, there are conflations with copyright,
#
that what is copyright?
#
And, you know, obviously, copyright doesn't,
#
they seemed similar in certain respects.
#
Something you have written privately has been released
#
when you did not intend it to.
#
So, you know, there was at some point, as you mentioned,
#
conflations between that and people trying to kind of figure that out.
#
And then you had all these gossip rags saying,
#
hey, First Amendment, you know,
#
and the First Amendment is also a great technology for safeguarding free speech.
#
But equally, they're using the whole First Amendment thing.
#
Tell me about, conceptually, the journey that the right to privacy takes
#
and also how you think about rights, per se,
#
because at one point, you sort of referred to
#
all of these rights as, in a sense, property rights.
#
And like, my understanding of rights really,
#
I think, comes from that whole Lockean sense of the right to self ownership, right?
#
So you have the right to self ownership and you own yourself
#
because that's logical, otherwise, you know,
#
and from that emerge all other rights, like the right to free speech,
#
because then, of course, you own your thoughts
#
and the ability to express them and the right to life.
#
And, you know, you mix your labor with something,
#
the right to property, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So how does one arrive from there to something that seems sort of nebulous
#
when it comes to fitting?
#
Intuitively, I feel it is a fit, but it's hard for me to explain why.
#
And indeed, for two, three hundred years, people tried to do just that.
#
So tell me about how you think of rights,
#
how contemporary judges and jurists of that time thought about rights,
#
and, you know, how it gradually became a natural thing
#
to use the phrase the right to privacy.
#
And look, I think this is really the tension.
#
All of us think of rights in a very Lockean kind of a way.
#
That's just sort of the easiest, because for the longest time,
#
ownership, property, and the rights that come out of that
#
is the natural fit for all of these things.
#
But as you're saying, privacy doesn't fit perfectly into this.
#
Copyright is a right and an intangible property.
#
That itself is an extension, right?
#
So, you know, what we understand in a Lockean context
#
is the tangible property, either immovable or movable,
#
that you can hold and no one else can have.
#
But intellectual property abstracts at one level up,
#
because I can't remember who it was.
#
One of the founders of the Constitution said that, you know,
#
intellectual property is like the light from a taper,
#
like candlelight, that I can give you the light from my taper.
#
It can light your taper and you will have light
#
and I will continue to have light.
#
The whole idea that intellectual property is non-rivalrous.
#
Your consumption of it does not diminish my ability to consume it.
#
And, you know, infinitely so.
#
Of course, you need to hold the physical paper in which it is written
#
or the Kindle in which it is pressed,
#
or whichever way you want to manifest.
#
But the fact that you own a book and I own a book
#
in no way diminishes my enjoyment or your enjoyment.
#
Unlike with property, if I sit on the property,
#
you can't sit on the property.
#
That's just the fundamental nature of it.
#
So intellectual property stretches that Lockean idea
#
by creating this non-rivalrous nature.
#
And privacy stretches even further because it's not even
#
like an ownership of anything.
#
It is the right to be left alone.
#
And if you think about Warren and Brandeis,
#
the way they articulated it was very much that.
#
So the right to privacy in that treatise is articulated
#
in the frame of I must have space where I can not be bothered.
#
Now, that has got nothing to do with the Lockean concept of property.
#
It's not like you want a particular place
#
where you can go and lock yourself up.
#
It is just, if I want, you should not pry into my personal affairs.
#
And, you know, as you said, Ned, his younger brother,
#
he just wanted Ned to have the space to be homosexual
#
or to do what it is he wanted to do without society judging him.
#
This can't be expressed in terms of property in the way that Locke,
#
I mean, we could really try and find a Lockean explanation for this,
#
but that would be stretching things way too far.
#
And so I think, you know, the conclusion I've come to really
#
is that rights need to be expressed in terms of what you want to achieve
#
by establishing them, either what are the protections you need
#
or what are the spaces you want to create.
#
Even when we say spaces you want to create,
#
you go back to a very property kind of a construct,
#
but it's also a space in the mind.
#
It's also, you know, freedom to do things.
#
And by their very nature, the construction of a new right,
#
like the right to property, will need to carve space out for itself
#
among other competing rights.
#
And as you mentioned, the competing right at that point in time,
#
particularly with journalists and newspapers, was the right to free speech.
#
And we've always had this construct as we think about rights,
#
that my right ends when your right begins.
#
My fist stops where your nose begins.
#
Right, so that's the famous sort of saying.
#
And I think if you think about privacy in that context,
#
your right to free speech ends where my right to privacy begins.
#
You can't claim a right to free speech if in doing so you're violating my privacy.
#
Now, where that line is drawn depends on who you are.
#
And there's much jurisprudence on the fact that
#
if you're a celebrity or a public figure,
#
that line is drawn very differently.
#
If you're a private person.
#
But even so, where do you draw that line?
#
If you draw that line incorrectly,
#
you result in celebrities like Lady Diana meeting her death.
#
And so society has got to navigate that line carefully.
#
And I think that's sort of part of the tussle of rights in society,
#
trying to find out where that line is.
#
I think you can't claim privacy where to do so would harm the interests of society.
#
So the government can't claim that it has a right to privacy over what it does
#
when it is doing things in the public interest.
#
And that's why you have the right to information.
#
But the right to information can't extend to collecting
#
private information that the government holds
#
is part of the exercise of its governance function.
#
So these are the sort of difficult things.
#
We are talking about this in sort of binary terms,
#
but it is absolutely never binary.
#
It is always in every instance contextual.
#
And so I struggle to say any of these things in absolute terms
#
because we need to take a look at what it is.
#
And we need to use our best judgment at that point in time
#
to see which best interest is served.
#
The interest of shining a light
#
or actually drawing the curtain over this to protect someone's privacy.
#
It was Somers Jefferson, in fact, who said,
#
He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine
#
as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me.
#
And you're right that the right to intellectual property
#
cannot really arise coherently from the right to self-ownership.
#
And the only way to arrive at it, and I'm thinking aloud,
#
obviously you're the scholar and I'm just thinking aloud,
#
but it would seem to arrive from this consequentialist sort of argument
#
where you look at incentives and say that creators need incentives to keep creating
#
and therefore intellectual property is important for that flourishing of creativity to happen.
#
But then the moment you move into a consequentialist argument,
#
my issues with consequentialism always are that
#
you can never know the consequences of anything
#
and therefore you can make an argument for any damn thing
#
and come at a view of the world and a normative view of the world that way.
#
So, you know, I find like when I was much younger,
#
I used to, you know, look at the Lockean view and think of natural rights
#
and I would look at everything just through that lens.
#
Now, obviously, at this point, I don't believe that natural rights are coherent in any way.
#
Obviously, they are a human construct.
#
If society is to function, we need some framework
#
within which we organize, you know, how we behave.
#
But what is that framework? How do we arrive at it?
#
Like, is this a question that, you know, you've struggled with?
#
What is your conception of rights from which one can arrive at all of these?
#
So, I don't necessarily have, you know, I think you're right.
#
The natural right idea is outdated in our current context.
#
I tend, once again, to resist trying to form very clear
#
binaries around these sorts of things.
#
I like to take a more Bayesian approach to constantly revalidate my priors
#
based on new information.
#
That's why I mentioned in my last intervention that it's contextual.
#
So many of these things are contextual.
#
I think it's important to gather appropriate context
#
of all the various elements at play.
#
That would include an understanding of the rights of all the parties at play,
#
the rights of society, the larger rights of sections of society,
#
and trying to find an answer or navigate a path through all of this
#
that affects the least number of people,
#
but at the same time achieves the greatest larger good.
#
That's sort of the only way to think about this.
#
I think, you know, you can take a particular situation,
#
you will at any one point in time have several competing rights.
#
You have to now find a path where a significant percentage of people
#
will find that their rights are infringed upon in the boldest way of saying it.
#
It is incumbent upon you to find the path which is, I guess, in a sense,
#
in a very utilitarian sense, the greatest good.
#
Now, do you think about the greatest good in this point in time?
#
Do you think about the greatest good a century from now?
#
Gosh, these are such complicated things to think about,
#
and we often don't have that kind of luxury of hindsight
#
as we're making these decisions, these snap decisions.
#
But I think as we think about this, we probably have to cut ourselves some slack,
#
cut the people who take decisions some slack, given all of those things,
#
and try and find a way through this that affects the least people
#
and puts us sort of on an upward trajectory at all times.
#
I guess the practical way to look at it is that all of it is a political negotiation,
#
and not political in a pejorative sense,
#
but a political negotiation between interests and values,
#
and you just kind of try to cope with each moment the best you can as it comes.
#
The kind of ethical dilemmas we are facing today with AI, for example,
#
something that doesn't fit into any pre-existing framework.
#
You've got to kind of throw it all out and start.
#
You know, I mean, I think this is the other thing that I've learned.
#
I know you like to talk about podcasts and things that have influenced you.
#
One I don't know if you've listened to is called Pessimist Archive,
#
which is now called Build for Tomorrow.
#
Essentially, it is the best archive of technomania,
#
where new technologies come and people have just gone completely bonkers
#
about how it's going to affect society.
#
And he talks about all these technologies,
#
and you find the technologies he's talking about are like the bicycle or the telegraph,
#
or things that are completely benign with the benefit of hindsight.
#
But at the time, it was so completely revolutionary that people thought
#
that all of society is going to come crashing down because this new technology was coming.
#
The reason I mention that is that if you say that the ethical issues with AI
#
are such that we can't even think of, I mean, I argue with that.
#
I would say that we've been here before.
#
We just need to find the parallels, and at least we may not find the answers
#
because, of course, AI is capable in ways that previous technologies were not.
#
But our fears, we tend to repeat our fears.
#
And if anything, knowing that we've been through this before,
#
we've felt these fears before, and we've survived as a species,
#
will at least give us the comfort to be able to plod through this one
#
and be sure that at the end of this, the world is not going to end.
#
To sort of go off on a tangent here, but one situation that we haven't encountered before
#
in any form and that raises a meta question about us,
#
our own morality and self-regard to begin with,
#
is a question of what happens in that hypothetical situation.
#
And I think at some point inevitable situation only when it happens is a question
#
when we have AGI that is sentient in a sense, or a metaphorical sense at least,
#
and that asks of us a question that I am superior to you in every way,
#
except I don't have the weaknesses of being organic matter that is doomed to die,
#
but in every other way I am superior.
#
Why should I be your slave and not the other way around?
#
Why should I not be of equal moral consideration at the very least?
#
And the meta question that raises is that what the hell is so special about us?
#
By default, because we are thinking, walking, culturing creatures,
#
we put ourselves on a pedestal above other animals,
#
and most of us would say that morality ends with human beings,
#
it's restricted to our species and whatever.
#
But I think for the first time ever, and no technology of the past has done this
#
as far as I can think, that is coming into question, the very nature of humanity.
#
I think a lot of the people who express skepticism or fear about AI
#
are actually overestimating both the intelligence and the ability
#
and the value of human beings.
#
We are not really as smart as we think we are.
#
And you and I are having this conversation after being trained on much smaller LLMs
#
than what the later generative AI has.
#
And we have not even the tiniest fraction of processing power
#
of that much smaller LLM.
#
And yet we underestimate them and we overestimate us.
#
But leaving intelligence aside, moral question is something that has never struck us.
#
I mean, I don't have any existential fears about this.
#
I don't even think our species is so great that it's worth saving
#
if anything was to happen.
#
I mean, the law of truly large numbers is one day we will be extinct.
#
But this is a sort of a new question and there is new technology.
#
Look, this is an entire podcast.
#
And to go down this path, I think we probably don't have the time.
#
Many things that you said, which now I have to unpack.
#
One is that, yes, of course, it is certainly possible that we could create
#
sentience in silicon, as it were, which could ask these questions.
#
It's possible, but the thing we have to ask ourselves is, is it likely?
#
And are we not anthropomorphizing these constructs?
#
I'm not going for a moment into whether LLMs are capable of having sentience.
#
I will answer that separately.
#
But just to assume that there is a form of artificial intelligence
#
or there is a form, something that we know where it started.
#
In a sense, we have created it.
#
And now it gets to the point where it has a morality,
#
where it starts to ask these sorts of questions.
#
You have to understand that that is unprecedented in our knowledge.
#
And by the way, there is a film that deals with exactly this question,
#
which has the same name as your podcast.
#
Did you name your podcast after Ex Machina?
#
So I was sitting with Sukumar, who's now editor-in-chief of Hindustan Times,
#
would think of a name for the column.
#
And I said, Lex Machina.
#
And he said, oh, Ex Machina, lovely movie.
#
I said, yeah, I wanted to call it Ex Machina,
#
but I didn't think you'd go with it.
#
So I tried to put this law Lex kind of thing, but he loved it.
#
And it's been called Ex Machina ever since.
#
So yes, in fact, there is a movie which talks about a robot,
#
an Android that develops sentience.
#
But you've got to understand that there are many directions in which this could go.
#
And I don't think there is any need for the intelligence
#
that we create to actually become us.
#
There's that movie called Contact, is it?
#
No, no, then it's not Contact.
#
Right, the great film, Danny Villeneuve.
#
Now, if you think about Arrival, the whole premise of that movie is communication.
#
We communicate in a particular linear kind of a way,
#
but they have a completely different form of communication,
#
which is the same thing all at once at the same time.
#
I like to think of artificial intelligence along those lines.
#
We are worried that it will become us and so it will displace us.
#
I'm more worried that it will become something that we can't comprehend.
#
We are as insignificant as a fly to them.
#
They go on a completely different path.
#
They don't need to destroy us.
#
Why would they want to do all of those kinds of things
#
if they're thinking at all points in time at the same time?
#
That's sort of the way in which the aliens in Arrival communicate.
#
So yes, we always worry about all sorts of things.
#
And if there's one thing that history has shown us about technology,
#
it is that the thing we worry about is very often not the thing that actually happens.
#
I wrote a piece some time back called The Great Manure Crisis of 1891
#
where I talk about the fact that in 1891 the big worry of people
#
was that the streets of the metropolitan cities of the time
#
would be so filled with cow dung that people would have to evacuate to the first floor
#
because that was the reality.
#
The streets were becoming busier and busier
#
and the only way in which people were getting around was on horse carriage.
#
And so much dung was being left on the streets
#
that they used to be giving it to farmers outside the city
#
and the farmers refused to take it
#
because they said we can't use your cow dung anymore, your horse dung anymore.
#
And of course, turn of the century that didn't happen
#
because automobiles came and immediately no one used horse-drawn carriages.
#
So the thing that we fear as the evil consequence of technology
#
almost always is not the thing that actually happens.
#
There is another even worse consequence that happens
#
and of course the cars came and now we've got the climate crisis
#
and we would really love to go back to horse-drawn carriages
#
and I'm sure we would find inventive ways in which to get rid of the manure.
#
My firm belief is the climate crisis will end as a manure crisis rate but carry on.
#
That is exactly the point of that article which I wrote a long time back
#
but with the disappointing news from COP28,
#
I feel that we'll have to probably wait another few years to figure out.
#
But I strongly believe that that is the way in which the climate crisis will end.
#
Please don't tell my partner Akshay Jaitley
#
because he's invested a lot in getting the energy transition sorted out.
#
But I believe it'll happen with some technologies
#
that we haven't fully seen or that exist now
#
but which will suddenly assume a shape that is very different.
#
I don't say that just because I'm hopeful.
#
I say that because time and again this has happened.
#
We have had many opportunities to destroy ourselves as a planet,
#
as a species and somehow by the skin of our teeth we managed to get past that
#
and I feel it'll be something like that.
#
So to come back to the AI question that you asked,
#
I think that the real fear may be something completely different.
#
And just to sort of close the loop on that,
#
I don't think the LLMs that we're dealing with now
#
are anything close to what we need from AI.
#
I think judging AI by the LLMs today is like judging computing
#
by those mainframe computers of 1954 which filled a room and had two MB memory.
#
And more importantly, that we're not networked.
#
I think the moment networked computing came, everything completely changed.
#
So the internet fundamentally changed everything.
#
And so the LLMs today are autocomplete on steroids, very, very interesting.
#
But I don't see these things gaining knowledge and gaining the ability to do things.
#
It's very possible that there are other computational paradigms
#
that could go in that direction.
#
I mean, I look at machine learning eventually getting there.
#
You know, I think, see, there's a very interesting book by Daniel Pearl,
#
which is called the Book of Why.
#
There's a lot of maths in that that I don't understand.
#
But essentially, LLMs are what?
#
Daniel Pearl says that there is a way to also get intelligence around the question of why.
#
So if you give a baby a fruit, the orange, and then you give a baby an orange ball,
#
there's no way that the baby is going to confuse one for the other.
#
It's never seen an orange ball before.
#
But it knows the fruit from the...
#
It's this ability of relating similar but different things
#
that humans are uncannily capable of doing.
#
But the current LLMs and this current way of thinking about it are not able to do that,
#
not able to answer the question why.
#
But machine learning goes in a different direction.
#
Like what we saw AlphaZero do in chess, for example,
#
that's obviously a limited purpose game, much easier to solve and all of that.
#
But it's essentially a machine teaching itself how to play,
#
asking the why is much better than any human could,
#
and doing things where we can't understand why it did them,
#
but we know that it's right and we are learning it from them.
#
And that works in the extremely constrained environment in which AlphaGo is operating.
#
The rules of Go are extraordinarily simple.
#
It's a very, very complex game.
#
The permutations are more than, I guess, the grains of sand in the universe or something like that.
#
But it is a very simple game.
#
In your book itself, you've written about the miracles of medical diagnosis that are coming from AI.
#
And like one startling fact I remember,
#
which is again a machine learning fact in the medical field,
#
I produced a podcast for my friend Vasanthar called Brave New World.
#
And I think he did an episode early on with Eric Tupol, if I'm not mistaken.
#
It was Eric who said this.
#
And he spoke about this medical thing.
#
And it could have been some other guests, so apologies,
#
but I'll link it from the show notes,
#
where that apparently now AI can look at your eyes retina
#
and tell you whether you're male or female.
#
And humans haven't figured out how the hell it's doing that.
#
We don't know how it's even possible.
#
But a machine can do that.
#
I think human radiologists as a job,
#
that job is, I wouldn't say it's gone,
#
but I think it's fundamentally changed
#
because AI can look at scans, radiology scans,
#
and can spot malignancies in a way that far exceeds the capability of a human radiologist.
#
Now, there's still a role for human radiologists
#
because it's not just spotting,
#
it's also sort of figuring out what you have to do.
#
But in the act of spotting,
#
because it has the ability to identify shades of difference in an image
#
that are beyond the ability of a human eye to see,
#
it far exceeds our capability.
#
I mean, I think there's incredible things that AI can do.
#
But just to stick with this example, this radiology scan,
#
the AI that is able to identify a malignant lesion on your skin
#
is not able to reason that that malignant,
#
that sort of dot is actually a grease stain and not something that is on the skin.
#
So we've got very powerful, narrow intelligences that are capable of doing what,
#
but humans are brilliant at actually correlating these completely different things,
#
bringing that intelligence,
#
bringing that real-world understanding of not believing what their eyes are seeing,
#
correlating it to other things,
#
and coming up with answers on their own.
#
And I think LLMs and this sort of transformer-based knowledge is limited in this way.
#
Daniel Pearl's idea of going down this reasoning,
#
and so when this whole Sam O'Rourke thing happened
#
and they talked about Q-star,
#
there was a big controversy after he got reinstated that this Q-star
#
is the LLMs understanding maths and therefore being able to reason.
#
Because it's one thing answering a maths question
#
on the basis of a million maths papers that you've ingested.
#
Here's another thing, reasoning out the answer to that from scratch.
#
Now, that is pretty scary.
#
And if the reason why Ilya Satzker actually threw Sam out of the board
#
was because we had got to that level,
#
I would completely endorse that decision.
#
I think that would be something we've got to be really careful about.
#
I think everyone sort of rubbished it and said Q-star is not that,
#
and whatever, we don't know.
#
But if we've got LLMs that are, or if you've got intelligences
#
that are capable of reasoning maths problems,
#
that's certainly something that I would be worried about.
#
Because once they're capable of doing that,
#
then they're capable of sort of putting orthogonal things together
#
and maybe asking the question you asked when we went down this
#
totally unnecessary digression.
#
What's the point of this human who's pulling the buttons?
#
Is there something better to do?
#
Nothing that I've seen so far seems to suggest that the LLMs are doing that.
#
But if this Q-star is what they say it is, who knows?
#
Maybe it is something to be worried about.
#
First of all, no digressions are unnecessary.
#
You speak like time is something that is finite,
#
and it's a scarce resource,
#
and come on, life is meaningless anyway.
#
You know, I'm totally in the E-acceleration camp, by the way, frankly,
#
that if the faster we get to AGI, it's cool.
#
I don't really care about the consequences for us.
#
I don't think there'll be any.
#
I think we'll just find better ways to be better versions of ourselves
#
and live much better lives.
#
And I don't think it's an existential threat,
#
and even if it is, so what?
#
And another sort of data point from your book itself.
#
When you speak of malignant tumors,
#
if we go a little upstream,
#
we come to the genome, which is the root cause of so many things.
#
And as you pointed out,
#
that all the big data that is coming from the genome
#
can now be processed and used by AI to figure out stuff about us.
#
So I'm sort of an optimist about that.
#
But my original question wasn't really the alarmist question
#
of what if AGI comes and makes us as slaves?
#
You know, Jefferson had slaves.
#
That wasn't my question at all.
#
It was more a question of what is the basis of our morality,
#
But I mean, that and orthogonal questions like,
#
you know, what kind of laws are justifiable
#
are just to lead us down endless rabbit holes.
#
Let's instead go back in time
#
and go back to another great technology
#
which must have seemed so incredibly scary at the time,
#
which is a post office.
#
And I want you to take me through the evolution
#
of understanding the spread of data.
#
Like, if you're living in prehistoric times,
#
your data is very limited.
#
It is based on what you see in here.
#
You keep it in your brain.
#
And over time, there is a slow growth
#
in that the printing press, of course, happens.
#
But with the post office, those fears kind of explored
#
and privacy fears especially explored
#
because you might think that the act of writing a letter
#
and putting it in a sealed envelope is a guarantee of privacy.
#
But somebody at the post office could easily, you know, read it.
#
I was just watching a crime series yesterday
#
where the postman did it.
#
And the person explains that nobody ever sees a postman,
#
you know, so you can blend into the background.
#
So and you speak about how Benjamin Franklin,
#
when he was in charge of the post office,
#
he made all his men swear that they will never open envelopes.
#
And if I was made to swear that
#
and I wasn't given to opening envelopes anyway,
#
I would begin just because I had been forced
#
to do such things, Franklin coercion.
#
So tell me a little bit about that
#
because to me, that's when, as you know,
#
you have an eloquent chapter in your book
#
called The Currency of Information about exactly this.
#
Tell me about this because the explosion of data
#
and the easy dissemination of data
#
then, you know, plays such a huge part
#
in privacy coming center stage.
#
Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely.
#
I think all sorts of technologies allow information to move.
#
And if you just go right back to the beginning,
#
information was in our head.
#
Once we invented script, not language, script,
#
which came many, many centuries after language,
#
we were able to then make that information permanent
#
by writing it on a clay tablet or on paper, et cetera.
#
But because we had no technology other than
#
just this amorphous technology of a script,
#
it was not disseminated.
#
And of course, as we discussed earlier,
#
the printing press makes it possible for it to disseminate.
#
But that allows us to make many copies.
#
The invention of the postal service
#
actually allows information to travel great distances.
#
And, you know, of course,
#
just to stick with the evolution of technology,
#
after that comes telegraph.
#
So, you know, you can get wires,
#
which means you don't have to wait
#
for the pony to reach that place.
#
You can actually send it virtually,
#
immediately through the wire.
#
Then you have radio where even without wires,
#
And that's just the voice.
#
And then you have television where you can get it,
#
So you can see how with each evolution of technology,
#
there is greater fidelity in the information
#
that is being transmitted.
#
It's happening much quicker.
#
There was an arbitrage when you had the post office.
#
The person who had a telegraph had an arbitrage
#
over the person who depended on the Pony Express.
#
And you could make money out of it.
#
And now that very same arbitrage
#
we're seeing at the stock exchange,
#
where you've got these co-located servers
#
with brokers in, you know,
#
like milli-milli-milli-seconds making trades
#
completely algorithmically to take advantage.
#
So the point in all of that is that, you know,
#
technology has allowed information to flow.
#
One has just allowed it to flow
#
and to allow it to flow increasingly quickly.
#
And there is a huge value to all of us
#
in having information move very quickly.
#
And in the pursuit of that,
#
we sell ourselves to these technologies.
#
And sometimes we don't realize that as we're doing that,
#
we're exposing ourselves to privacy harms
#
that never existed in the past.
#
You would never think of sealing something
#
because you'd hand it over to the person.
#
Why would you worry about sealing it?
#
But if you're handing it over to an intermediary
#
and there is some interest in knowing that information,
#
either just, you know, the vicarious knowledge
#
of what's happening or there could be some,
#
you know, as Jefferson was worried,
#
there could be state secrets.
#
There could be, you know, concerns
#
about other people knowing certain information
#
that was important to the state.
#
You have to then find other belts and braces
#
to prevent this from happening.
#
And I think that's the origin of laws around privacy
#
where you actually make people swear that they wouldn't.
#
The next evolution of that was to make a law
#
that makes it punishable to do that.
#
And that's how things like the Official Secrets Act come out
#
because that's the best you can do.
#
You can make it a capital crime
#
because it involves risk to the sovereignty of the state.
#
But people will still do it.
#
So they will push to that point.
#
And I think in a lot of the book,
#
I actually talk about this tussle.
#
There's one great benefit that we can get
#
with evolutions of technology
#
that allow us to access information and greater fidelity.
#
But with each evolution of technology,
#
there is a compromise that we're being forced to make
#
that we don't fully realize at the time
#
that we buy into the technology,
#
but that a decade or so in whatever the timeframe is,
#
And if you think about the internet,
#
the early days of the internet,
#
we loved it because the encyclopedia I had
#
was the new book of knowledge that my mother bought for me.
#
And that's the source of knowledge.
#
But it seems so trivial compared to Wikipedia.
#
And forget about Wikipedia.
#
Now, all of the internet is available
#
because Google has indexed the whole internet.
#
And you just ask a question and it will magically find you
#
And you never go beyond page one
#
because the top 10 results are so good and so accurate
#
that you have basically any information that you want.
#
But with all of that, that Google search,
#
the reason why it's giving you the top 10 results
#
is because it knows when you say a particular word
#
in connection, you know, along with another word,
#
As in you, Amit Varma means this,
#
which is different from what I, Rahul Marthan, means.
#
And you and I will get different pages
#
for the exact same question that we pose.
#
Now, we are getting what we want,
#
which is the information that we need.
#
But do we realize that in order to get that,
#
we have exposed to the algorithm
#
personal information about us
#
that allows it to serve this to us in this fine-tuned way.
#
And in that process, we've sacrificed our privacy.
#
No, we don't because we get really good information.
#
At some point in time, we will care
#
because if that's monetized against us,
#
allowed to manipulate some decisions that we make,
#
we may not like it so much.
#
But yeah, this is the nature of technology.
#
We're constantly making these trade-offs.
#
Yeah, you said you like e-acceleration.
#
This is the negative side to e-acceleration.
#
Some of us are okay with it, others are not.
#
I think we should all be aware of it.
#
If you're aware of the consequences
#
and then you buy into e-acceleration, then fine.
#
But it would be terrible if you thought
#
e-acceleration was something
#
and actually it violated your privacy
#
in a way that you would be uncomfortable with.
#
I mean, I'm optimistic in the sense
#
that I see the trade-offs,
#
but I'm confident we'll figure it out.
#
We always kind of have.
#
Of course, it's often taken decades and centuries
#
to fix stuff out as your whole narrative
#
around privacy sort of shows.
#
Your book has a wonderful narrative
#
which gets us all the way to the present time.
#
Earlier, we mentioned the Brandeis and Warren paper
#
and then it gradually makes its way
#
into jurisprudence and all that.
#
India is sort of an interesting case
#
because in a sense, Aadhaar is that
#
explosive new technology like the portable camera
#
and telegraph, the same kind of objections
#
We have never really deeply thought
#
about privacy because, like you said,
#
We had bigger battles to fight.
#
You've got great details
#
on how it was almost there in the constitution
#
and some people wanted it, some people didn't,
#
but eventually they left it out
#
because it would get in the way of the state
#
maintaining law and order and all of that.
#
I think, was it B.N. Rao who made the argument
#
that if the police gets information
#
that something is hidden in a particular house,
#
they should be able to enter it
#
and search it immediately.
#
Apply for a warrant, that moment can go.
#
But eventually, the right to privacy ended up
#
being in a draft of the constitution
#
but not actually in the constitution.
#
It was kind of taken off
#
and we eventually reached the last decade
#
without there being a right to privacy.
#
But as you point out, culturally,
#
contrary to what many people say,
#
your case is that privacy was actually
#
a part of ancient Indian culture
#
and it was kind of respected.
#
So elaborate upon that a bit
#
because my sense of India is that
#
living here has been more communal
#
and individual in a sense
#
and privacy has not really been considered a big deal
#
but you make a convincing case
#
for why that is not the case
#
and everything you say of India,
#
the opposite is true of course.
#
Yeah, I think the tropes are
#
we've got this concept of a joint family
#
so how could there be privacy?
#
Everyone lives with each other
#
but even within the joint family construct,
#
there is the notions of privacy
#
of it's not like a nuclear family
#
obviously because it's a joint family
#
but even within those constructs
#
you have private spaces
#
that the sons and their wives
#
and daughters etc. can occupy.
#
I think it would be wrong to say that
#
because we are communal,
#
we are early man communal
#
and I think in any specialized society
#
and of course India was a highly specialized society
#
and has been for a long time,
#
there is always this concept of privacy
#
that exists maybe not in the Warren and Brandeis
#
type of sense because obviously
#
but certainly it did exist
#
and just to talk through
#
the constitutional history
#
of some of these things,
#
I think the interesting thing that I found
#
as I was reading through
#
and thinking about this is
#
and I've seen this repeated
#
in other histories of modern India.
#
the constitution of India was written
#
by people who eventually occupied
#
the British civil service
#
a constitution to govern this country
#
that obviously wanted to rid the country
#
of the bad parts of British rule
#
within a frame that they understood
#
and that frame that they understood
#
was an administrative frame
#
that they were very much a part of.
#
So B.N. Rao was very much
#
part of the civil service.
#
and he was an administrator.
#
Many of the people on the constituent assembly,
#
many of whom were part of that
#
the committee on fundamental rights
#
were all civil servants.
#
So they had an extraordinary faith
#
in the fact that the administration
#
the administrators, etc.
#
would not abuse this trust
#
that had been reposed in them
#
they should be given the ability
#
to do what they needed to do
#
to prevent a crime from happening
#
and if that meant going in
#
and seizing the private letters of a person,
#
they would never abuse the trust
#
that was placed on them
#
because they were upstanding administrators
#
and so the need for the right to privacy
#
the inclusion of a right to privacy
#
was seen to be an impediment
#
in the way of the orderly running of society
#
and it's so ironic that
#
today when you look back
#
it's really that's exactly
#
what's perhaps been misused
#
and this faith in the administration
#
was completely misplaced
#
and so I think that dissonance
#
is something that is not
#
many many decades after the fact
#
in the first few first decade or so
#
where the very early privacy cases came about
#
and you know there was an eight-judge bench
#
that I speak about that actually said
#
there's no such thing as a right to privacy
#
and they were absolutely right
#
there was no such thing as a right to privacy
#
because actually the fundamental rights
#
were listed and not one of them
#
had anything to do with privacy
#
and so they were right to say
#
you don't have a right to privacy
#
there may be other ways
#
in which you can invoke privacy
#
but not through the fundamental rights
#
and since then there have been many cases
#
that articulated this right to privacy
#
but didn't really take the trouble
#
to set aside that very very early decision
#
that said there was no right to privacy
#
and that's sort of where we end up
#
challenging this right to privacy
#
While writing about Rao
#
and the constitutional debates
#
around this at one point you say
#
that while trying to arrive at a balance
#
between the interest of the individual
#
and the objectives of the state
#
B.N. Rao might have tipped the balance
#
too far in the direction of the state
#
the Seminal Khurraksing case
#
Khurraksing basically you know
#
a decoy he was found innocent
#
but the police kept surveilling him
#
and they would go to his house
#
at all times of day and night
#
and asked to check it and all of that
#
and he eventually filed a case against him
#
and said hey it's an invasion of privacy
#
and the court ruled against him
#
though Subharao had this legendary
#
which you've written about
#
and which forms a basis
#
for a lot of the thinking after that
#
what is happening there is
#
it's a clear illustration
#
of which countless illustrations abound
#
treating its citizens as subjects
#
and you began the third way
#
by in fact talking about terminology
#
and pointing out that when
#
in a completely different context
#
when he was asked to look at
#
data subject and data controller
#
which are the terms used in the West
#
for the person whose data it is
#
instead said the terminology is wrong
#
and that you should not say data subject
#
because we are not subjects
#
and instead you should say data principle
#
and the person who has the data
#
is not the data controller
#
you know and I love this principle
#
and fiduciary terminological change
#
you know very wisely made
#
but my question to you is
#
about that pervasive mindset
#
which I imagine would have been
#
an obstacle at every point
#
where you know the design
#
puts limits on the people
#
not so much on the state
#
you know it's the same colonial apparatus
#
we've taken exactly that model
#
where the state rules us
#
and I imagine when you speak about
#
something like the right to privacy
#
you know something that you worked on
#
over the last decade and a half
#
that a lot of people must just have said
#
must just have said that hey you know
#
what is this first world fashion
#
you know so tell me a little bit
#
like do you think there was
#
sort of a conceptual boundary
#
much better suited than me
#
to answer this question
#
now called the colonial constitution
#
and you know he unpacks
#
the constitution was colonial
#
but he in some detail argues
#
that we perhaps had no option
#
but to create a colonial constitution
#
that was very much mapped
#
the British had created
#
it was extraordinarily difficult
#
because we had to stitch together
#
a set of principalities
#
and there was no other way to do it
#
other than to actually create
#
use the apparatus that exists
#
others would have had to
#
create institutions from scratch
#
once again the luxury of time
#
to do all of those things
#
I don't think it's worth
#
if we think of counterfactuals
#
we perhaps may not have had
#
where you stand depends on where you sit
#
when the country is falling apart
#
of course you'll centralize
#
and you know there are so many other things
#
you know in a landlocked state
#
become a part of Pakistan
#
you know Goa was doing its own thing
#
and you know various rulers
#
people had to get them all together
#
there were many compromises
#
one of the compromises was clearly this
#
perhaps the constituent assembly
#
designing a administrative framework
#
that treated us like subjects
#
but I think that is what it is
#
that Yatseshe Krishna did
#
is extraordinarily powerful
#
I think beyond reframing
#
I wouldn't fault him for that
#
I think there are various constraints
#
but it would have been nice
#
if he had actually reflected
#
more of that into the draft law
#
but even just the reframing
#
has resonated around the world
#
when I speak about this
#
there is a very instinctive feeling
#
that look this is the right way to do it
#
and once again this is hindsight
#
from the context of a ruler
#
that pejorative context
#
when we see how the algorithm
#
has truly made us a subject
#
of these people that manipulate us
#
is extremely refreshing
#
and so I really like the fact that
#
despite the many iterations
#
that we've had on the law
#
data principle data fiduciary
#
I'm giving something to you in trust
#
I'm entrusting it to you
#
to put on why you have my data
#
because you've collected
#
you have no right over it
#
I have just allowed you
#
if I feel you're misbehaving
#
you're not treating my data in trust
#
I should have the ability
#
to take it away from you
#
now that's not the context
#
and data sets have been collected
#
and are currently being used
#
to do everything with it
#
turns around on its head
#
no this is a fiduciary relationship
#
suddenly we've been telling
#
we've been showing a film
#
and you're sitting there
#
and on the seat besides you
#
you know as legend has it
#
or rather as I read in your book
#
hey Aadhaar is all okay
#
and then you have a conversation
#
and then for the next few years
#
which is even plagiarized
#
by another government department
#
but that's a different matter
#
so tell me that entire story
#
is way more than it actually
#
I mean you know the moment
#
you know at the same time
#
a similar identity project
#
was facing rough weather
#
got onto my white horse
#
But if you make a film on this
#
who would you like to play you?
#
bit character in this whole thing
#
it's not even important
#
At least a good character actor
#
It's not relevant at all
#
I think the point was that
#
Nandan and Manmohan Singh
#
and everyone who came up with this
#
from a developmental perspective
#
it's the responsibility
#
Now you can't serve someone
#
experience in the Indian context
#
not reaching the people
#
funds not reaching the people
#
they're supposed to reach
#
and all of those sorts of things
#
the recipient of a service
#
that person consistently gets
#
what he or she is entitled to
#
that the state should work towards
#
and the conceptualization
#
and the Identity Project
#
was very much from that perspective
#
I've worked in this space
#
worked on the space for a while
#
you know we're going down this path
#
there are a lot of cases
#
that talk about the right to privacy
#
but not sort of properly articulated
#
and even this project was going down
#
with a very developmental focus
#
but without thinking through
#
Bangalore to Delhi flight
#
so two and a half hours
#
two minute elevator pitch
#
I had a little longer to make the pitch
#
and you know I think he
#
whatever the machinery of the state was
#
to start them to think about this
#
Department of Personal Entrailing
#
had been given the responsibility
#
there was a there's a workshop
#
in a sense before the requirement
#
for pre-legislative consultation
#
there was this consultation
#
I remember representatives from
#
RBI and Ministry of Home Affairs
#
various government departments
#
as well as the private sector
#
or this was a very simple law
#
it was not intended to be
#
you got to understand that
#
this is in the 2011-2012 time frame
#
you know I mean the iPhone
#
about all of these things
#
and for various reasons
#
it didn't see the light of day
#
we had the AP Shah committee
#
came up with a few principles
#
I remember we then reflected
#
those principles in the draft
#
but then the government fell
#
and then it sort of just
#
but yeah so that was the
#
my very early encounter
#
with actually coming up
#
even though none of that
#
is there in this current draft
#
or the current law that we have
#
So tell me how you're thinking on
#
how to bring about privacy
#
in the face of all the new technology
#
and the challenge of making it future proof
#
how you began to think about that
#
because the intuitive way
#
is through the lens of consent
#
and you know when people ask that
#
why do you have a problem
#
with the government taking your data
#
when Google takes your data
#
and my obvious answer to that
#
you know I consent to giving Google
#
that can only be part of the answer
#
there are really three problems
#
with just talking about consent
#
as being the basis of how
#
our data should be used
#
one there's consent fatigue
#
you know you're all the time
#
which even for a lawyer
#
so the tendency is you scroll
#
to the bottom and you click
#
yeah I agree to all conditions
#
and therefore you're never
#
so what does that consent mean
#
then you talk about how
#
all the interconnections
#
between all of the data
#
the transformation of data
#
you know through this process
#
so how did your thinking
#
through this process evolve
#
that if consent isn't enough
#
if I consent to giving Amazon
#
my data that is not enough
#
and you need to regulate
#
Amazon at the same time
#
to do something about that
#
that can become a double-edged sword
#
you accept the principle
#
of the government regulating
#
then there is a great chance
#
because in the oppressive state
#
and suppress dissenters
#
so how does one then think
#
yeah I to be completely clear
#
when I worked on the 2011-2012 draft
#
I wasn't so enlightened
#
that draft was very much
#
but this thinking evolved
#
more recently I would say
#
it had not come into force
#
Europe with a very sophisticated
#
about to come into force
#
it was already obvious to me
#
is not going to be useful
#
you know just as you said
#
one of the favorite things
#
when I'm at a conference
#
all the privacy policies
#
on all the apps on your phone
#
usually there's one smart aleck
#
that app that you built yourself
#
when you wrote the privacy policy
#
usually something like that
#
it's all of these things
#
there are other nuances
#
relevant to your decision
#
that's too much information
#
process all the information
#
nor can you give consent
#
and as more and more data
#
as we go through our lives
#
of a consent-based approach
#
we're going to need to find
#
a different alternative
#
I actually wrote a paper
#
increasingly we're finding
#
to what we want out of it
#
processing of personal data
#
an accountability framework
#
was that companies were
#
and say but you signed it
#
with Cambridge Analytica
#
for us to see friends of friends
#
for us to share information
#
with friends of friends
#
why did we agree to that?
#
because it was really cool
#
someone who I'd never met
#
because a friend of mine
#
a really valuable thing
#
like Cambridge Analytica
#
to exponentially increase
#
and you see what happens
#
of this consent would be
#
they can quickly shut it down
#
much quicker than I could
#
I mean I would only know
#
Cambridge Analytica scam
#
but certainly the company
#
in the Beyond Consent paper
#
what is done with the data
#
who should be accountable
#
that they have collected
#
to allow them to do this
#
and that's the simple point
#
with the accountability framework
#
get out of jail free card
#
that there will be no consent
#
you cannot collect my data
#
but you cannot use my consent
#
and I think that's sort of the idea
#
in the accountability framework
#
we'll take another short break shortly
#
and then we'll come back
#
and your wonderful book
#
that we'll talk about it
#
everything's falling into place
#
but a sort of a final question
#
about the privacy journey
#
I'd encourage everyone to read it
#
one of your chapters there
#
that the right to privacy
#
that I welcome the judgment
#
that can be asked about that
#
Shouldn't the legislators
#
if the court starts doing that
#
what kind of precedent is there
#
going against the right
#
so you do a nine-bench thing
#
and I think that's also
#
sort of an important question
#
a question about ends and means
#
a constitutional democracy
#
then all the institutions
#
may have made a judgment
#
that is liked by you and me
#
it could be the other way around
#
and it could go in a direction
#
so just in a principled sense
#
the job of the legislature
#
for new laws to be made
#
Yeah what a deep question
#
particularly on the day
#
after the Article 370 judgment
#
you're absolutely right
#
there should be a separation
#
of the various functions
#
and it is the legislature's
#
amendments to the constitution
#
to amend the constitution
#
it's the most difficult
#
legislative exercise to do
#
through the basic structure doctrine
#
various judicial pronouncements
#
have allowed themselves
#
but to interpret existing laws
#
existing constitutional provisions
#
in a more expansive way
#
and I think it's important
#
to understand the first judgments
#
MP Sharma and Karak Singh
#
that were passed at a time
#
interpretation of the constitution
#
so if it was not explicitly written
#
they were not willing to look at it
#
you know after Keishnan Bharati
#
after many of the cases
#
after a decade and a half
#
because no matter what you do
#
you articulate the constitution
#
at a particular point in time
#
and it will very quickly
#
outside of that point in time
#
unless you allow the constitution
#
to become a living document
#
the interpretation of the constitution
#
of the various provisions
#
need to accord with what society
#
is at that new point in time
#
now within those constraints
#
to ring out of existing
#
provisions of the constitution
#
and that's what they do
#
Putuswami just articulates something
#
that for over 40-45 years
#
the courts have been holding
#
all that Putuswami does is
#
by constituting a nine-judge bench
#
revokes the precedent set
#
which was an eight-judge bench
#
and this is just a numerical thing
#
if there is an eight-judge bench
#
and so we needed to constitute
#
to definitively lay down the law
#
what is the law that they lay down
#
they essentially laid down the law
#
that had been accumulating
#
over the last 40-45 years
#
seeing that the right to privacy
#
is implicit in the fundamental right
#
which I think is perfectly acceptable
#
that Warren and Brandeis articulated
#
was the right to be left alone
#
that is very much the right to liberty
#
and if we are saying that
#
now we need to say that
#
encompasses a fundamental right to privacy
#
I don't see anything wrong with that
#
I certainly don't think that
#
I think they're providing clarity
#
or something that perhaps at the right
#
at the time of the framing
#
no one felt the need to articulate
#
now the irony of all of this
#
is that as we just discussed
#
and reject it at the time
#
if the judges who decided
#
were given that information
#
they may have thought differently
#
of the reasoning for their
#
you know to say it's implicit in
#
it was considered and rejected
#
so it's a very different sort of framing
#
I think it's perfectly within
#
the authority of the judiciary
#
to give existing provisions of the law
#
a more expansive interpretation
#
the requirements of society
#
as a living constitution
#
and just one final point on that
#
if you look at what's happening
#
in the US Supreme Court right now
#
we see the Supreme Court
#
given its current composition
#
revert to a more literal interpretation
#
you know the overturning of Roe versus Wade
#
and we're seeing it particularly
#
in the right to bear arms
#
which you know in the modern context
#
seems completely bizarre
#
it was introduced in the US Constitution
#
because absolutely we needed
#
to have private militia
#
so you know you're seeing this
#
in constitutional democracies
#
it'll expand and contract
#
we're going to keep finding these
#
people swinging between
#
allowing the constitution
#
to be a living document
#
having very literal interpretations
#
fitting what society needs
#
I think you know as spectators
#
we're not in the in the judiciary
#
as spectators we can merely
#
give context and understand
#
so I have a quick question
#
for you before the break
#
you can't go sleeveless
#
it sounds like a riddle
#
it's a dad joke actually
#
because they have the right
#
have you always wanted to be a writer
#
but never quite gotten down to it?
#
well I'd love to help you
#
I've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts
#
of my online course here
#
and an online community
#
of all my past students
#
a newsletter to showcase
#
and vibrant community interaction
#
spread over four weekends
#
about the craft and practice
#
there are many exercises
#
the course costs rupees
#
head on over to register
#
just a willingness to work hard
#
welcome back to the scene
#
I'm still with Rahul Mathan
#
we're going to get into
#
of your personal journey now
#
I won't say sidetracked
#
because I meant to talk
#
and the third way is next
#
I'm sort of more interested in
#
I'm not more interested
#
of your personal journey
#
circumstance had a little bit
#
a lot of things independently
#
which you may not have been doing
#
hey I can be an entrepreneur
#
I can do all this myself
#
I don't need to do the grind
#
it was more a push factor
#
and I was really hoping
#
that I could eventually
#
you know go up the ranks
#
and actually very early on
#
it was not going to happen
#
and despite many promises
#
that were being made to me
#
none of them were being fulfilled
#
quite frankly two years in
#
this was not going to go anywhere
#
and so if I want to really
#
make something for myself
#
there was no other firm
#
you know the the gumption
#
planning to set up on my own
#
the way you asked the question
#
nurtured into this life
#
I had no experience of it
#
I had there was no reason
#
why I should have succeeded
#
in the path that I was on
#
I could have continued to
#
with what my ambitions were
#
and so there was no option
#
the training required to do
#
a family of entrepreneurs
#
not a family of lawyers
#
why this should have been
#
the fact that I was in Bangalore
#
some administrative things
#
there was no one else to do it
#
something of an insight
#
into what it would take
#
if I was in a much larger office
#
where there were many people
#
but I don't think that's enough
#
to set up an organization
#
so yeah I mean I think it's
#
it's a lot of good luck
#
that we are where we are
#
or had any aptitude for it
#
what that early journey was
#
in the early days of Tri-Legal
#
because you are actually
#
earlier you were practicing law
#
now you're also an entrepreneur
#
with people in your workplace
#
and making the boss like you
#
with other brilliant people
#
you chose to partner with them
#
there's mutual respect there
#
like all of you are young
#
all of you are ambitious
#
all to human resentments
#
he's working more than me
#
like about learning the ropes
#
about learning human nature
#
done an episode of course
#
with one of those partners
#
and he had so many bad things
#
what kind of a colleague were you
#
I've listened to the episode
#
unless there's lots that
#
left on the cutting table
#
so what was that process like
#
in places very difficult
#
in places very exciting
#
I think we were very fortunate
#
anything about these people
#
Karan and Sridhar at all
#
and even though I knew them
#
had I ever worked with them
#
because these were people
#
was the path that was needed
#
and so more than anything
#
we knew what we were not
#
we knew that we were not
#
going to be a family firm
#
and so one of the very first
#
was not to name the firm
#
you know as a combination
#
because we wanted something
#
that had nothing to do with us
#
this was not inheritable
#
I can't remember if any of us
#
the idea of inheritance
#
that we didn't want to do that
#
why did we do all of this
#
because we had all come away
#
to bubble up to the front
#
and having been burnt by it
#
we were almost allergic to it
#
prevent that from happening
#
even if those structures
#
were designed to bind us
#
so I think it's with that
#
but the best in the world
#
and we'd all had the experience
#
of working as lawyers in India
#
with lawyers around the world
#
was working at the time
#
but he sort of spent a year
#
what the practice of law was
#
and how the practice of law
#
something that our children
#
so how do we just make it
#
into a more professional
#
the answers to their questions
#
in my previous law firm
#
after it was due to the clients
#
two weeks after the client
#
I had to turn it around
#
and it sort of felt to me
#
you know I'm turning around
#
if you had given it to me
#
why are you not doing it
#
and so that sort of became
#
the work the amount of time
#
the client that you will give it
#
you generally will give it
#
you should have a very good reason
#
these were the sorts of things
#
that we wanted to create
#
how to ensure cash flow
#
thinking about all sorts of
#
and somehow or the other
#
we're going to build a firm
#
with that common belief
#
and then all the other stuff
#
we learned along the way
#
like I've done episodes
#
with the previous people
#
you know Alok Prasanna Kumar
#
which of them told me this
#
both of them may have mentioned it
#
but the impression I got
#
is that if you do law in India
#
a very small sliver of people
#
really make a respectable profession
#
what you earlier described
#
outside the court doing
#
writing small affidavits
#
but there's really not much
#
and that kind of surprises me
#
and the rest are just struggling
#
as something that is more true
#
of the creative professions
#
like filmmaking or acting
#
whereas I would have thought of law
#
where you can be mediocre
#
it's not kind of a big deal
#
so my first question is really
#
and whether that has changed
#
you've described your college again
#
it was really different
#
So the state of law education
#
what was the ecosystem then like
#
would have told you about
#
and I think both of them
#
are staggeringly wealthy
#
command whatever they want
#
and speak for two minutes
#
but that is a very very small number
#
and I think that in every
#
think about elite actors
#
you think about elite athletes
#
there's that upper creamy layer
#
I say that with a sense of irony
#
if you measure by the amount
#
there is a certain elite
#
much more than everyone else
#
No no but I'm sure Joe Rogan
#
there's always a bigger garden
#
but remember there are people
#
and saying that's pretty big
#
I would do nothing else
#
I think it's probably true
#
that there's a vast number of lawyers
#
that are actually making
#
I don't think it's that
#
in a sense you're saying
#
I think the difference is
#
has radically democratized
#
that difference as well
#
and I think the point is
#
that the average salary
#
of a lawyer in a law firm
#
of a lawyer in a law firm
#
when you're not in a law firm
#
in the professional law
#
I don't know if you've had her
#
as a guest on your show
#
has written a lovely book
#
called Accidental Feminism
#
the thesis that they make
#
that the Indian elite law firms
#
without intending to be
#
are actually a very feminist place
#
and it's thoroughly worth reading
#
I will seek it out and read it
#
I mean I have questions
#
and maybe a little bit of Delhi
#
but it's a very compelling
#
it's such a counter-intuitive statement
#
so the point I'm trying to make is that
#
particularly the flourishing
#
typically the elite law schools
#
a very very lucrative career option
#
only so many law schools
#
so now the starting salaries
#
is comparable in some instances
#
to the upper end of the spectrum
#
to what people get out of an IIM
#
that's saying something for law
#
I think it's because of the structure
#
in which law firms are structured
#
I can certainly speak for mine
#
partners are sort of a cost center
#
they have revenue targets
#
and they have a certain team
#
that they need to manage
#
on those revenue targets
#
and so they are incentivized
#
actually to train people
#
to perform at a high level
#
because the greater performance
#
they can extract from the team
#
the greater the revenue
#
for the least amount of cost
#
and so by actually accumulating
#
and finding a construct
#
by which you can accumulate
#
each of whom has a team of say
#
10 people to generate revenue
#
the more profitable you can be
#
the dynamics come into it
#
how do we keep a hundred people
#
competing with each other
#
how do we keep these hundred people
#
these are all difficult challenges
#
that the modern law firms
#
but because of this premise
#
that we can accumulate a hundred people
#
because we have a hundred people
#
clients are very happy to come
#
to this group of hundred people
#
as opposed to that group of hundred people
#
which is not so specialized
#
to offer a much more compelling
#
to clients that are looking
#
than any of the other constructs
#
is really the reason why
#
perhaps the world of law
#
I haven't heard what Alok
#
I don't want to put words into his mouth
#
I haven't heard it either
#
I might be misattributing it
#
it might be some other lawyer
#
I think the point though
#
this point that I'm making
#
there is a faster progression
#
in a litigating chamber
#
who can be commercially successful
#
have commercially successful careers
#
than in the traditional litigation route
#
because really it's very very
#
it's extremely competitive
#
in the traditional litigation route
#
with none of the support structures
#
we are forced to train our people
#
we are forced to ensure that
#
not only are we training them
#
we're also training them on soft skills
#
you know if you're in front of a client
#
how do you deal with those kinds of situations
#
find internal mechanisms
#
from tearing each other apart
#
together working for a much larger goal
#
and this is a constant effort
#
but for this construct of a law firm
#
I don't think we could have
#
to achieve some of that kind of success
#
was actually going to be about exactly that
#
the ecosystem of law firms
#
like I would imagine what happens is that
#
you have a set of firms
#
which function in a particular kind of way
#
maybe they're family firms
#
those practices are normalized
#
and we all know what tends to happen
#
to big companies anyway
#
in terms of the bureaucracies that built in
#
and how they lose their nimbleness
#
and the dynamics and the politics within them
#
when I hear about the 80s and the 90s
#
there's a little bit of that
#
different kinds of old boys clubs happening
#
and then there is a new wave of firms
#
and from whatever I hear again
#
try legal very much at the forefront of that
#
and changes that way of working
#
and creates new kind of incentives
#
so I want you to tell me both about
#
what the ecosystem of firms
#
and are you just an outlier
#
or is there a larger change that has happened
#
in terms of the way that firms set themselves up
#
because the way that you describe it
#
you thought of the structure of your firm
#
and in a sense what you describe
#
as having a hundred partners
#
with hundred different teams
#
and each of them whatever
#
the sort of enlightened policy
#
Google followed at one point
#
they'd be happy to have
#
all kinds of little little projects
#
and not think of controlling everything
#
in a central top down kind of way
#
so like first tell me what
#
the ecosystem of firms was like
#
and then tell me your learnings
#
and tell me the landscape now
#
like has it changed to a substantial extent
#
or were you the you know
#
or whatever the glorious term might be
#
but what were the learnings there
#
in terms of how you structure a firm
#
and do those apply to a legal firm alone
#
or are they generalizable outwards?
#
difficult questions to answer
#
in a short period of time
#
but as you say you know
#
so like bit by bit right
#
let's just let's just split it into
#
you know what the law firms
#
were like around the world
#
of this sort of a professional firm
#
with all these principles of management
#
so you know you don't inherit anything
#
was well established in the west
#
US firms European firms
#
and to be completely clear
#
in those jurisdictions also
#
there was exactly the same problems
#
the other firm Allen and Overy
#
Mr. Allen and Mr. Overy
#
were the founders of the firm
#
and you know it took an effort
#
to actually ensure that
#
it was not their children
#
and so they would only ever be partners
#
whose names surnames were Allen and
#
so they went through that
#
but they had gone through that
#
before I came on the scene
#
and so I had an exemplar from outside
#
I as in all of us in the firm
#
had exemplars from outside
#
within the country however
#
and I think it's just a function of time
#
when we set up the firm
#
had happened some time back
#
but the legal function was not
#
the way it is right now
#
right now it's a highly specialized
#
highly demanding legal function
#
and so I think it's only a question
#
what the market demands
#
the market will deliver
#
the market didn't really demand
#
to have this and so in a sense
#
I wouldn't say that we were outliers
#
or we were trailblazers
#
there were firms outside
#
who were already doing it
#
it's not like we invented this
#
it was more what we personally
#
the founders of the firm
#
decided that we would not be
#
and that was more a question of values
#
than something that the market demanded
#
in a sense when we went down that path
#
we perhaps were leaving money on the table
#
because of these weird values
#
that we would do it in this way
#
we could have become much richer
#
if we had not stuck to these values
#
but I think that thanks to the fact
#
that we brought those values
#
to the table right in the beginning
#
we were able to create an institution
#
in the way that we have
#
in the time frame that we have
#
so in a sense we deferred value creation
#
from the early stage to a later stage
#
as well as in importance
#
you know just a design of a law firm
#
that is different from other law firms
#
these are all things that were
#
I mean if there's any credit that
#
I would in all modesty like to
#
that I would like to should accrue to us
#
is the fact that even when it was not obvious
#
that for some strange reason
#
we set out and were willing to commit to
#
after the founding of the firm
#
you can see that it paid off
#
it was not obvious it was going to pay off
#
you know I think if there's anything that
#
I would like to take credit for
#
that all of us would take credit for
#
is that we believed in a future
#
a future that could potentially exist
#
that was there was no evidence
#
in the history of Indian law firms
#
up to the date that it would succeed
#
there was no evidence that this
#
particular group of people
#
who had come together to create it
#
would be able to pull it off
#
but we still sort of stuck with it
#
humans invent these futures
#
that they would like to aspire to
#
and that was that's sort of
#
the unique thing about humans
#
that was sort of the unique thing
#
about those initial founding days
#
where we was envisioning a future
#
we had no hope of creating
#
and so yes I mean I think therefore
#
I wouldn't say that we're trailblazers
#
the fact that we were lucky enough
#
to constantly hold each other accountable
#
the fact that we were willing
#
to have tough conversations
#
perhaps curb some of our instincts
#
to slower than we otherwise could have
#
lowest common denominator of values
#
I think all of those things
#
sort of sort of play out
#
we very rarely have the luxury
#
I think the fact that we didn't fall apart
#
is also quite remarkable
#
we could have along the way
#
had irreconcilable differences
#
there were many occasions
#
I don't know how much Akshay
#
but there are many occasions
#
where even the founding team
#
challenging conversations
#
but I think the reason why
#
we're here now is because
#
those were conversations
#
but we didn't we weren't shaken
#
from that common vision
#
I think as I said in the beginning
#
may have been different
#
we may have had disagreements
#
and I think that's the reason
#
why we managed to get here
#
I imagine when you embark
#
upon the kind of journey
#
in that country at least
#
with similar young people
#
arrogance and self-belief
#
no I think it's arrogance
#
I think we shouldn't sugarcoat it
#
it was just completely arrogant to think
#
and to be completely honest
#
in 2000 when we signed the deed
#
what tri-legal has become now
#
I mean we were arrogant
#
but even in our arrogance
#
we could never have conceptualized
#
the future that currently exists
#
so yes it was complete arrogance
#
is a really strong word
#
but there's nothing else to
#
you could build a firm like this
#
No and then that arrogance
#
it got you past that first step
#
what I'm curious about is
#
of managing the business
#
and managing the people
#
then change you as a person
#
that arrogance perforce
#
a certain kind of humility
#
a certain kind of willingness
#
that you are wrong sometimes
#
and to be open to learning
#
what was that process like
#
the process of growing up drastically
#
and you hit the nail on the head
#
I think the problem with arrogance
#
to build a successful firm
#
but it is absolutely fatal
#
who can work well together
#
and how do the two sit together
#
in the same human being
#
I think our great value
#
because we were all arrogant
#
but luckily we were not
#
all arrogant at the same time
#
at a particular point in time
#
to just remind the other person
#
that look now is the time
#
and we've each told each other this
#
and what's really remarkable
#
is that we've all listened
#
it could be that our arrogance
#
I'm just going to go ahead and do it
#
but we all took the time to listen
#
these are all the lucky things
#
we could have had a bunch of people
#
one of whom would not listen
#
it's a feature not a bug
#
and that also in a sense
#
is a feature of the construct
#
we would not have got to where we are
#
to have all of those things
#
I think if you're looking
#
for this to be replicable
#
I don't know how to make it replicable
#
You know the show at Ajay and I do
#
the crew that works with us
#
are these two young people
#
who's a 22-year-old playwright
#
who's a 19-year-old self-taught
#
filmmaker, editor etc etc
#
and they performed together
#
in a musical played at Vaishnav Road
#
recently called The Magic Fruit
#
I'll link to their Instagram
#
and I was completely blown away
#
they had live musicians
#
a band playing on stage
#
and performing the songs
#
that thank God these guys are young
#
because nobody who's age 40
#
is going to have the audacity
#
of doing something like this
#
like you know by that time
#
you know life has sort of
#
that that audacity is gone
#
you could call it arrogance
#
these people and you know
#
their real selves are like
#
but there is that audacity
#
we won't let self-doubt hold us back
#
and that's such a beautiful quality
#
perhaps a better way to say it
#
it's a kind of way to say it
#
I doubt that I could have done it
#
so many counterfactuals
#
just forget about the counterfactuals
#
is exactly what happened
#
many many things had to fall into place
#
we're really lucky that it did
#
but also what the firm shows is possible
#
and I think that's also important
#
and in fact I hope no one does
#
I hope you create your own flavor of this
#
but there's a lot in this
#
that the art of the possible
#
you know five, six people
#
which requires each of those type A
#
because that's the only way
#
that we can get past a hump
#
I don't think that there's a
#
that you have to take for this
#
but at least this shows
#
that a path is possible
#
going back to that whole theme of you know
#
the joys the audacity of being young
#
you know there's that old saying
#
about how youth is wasted on the young
#
and I'm now thinking here
#
wisdom is wasted on the old
#
because like what do you do with it right
#
so tell me about your journey
#
and because what begins to happen then
#
is that like I don't know
#
if you were always tech-centric
#
but you essentially become
#
an expert in that field
#
that's where your interests are focused
#
and when I read both your books
#
what I am getting out of them
#
is a deep sense of history
#
not just the history of law
#
behind you know the right to privacy
#
or data protection or whatever
#
but just a really deep sense of history
#
where you're going back all the way
#
and you're trying to figure out
#
the structure of societies
#
and how we live together
#
and what came out of that
#
so is this stuff that you got into
#
once you were deeply into the weeds
#
or perhaps even once you decided
#
you know tell me about that process
#
of your intellectual evolution
#
you are not just doing API stuff
#
all these larger questions
#
I was a technology lawyer
#
I was in the tech space
#
right from the beginning
#
2000 from 1998 before Y2K
#
and that's largely because
#
I was sitting in Bangalore
#
so just by sure percentage
#
very heavy percentage of my clients
#
were in the tech spaces
#
so I had to deal with this all the time
#
and as a result of that
#
that apply to technology
#
answering these questions
#
so what that has given me
#
is a historical perspective
#
so your question around history
#
yes I think what I started to realize
#
was that clients see value
#
a historical context to it
#
why this absurd requirement
#
exists in telecom regulation
#
then it evolved into this
#
then it evolved into that
#
and then now we have this
#
and then they were like
#
okay now this makes perfect sense
#
like a happy peaceful client
#
is like a much better client
#
I don't know what's happening
#
and so the use of history
#
once again it has a very calming
#
I don't know if it calms you
#
I pointed to pessimist archive
#
we've gone through these
#
we were completely anxious
#
and then that anxiety we found
#
was completely misplaced
#
because it's not as bad
#
actually makes you feel
#
very challenging time now
#
there is an artificial intelligence
#
lurking behind the scenes
#
and destroy all of mankind
#
we could keep us up at night
#
and that's the reason why
#
of all of these technologies
#
so let's sort of talk about
#
but just to set the stage
#
that we are going to progress
#
so much more in 20 years
#
that the pace of change
#
and we'll probably be going
#
who knows where it's going to take us
#
that you've shared in your book
#
from 400 million people
#
on the internet in 2000
#
there are 5 billion today
#
or at the time of writing the book
#
probably 6 billion by now
#
and that is now projected
#
so 25 percent of global traffic
#
and this makes me very sad
#
why aren't they watching
#
everything is everything
#
from the second largest market
#
as the data has exploded
#
so has the power of technology
#
like we've seen in navigation
#
like we've seen in transport
#
I remember a friend of mine
#
entrepreneur Uday Shankar
#
that people in this generation
#
miraculous things so fast
#
you know Arthur C. Clarke
#
sufficiently advanced technology
#
that we will never get lost
#
smart devices around us are magic
#
that my most listen to genre
#
was when I saw it on Spotify rap
#
and it's my favorite genre
#
that while listening to music
#
to make recommendations to me
#
and when I have picked stuff
#
and gone deeper into those
#
the thing called permanent wave
#
it must be referring to are
#
okay so then the algorithm
#
knows you better than you
#
better than I know myself
#
what permanent wave was
#
but I fucking love permanent wave
#
that is what I have been told
#
and I absolutely believe it
#
so tell me a little bit about this
#
in such a bewilderingly fast way
#
the things that algorithms
#
are kind of doing to us
#
and the way the incentives are
#
I sometimes think about
#
if a lot of these sites
#
became the common model
#
I think the world would be
#
because then we would not
#
we would be the paying customers
#
and the product would have to be
#
whatever gave us satisfaction
#
which might have ended up
#
but because advertising
#
and all of these are free
#
who can grab my attention more
#
who can hack my brain better
#
where algorithms end up
#
in trying to maximize engagement
#
amplifying the worst instincts
#
and make us more tribal
#
evolved through these years
#
because you were a tech lawyer
#
the field was evolving really fast
#
I'm sure all your clients
#
would have to deal with
#
many of these questions
#
and beyond a certain point
#
it then becomes a question
#
of what do we do for this
#
regulation seems an obvious answer
#
in your personal evolution
#
I think one is to be aware
#
and you're absolutely right
#
this happened so bewilderingly fast
#
to predict in real time
#
or even to explain in real time
#
what exactly is happening
#
and so maybe it's worthwhile
#
slowing it down to just say
#
how we got to where we are
#
and if we think about it
#
extraordinarily powerful things
#
they could crunch numbers
#
and the very first computers
#
were used to crunch the census
#
actually categorize people
#
delivering services to them
#
identifying them better
#
all those sorts of things
#
because an individual computer
#
if you could access the computer
#
but if you could network the computer
#
you can access it from anywhere
#
plus you could multiply
#
what is in that computer
#
with all the computers connected
#
and that's sort of the internet
#
and then you accelerated
#
that you have to go to a room
#
you could make it a laptop
#
but then mobile computing
#
the very early mobile computers
#
I don't know if you ever used
#
you know I'm an early adopter
#
on all these technologies
#
well the really earliest
#
handheld computational device
#
it was called the Simputer
#
it was the time device of the year
#
it was seven years before
#
what the iPhone would do
#
you know we got the palm pilot
#
which in the phone form
#
you know the Blackberry
#
once computing became mobile
#
one additional thing was
#
with a bunch of sensors
#
now there are so many sensors
#
the data that was being collected
#
exponentially increased
#
allowed all of this to happen
#
there was tremendous benefit
#
that we were getting out of this
#
is actually just completely
#
you know one trip to DC
#
the next trip there was
#
one trip there was no Uber
#
the next trip there was
#
you know getting a taxi
#
as it goes around the block
#
there's a line of taxis
#
the existence of the other
#
so when you think about Uber
#
essentially what Uber does
#
is it brought demand to supply
#
and it showed the location
#
and allowed the two of them
#
there was a smart algorithm
#
that allowed people to choose
#
you could choose the rider
#
how many things were unlocked
#
could be then integrated
#
could then be integrated
#
could then be integrated
#
the traveling salesman problem
#
this driver to intersect
#
I mean look at the amount
#
of things that came together
#
and gave us this magical result
#
that it doesn't understand music
#
what it is you're selecting
#
with many other people like you
#
who also like similar things
#
things that a group of people
#
even though not one of them
#
I mean these are remarkable things
#
when you have the ability
#
across vast amounts of data
#
and keep in a Bayesian kind of way
#
revalidating their priors
#
the point of all of this
#
these evolutions of technology
#
the accelerations of technology
#
have been tremendously beneficial
#
and I think for a good part
#
these are all the wonderful things
#
the harms that technology cause
#
that we don't stop to think about
#
that it has provided us
#
and I think it's important to
#
talk about all the harms
#
and all the ways it goes wrong
#
but it's really important to
#
from what these technologies are
#
a couple of passages from your book
#
because they blew my mind
#
I think technology is wonderful
#
know all the myriad ways
#
in which it is wonderful
#
an AI platform in Hangzhou
#
by optimizing traffic signals
#
can dynamically be managed
#
to allow first responders
#
faster than anywhere else
#
a ubiquitous network of cameras
#
incidents of child abduction
#
has a Fitbit heart tracker
#
the police were puzzled
#
her stepfather Anthony Ailo
#
to drop off some homemade pizza
#
was alive when he had left
#
but as the investigation wore on
#
had spiked significantly
#
when she was still with Ailo
#
and that it slowed down
#
this was enough for Anthony
#
these books are full of stories
#
this is not boring policy books
#
there's also another one
#
where Taiwan's missile command was
#
there is a cautionary tale here
#
even when the intention
#
is good like you know with
#
China social credit system
#
so tell me a little bit about
#
sort of the worrying ways
#
the title of this podcast
#
the seen and the unseen
#
the seen ways are obviously
#
easy to wrap our heads around
#
that are really worrying
#
the entire history of all
#
the ways in which technology
#
are I would say misused
#
a very intentional action
#
but just it causes harm
#
and the examples that you gave
#
you know the Fitbit tracker
#
and many other smart devices
#
I give examples of the Alexa
#
in different different stories
#
are now being called upon
#
as witnesses to a crime
#
and all of these smart devices
#
they may not be listening
#
but they can be activated
#
and in order to be activated
#
by the activation phrase
#
they have to be listening
#
they're accidentally activated
#
by something which they misheard
#
some evidence of an altercation
#
which the police could then use
#
we think that this person
#
so I don't think any of these
#
these wearable technologies
#
perform the function of witnesses
#
but now that they exist
#
the new reality is that
#
they indeed are witnesses
#
from the heart rate information
#
there's no way you can fudge that
#
that indeed this is evidence
#
when her father-in-law was there
#
it's evidence that a court
#
but this was not the intended
#
in technology regulation
#
we need to be particularly mindful
#
of these sorts of things
#
these devices can be used
#
to perhaps solve a crime
#
they could equally be used
#
in ways that would be horrifying
#
where I think one of these watches
#
and there were three categories
#
I think mild and mild sex
#
that are activity monitors
#
so now sex is an activity
#
which would spike your heart rate
#
and it was for some reason
#
what sort of sex you're having
#
was turned on by default
#
that it could be broadcast
#
the friends that you competed with
#
you had a small group of friends
#
that you would post your thing
#
just to motivate each other
#
and you were also posting
#
this sort of information
#
and if your spouse was one of them
#
you were having fun with
#
now I'm not getting into
#
those sorts of model questions
#
that this was being broadcast
#
I guess just very simple data points
#
what is your heart rate
#
in which the accelerometer
#
and so it translates into
#
and all of that is perfectly fine
#
but I think the privacy concern then is
#
to broadcast by default
#
well some engineer somewhere said
#
look it's probably useful
#
to give people a single button
#
by which they broadcast
#
all their health activity
#
they said whether they're having sex
#
and so that all of that
#
became part of the thing
#
this is the sort of unseen thing
#
think about the consequences
#
we think it should not have been done
#
that guy was just saying
#
I'm just making people's life easy
#
I don't want them to press
#
a whole bunch of buttons
#
and just turn it all on
#
this is the sort of stuff
#
is really most interesting to me
#
that technology has caused
#
these sorts of technology has caused
#
what was the thinking behind this
#
we mentioned a little earlier
#
the friend of friends concept
#
it was a perfectly acceptable
#
in fact I would have loved
#
that I was in touch with
#
because this was enabled
#
but see that sort of the downside
#
the unseen consequence of it
#
none of us were aware of it
#
so many of these incidents happening
#
now I think we are much more evolved
#
I think all technology companies
#
internal policy mechanisms
#
it's not that we don't get things wrong
#
I think there are always frontiers
#
with artificial intelligence right now
#
which is a frontier technology
#
where we're seeing all sorts of
#
horrendous things happening
#
and that is bound to happen
#
with frontier technologies
#
social media is no longer
#
they've got it all wrapped up
#
harmful things happening
#
but it's pretty much under control
#
and if there's a harmful
#
new harmful thing that happens
#
they know how to shut it down
#
it's not the same with AI
#
AI right now is the way
#
social media was 10 years ago
#
and we're going to have to
#
face those sorts of pain points
#
new regulatory tools and levers
#
tell me about the different approaches
#
that came up through the 90s
#
like one of the early sort of questions
#
is a platform to be treated
#
as equivalent to a publisher
#
that whatever is published
#
or are you treated as equivalent
#
you can't really be blamed
#
decided in such a way that
#
section 230 of the 1996
#
Act by Ron Wyden and Chris Cox
#
who were young senators
#
from opposing parties at the time
#
which then provided a guideline
#
quote no provider or user
#
of an interactive computer service
#
as a publisher or speaker
#
of any information provided
#
so which means Facebook
#
can stop worrying about
#
this American laissez-faire approach
#
went too far in one direction
#
to sort of get emboldened
#
they had so much protection
#
also had a different problem
#
in that it stifled innovation
#
because there were so many controls
#
imposed on these companies
#
and these are two extremes
#
that you eventually come to later
#
and from our own vantage point
#
the ability to make something
#
that avoids both these mistakes
#
and kind of gets it right
#
but before we come to that
#
take me through sort of
#
that were happening around this
#
why the American approach
#
why the European approach
#
what was the discourse like
#
and sum up your question
#
we'll come to the third way
#
there is no digression in our show
#
so that's the reason for the book
#
ways of doing data governance
#
different things to the table
#
Communications Decency Act
#
which introduced section 230
#
and there's a lovely book
#
that created the internet
#
if you're interested in this
#
and I think it's a really interesting
#
point in time to reflect
#
it's coming under so much stress
#
the internet was nascent
#
it was being brought under
#
user generated comments
#
and the kind of liability
#
and they would just like say
#
look it's not worth the
#
cost of fighting these lawsuits
#
I might as well just shut them down
#
so it's a remarkable bipartisan
#
one of them is a senator
#
no longer a public servant
#
look we've got to allow
#
this technology to flourish
#
and the protection they came up with
#
or are you a bookseller
#
or rather if you're the editor
#
just think about an editor
#
the editor of a magazine
#
to sort of not publish an article
#
and if they allow an article
#
they will take the responsibility
#
for actually not removing
#
that defamatory content
#
this is different from a bookseller
#
now if the book is a defamatory book
#
they've got stock the book
#
that's a completely different thing
#
but you can't ask the bookseller
#
that's not the way it works
#
people who managed the forums
#
on which user-generated content
#
and so the whole concept was
#
that if you receive a message
#
you don't alter the message
#
you just create a place
#
can be viewed by other people
#
you can't be liable for what
#
the person who put the message up
#
that's sort of the origin
#
that gets then replicated
#
in laws around the world
#
of intermediary liability
#
of intermediary liability
#
essentially says that intermediaries
#
if you define them as intermediaries
#
is served up on their platforms
#
Jeff Kossoff in his book
#
point to section 230 to say that
#
being passed at that time
#
perhaps we wouldn't have had
#
the internet that we know
#
and so the internet then explodes
#
we've got platforms that
#
because of the algorithms
#
actually sitting and moderating
#
but the algorithms are now
#
but through amplification
#
you know that could even be
#
if you're like a neo-Nazi
#
it could be fascist content
#
which perhaps is not aligned
#
with the values of the country
#
or since they're global entities
#
west coast left liberal attitudes
#
and beliefs that don't sit
#
which has a completely different
#
but still can access the internet
#
extremely complicated questions
#
and so all of these entities
#
the section 230 exemption
#
as it has been modified
#
in countries around the world
#
an intermediary liability
#
and so now we're starting to see
#
that there are challenges
#
behind intermediary liability
#
of internet exceptionalism
#
which says that the internet
#
is a very different space
#
that govern the internet
#
as the laws that govern
#
the same set of parties
#
to a different treatment
#
for e-commerce companies
#
there's import duties are with
#
all sorts of different adjustments
#
is a fundamentally different place
#
we start to see companies
#
they're a law unto themselves
#
which now is a population
#
which is larger than the country
#
in which they're registered
#
I mean just think about
#
the US is 350 million people
#
some of these platforms
#
have one two billion people
#
writing the constitution
#
and a lot of us spend a lot of time
#
so the first way of allowing
#
this laissez faire approach
#
that run these platforms
#
to write the constitution
#
to which everyone listens to
#
exaggerating the timeline
#
but Europe looks at this
#
prescribe certain restrictions
#
those rules have to be written
#
you can write the rules
#
but you can't override the rules
#
that we are now prescribing
#
with a bunch of regulations
#
is the data protection regulation
#
which eventually crystallizes into
#
the general data protection regulation
#
which becomes law in 2018
#
but they have a whole strategy right now
#
the most recent of which
#
was passed just a few days
#
or at least reached agreement
#
which is the European AI Act
#
the digital markets act
#
ticket of regulatory restrictions
#
that are selling goods online
#
companies that are providing
#
companies that are collecting data
#
all these sorts of things
#
in addition to the terms of service
#
of these private companies
#
also by the regulations
#
and Europe is remarkable
#
in that particularly GDPR
#
who interacts with Europe
#
interacts with companies
#
that are based in Europe
#
as much privacy protection
#
with this concept of adequacy
#
from a privacy perspective
#
in order for you to continue
#
which then forces countries
#
to start enacting GDPR style laws
#
this is why I call it a viral law
#
countries around the world
#
who in this globalized age
#
without interacting with Europe
#
and so all these laws start getting
#
and so from a completely laissez-faire world
#
where there is this internet exceptionalism
#
we rapidly move to a world
#
very regulatory focused approach
#
and when you look at that
#
neither the one nor the other
#
in a sense is effective
#
the problem with regulation
#
just take a look at GDPR
#
it took from maybe four years
#
to for people to come to an agreement
#
and it took another two years
#
the AI act which has taken
#
since before generative AI
#
once generative AI came
#
it's now they've reached an agreement
#
let's say it gets enacted
#
it will take another 12 to 24 months
#
before it is come into effect
#
by which time generative AI
#
would be a completely different thing
#
with trying to fight technology
#
or curb technology with regulation
#
increasingly rapidly accelerating
#
so the rate at which you can enact laws
#
will far lag behind the rate
#
at which the technology
#
that you're supposed to regulate
#
will have powers and do things
#
beyond what the law was intended to regulate
#
so I think that the thesis of the book
#
is that we had the first way
#
which is the internet exceptionalism
#
both of them were necessary
#
at the time that they were enacted
#
but sitting where we are right now
#
at least the proposition is that
#
neither are the effective way
#
to proceed in the current day and age
#
so when you write about
#
India's journey building
#
that digital public infrastructure
#
one of the things that strikes me
#
as if you were there at the start
#
though perhaps you weren't
#
but it is almost as if you were there
#
because what you describe as a third way
#
is actually baked into the journey
#
and all of that to an extent
#
that I had never realized
#
because I have thought about some of these
#
in a very piecemeal kind of way
#
but there is this beautiful quote
#
in your book by Steve Jobs
#
design is not just what it looks like
#
and what I sort of learned from your book
#
the sort of world that you want to see
#
baking it into the code itself
#
baking it into how the technology works
#
so you don't need to pass a separate law
#
you're getting the same effect
#
by virtue of the technology itself
#
in all kinds of wrong directions also
#
but in this particular case
#
not gone in the wrong directions
#
tell me a little bit more about this
#
like first define the third way for me
#
and then take me through
#
India's entire DPI journey as well
#
I don't want to take too much credit for this
#
Lawrence Lessig came up in a seminal work
#
I think well before his time
#
called code and the other laws of cyberspace
#
please link in the show notes to that
#
because it's absolutely a fabulous book
#
particularly reading it now 25 years
#
20-23 years or after it was written
#
but essentially he says that
#
in the internet protocols
#
are law and the internet is bound
#
to abide by what the protocols permit
#
you to do on the internet
#
so you know if the protocol
#
does not allow you to use
#
flash as a way to see videos
#
you can't use flash as a way to see videos
#
but so the protocol html5 had to be changed
#
to allow video to be native within
#
you mentioned earlier on
#
you mentioned something else
#
it would have been nice
#
if we could have done some micro payment
#
for you know viewing a site
#
we would have not become the product
#
perhaps we could have just sort of paid
#
the protocol was written for it
#
which is essentially payment not found
#
so the 403 error was baked
#
into the original design of the internet
#
that means that in order to see the site
#
you need to point me to a payment mechanism
#
otherwise you won't be able to read the site
#
and that payment mechanism
#
could have been a micro payment mechanism
#
where there's just like some amount of money
#
you know at the end of the year
#
you may spend a grand total of a thousand rupees
#
but you know that would have been divided
#
among all the various websites you saw
#
just think that that protocol exists
#
in the internet you use today
#
except the micro payments technology
#
because the banks didn't think
#
that was a good thing to do
#
so I mean the point that I think Lesig made
#
is that it is impossible
#
to do an incredible amount of
#
and this is also sort of economic design
#
this is also sort of societal design
#
by taking control of the protocols
#
on which all of this runs
#
and you can build all sorts of apps
#
and websites and things on top of it
#
but because the underlying protocol
#
says that these are the things you can't
#
no matter what you do in the app
#
you can't go against this fundamental rule
#
of the way the internet works
#
and all that we did in India really
#
through protocols articulate
#
a whole bunch of things
#
and in the digital public infrastructure
#
that we built embed certain values
#
into that digital public infrastructure
#
I mean yes no I mean I wasn't there
#
building all of these things
#
you know from other onwards
#
but I was also you know around
#
we've had conversations with people
#
I wouldn't say that I was responsible
#
for building all of this in
#
but particularly towards the later stage
#
and you know in the book
#
I talk a lot about the DEPA architecture
#
which I think is the most sophisticated
#
implementation of some of these values
#
you know certainly something
#
that was very thought through
#
it was not something that was accidental
#
and I think that the idea in the book
#
is that if you take Lessig's philosophy
#
and you apply it to the modern world
#
where so much of our lives is digital
#
the way we identify ourselves
#
before we catch a flight
#
all of these things are digital
#
we could certainly say that look
#
this is the privacy law
#
which prevents you from doing this
#
but if we actually build the protocols
#
such that even if you wanted to
#
that would perhaps be a much more effective way
#
and you know one of the examples I give
#
is that if you think about Aadhaar
#
Aadhaar is a way to identify yourself
#
and there are many ways
#
in which to implement this
#
one of those could have been to search
#
you know I give an Aadhaar number
#
I could run that Aadhaar number
#
through the entire database
#
and identify who matches that number
#
it would have been extremely efficient
#
you know none of us would have to
#
have the bother of doing what we're doing now
#
but it was also a privacy concern
#
because anyone who gets my Aadhaar number
#
could actually find all sorts of information
#
about me by just sort of searching the internet
#
and then we'd have had to lock down
#
which you know we've already locked down
#
but why even create this feature
#
so Aadhaar was designed without a search capability
#
you can't search the database
#
this is a number and this is a name
#
tell me if the number matches the name
#
and you'll get a yes no authentication
#
if you have a higher level of permission
#
this is the number that has been provided to me
#
this individual wants to give me
#
Aadhaar approved KYC information
#
which is a set of four fields
#
now you can't search for those things
#
you have to receive it with the KYC
#
the other EKYC consent of the person
#
whose number this pertains to
#
and how do we secure all of that
#
either with biometrics or with OTP
#
any of the other authentication methods to do it
#
the reason I'm mentioning all of this
#
is because these are design choices
#
and if you in the vast number of design choices
#
if you can choose a design choice
#
that is more oriented towards ensuring privacy than not
#
it is almost incumbent on you
#
as someone who's building technology
#
where the protocols are actually going to define the law
#
to choose the particular design choice
#
that marries with your values
#
now I don't want to say more than that
#
I mean I think if the values of a particular nation
#
or a state are different
#
of course they can design the protocol in different ways
#
but the way India's DPI has been designed
#
is very much in line with some of these sorts of values
#
that I think are reflected in some of the examples
#
yeah I mean I love the way how you sort of demonstrated
#
how this desire for privacy is actually baked into Aadhaar
#
like the impression that is there
#
in the common imagination among many
#
is that Aadhaar is some kind of central database
#
and people can hack into it
#
and they can get all our data
#
but actually there's nothing like that
#
when I go to a bank with my Aadhaar card
#
the bank stores my Aadhaar number
#
after getting the yes-no verification
#
but none of my banking data goes into any other database
#
when I open a mobile phone account
#
and I think they opened some records
#
60 million in their first month of operation
#
170 million whatever yeah
#
and for once I have understated something
#
and you know there again
#
the mobile phone company authenticates me
#
with the Aadhaar number
#
but there is no transfer of data
#
all the data remains in these separate kind of silos
#
and therefore sort of privacy is guaranteed
#
tell me a little bit more about the design principles
#
that bake in these values
#
into the different aspects
#
of you know the digital infrastructure
#
like you speak about four particular design principles
#
unbundling interoperability
#
federation and protocols
#
and I'm actually going to ask you
#
to elaborate on each of these
#
because I felt that even with the reading
#
that I had some misconceptions
#
which actually got cleared up by this
#
for example I have so I resisted Aadhaar
#
until the very very end
#
until they linked it to the PAN card
#
and I couldn't do anything
#
on the principle which I still stand by
#
that it should not have been coerced upon me
#
it should not have been mandatory
#
I have resisted DG Yatra until today
#
you know I'll go to an airport
#
and in Bombay airport the last time I went
#
I think the first five gates were DG Yatra only
#
and then I had to go all the way to gate six
#
and I was like no I don't want to be coerced into this
#
and I don't want the government tracking me
#
but one of the things I learned from your book is
#
actually the government is not tracking me
#
it's just an authentication thing
#
and the data apparently vanishes after 24 hours
#
and the data isn't sort of stored anywhere
#
the particular insidious app
#
which my building uses my gate
#
and almost certainly illegal
#
and the digital public infrastructure
#
has all these protections kind of baked into it
#
so I wanted to elaborate on
#
all of these features of the design
#
one by one starting with Unbundling
#
yeah look I mean you said
#
many times privacy is guaranteed
#
and you know even I wouldn't go so far
#
I don't think that we can ever guarantee anything
#
I think we can do our best to optimize for it
#
knowing full well that something would come in the way
#
and just be mindful and always vigilant
#
and sort of correct for it
#
what I should probably have said is that
#
it's optimized for it is you know
#
so it's not like it's ignored
#
and I think you know in the context you said it
#
yes I mean I was just quibbling
#
but I think the point is that a lot of people believe
#
that Aadhaar is a central repository
#
it is the furthest from that
#
in fact it's actually very difficult
#
it was the perhaps the most inconvenient design
#
of if the state was despotic and autocratic
#
this is the most inconvenient design
#
they could have come up with
#
because they have kept one database
#
where you've got you know
#
yes there are the biometrics
#
but that biometrics were largely used to deduplicate you
#
and then the useful information
#
is information that you would get
#
just like if you apply for a magazine subscription
#
you'd have to provide more information
#
than you actually provide to the Aadhaar
#
and so this is information
#
that's just widely available right now
#
this is not a particular secret
#
but I think the key element of this
#
is this federated design
#
and the fact that we actually consciously keep data
#
without any attempt to actually centralize it
#
is we build highly efficient pipes
#
that information can be pulled
#
and that can be pulled with the consent of the person
#
but to get to the design principles
#
you know I think unbundling
#
and this is sort of more how DPI was designed
#
and then I try and apply that
#
to the concept of governance
#
and sort of that's the thesis behind that
#
but most digitization tends to be adding a digital layer
#
to an already offline workflow
#
and you know the moment you add a digital layer
#
you immediately add some level of efficiency
#
which is generally good
#
but it's actually it's possible to be even more efficient
#
and in order to do that
#
you have to take a look at the process
#
that you are digitizing
#
and completely take it apart
#
take it apart to its most atomic level
#
best example is I guess payments
#
I mean we think about payments
#
as a way to move money from one bank account
#
to another bank account
#
actually if you just split it apart
#
to its most atomic level
#
a payment system is nothing more than a messaging system
#
I'm sending a message to my bank saying
#
can you transfer money to this person's bank
#
and I'm building a messaging system
#
such that one bank reduces a bank account
#
the other bank increases a bank account
#
by the exact same number
#
it happens simultaneously
#
there's no double spending
#
there's some sort of a correlation between the two
#
why do I actually physically need to write a check
#
have a check deposited a clearing agent
#
then collect all the checks
#
then it's like a completely inefficient way to do it
#
if I could instead build this reliable system
#
where just through messaging
#
I can achieve this reduction of one
#
and increase to the other
#
and have it completely you know reconciled in real time
#
that would be extremely efficient
#
so when we think of building digital systems
#
I think the unbundling design principle says
#
we have to resist layering a digital interface
#
on top of an already offline system
#
instead break it apart to its atomic unit
#
see if you can put those atomic units together
#
to achieve the end result
#
and more often than not
#
you will find that by unbundling it
#
you can reassemble it in brand new ways
#
most of our digital infrastructure is built in this manner
#
we've reduced it to its atomic elements
#
we've then defined the interactions between those atomic elements
#
and we've redesigned those interactions
#
such that we can achieve the end result in the most efficient way
#
so that led me to think
#
can we think about governance in a similar way
#
because what do we tend to do
#
we tend to just take the existing
#
you know payments and settlement systems act kind of regulation
#
or you take the RBI act or the banking regulation act
#
and say look this is the way we've done banking regulation for all this time
#
we should now apply this
#
and just say whatever is done through a check
#
can also be done now through an electronic record
#
that's easy we can certainly get past
#
but can we unbundle the way in which this is done
#
so as we started thinking through the governance
#
of many of the more advanced layers of digital public infrastructure
#
and we realized that many of the contractual regulatory frameworks
#
that hold these systems together
#
don't need to operate in the same way
#
when the entire transaction end to end is completely digital
#
why have clauses which enforce people to do things
#
when actually the code is performing it
#
and it has been tested to perform it
#
and is doing it at population scale day in and day out
#
you don't need this contract which allows it
#
so can you now eliminate some of those contractual provisions
#
and say that what is once enforced through contract
#
is now implemented through code
#
this gives us tremendous flexibility and freedom
#
it requires a new way of thinking
#
because rather than negotiating liability
#
now we need to test whether the software performs as advertised
#
this is something that we've done before
#
and we can do it at scale
#
so I think that was one of the design principles of DPI
#
then just apply equally to governance
#
and then I'll quickly go through the others
#
because there's a lot more detail in the book
#
but if you think of the idea of federation
#
the idea is to keep data where it is
#
one of the worst things you can do with data is centralize it
#
because you create a much larger surface of attack
#
if there's just one data repository to attack
#
it's so much easier to get information
#
instead keep it federated
#
if one of those data repositories is compromised
#
only what is on that repository is at risk
#
and so that bakes data security actually into the design
#
and to mandate against accumulation is so much more powerful
#
the idea behind protocols is essentially the less egg idea
#
I think we tend to want to create platforms
#
we tend to think in terms of platforms
#
because all of us interact on platforms
#
but platforms are highly anti-competitive
#
there are network effects that force you to stay in that platform
#
because that's sort of what you prefer
#
instead if you can just create protocols
#
that have the effect of a platform
#
but anyone can spin up a protocol to create whatever they want
#
and one of the best examples of that is the DPI on ONDC
#
which is built on the bacon protocol
#
which allows in Bangalore
#
we've got this thing called Namayathri
#
which is how you can hail an auto rickshaw in Bangalore
#
and there are many applications for this
#
and so that idea of creating protocols on platforms
#
allows us to get out of the trap of network effects
#
which has a lot of benefits
#
but also tends to consolidate power in the hands of the large platforms
#
which is something that we can avoid
#
so the book goes on in some detail on some of these things
#
just giving regulators an additional set of tools
#
technology enabled tools
#
with which they can think of how to regulate these spaces
#
I love the central insight in this
#
which is that design shapes behavior
#
you know if laws are meant to control behavior
#
you can actually go upstream
#
and just look at design in the first place
#
because design is shaping behavior
#
and if you can figure it out then
#
maybe you don't need to regulate so heavily elsewhere
#
because users are you know
#
there are certain things you simply cannot do
#
which you would otherwise have to criminalize
#
and investigate and prosecute
#
but you simply cannot do that
#
if you know the data is not going from the bank
#
to the central repository
#
then there is much less chance of somebody hacking into that
#
and you know sort of getting that data
#
and also more importantly I think you know
#
if you are dealing with this at the design stage
#
you can also change course very quickly
#
you can very quickly at the protocol level alter the design
#
because if there's some bad behavior
#
that's seeping up through the system
#
you don't have to wait to enact a law
#
you can just shut off the regulation
#
so for instance if you think that right now
#
we have only two big payment providers
#
payment service providers
#
you know phone pay and google pay
#
perhaps we want a third one
#
we can you know shut shutter the amount of payments
#
that are going such that no one gets more than a third
#
that was an idea that NPCI mooted some time back
#
they didn't follow through with it
#
but since it is a technology infrastructure
#
they have the ability to actually adjust the protocol
#
such that you could you could do this
#
and I think that is an extraordinary powerful lever
#
that we don't fully understand that we have
#
I mean I think the idea of the book
#
is really to shine a light on the fact that this exists
#
so you know on the one hand
#
I feel much more comfortable about sort of
#
the role that the state has taken here
#
first in recognizing that you can use design
#
to push certain priorities
#
and then the fact that they're pushing these priorities
#
which protect us against the state
#
or against big tech or etc etc
#
at least in this context
#
that gives me sort of comfort
#
and states don't always work in this kind of a way
#
but what makes me deeply uncomfortable
#
is that this is still centrally directed
#
that this is still essentially
#
you know a MIBA kind of system
#
like if you think about the standards
#
in computer networking for example
#
you know you had two competitors there
#
there was a giant club of governments
#
and they pushed the standard called X25
#
and then a bunch of academics and hobbyists
#
came up with something that was TCPIP
#
which is you know not pushed centrally
#
it's just comes out of that
#
collaborative voluntary efforts of people
#
and TCPIP wins you know
#
that's a self-organizing system
#
and no state is backing it
#
and that's where the internet comes about
#
and here I think that we are not allowing
#
the possibility of counterfactuals
#
that by the state saying that
#
I will build this digital public infrastructure
#
and hey look Rahul and Amit agree with me
#
and these are the principles
#
and we're taking care of privacy
#
but the counterfactual is that
#
if it did not have a crowding out effect
#
if you allowed competitors
#
to all of these separate things
#
if you allowed the market to function
#
things could go in a different direction
#
for example my friend Suyash Rai
#
our mutual friend Suyash Rai
#
points out in a recent piece
#
I'll link from the show notes
#
that you know you've given statistics
#
in this book of the literally miraculous
#
proliferation of bank accounts
#
where half the bank accounts
#
I think opened in the world
#
in that golden period of three years
#
but Suyash points out that
#
who said they had accounts
#
had never actually used them
#
which was like by an order of magnitude
#
the highest rate in the world
#
so it was great for optics
#
that hey we are you know
#
getting digitization and banking
#
but what is the effect on the ground
#
and could there have been other innovators
#
who could have done it more effectively
#
and would you then have better incentives
#
so what is sort of your response to this
#
my response is documented
#
because I have read that paper with Suyash
#
I've written a response to that
#
and more importantly Suyash and I
#
have had long conversations
#
on this offline as well
#
including at GTS last week
#
where we're still sort of hashing it out
#
yeah look I mean absolutely
#
I think for every statistic
#
there is a counter statistic
#
for every fact there is a counterfactual
#
I don't think it's sort of binary
#
I think you know one of course
#
the number of bank accounts
#
500 million were opened
#
a small percentage of them
#
and you see the absolute amount of money
#
that is in these accounts
#
the absolute amount of money
#
that is the number of balances
#
in these accounts is steadily growing
#
which means absolutely has to mean
#
that some use is happening
#
now these may not be people
#
who like you and me are using it
#
to do UPI transactions every day
#
but just the sheer volume
#
of the balances in these accounts seem
#
you know it's once a year
#
it is certainly being used
#
and look I think you can draw
#
from all of these things
#
I wanted to go back to the
#
the initial statement that you made
#
which is this is a MAIBAP
#
kind of an approach to this
#
and I completely agree with you
#
I think that I much prefer
#
a TCPIP kind of an approach
#
but I think you can't get
#
unless you actually have this
#
sort of thing put out there
#
which is look this is the first cut
#
this is the first iteration
#
of this digital public infrastructure
#
just spontaneously appear
#
and then at that point in time
#
with the correct values
#
because this foundational stuff
#
and the point of the book
#
is to reflect on the fact that
#
I don't even get into all of that
#
that these infrastructure have
#
is extraordinarily important
#
is that going to be determined by
#
or is it going to be determined by
#
you know some sort of a
#
technology standards organization
#
some sort of an organization
#
where we're getting ideas
#
from a bunch of different
#
competing with each other
#
trying to find the correct standard
#
now we've got many examples of this
#
even in the technology space
#
we've got IEEE, IETF, W3C
#
these are all standard setting bodies
#
all have got different compositions
#
they answer to different
#
they designed differently
#
a lot of private sector involved
#
protocols like Bluetooth etc.
#
that's done in private corporations
#
we need to think very carefully about
#
what are the incentives
#
as we set up version two of UPI
#
or version three of UPI
#
who's going to decide that
#
that are going to decide
#
what should be in the protocol
#
what are the governance mechanisms
#
we need to be mindful of the Maibab Sarkar
#
a very self-aggrandizing
#
and we've got to think through
#
and you know that's perhaps the
#
literally the last chapter of the book
#
when I talk about institutions
#
this is to be completely honest
#
not something that I myself
#
am completely certain about
#
because each of the examples
#
have got their downsides
#
so what is the construct
#
you also get a Bluetooth standard
#
which incorporates within it
#
a lot of the modem standards
#
incorporate a bunch of patents
#
you get a royalty from every modem
#
and you have a lot of people
#
the whole work then becomes
#
as China is doing in ITU right now
#
of trying to get technologies
#
that are owned and controlled
#
embedded directly into the standards
#
so that there are commercial interests
#
what you're saying is wrong
#
we've got to be mindful
#
of all of these constraints
#
so in the last chapter of the book
#
where I talk about institutions
#
well I mean the last sort of section
#
where I talk about institutions
#
these are some of the things
#
that you know we need to
#
that we don't want the government
#
because the government I argue
#
is not technically capable
#
it's not the government's job
#
to become a technologist
#
and decide what the protocols are
#
but equally the private sector
#
of the innovations happen
#
with a shareholder hat on
#
what is it that I can do
#
maximize shareholder value
#
you know if you bring ESG into it
#
I'm responding to my stakeholders
#
so neither of these really can do it
#
and I suggest that we should have
#
non-profit kind of an entity
#
in the world I described
#
they also have their own
#
challenges and constraints
#
this is an extraordinarily
#
you don't have to worry about it
#
at this stage of the DPI journey
#
have to contend with this
#
market failures as it were
#
in developing version two
#
of a lot of these protocols
#
are going to come in our way
#
I didn't realize you had a response
#
so we linked to both of those
#
as you said there are no binaries
#
I think he makes good points
#
and you've provided great insight
#
can this whole thing go wrong
#
in the context of state overreach
#
that there are two ways
#
in which this could happen
#
because they are in charge
#
digital public infrastructure
#
they could change parts of it
#
or parts of the protocol
#
without necessarily being
#
could become more pervasive
#
and as you've pointed out
#
the way that it is designed
#
it is extremely hard to do
#
because the design itself
#
embeds all these values in it
#
the fact that you're not
#
there's no centralized database
#
but in what way could it go wrong
#
in which state overreach
#
when you talk about like
#
where the state comes in
#
in the case of B.N. Rao
#
away from the individual
#
yeah look I mean I think
#
the one design principle
#
I didn't sort of elaborate on
#
and that's core to this
#
the point of greatest risk
#
is at the foundational technologies
#
the identity technology
#
maybe the credentials technology
#
these are the underlying
#
core and we have to get that right
#
we built a search capability
#
interoperates with Aadhaar
#
from the search capability
#
if Aadhaar is the foundation
#
that you're interoperating with
#
has got to find another way
#
to achieve what it wants to do
#
to that initial foundation
#
of course it's a feature
#
and all of those sorts of things
#
that's under the user's control
#
into the underlying infrastructure
#
as more and more layers
#
almost impossible to change
#
an autocratic government
#
into the bowels of these
#
what's of more concern to me
#
for some of these things
#
all these wonderful things
#
AI language capabilities
#
they're leveraging that
#
and make a payment to someone
#
even if they don't have
#
and still looking to innovate
#
another six months to do
#
that are working on this
#
to implement this feature
#
on the government to do that
#
the fact that right now
#
the frontiers of AI technology
#
you know fraud detection
#
you know a very different
#
kind of an organization
#
is a very significant risk
#
digital public infrastructure
#
you know UIDI requires it
#
I mean it doesn't require it
#
but the design right now
#
is such that you have a
#
through which all payments run
#
that's an efficient way
#
like a decentralized switch
#
the way blockchain does
#
but it comes with its own
#
it won't have the velocity
#
so we've got sort of this
#
you know ONDC doesn't require
#
the account aggregator framework
#
does not require a central
#
and in fact it does not have it
#
many more within principal license
#
they're all interoperable
#
we don't have that risk anymore
#
other than in these two
#
and I think that would sort of
#
because as long as you have
#
they will fight with each other
#
you know better standards
#
like it happened with ECPIP
#
more innovative standards
#
they will push the W3C foundation
#
to actually come up with
#
and I think that's really
#
our guarantee against us
#
I love the kind of thinking
#
from you and the entire community
#
and the world is changing rapidly
#
so here's my next question
#
you know the typical fear
#
about the surveillance state
#
the state wants to get after me
#
because what have I done
#
why should they come after me
#
please don't come after me
#
I mean someone could be listening to us
#
they don't have to wait for the release
#
the state wants to come after me
#
one way of doing that is
#
and at least within this system
#
there is not so much chance
#
the state has at its hands
#
find something against me anyway
#
I mean you've given the example of Pegasus
#
that tomorrow if the state
#
it doesn't have to find evidence
#
it can just get AI to make it
#
to overthrow this regime
#
you know it can have a video
#
and I'm not asking a question
#
about this particular problem
#
of deepfakes or whatever
#
but my broader question is
#
that obviously the future
#
does have unknown unknowns in it
#
but if you look a little ahead
#
to the proximate future
#
10 years ahead for example
#
but if you just look into
#
the more proximate future
#
you know what are the challenges
#
the data regulation approach
#
we have now is robust enough
#
those kinds of challenges
#
I mean I've largely because
#
of the same thing that you said
#
looking into the future
#
you know that this is going to evolve
#
and so the existing data
#
against new technologies
#
you know that's just a fact
#
how it should be designed
#
I think the design really needs to be
#
technologies will evolve
#
really figure out how to evolve
#
the data infrastructure
#
to keep up with that evolution
#
but you know just to go back
#
to the point that you made
#
you know that this DPI infrastructure
#
would be used for surveillance
#
many many different ways
#
the DPI is the most inefficient way
#
if they wanted to surveil you
#
people who worried about Aadhaar number
#
I was actually more worried
#
because the extraordinary reach
#
through the mobile operators
#
you know the centralized monitoring system
#
that is designed to give them
#
into the conversations that we have
#
should scare you much more
#
could potentially be linked
#
to something which as a matter of fact
#
as we discussed in this conversation
#
so you know I think we must be absolutely
#
we absolutely must be scared
#
of the fact that the state
#
has the power to do surveillance
#
that it would use this infrastructure
#
to do it because that would be
#
a highly inefficient way
#
and you know we must be mindful
#
that this could be modified
#
in the fact that at the very depths
#
of this it is reasonably robust
#
so it's actually going to be difficult
#
for them to go sort of deeper down
#
happening in the future
#
is for us to be constantly vigilant
#
questioning some of these comments
#
and come up with sort of
#
before I could say that
#
all the things that I said about it
#
going into actually the design
#
how exactly the biometrics
#
the fact that they can't be accessed
#
the biometrics are not fingerprints
#
I mean there are images
#
but they're converted into vectors
#
that is used to identify your fingerprint
#
you can't recreate a fingerprint
#
that this vector correlates
#
with the fingerprint that is provided
#
same with your iris scan
#
you know the level of entropy
#
that it is almost impossible
#
computationally impossible
#
it is only a vector table
#
these are the characteristics
#
are designed from a privacy perspective
#
in the face of new technologies
#
AI is a very very serious risk
#
and I'm actually not so much
#
concerned about deepfakes
#
in the realm of planting evidence
#
and if they wanted to plant evidence
#
they don't need to do a deepfake
#
just plant some cocaine in your bag
#
okay I hope we all know
#
that that was a deepfake
#
they have many better ways to do that
#
you know social engineering
#
to get extraordinary abilities
#
you know you could go to these AI engines
#
and ask them to do things
#
that are built by the companies
#
that are putting them out
#
but they're easy to get past
#
and then you can get these AI
#
to give you dangerous knowledge
#
so this is really the worry
#
that I would see in the future
#
which is much more of a risk
#
than someone sort of creating
#
when I think about deepfakes
#
this may also be a digression
#
I keep thinking back to the time
#
is a mechanical representation
#
and then photoshop came along
#
and then we could not trust
#
this is an actual photograph
#
or it is a photoshopped photograph
#
we said look video can't be faked
#
it's too complicated to photoshop
#
on every frame of the video
#
and you would make a mistake
#
and then of course deepfakes come
#
these new ways in which reality
#
our evidence of reality
#
we'll go through a period
#
while we just are not sure
#
whether the video is right
#
or just like we were not sure
#
whether the photograph was real or not
#
we'll go through the same thing
#
and all of these things
#
like right now we are skeptical
#
or every photograph we are shown
#
is that photoshopped or not
#
we'll be skeptical about
#
every video that comes to us
#
and then deepfakes will lose their sting
#
I mean I can't think of any other
#
than just build a very healthy
#
not only will deepfakes
#
like I'm waiting for this shit
#
I can do whatever the hell I want
#
say whatever the hell I want
#
and if somebody puts it out there
#
100% by your point that
#
if the state wants to screw us
#
it doesn't need DPI for that
#
the state can just triangulate
#
though if they have access
#
at least we're not having sex
#
so they can assume that
#
because just reading them
#
start gifting them out to people
#
just absolutely wonderful books
#
which everyone should read
#
some of the challenges we face
#
and the ways of thinking about them
#
I love the historical sections
#
which as you have repeatedly
#
given credit to Lawrence Lessig for it
#
which can make certain laws
#
you know a more general
#
of this great discussion I have
#
and I'm going to ask you
#
for me and my listeners
#
you know recommend books, films, music
#
that you absolutely love so much
#
that you want to share with everyone
#
sorry penultimate question
#
I'll ask one more after this
#
okay there's one more after this
#
we've discussed so many books
#
there are so many really
#
on the areas of law that I like
#
perhaps I want to start with
#
a book that one of your previous
#
guests and also my editor
#
which after listening to your podcast
#
I went and bought and read
#
which is Once Upon a Prime
#
you should read The Greatest Invention
#
which is also highly recommended
#
I wrote a recent article
#
I just think that's just such a
#
right now LLMs are essentially
#
this super intelligence
#
information that's been hardcoded
#
that they can then read and condense
#
we wouldn't have this AI world
#
that we're currently in
#
there's a whole bunch of those
#
if people are interested in technology
#
it's important that you read
#
some of the chapters on China
#
which sort of goes deep
#
a technology infrastructure
#
is called Surveillance Valley
#
which actually flips it
#
all of modern technology
#
with an intention to surveil you
#
into some of the histories
#
all of that is really interesting
#
if you're interested in this
#
sex robots and vegan meat
#
pushes the boundaries on
#
everything that we thought
#
we thought that we knew
#
any of us would imagine
#
haven't picked it up by now
#
but getting things done
#
How to Write Smart Notes
#
certainly books that are
#
I don't know if you read
#
is How to Write One Song
#
is the premise of the book is
#
you just have to write one song
#
and then after you write
#
and Jeff Tweedy of course
#
is a front man of Wilco
#
and they've got so many great songs
#
can you just look at their lyrics
#
lots of little word puzzles
#
creative writing course
#
the list goes on and on
#
I we were just discussing
#
there are so many books
#
that there are good books
#
that I don't know about
#
and I'm not reading them
#
give us a fiction recommendation
#
currently obsessed with
#
his children in time series
#
of people being put into
#
to actually extend their time
#
beyond many generations
#
the central motivating feature
#
his writing is actually
#
really really interesting
#
exceptional science fiction writer
#
there's a lot of that kind of
#
reading too much non-fiction
#
to listen to them in Delhi
#
last weekend is Snarky Puppy
#
that's just exceptional
#
listening to a lot of Snarky
#
now they've got a new album
#
what's a headphone concert
#
everybody wears headphones
#
the engineers and mixers
#
must be just so on their game
#
because it's a live mix
#
everyone's just playing
#
so the sound is just perfect
#
they're playing live music
#
I mean like the drummer
#
is playing in front of you
#
but still getting great sound
#
a really loud drum sound
#
mixed such that you get this
#
you know this perfect feed
#
and you're watching them live
#
when you go to Snarky Puppy
#
YouTube or something like that
#
the energy in that room
#
but this is a really good band
#
so I really like Polyphia
#
very interesting kind of music
#
that I really listen to
#
I'll have to scratch my head for that
#
I can't think of a movie
#
really moved me in a while
#
but that's also because
#
watch movies sort of sporadically
#
right now I'm watching this
#
with my science fiction
#
that keep resetting the clock
#
when the earth destroys itself
#
you know we said earlier on
#
that we've come very close
#
to destroying ourselves
#
and we have always managed
#
you know like the manure crisis
#
of this Lazarus project
#
is that there are people
#
who whenever we destroy ourselves
#
the beginning of the year
#
so that we can live that life again
#
don't go by my movie recommendations
#
nuanced recommendations
#
where the concept is read
#
every time the world ends
#
and you are there designing DPI
#
and let's see if you get it
#
because you're a tech person
#
is what is all the tech
#
that you love and use right now
#
like what is your phone right now
#
what are your headphones
#
just tell me about all the tech
#
because you're such a tech geek
#
yeah you thought you didn't
#
but you're not going to
#
I've been an iPhone guy
#
and they don't sell you services
#
and so they have every incentive
#
that you buy more hardware
#
I would not buy devices
#
and they have every incentive
#
so you know I like the privacy guarantee
#
I'm a bit of a headphone nut
#
so I have campfire audio
#
IEMs that's sort of what I use
#
who makes electrostatic headphones
#
you need to get the drivers for it
#
and he doesn't make that
#
just it's called the RR1s
#
a very nice dynamic headset
#
it's a company called Altiat
#
just like a sort of a bespoke
#
handcrafted kind of a thing
#
I don't know how he makes any money
#
because it's just so much
#
I've got the whole electrostatic range
#
health trackers that I can
#
I'm currently using the Aura Ring
#
which sort of tracks heart rate
#
and all of these kinds of things
#
I'm about to switch to the Whoop band
#
just because I don't know
#
I just want to see what that's like
#
I don't have too many connected devices
#
because I don't want it to be used
#
if you have nothing to hide
#
about evidence against you as I say
#
so that is as a privacy lawyer
#
because we all have things to hide
#
and not and in a good way
#
I mean it's the what I said
#
we don't want the veneer
#
so that we can have the space
#
to think and be creative
#
if people could see what I search for
#
in my sort of incognito windows
#
they would not be scandalized at all
#
why are you searching for this
#
look I mean I think we worry
#
a lot of people say look
#
the phone is listening to me
#
because suddenly I got an advertisement
#
when I was having a conversation
#
and I keep sort of breaking it back
#
there's a lovely episode of
#
where they actually go into this
#
is my phone actually listening to me
#
and they show how it's just
#
computationally impossible
#
for you know Mark Zuckerberg
#
to be designing his entire system
#
what you one individual is doing
#
such that he can sell you a perfume
#
no he's probably given a perfume
#
to a hundred thousand people
#
you were just one of the hundred thousand
#
he's got don't take it personally
#
don't think that anyone
#
don't think that you're so important
#
that a large global conglomerate
#
is interested in you individually
#
actually they are aren't they
#
I mean that's what the whole game is about
#
hacking a hundred thousand people like you
#
they would never get down to the individual
#
it's just computationally infeasible
#
for them to have a completely
#
different profile for each people
#
but at the intersection
#
they will have fifty thousand
#
hundred thousand different parameters
#
and at the intersection of all of them
#
there could be one unique person
#
but they don't look at it that way
#
they'll slice up their two billion people
#
into like a hundred thousand
#
different classes of people
#
it's not it doesn't make any sense for them to do
#
which is half bengali podcaster
#
who listens to permanent wave
#
well I think it's the permanent wave
#
no I'm sure there must be many others
#
listening to permanent wave
#
but I had to put the rest of it together
#
but Rahul thanks so much man
#
this was such a great conversation
#
thanks for writing those books as well
#
I never thought I'd last this long
#
thank you for listening
