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It's a beautiful world.
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It's beautiful because of the things in it, and the animals in it, and the people in it,
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and the ideas that float in the air and in our heads.
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Sometimes I like to go out in nature, breathing fresh air and not thinking at all.
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And sometimes I like to be in a space of ideas, just letting them come to me, following them
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A good conversation is a great way to make this happen.
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We bounce ideas of each other, and always, behind the scene, there is the unseen.
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You would have noticed that often in my conversations, I'll say something like, I'm just thinking
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And when we are thinking aloud, we are alive.
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I love having conversations like that, conversations like today's.
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It's a beautiful world.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Deepak Vyas, a dear friend of mine, who I've had such great conversations
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with in the past that I wonder why it took so long to get him on the show.
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Deepak is an entrepreneur, and he's founded and runs a startup called Tilt, which provides
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shared bikes for residential campuses.
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You'll hear more about that idea here, but it's far from the only idea you'll hear about.
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Deepak is a deep thinker on many subjects, and when I chat with him, I feel like my brain
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has been poked in a hundred different places in a good way, and it is now explosively alive,
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ready to embrace and grok more of the world.
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In the conversation you'll hear now, we'll share radical thoughts on education, entrepreneurship,
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We'll talk about an old woman who sits on your chest, on shadows that flit about the
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room when you lie paralyzed.
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Entrepreneurs will of course find this episode super useful, as Deepak has some great insights.
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But honestly, the wisdom in this episode goes far beyond that, so enjoy.
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But before we get started, 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
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to 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
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at 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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Deepak, welcome to the scene on The Unseen.
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So, you know, we first met at a conference a couple of years back, and you were of course
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easy to talk to, our ideas coincided in many things.
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But one particular thing I remember is your insistence that I come for a long walk with
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you around the lake, at the place where we were, at some ungodly hour, right now it seems
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to me like it was four in the morning, but it was probably more like six.
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And then we went on a long walk and sort of had a conversation and you told me about your
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love of dancing and so on and so forth.
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So tell me your approach towards meeting new people and making friends and all of that.
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Like how much intentionality is there in that?
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How much of it is just natural to you in the sense that it is to some gregarious people
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that hey, I'm just friendly with everyone?
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And how much of it is an effort you put in because you've, you know, seen the benefits
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that accrue to yourself?
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Okay, well, the question is very good.
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And the reason it's good is because in 2022, my best friend got married.
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So I'd known him all my life from childhood and up.
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And for the longest time, he was my only meaningful close friend.
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You become very close with your co-founders, they're also my friends, of course.
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But inevitably you have a business relationship as well, and so it's not purely friendship.
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And I think when that happened and he's since moved to Japan, it forced me to find new friends.
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So I don't think I contended with this question until this happened.
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And I said, all right, what is that process like of finding new friends?
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So that year, 22, 23, was that period of exploration for me.
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I think it's a few things.
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So if you remember, I'd like to bring you back to before we went for the walk.
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So the first time we met actually was Shruti introduced us.
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And then we got on a bus and we were in the last row of the bus, if you remember.
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And I said something about anti-natalism to Mohit.
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And then you said, have you read Phil Larkin's poem, This Be the Worse?
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And I said, yes, I have.
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And then I started to recite it.
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So I said, they mess you up, your mom and dad.
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They do not mean to, but they do.
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And then you said, no, no, they fuck you up, your mom and dad.
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They do not mean to, but they do.
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And at the time, I knew we'd be friends because one, you love reading poetry, which I love
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And two, you were not afraid to say the word fuck.
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And you were not afraid to call it as it was, which is that I was being politically correct
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in reciting a poem because I thought, well, I was in front of people who are much older
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than me and it would not be the most appropriate to say something that was offensive.
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And maybe it's something in that which is that the ability to form friendships depends
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on some level of shared curiosity.
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So we may not have to agree on the places we reach, but we have to agree on the fact
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that we're mutually curious about something.
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You may have friends who, I don't know, and you seem to have lots of friends who, for
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That's a mutually shared curiosity.
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You may not agree on many other things, but that mutual love for curiosity sort of sets
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So in the last two years, perhaps, the sorts of friends I've made are people who I have
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mutually shared curiosities with.
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I've also pivoted my definition of what a friend means.
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So I used to think of it as an extremely tight and rigid structure where it meant undying
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loyalty from today to infinity, which it does mean, but there's also gradients and people
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come across the entire spectrum.
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So it could also mean that you're just a friend that one time a year when they have to call
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and talk to somebody about something, in which case I'm happy to be their friend.
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And then sometimes it means what I said before, which is that undying loyalty from today to
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So it's an entire gradient.
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It's perhaps a dilution of my original conception of a friend, but nonetheless, that's approximately
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my answer to what friendship has been for me.
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But it's a discovery for me as well.
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I'm new to building a large base of friends.
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I've always had very few, so I'm trying to change that.
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For those of the listeners who are not aware of Larkin's great poem, I'll just read it
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This Be the Worst by Philip Larkin.
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They fuck you up your mom and dad, they may not mean to, but they do.
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They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you.
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But they were fucked up in their turn by fools in old style hats and coats who half the time
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were soppy stern and half at one another's throats.
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Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf.
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Get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself.
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And you know, we can come to our joint views on antinatalism later, but I love this phrase,
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Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf.
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I was about to say exactly that.
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What an incredible way to write something.
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Only a poet can do that.
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Man hands on misery to man.
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So I have the tendency to remember lots of poems that are just sitting in the back of
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my head and I can rattle them off without having to look at the page.
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And this is one of those, right?
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Man hands on misery to man.
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And the image that it forms, which is it deepens like a coastal shelf.
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Get out as early as you can, which is the advice that he so wisdomously provides.
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And don't have any kids yourself.
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And of course we can agree to disagree or discuss antinatalism in detail if we'd like
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But it doesn't take away from how powerfully that poem was written.
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So I think that that's what drew me to you for sure, which is that we had a shared love
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for poetry and literature.
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But it could be any topic.
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That's how friends are made.
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And I sometimes wonder if, and this will sound like a very cynical thought, but I sometimes
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wonder if, you know, there is a little bit of hypocrisy at the heart of any friendship
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because I think about how all of us live our lives inside our own heads, right?
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Everything else is, you know, we are the main character.
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Everyone else is a character in the play.
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And I have, and I guess this is true for introverted people, especially that people who live the
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kind of withdrawn life that I have, that you are in your head much more than you would
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And I realized this much later in years.
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And I started questioning myself that am I treating people, including people close to
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me as something that is instrumental?
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And then it takes an act of will to see them as people in themselves.
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Like, you know, Satra has this famous quote about how hell is other people.
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And Iris Murdoch has, you know, my favorite quote about love where she writes, love is
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the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real, right?
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And so the way that I think about friendship is that someone that I'm straight away comfortable
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with and like, but I, but that also, of course, originates from putting oneself at the center
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of it that I am comfortable with.
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I like, I think about, like I've had, I've had people die on me of different ages.
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And when I remember, I always realize that the memory I'm remembering of them when I
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feel sad or whatever is a memory of something that happened between us.
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And I am again at the center of it.
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So I mean, I don't know if this is coherent, but I was just thinking aloud after what you
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said that to that, that I think that a certain part of accepting this fact is accepting that
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then you also need to be intentional about your relationships and see other people as
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other people and not just something that adds a particular kind of meaning or value to your
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What are your thoughts?
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I mean, I would say that the reason that you want to be intentional about this is also
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So which is perfectly fine.
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I think being selfish about your relationships is the natural way to do it.
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Anybody who claims otherwise is either not being introspective or is being dishonest.
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But there's nothing so, in fact, so this is the same as the double thank you moment of
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a free market or a capitalist interaction, which is let's say you meet a friend and you
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have a wonderful conversation.
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So we do this for however long you're going to make me sit here.
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And at the end of which I shake your hand and I say, thank you, that was wonderful.
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And then you say, thank you, Deepak, that was wonderful.
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And we've created more than each of us individually could have in the same amount of time.
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So we were saying, I was saying this earlier to you when we were speaking, but we are just
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accidental animals on a little speck of dust on some corner of at least as far as we know,
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All the empirical evidence points to that.
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And there are no obligations for perfect solutions.
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There are so many things that we certainly can't control.
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History, our psychology, the things that we philosophically believe are childhoods.
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All of that is completely outside our control.
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And there seems to be tied up in all of that this deep and instinctive urge to get it outside
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of yourself through the use of words.
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Could be action as well.
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So you may want to dance or sing or something like that, play an instrument perhaps, but
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words quite frequently.
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And we're trying to grapple with all these super interesting concepts, interesting on
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some level, but also worrying on another, where it keeps us up at night or we're quite
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concerned about how we resolve these abstract topics.
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And I think the only way to do it is to speak to somebody else about it.
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That's only so far you can go in your own head.
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And it could be something as simple as, hey, this is what's happening in my house, or something
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as complex as I don't know why I'm here and why all of this exists, or even if it does.
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Irrespective of degree of complexity, inevitably having that conversation with somebody is
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the process by which you sort of flesh it out.
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I mean, I don't know more about this than that.
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I'm sure there's a psychologist somewhere who can explain it better.
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But I feel like the way to evolve on ideas that you already have or troubles that you're
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already facing or philosophy that you're already in the process of believing, undergoing is
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invariably to have it go out there into the world, so sound it out, and then have somebody
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else play the role of poking at it, asking questions, validating, and you keep coming
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back to door to door again.
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That's why we have these relationships.
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Of course, there are lots of other reasons, but we do it selfishly, and that's perfectly
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If they're getting a similar end result out of it, or, well, the means is the end.
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So if that is as exciting and interesting and valuable to them through the process,
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then what else could you ask for?
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That's a great friend to have.
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Earlier at breakfast also, you pointed out that the means is the end in a different context.
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And I love how many different things it can kind of apply to, you know, and of course
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it leads to all these cliches about journey, not destination, and et cetera, et cetera.
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Also, what kind of a kid were you?
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Were you sort of an introspective kid?
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Were you reading a lot?
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What did you want to be?
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What was your view of the world?
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And this journey, not the destination, comes straight from my dad.
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So every time we would...
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I think how you do some things is how you do all things, and every time we'd attempt
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It's a yeah, but once you get there, it's not really what you think it's going to be.
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And it's the process of getting there that's super fun.
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In fact, it's the process of getting there that is the end.
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That is what you have to strive towards, because once you get there, you'll genuinely miss
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the entire flow of all the things that happened on your journey to wherever it is that you
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And I'd also contest that we never really get anywhere.
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We're always traveling, and then we stop.
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I grew up in a house where dad used to read lots of books.
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He used to read books in the toilet, like on the party, which is where I got the habit
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And I know that that's considered blasphemous in lots of ways, right?
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But that seemed to be something that we were comfortable looking past in our household,
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because what was in the book seemed to be a lot more valuable than the sanctity of the
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So I started reading very young.
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I think reading certainly marked a large part of my growing up.
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A lot of it in the early days was just fiction.
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So Enid Blyton, Goosebumps, those were the sort of early years of reading.
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And then as I grew, sort of harder to read, but more complex stories.
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And it became apparent very early on that if you learn to communicate well, that is,
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you speak well, write well, and then you're able to understand the intent of what somebody
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is attempting to communicate when you read something, that's very valuable.
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It's very valuable in a way that it anchors you for the rest of your life and makes you
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The ability to learn by reading a book and the ability to communicate your ideas to people
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across different fields.
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So each individual person may be able to understand a concept differently.
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The onus is on me to be able to express it in such a way that that person understands
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it became sort of fundamental to his early years of growing up.
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So I did all those things.
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I spent a lot of time debating.
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That was part of sort of growing up.
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But broadly words, literature, poetry, language was key and fundamental to that early stage
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or early years journey of mine.
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My dad was a government servant, so he started working at the age of 19, 20 in the income
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tax department and then worked there all his life till his early 50s.
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Then he recently retired.
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Mum is a school teacher.
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So she used to teach computer science and computer applications before my brother was
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And then once he was born, she took a break and then came back to teach the earlier years.
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So she does Montessori.
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She taught for many years before starting her own school.
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And then today that's what she does.
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So we have three branches in Bangalore and she teaches young children.
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It's an integrated Montessori, which means some of the children in her class are on the
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They have learning difficulties.
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And I ended up, at least through observation, learning quite a bit about what that journey
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And I think the interesting thing in watching my household evolve, so my mum was very young
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My dad also is fairly young.
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They had me fairly young, is how all of us grew as people through the years.
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So I don't think we'd ever had a startup conversation at the dinner table.
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We'd have lots of conversations.
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It was very frequent to have detailed conversations about all sorts of abstract things.
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We'd vehemently disagree, and in a good way, in that we're all growing in the same direction.
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But over the last few years, maybe the last 10, 15 years, those conversations have evolved
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as the world has changed around us and as topics have changed.
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We've grown as people individually.
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And I think that that's sort of an earmark of what my childhood was like as well, which
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is that you start off somewhere, but we're all willing to consistently evolve and adapt
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I think that was broadly what my childhood was like.
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I'm happy to answer any other questions you have pertaining to that, if you do.
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Tell me about how you sort of learn to look at the world, because what typically happens
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is when you're young, you adopt a frame that seems to fit the way you look at the world.
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For some people, they stop right there.
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The first set of explanations that explain the world to them is what it is.
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Some people keep looking and keep looking, and it's always fluid, obviously, and it
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And I think for me, where it got fixed is after wrestling with various different ways
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of looking at the world.
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Where it got fixed was in terms of the values that I hold dear to myself, like individual
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freedom and consent and all of those things, and it eventually arrived there in a bunch
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of different ways, and then that clarifies everything.
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So tell me a little bit about what shaped the way that you look at the world, because
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it is very different from the default around you, and it is also quite different from people
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in your generation itself, right?
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So how did you arrive here?
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I think it's marked by an early understanding that authority may not be correct.
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So it was not long before I realized that my teachers, my parents, all of my mentors
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could possibly be wrong, which is not so easy to come to.
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If you think about your own childhood, most people think about how they grew up.
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Unless that degree of skepticism is introduced as something fundamental to that journey of
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learning, inevitably you end up thinking that that which my ancestors or people around me
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or whoever it is who is giving me tuition believes is likely what is true.
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And I think for me it came from a set of conflicting beliefs, because I'd hear one person say something
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and I respected and trusted their opinion quite a bit.
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Another person say the opposite thing, the mathematical equation, like these Venn diagrams
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don't intersect, so only one must be true.
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At best it's possible, neither are true.
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And the only way out was to read a book about it.
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And I spent a lot of time on 4chan and just the early years of the internet, which I think
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also was, I can't believe I missed this out in the earlier question about my childhood,
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but the internet was so fundamental to it, because I remember for one of my birthdays
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actually my dad brought home a computer, of course a shared family computer, and I took
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to it so quickly, and it was this 512 kbps telephone line, so super slow, but it had
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the answers, well it had potential answers to practically everything, which is if I could
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Google a question then I'd have 50, 60, 100 different possible solutions to the same question.
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And all so nuanced in little ways, and I'd find myself diving deep into random rabbit
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holes that were not of any practical utility, but I think unlocked that sceptic part of
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me, which is that it's possible that everybody is saying things that are not possibly true,
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it's possible we don't know what true means, it's possible people have different definitions
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of what true is, and so inevitably the philosophy underlying these dispositions that people
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have came to the forefront.
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Yeah so I think it came from that, which is a combination of having the internet to tell
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me that hey there are other people in other parts of the world who have other beliefs
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and those beliefs or other theories on how the world works or something in particular
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works, which are equally good, and then the second is in my own life being surrounded
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by people who have different views, which meant that the only legs to stand on were
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my own, and I had to figure this out by myself.
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What I'm also curious about is how we learn, the process of learning, like one thing that
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I think we might have spoken about in the past as well is on how much education is broken
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in the sense that our current education system, if you just look at schools, it was designed
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for the industrial revolution, you have kids of the same age studying together, studying
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the same bunch of subjects etc etc, and it's designed in the early 19th century, it's designed
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to turn out workers for the industrial revolution or baboos for the British Empire in India
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or whatever the case might be, and it is completely irrelevant now, and I guess this is a subject
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you've thought about, one, because like me in some ways, you're mostly self-taught through
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technology enabling that, through the internet and all of that, and second, your mom of course
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has also, is an entrepreneur herself in the space where she's doing all of these schools
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etc etc, so you might have been exposed to really early ideas on why education isn't
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working and so on and so forth.
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So what are sort of your thoughts on that?
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Because I've been thinking about it for a few years and it seems to me to be one of
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the great problems to solve, but it appears also that no one really has a handle on this,
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all the edtech start-ups I see are really basically teaching school syllabus or whatever
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and you know, are within that same paradigm, how does one change the paradigm, what should
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one learn, how does one learn it, how do you think about all of this?
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Yeah, so I have two answers to this, the first is a thought experiment, which I conducted
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with a close friend of mine recently, it's called the grand swimming race, so let's say
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that we replace the IIT exams with a swimming race, India has a vast shoreline, so I'm sure
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you could fit all 10 lakh, 15 lakh applicants along the shores, you were to blow a whistle,
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10 kilometers long, you swim the entire distance, the first 10,000 to cross the other end, end
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up getting seats across various IITs, NITs, whatever it is, and I know you asked about
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but this hypothesis, this thought experiment lingers on the later stage, let's say they
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all went to these IITs, studied, and then sort of grew on to be engineers, whatever
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it is that they do afterwards, now I would contest that you would have no difference
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in the quality of engineering you produce, and if you had to say, Deepak, you're wrong,
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you'd have to explain why, and the way to explain why is probably to tell me what the
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exam tests for in particular, and I don't think anybody has a good coherent answer,
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what do our exams or what is the testing process test for in particular, it certainly can't
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be scientific rigor, and there's various reasons for that, so one good way to think about it
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is that, take these exams, the engineering exams in particular, you don't really apply
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to a computer science degree at an IIT, you pass the exam, and then you take up whichever
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seat you get, which to me sounds something like, let's say, an example here is, if you
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think about subjects like metallurgy, which are taught in IITs, they're filled with kids
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who wanted to study computer science engineering, didn't get in, and didn't want to lose the
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IIT or the NIT tag, and hence said, you know what, I'll take whatever it is that comes,
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that's second best, and they're sitting in these classrooms instead, somewhere in India,
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there are, there is some collection of children who deeply care about metallurgy, they love
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the subject, they certainly want to study it, they want to be metallurgists all their
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and the very best metallurgy professors are stuck in IITs and NITs, teaching kids who
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never want to be there in the first place, so something is broken about this whole setup
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in the first place, I don't think we aspire to be engineers, scientists, although that's
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certainly part of that curious drive when you start off, right, but along the way it's
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corrupted, muddied, dirtied by this drive to get the tag, get the degree, so on and
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so forth. Yeah, so I agree with you, I mean, I think the deeper question is what are we
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testing for? One layer deeper than that, perhaps, is why are we testing? And I think once it
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started up and we started building a business, we had to do the arduous task of hiring employees,
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and all of a sudden, we found ourselves in the position of having to ask certain questions
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that determine whether we hire this person or not, and none of the scores that they had
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on their resumes, the tests that they did conduct, etc., were indicative in any way
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of their ability to be long term meaningful assets to whatever journey we are on as a
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business, right? It could be that, hey, we want you to help us on figuring out the operations
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of the business. And it's not so easy. It's not a 60 second question, which is another
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very bizarre part of testing. Nothing in the real world is 60 seconds or you're dead, or
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it doesn't work out, or you don't. In fact, my strong preference is for those people who
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don't give me a 60 second answer, who say, you know what, I'm going to think deeply about
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the subject, and maybe a week or two, the best discoveries that we've ever made collectively
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as humanity have come after years of meditation, and never in the short run. Why do we use
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that as a testing mechanism? Yeah, it beats me. Except for that, the practical answer
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is it's a filter, right? It's an arbitrary filter, as arbitrary as swimming raves, perhaps.
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And when we were hiring, I think that's when it stood out most to me, that those folks
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who had the very best resumes, the highest scores, et cetera, were very poor long-term
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partners for these arduous journeys that don't involve certainty. And it's a breakage in
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SOP. The SOP that you're given as a child is you go to school, top three ranks at all
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times, then you do your 11th grade, 12th grade, you write the IIT exams, you get into an IIT,
#
you top those classes all the way, and then you get a great package monetarily. And that's
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you for life, right? And you ideally go off into one of these, you know, ABC, red accounting,
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banking, any of these sort of industries. So that's sort of answer number one, which
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is I don't know what we're testing for. I don't know why the results of these tests
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are meaningful. And if they are, of course, you're a random subset of those people who
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are also, you know, great in other ways. So they could pass the test and they could also
#
do other things. But that's the first way to think about this. The second, my co-founder
#
Daksh dropped out of college in his second year. He's been coding since he was 14 years
#
old. And I have not met a better developer than Daksh. And that's because in the first
#
week of meeting him, we were talking about, you know, people who write code, developers,
#
software engineers. And he said, a great engineer is not one who knows how to write code well.
#
That person should have two additional skill sets. One, they should know how to communicate.
#
And the second, they should know how to design. And both these skill sets are so hard to learn
#
in a classroom. If you're talking to a product team and you have a disagreement about the
#
color of a button, which, by the way, happens if you talk to enough early stage companies,
#
the leading cause of startup failure is that founders fall apart. And founders fall apart
#
for silly reasons. Reasons like we can't agree on what the color of a button should be. We've
#
never had those disagreements at Tilt. And the reason is because I have co-founders like Daksh
#
who come into it knowing that to be able to communicate well through the process of building
#
something. So this is the right brain, right? You've set a meaningful goal. That meaningful
#
goal is, I want to build something of value because it gives me purpose. It fills me with
#
something to do to the entire day such that when I go to bed at night, I look back on my day and
#
say I wouldn't have done it differently. So that's my right brain, long-term purpose that I've sort
#
of placed into the world. And I've said that's where I want to go. And then I have to use reason
#
and logic and my left brain, all the math in the world and all the writing the code to accomplish
#
that goal, right? It's the emissary in some way. And knowing that means that you communicate well,
#
you design well because you're designing again, knowing that you have a long-term goal in place.
#
And of course you write code well. So he's been coding since he was 14, then came to I think
#
an NIT in India to study. And then in the second year dropped out. And I remember when I was talking
#
to him over the phone and we were not co-founders yet, very close to being. And I asked him why he
#
was considering dropping out. And he said, everything they use is outdated. The languages
#
they're teaching me are wrong. In fact, he failed an exam, if I remember correctly, because he wrote
#
the code in an updated version of the language that the professor did not know at a pioneering
#
institute in the country. Okay. So we know the problem exists, right? All of this could be replaced
#
with a swimming race. We just want to produce engineers. And so we do, but for those people
#
who care deeply about the tasks that they're doing, this is not a monetary exposition. It's
#
not that I want to earn money, fill my bank account, retire, right? Whatever, have a car, a job,
#
wife, children and die. If you don't want to follow that extremely boring and preset life,
#
then your best bet is not doing it at all, which is the earlier you get out of the system,
#
the more time you spend self-learning and doing it on the internet, reading books, meeting people,
#
having these conversations, and then figuring stuff along the way. A lot of learning is done
#
through doing, which is you have to write the code, you have to build the product, you have to ship,
#
you have to sell, you have to actually do it, and then make all those mistakes along the way.
#
And it's quite unfortunate that all of those really intelligent, well-meaning individuals who
#
have been sucked into the system simply because they've been convinced that the system is the
#
only way it will work and they have to have the degrees and so on and so forth to be able to make
#
it in life are only delaying that process. They do not avoid it. So when you're 25, 26, and you
#
finished your master's or your PhD, whatever it is, and then you leave the system, you still walk
#
into a world where you're quite unprepared for what you really need to be able to succeed in it.
#
And inevitably at that time, you have to go through the same journey. You have to do all
#
of the same things. So start early. That's my only advice. And skip the system. I mean,
#
we have to ask the deeper question. Why test at all? Why have these complex systems?
#
In today's world, do you really need to go to college? Or can you just start?
#
Pick something that you're super excited about and go do it.
#
This is such a fantastic thought experiment. I'm so glad we're having this conversation.
#
If nothing else comes out of the next nine hours that we talk, just this thought experiment alone
#
is enough for me. No, no. And I actually think that it's a serious thought experiment. And I
#
kind of agree with you because what you would test for with the swimming race is really temperament
#
and hunger. And to me, those things really matter. Like you would no doubt have heard of this famous
#
iconic study by Claudia Muller and Carol Dweck, where the title of the study is praise for
#
intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance. And I'll tell you why this is
#
relevant. I'll describe the study briefly. What they basically did was they split kids into two
#
groups and they were given tasks. And one group was praised in terms of attributes, like adjectives,
#
you are intelligent, you are smart, you are this, you are that. And the other group was praised in
#
terms of efforts and thereby verbs, you tried hard, you stuck to it, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And what they found over subsequent tests is that the cohort which was praised for its attributes,
#
you're so intelligent or whatever, would try less hard, would feel entitled because hey,
#
they've internalized that they are intelligent and would even cheat if they had to. Whereas
#
the cohort that was praised for their attributes would just keep trying hard because that's what
#
they were praised for and they would inevitably get ahead. And when you mentioned that the people
#
with the best resumes were the people who were least suited to what you were hiring for, this
#
instantly struck me that actually it's not a coincidence. I would expect an inverse correlation
#
because someone who's been through that filtering system and would automatically have the self-image
#
that I am brilliant, I am this, along with all the attitude problems that that would bring.
#
And they would have learned at a slower rate, whereas others outside the system would have
#
tried harder. I remember for everything is everything, at one point when we were looking
#
for a new crew, Ajay and I interviewed this girl called Namsita who is 19 now and who works with
#
us. And there was a moment where she said that she dropped out of school and taught herself filmmaking.
#
And Ajay and I looked at each other and we knew there's no reason to even communicate beyond that.
#
You just know that this person is right because they've got a great attitude, they've got the
#
hunger, they're positive and so on and so forth. And therefore the education system therefore is
#
fundamentally wrong. Like as Kartik Mullitharan said in a memorable episode we did on education,
#
that our education system is meant for sorting and not for educating. But here it would seem
#
that even the sorting is based on the wrong attributes and that the sorting can be done
#
sort of differently. You mentioned how you sort of designed your approach in the company
#
differently to get the right people. How would you design the education system differently?
#
I mean the swimming thought experiment indicates that it's completely broken as it is because
#
swimming would actually, I agree with you, it would in fact get you better students.
#
So here I'll push back and the reason is of course swimming would get you better students
#
if all you had to do was swim. But now you'd have all of these new layers pop up. So every
#
institute in Kota would replace their classrooms with very large swimming pools. Every, I don't
#
know, professor who sits on a billboard because they teach physics or chemistry really well
#
will get replaced by a swimming instructor in his speedos who will be standing there saying
#
that I can get you there in 15 seconds, 20 seconds faster. And you'd start hacking the process,
#
which is what happens with the IIT exams or any exam actually, any competitive exam.
#
And I did this, I did this for about a year. I prepared for the examination myself. You spend
#
a lot of time learning how to eliminate certain questions that could possibly be wrong, how to
#
skip questions that don't make a lot of sense. So you end up hacking the process. This is the unseen
#
behind the scene. And it is true that many of the people who end up passing these exams
#
are using these loopholes to get there. So you're certainly missing out on those wonderful,
#
genuine, amazing scientists, amazing engineers, amazing managers, whatever it is that these folks
#
want to do. I'm saying skip the testing. There are very many ways to learn. I know that some
#
subjects need a classroom. I don't know if we've ever spoken about this, but I've always wanted
#
to learn physics. I wanted to be an astrophysicist all my early childhood, from when I was a child
#
up until like 10th, 11th grade, I wanted to be an astrophysicist. And that's an example of a subject
#
that's certainly learned in a classroom. You need some equipment, you need a good professor, so on
#
and so forth. So seek them out, because these are not people who are unwilling to teach. And we know
#
this. And it's something that it's so silly. When I look back in retrospect, it seems so obvious.
#
But as a young person, it doesn't stand out to you. You always feel like, oh, you know what?
#
Amit is such an extraordinary podcaster, that if I wrote an email to him saying, Amit, will you
#
teach me how to podcast or start my own podcast? He wouldn't even respond, right? Which is not true.
#
I mean, you certainly would. You'd be so excited about the fact that someone wrote to you,
#
saying, hey, I want to start a podcast. And you have so much knowledge about this particular
#
domain that you're waiting to give away, because it's so useless otherwise. Most people in your
#
life don't want to learn about how you organize your podcasting. That you'd explicitly do a one
#
and a half hour call or meet him or her for coffee, just to tell them about the art of podcasting.
#
So seek them out. Why do we have to do three, four years of these additional steps, right?
#
In turn for them, do free work, which is go to them and say, hey, listen, I will tail you for the
#
next two years. I'm willing to do that. And I learned this, I think, in two, three different
#
ways. So when we first started up, our first step out of university was an incubator based in
#
Nasik. I don't think it functions today, but it was a Tata Group based incubator. And a gentleman
#
then, Mr. Haseet Kaji, he led special innovations for TCS and then became the CDIO for Tata Power.
#
So an extremely intelligent gentleman. He'd come to our university to do some presentation
#
on something and talk about the incubator. And we ended up connecting with him. And I remember
#
the degree of uncertainty in whether we were worth being one of the folks that the Tata Group gave
#
money to, which in hindsight is so silly, because of course we were. We were willing to work whatever,
#
18, 24 hours a day, if that's what it took, travel anywhere, do anything. We cared so deeply about
#
doing something with our lives that wasn't just sitting in a classroom, that we were willing to
#
go above and beyond. Most people are age. And he saw that, but we didn't see it ourselves.
#
And I also think about how today, if somebody who's 19 wrote to me saying, Deepak, I want to
#
build so-and-so, would you be interested in giving me an hour? I'd say, of course. Of course I'm
#
willing to help you out. And I think that slowly became clear over time. And by the time we sort
#
of met Shruti and Mohith, and these people who have in the last few years been so pivotal to
#
our journey, we've become a lot more willing to make the ask, which is to write the email,
#
to send the message, knowing that they'd be sort of well-meaning and responding.
#
So I think skip the institution entirely. Don't waste time on, you play stupid games,
#
you win stupid prizes. That's my second favorite quote. I referred to it quite frequently in my
#
head. Don't even play the game, is sort of my position. Let them do what they do, because the
#
bureaucracy will come up with new and more innovative ways to trouble you and make it harder
#
for you and all of that. And you're right that the end goal is still to produce an employee.
#
It is to produce somebody who is just a pair of hands or is just typing into a keyboard. And those
#
jobs are unlikely to be valuable in the long run. They will always be the first to be disrupted.
#
You have to learn how to be genuinely curious and creative and adaptive. And all of those things
#
are not things that you can learn so easily in the classroom. You can learn with mentors,
#
et cetera. So do it that way. What's your favorite quote that you said I was
#
your second favorite quote? My favorite quote is from Tim Minchin, who you've not met yet.
#
I don't think it's his quote directly, but there is a song that he wrote based on the quote.
#
If you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out.
#
Fabulous. So, and I'm just thinking aloud here, and I'm thinking that number one,
#
I think the key skill in the times to come is the ability to learn something new, right? Now,
#
if I want to learn a specific skill, like how do I learn writing? One thing that is not negotiable
#
is I have to write a lot, right? How do I learn, say, playing the guitar? One thing that is not
#
negotiable is that I have to play a lot. Similarly, I would imagine that if learning
#
is to be the key skill, then one thing I have to do is learn a lot. And I think about then the
#
mechanisms of how people learn. And you spoke about leaving institutions behind. My dear friend,
#
Gaurav Chintamani, who edits his show and is a great musician, his son is being homeschooled
#
right now because they found the school inadequate. And something that I found fascinating about
#
Sanishan is that he learned to read through Spotify lyrics. This blows my mind. He's just
#
listening to songs for the joy of it, and Spotify happens to have the lyrics. And through that
#
correlation of what he is hearing in the lyrics on the screen, he learns to read. And this is not
#
a use case that anybody would ever have considered for Spotify lyrics, but there you are. And I'm
#
thinking there are so many ways to learn about the world. Now, it so happens that, you know,
#
in Gaurav's case or in the case of Natasha Badwar, who did a truly memorable episode with me,
#
episode 301, she also homeschools her kids. But they are privileged parents who know what
#
they're doing, who've put a lot of thought into it. Most parents can't. I mean, school is really,
#
it's not for education, it's a daycare center. So, you know, is there even the glimmer of an
#
alternative model? Obviously, these existing institutions don't work. And like you said,
#
if you tweak the existing institutions, whatever the tweak is will obviously be
#
gamed immediately. So you are right, you will have swimming classes in Kota if you make that
#
the thing. But like when you look at your journey of learning, is there something in that that you
#
feel is typical to the human experience of how we learn something? And people have different
#
approaches. For example, learning the guitar. I'm going to start doing that now. And my approach
#
towards learning anything is you go to first principles, you understand the theory, and then
#
you do the basic hard work. So you'll find me practicing skills and doing all of that and doing
#
the basics. But for a lot of other people, the advice that is given is that you learn a few
#
chords, you learn to play songs that will give you the gratification you need, and then you can go
#
deeper. And that is also a way of learning. So is this, how have you learned everything that you
#
have learned? There's a presumption baked in that question, which is that I've learned a lot,
#
which I would disagree with quite vehemently. You learned a few things. Fair enough. And Gautam,
#
as you are editing this episode, Gaurav, sorry. Yeah, please be mindful that this is my first
#
podcast. This is an example of me learning, for example. And I'm invariably quite nervous,
#
right? So as I step into this room with you, and I'm chatting with you, I'm quite nervous about
#
the fact that this is going to be public. And I'm not so nervous about the fact that strangers are
#
going to listen to this. That's fine by me. It's that the people I love and care about will be
#
listening to this, right? My friends, my family, what would they say about the things that I'm
#
saying, right? So, okay, so we'll use this as the example. You start off with quite a bit of
#
apprehension about whether you're able to do it at all. Can I ever play the guitar, right? I read
#
blog post, which is how do you get to the top 20% or something, which is, and I thought it was
#
fairly smart, actually. The first year of meaningful practice, a few hours a week,
#
means you're in the top half of whatever subset of people you're in, because most people quit in
#
that first year. The second year of practice, the top half of that. By the third or fourth year of
#
practice, the top half of that, which is the top 20%, top 25% of whatever field you're aiming to
#
be in. So sure, I mean, practice is a way to go about it. But for me, and this is what I'm doing,
#
or I did as a way to think about learning how to be on a podcast to podcast itself.
#
Imagine you're in school and you're in fourth grade. You've just learned algebra. Such a weird
#
concept, right? You have a letter amidst all the numbers, like X plus something.
#
And it's so confusing at the outset. You view it on the blackboard and it makes no sense to you.
#
Your brain doesn't compute why things work like this. But you know two things. One, you know that
#
others have figured it out. There's a great many number of children in fifth, sixth, seventh grade,
#
all above you, who've all figured out that this thing makes sense. It's part of the curriculum,
#
which means it should make sense in some way. So you have comfort in that. And second, you know,
#
somewhere deep down, that you will figure it out. Because you've made it from first grade to second
#
to fourth, which means invariably you'll make it to fifth. So it's only a matter of time before
#
you get there. Now think about if you were in fifth grade already, right? And some fourth grade
#
kid walked up to you and said, hey, there's my teacher sort of putting, you know, alphabets in
#
numbers. Can you please explain to me what the hell is happening? You could, right? You would be
#
able to, because you've just finished your algebra course. You've passed all the exams. You would be
#
able to. So I think the way to approach learning is to third person yourself. To say, look,
#
um, and this is also the answer to lots of moral questions. I was talking to Mohit Sathind about
#
this, where the Stoics would frequently recommend doing this, where they'd say, imagine a future
#
version of yourself standing beside yourself when you're about to make a very hard moral decision.
#
What would they say to you? And how would they advise that you go about this? Right? And it's
#
what I would recommend in this case as well. Make the presumption that you're certainly going to
#
figure it out. You have figured everything else so far. Enough people have figured it out that you
#
know that it's not just the top 1% of IQ that sort of gets you there. And lots of things are
#
not a function of IQ. It's just a function of practice. And then how would a future version
#
of yourself who knows that subject advise you on how to navigate this learning field ahead of you?
#
And perhaps they wouldn't say, take the short-term route. They wouldn't say, memorize,
#
or they wouldn't say, just learn a few chords to go back to your example. They'd probably start
#
off by explaining the first principles really well. If I think about how I teach somebody
#
something, I have a little brother and he often comes to me with some questions or the other.
#
My attempt to teach starts off with some first principles where I say, look, here are some things
#
that we know are true. Of course you can question them, but for the sake of this learning experience,
#
let's pretend like those are true. So then remember those and then now we'll try and build on top of
#
this. Right? So I know I employ this frequently, which is I other myself. There's a third person,
#
Deepak, who's from the future, who's already done the thing that I want to do. And then I would ask
#
off that Deepak what advice he has for me. I don't do this really. I don't find myself in a room
#
talking to the air, but in my head, this is sort of the thought experiment that takes place.
#
I recently learned how to drive very late in life because I lived all over the country,
#
didn't have access to a car. And I remember before I learned to drive, I would have dreams
#
where I would have to drive for something, you know, like a parent would have an emergency
#
or I'd have some meeting to get to and there's no other way to get there. There's some
#
bund or something, right? Of course my brain will figure out some collection of parameters that makes
#
it so that I have to drive. And I do drive. It's not that I don't because theoretically I knew how
#
to drive, but I'm ramming into everything along the way and scratching every car and a bunch of
#
pedestrians die. But I get to wherever I have to get to. And I know that that filled me with a
#
certain sense of apprehension around driving itself. And when I sat behind the wheel of the
#
car for the first time to learn how to drive, I did exactly this, which is I said, look, everybody
#
around me drives. It's millions of people. There are some people who I would consider
#
squarely idiotic who drive really well. So this is not something that I should not be able to do.
#
There is a future version of Deepak who has learned how to drive. What would he say?
#
And then that took me to YouTube videos to figure out how a clutch works, you know,
#
how the engine works itself, just the internals of a car. And I studied engineering, so I had some
#
basic understanding of it. And then me proactively using all those first principles as I learned to
#
drive. And it was not long, like a few sessions before I was able to drive fluently well. So this
#
is an example of a model that I use. I don't know if it's useful to your gentle listeners,
#
but yeah, this is about the process that I'd like to follow, especially for tasks that I know others
#
have accomplished. It's incredibly useful. I, you know, in my writing course, I invoke the future
#
self in a different way, where I talk about, you know, building habits. And I talk about how
#
everything you do shapes your future self. If you play and if you spend an hour playing Candy Crush,
#
your future self will be stupider. While if you spend an hour reading or writing, or even just
#
relaxing and unwinding, your future self will be better off. So every action impacts your future
#
self, and we don't really think about it. But I had never sort of done this twist of a future self
#
coming back and talking to you. Give me another concrete example of how, you know, at some point
#
in time, you were stuck in the future self, sort of this framework. Moral questions. In building a
#
business, it's quite easy to build an immoral business, especially in India. When I say
#
immoral business, I don't mean the business is immoral. I mean, you will follow immoral means to
#
get to whatever end, a revenue goal, a number of users goal, whatever. It's super easy. It's easy
#
to bribe. It's easy to lie. It's easy to do all the things that you shouldn't, shouldn't in quotes,
#
do to progress the business. And I think at each of those junctures, I have two great friends.
#
The first is my future self, who I consult. And I say, look, and invariably the advice is always,
#
don't take the shortcut. It's okay. It's okay if you spend a year languishing in whatever place
#
you are in, but don't take the shortcut. And I feel this is like a metaphysical archetype of
#
sorts, right? So you could say future self, but you could also say something like,
#
my purest self, right? The person behind your face, right? When all the fog has been has been
#
removed, there is a person behind your face. And that person is saying something. And that
#
something comes from a deep intuition, consequence of social upbringing and the things that you've
#
identified as first principles. So you could question all of that, but undoubtedly there is
#
a man behind your face. And what he says is quite important. Some people are able to clear the fog
#
through meditation, for example. Some people are able to clear the fog through deep introspection,
#
whatever. But it's the same as the future self, right? I would even go so far as to leap and say
#
that it is the same as God. A lot of the ways we use God in our personal lives. Let's say somebody
#
kneels down and prays, and they're talking about something that's deeply problematic in their lives.
#
Effectively, what they're doing is invoking this man behind their face. And they're saying
#
that there seems to be a lot of mist and fog between me and the answer. And how do I navigate
#
its clearing? Let's say that as an example. Yeah. So in the business world, it's very easy to get
#
lost. But there are two other, there's another friend I have, which is the people around me.
#
I remember calling Mohit about a very complicated situation. I thought it was complicated, but it's
#
very simple in fact, where we had the opportunity to, well, it wasn't really a bribe, but it was
#
just mildly unethical, right? This is some sort of an equity transaction that involved a little bit
#
of quid pro quo. And the way it had been presented to me rationally, right? Sounded completely
#
reasonable. This happens with the industries, like you should go ahead and take it. And I felt very
#
uncomfortable with it. And the first people I go to always with issues like this are my co-founders.
#
I say that the two of them are the wind above my wings, because they do quite a bit to temper,
#
and we do it for each other. We do quite a bit to temper each other, which is how lucky I am
#
to have co-founders like that. And we wrestled with it internally for a bit, but we're really
#
unable to come to the conclusion that we shouldn't do it. And I think the reason was because the
#
financial upside was so apparent. It was so easy to make a lot of money and make a lot of progress.
#
Nobody would ever know that we did something like this. Even if they did, they'd probably say,
#
it's perfectly fine. Everybody does it. There's a way to rationalize away these things. And I
#
remember calling Mohit. Mohit is investor number one. Yeah, for context. And he has the highest
#
incentive in my financial growth or the company's financial growth. But when I called him, so I
#
explained it to him. And he said, well, of course you can't do it. It isn't an option.
#
And I'd never thought of it that way, which is you can only do those things, which are options on
#
the table. If it's not an option, then you certainly can't do it. And so if it goes against what the
#
man behind your face, what the person you are, your future version of yourself, however it is
#
that you want to personify this feeling of a moral compass, then it's not even an option.
#
So anyway, that's another example. But I think through the course of building a company,
#
I'm sure it's true for you as well through the course of building a podcast, there will be
#
certain moral quandaries that come up and usually invoking a future self is a great way to figure
#
out if it's right or wrong. I've never thought about it explicitly. In the past, I have sort of
#
a very early on, I refused advertising because I wasn't comfortable with who the advertisers were.
#
In one case, it was a PSB which said that we'll advertise the show, but you have to clear your
#
guest list with us. And of course, I said no. And at another point in time, it was an Ayurveda
#
company. And I was like, no, I'm not doing that. And while you're speaking, I sort of remembered
#
what Jeff Bezos said in his recent episode with Lex Friedman. And that's when I got introduced
#
to the concept of one way doors and two way doors. Where a two way door is a decision where you
#
take a decision, you can easily reverse it, you can walk out of the same door. But a one way door
#
is once you've taken the decision, you've taken it, there's no walking back. And I would imagine
#
in the kind of decision that you took, obviously, it is a one way door in the basic sense of once
#
you've taken the investment, you're stuck with it. But I think it is also a one way door in a moral
#
sense that once you have compromised this little bit, why won't you compromise more? And there is
#
a part dependence there. And I think it is important to kind of define your limits in that way.
#
And obviously, one can change and one can walk it back and one can say, okay, I did that in the
#
past, it was wrong, I won't do it again. But at the same time, I think it's a great advantage to
#
start with a sense of clarity about, you know, who you are, and to understand what is a one way door
#
and what is a two way door in this sense. And I guess that was a one way door in a sense.
#
Yeah, it certainly was. But I don't think you start with a lot of good first principles.
#
It's very hard. Some people do. I suspect if you were to start a new company today,
#
you'd probably have a very solid set of first principles. But we started off fairly young,
#
late teens, right? And I mean, so I didn't know what a private limited company was.
#
My parents don't have a business background. Like I said, it's not like we were discussing business
#
at the table, day in and day out. In fact, we'd started up and then my dad said, you know, I have
#
a chartered accountant friend of mine, you should talk to him. And I said, what is a chartered
#
accountant? And then he said, you know what, the state does this and they regulate and so you have
#
to have CAs who sort of sign off on things. And his name was Mohan uncle. And I spoke to Mohan uncle
#
and he introduced me to the concept of a private limited company. And it blew my mind that you
#
could that limited, of course, being the limitation of liability, that you could divide a company up
#
in little shares, and that each of those shares could be sold to people for real money, real,
#
again, in air quotes, and that they could make a return on that investment and that there were
#
people doing this for a living. It was never introduced to me as a concept through school,
#
through college even. And it was so wonderful as an original idea.
#
So if you don't already have strong first principles, and you are going through life
#
and discovering them at the same time, and I hope that happens for the rest of my life,
#
that I'm always revisiting and rediscovering these first principles, then I think you have to
#
negotiate with them at every juncture of a decision. So you have to come back to it and say,
#
does this still make sense? And are there any new considerations that I now have that amend these
#
along the way? You try and read as much as you can. So you're still always grappling with whether
#
they make sense or not. And some are soft, some are harder. And these first principles extend
#
across the width and breadth of types of domains. So it could be to do with business building. There
#
are some things I certainly won't do. Could be to do with family, with the state, with friends,
#
could be in your personal life, in public life. So you have so many first principles to contend
#
with. So I think every time two roads appear in the yellow wood, you must stand and redo the
#
entire thought experiment and consult again the man behind your face. At least that's the process
#
that the three of us as founders tend to follow. Ajay Shah and I have a wonderful episode of
#
Everything is Everything called The Beauty of Finance, where we talk about the evolution of
#
companies, including the joint stock company and the private limited company and etc, etc.
#
And it is miraculous. And we are so fortunate to be the beneficiaries of innovation that took
#
centuries but kind of brought us here. Let's go back to your formative years. I'm curious to know,
#
you know, what was your sense of yourself while you were growing up? Like what were you studying?
#
Where did you go to school? And what was your sense of who do I want to be? Like in the sense
#
that did you always have a sense that you would be an entrepreneur? Did you have a sense that
#
you would do things in the field of knowledge? Take me through the paths that got you to your
#
startup to begin with? So I went to school at Clarence. Clarence High School is a school
#
in Richardstown, not too far from here. So I grew up in Bangalore. And I think through school,
#
I mean, I'd like to say I spent a lot of time debating, but I'm sure that's a consequence of
#
some personality type that I have a proclivity to exhibit, which is what I mentioned earlier,
#
which is to be skeptical about everything. I'm very happy to take the contrarian position on
#
any subject, anything at all. I mean, sometimes it irritates friends around me. And I'm sure that
#
they're kind enough not to say it that way, because whatever they say, I will take the opposite
#
position and then be happy to spend a half an hour attempting to defend that position.
#
And I think that came from this, which is, hey, if everybody around me seems to not agree on how
#
the world works, then I really have to figure this stuff out for myself, which means nothing
#
is off the table. So everything has to be sort of argued for. And then of course that presented
#
in debating. The difficult thing about taking that sort of a path is that
#
you don't really have an end place in mind. Yeah. So I think that there was a parallel
#
difficult thing for me to figure out, which is what do I want to do with how many of years
#
that I'm on this accidental planet? And the way I'm able to formulate it now in hindsight is
#
I fell in love with problem solving. The way to avoid intense nihilism in the long term
#
is to have enough meaningful problems to solve in the short term. I know that the word meaningful
#
is in air quotes, right? Eventually it's all going to shit. The heat death of the universe
#
will take us all with it. But it does not mean that it's not worth pursuing in some way
#
in the immediate. It could be a challenge that is as small as a game of chess, which I know you
#
love playing. And maybe that's a good way to think about this as an example, which is when you sit
#
at the chess table, there are some rules, right? So you can't break them. These are the rules
#
imposed upon yourself, imposed by the person behind your face. But those rules mean that a
#
bishop can only move diagonally, right? So there are some rules to how you've decided to play this
#
game. And then you have a great opponent. The opponent can be yourself, of course, but can also
#
be a competitive space, an actual person on the other side of the table, whatever it is. And
#
through the hour that you spend playing chess or whichever, whatever game you choose,
#
that is so truly and deeply engrossing. I don't know about you, but I've never walked away from
#
a chess game that I've lost saying, damn it, I shouldn't have played. I always walk away saying,
#
wow, what a game. I have such a deep appreciation for my opponent and appreciation for how there
#
were ideas on the chess board that I didn't see. And then for how much I still have to learn about
#
the space, which means what? Which means I go to bed at night and I feel quite content and happy
#
with how the day went. It doesn't matter whether I won or lost that particular game, the means is
#
the end. It is the journey itself that was so interesting and so consuming for my being.
#
And that's a very personal choice because the sort of journey that's consuming for your being
#
is some combination of how you grew up and the first principles that you have, your skill sets,
#
right? What your ambitions are, so on and so forth. So it doesn't matter, pick one. But broadly,
#
I think that's what I defaulted to, which is I said, okay, I'm not able to resolve long-term
#
purpose, long-term, like these big broad questions that for the last 15,000 years have been debated
#
among every civilization, every society will certainly plague me as well. But we should take
#
on short meaningful goals and journeys and arcs to pursue. So that presented in various ways. I love
#
to dance through school, which I particularly like because it's not verbal. As much as I love
#
literature and words, there are some things I certainly cannot express with what comes out of
#
my throat and dancing is one of those things. I can give an example. When the transit of Venus
#
happened, which is in 2013 or 12, I worked with Dr. Ajay Saxena, who's an astrophysicist at the
#
Indian Institute of Astrophysics. And we built a small telescope and then had the whole school
#
observe the transit of Venus from my school as Venus passed between the Earth and the Sun.
#
11th grade, so 16, 17. And I mean, it's so meaningless in the long arc of things, right? It's
#
just one rock moving between two rocks and some light that we're able and not even the absence of
#
light, right? Because you cannot see the planet and hence you can see it. But it engaged my left brain
#
immediately, which is I set a flag somewhere. I said, here's a great and fun thing to follow.
#
Here's a puzzle. And then the rational side of me with all the math kicked into work immediately,
#
which is, how do we build the telescope? How should it be set up at what time of the day?
#
What if there are clouds? And when I went to bed that night, I was quite fulfilled. I was quite
#
happy with how that day had panned out. I'd set a goal and even if I'd fail, even if we didn't
#
watch the transit of Venus, I'd have felt quite happy in that we'd attempted in such a meaningful
#
way to try and solve this quote unquote problem. So I think that that has become the philosophy
#
for me now, which is the only way to build purpose and meaning is to pick nice fun puzzles
#
of some sort or the other and then throw yourself into it and have a ball doing it.
#
You know, you mentioned chess and while chess as a game is fairly simple in the sense that you have
#
perfect information and it doesn't mirror the complexities of the real world, but I'm struck by
#
something the great chess player Levon Aronian once said in a sort of a post-game interview,
#
where he referred to the game that he had been playing with a fellow top player as a conversation.
#
And I love that because in the fact that in his mind, these are not just pieces moving,
#
these are an attempt to get at the truth and you're having a conversation with the other player
#
where you say something and the other person says something and eventually you get somewhere. And
#
there is sort of a beauty to that endeavor, which lifts it above something merely competitive.
#
And earlier in this episode, you said how you do some things is how you do all things, reminiscent
#
of, you know, the great quote by Annie Dillard, which I love so much, how we spend our days is
#
how we spend our lives. And it strikes me that then, you know, how you built that telescope
#
is how you are building your company is how you will build your life is how you will tackle
#
bigger problems down the line, perhaps. So tell me about some of the problems that intrigued you,
#
like I'm intrigued, of course, by how you got to the specific problem that you're solving with
#
Tilt. But what are the other sort of problems that the small problems that you were solving on the
#
way and the big problems that you might have realized will take a lifetime anyway, I'm not
#
going to solve this. So tell me about your landscape of problems. On that last point,
#
I haven't given up hope that I will solve them. Maybe I figure out something that billions of
#
other humans have not. Like the meaning of life. Yeah, and also that 42, which by the way was the
#
name of my college club. So we started a college club in college called 42 Labs. Anyway, but
#
just that, that I have concluded that it's not worth spending the entire day, the entire week,
#
the entire year thinking about those problems. Those are parallel problems. And lots of things
#
that happen in the real world and through the process of living, end up adding to those to that
#
plate and my ability to think about it. Could you repeat your question? Your problem landscape,
#
what are the kind of problems you solved and how did you eventually arrive at? So I mentioned that
#
I wanted to be an astrophysicist growing up. And that's because I thought that the problem that I
#
had to go after was why the fuck all these things were there. There is this incredibly large
#
universe, which as far as we know, is some nearly 14 billion years old. And on the outer wing of
#
some outermost galaxy on a little speck, we exist. And I loved reading the Carl Sagan's,
#
the Stephen Hawking's and their entirely objective way to approach analyzing the world. So that was
#
me growing up. I felt a lot of comfort in those sorts of models. So initially I thought I'd spend
#
my entire life solving those problems, which is if I could do something as meaningful as figuring
#
out that a black hole exists even on paper, or the Higgs boson particle. These are all incredible
#
leaps to science and mankind. So I think those are the problems that initially gripped me. And
#
the reason they gripped me was perhaps I'm not describing it well enough, but the revelation
#
that nobody knows was something that came to me rather late. I think it was like 12, 13, when I
#
think it dawned on me that there are so many unknowns. Until then as a child, you're cocooned
#
in a world where you think everybody knows everything. You ask a question, you get an answer
#
and you take comfort in that the answer is right. And to have that flipped on its head, nobody knows
#
anything and everything could be wrong. And there's so many things that we've been entirely unable
#
to explain that we explain through some of the mechanisms was super interesting to me.
#
I think the way to look at a problem is the Y Combinator slogan. It is to see if people want it.
#
That is the definition of problem. It could be just me, it could be
#
some subset of people around me, it could be all of humanity. But a problem is that which people
#
want solved. I think it's a default in my brain on how in any circumstance, if somebody is
#
struggling with something, and I receive a lot of criticism for this, I will default to saying,
#
hey, so here's how you solve this. So here's a potential solution. Or why don't you build an
#
app? Or have you tried talking to this person? It just seems to be the way that I'm wired. And
#
I think the wiring took place upon the recognition that there are lots of unanswered
#
questions. I don't think that I have a particular affinity for a type of problem. It could be
#
anything at all. Some things I understand better than others. Some things I just don't get as
#
deeply. But if it's a problem that's interesting, then I'm willing to dive deep in that. An example
#
is we were talking about this earlier. Someone asked me about why there are no such things as
#
pro-suicide helplines. Now, I'm not saying that I want pro-suicide helplines. But if you want to
#
spend half an hour talking about it, I think it's a great discussion. Because that part of my brain
#
sort of turns on and how do we problem solve for this? Is there really a problem? Is there a market
#
of people who want to know why they should commit suicide? And if they should, then how do we
#
structure this? What are the legal challenges? What does the law say? And then you dive into a
#
two, three, four-day fund run on trying to solve a problem. I don't suspect it will get many calls.
#
But if it did, then it's an interesting problem to solve. Another friend proposed an alternative
#
legal system, which is today the way it works is you hire the most competent lawyer you can,
#
and I hire the most competent lawyer I can, and then we litigate. We could do the opposite.
#
I could hire your lawyer and you could hire mine. I will seek out the least competent lawyer possible
#
and you could seek out the least competent lawyer possible for me. And it's still an equal battle.
#
These are both equally competent or incompetent lawyers. And could this be an equally
#
well-working legal system was the question. I'm happy to spend like an hour, two hours,
#
just digging through this bizarre idea and whether it makes sense or not.
#
And I think this has been me for everything. Some of these are practical problems that really
#
need to be solved meaningfully, in which case I love getting my hands dirty. A schoolmate of mine
#
told me as I was growing up that I would make a terrible astrophysicist because I can't put my
#
hands in the sun. I can't really touch and feel the problem that I'm solving. And I agree with
#
that. I think I do well when a problem is in the real world and I can go out and stand there and
#
look at it and touch it and feel it and solve it. So some proclivities that I have a problem
#
solving, but in general, if people want it, then I'm interested in exploring how it can be solved.
#
At one level, I love that, you know, the quote from YC about give people what they want,
#
you know, so one way of looking at the world. But I think it was Henry Ford who had this old
#
quote about if I asked people what they wanted, they would say faster horses. Right. So at some
#
point you have to kind of go beyond that and think not just about what people might want in
#
this particular moment, which a market survey would tell you, but imagine the future in a sense
#
like something Rohini Nilakani in her episode with me or maybe outside the episode said about
#
her husband Nandan is that he has the ability to sit in the future 20 years from now and then look
#
back at the 20 years that have gone by. I think at least that is what she said. It has been said
#
about him. I forget exactly by whom now and how much of in a rapidly changing world, you know,
#
it seems that these two also bleed into one another that as much as there is a demand for
#
faster horses, the idea of the automobile is more than, you know, a mere glimmer. It is kind of in
#
these times where things are happening at the speed they are. So how did you arrive at your idea for
#
your startup? Because it is not an obviously intuitive idea. It isn't an obvious gap in the
#
marketplace as it were. You think people ought to be doing this, but if you were to ask them,
#
they would not even think of it. Now you drop into the gradient because it's not like it's not that
#
people don't want faster horses. In the absence of cars, they certainly do. So the entrepreneur
#
who started a faster horse company would probably have sold a whole bunch of horses before they
#
were overtaken by Ford, which just made the best faster horse, a horse that doesn't eat and is
#
significantly faster and so on and so forth. So we're in the gradient of if I have to be able
#
to solve a problem meaningfully well, then what is the best way to impact that? And that's an
#
innovation question. So the market gap is clear. People want to move faster. It's the innovation
#
question on how we deliver that. The story with Tilt is we started up in university and the idea
#
came out of my friend and myself buying a bicycle together. And the reason we bought a bicycle is
#
the same as every student across every Indian college campus. The campus is very large. There's
#
no way to get from point A to point B. And a cycle is the easiest way to solve that problem.
#
You typically buy either a share, you share a bicycle firstly, because some of you have classes
#
in the morning, some class in the evening, and invariably you can just share it. So why would
#
you spend all the money on owning one? And you buy it secondhand from a senior, somebody who's
#
passing out because they use the bike. And the next morning as I rode to class, the question that
#
popped into my head was why not have a shared bike fleet for the entire campus? This is engineering
#
brain, right? I know I can build it. It's possible to engineer the thing that locks and unlocks a
#
bicycle. And I know that students want it because I was a student and I wanted it. So why don't we
#
build it? That's sort of where the idea took shape. We convinced the university to give us
#
some money. That started a college club that turned into a small company. And we deployed
#
the first version inside the university campus. And so many things went wrong. My assumption that
#
we could build the tech turned out to be too simplistic. It's actually quite hard to build
#
the tech that locks and unlocks a bicycle remotely with a SIM card across servers. All of those things
#
are quite complex. And so immediately the tech started failing. People were using the bikes in
#
ways we didn't think they would use it in. So an example is, let's say you put 10 bicycles at a
#
university hostel entrance, 10 students come and pick up those 10 bikes and go to class. The 11th
#
student does not have a bike. In which case, what you would do is hire a truck and a truck driver,
#
which is not part of my original plan, to now redistribute the bikes from the destination back
#
to the origin, right? So demand and supply matching. In which case the obvious question
#
represents itself. Why not put the students in the truck? The truck is going back and forth anyway,
#
which is the shuttle bus, which already existed on campus. And it's such a hard realization to
#
come to that the thing that you've spent six months then working on is not really that meaningful
#
a solution because the asset needs to be redistributed at a frequency that you had not previously
#
taken into account. And at the same time, we got in touch with the Tata group, like I mentioned,
#
and they were running an incubation program. They had lots of large campuses. So my first
#
paying customers were Tata Motors, TCS, Tata Steel, the huge campus spaces. And the problem
#
was fairly similar, which is you have lots of blue collar staff who have to travel from point A
#
to point B, are not allowed to bring their own private vehicles in. These are staff who
#
already cycle to work. So if you go to the Tata Steel campus in Jhamsedpur, you will see the
#
outer walls lined with bicycles the entire way through, right? We ended up deploying in Jubilee
#
Park in Jhamsedpur, but it's sort of similar across all campus types, whether Tata Motors,
#
TCS, so on and so forth. And they were willing to use a bicycle to do those short mile commutes.
#
So we pivoted the business. And this is what I mean. I'm happy to make something people want.
#
When I spoke to the Tata group folks, and they said, look, this is a need that we have. I'd made
#
an assumption the first time around, which is the students want this. Clearly, they didn't want it
#
as much as we assumed that they would. But here was a customer telling me, look, if you're willing
#
to give it to me, I'm willing to pay you for it. And we had the tech ready. So we pivoted. That was
#
our first pivot. And we moved to the manufacturing side. And we had other customers as well, like ONGC
#
just large petrochemical manufacturing plants that needed bikes.
#
There were, I mean, put yourself in our shoes, right? So this is the first time we're earning
#
money. We have enough money to have a small team, live somewhere in a house of sorts,
#
and build a product and build a company. So it feels like you've made lots of progress.
#
And this is my discovery of capitalism and my discovery of shares and the free market
#
in the first place. So I already feel like I made progress. I had nothing. And then through
#
the will of my brain, we were able to, or our collective brains, we were able to build a product.
#
And then that product could be put on site and someone's willing to give me money for it. Double
#
thank you. Great. Okay. Then a new problem arises, which is it's not a very large market.
#
And I'd never thought about it as a first time entrepreneur who does not have any entrepreneurial
#
background or experience. I'd never really considered market size as a problem, but it was
#
very tough to scale in that every manufacturing plant had six, seven layers of hierarchy,
#
multiple negotiations, a real pain in the ass. And while the administration of a campus were
#
hell bent on needing a green mobility solution, because it ticked multiple boxes for them,
#
the end user, the people riding the bikes were using it only for health and fitness.
#
There were very few mobility use cases. And we knew because all the bikes would start and stop
#
at the same junction. And it all happened after lunch early in the morning, right? So these are
#
people who are coming to work and then saying, I haven't gotten my workout for the day. I should
#
go cycling. It's a big campus, beautiful roads. I should go cycling. And a lot of bike share
#
companies at the time. So this is 2018, 19, right? This, this, this time of history were
#
seeing similar trends and not seeing it. So if you look at the Chinese bike shares,
#
the O4, Blue Go Go, Mobike, those companies, they were seeing a large majority of use cases
#
for health and fitness and not talking about it. They sort of added to their ride graph and say,
#
we're having all these rides and sell as a mobility company, but they weren't a mobility
#
company and they were losing a lot of money on redistribution and all of those other problems.
#
And in India as well, lots of companies were having similar trends. So we were unwilling to
#
acknowledge just like they were that this was true. And the reason for this was it was so
#
contrary and so weird to say that I want to build a bike share, but not for mobility.
#
Nobody had ever heard of it. And we were already in a comfortable spot. Somebody was paying us for
#
the mobility use case. So, you know, why sort of kick the nest? And for us redemption came in
#
the form of COVID because when COVID struck, all of our manufacturing plants shut down and all of
#
our riders went back home. They went to their apartment complexes and they were cooped into
#
their cages. And if you remember through COVID, bicycle retail, bicycle sales were through the
#
roof because it was the most accessible health activity beyond walking and jogging that people
#
could do. And everybody wanted a bicycle. It was naturally socially distanced. And we had a huge
#
market ahead of us, which is we could put our bikes in every apartment complex, in parks,
#
any space that had a health and fitness use case where somebody was a walker or a morning jogger
#
and wanted to get into cycling, but just hadn't bought a bicycle and happy to get into what those
#
insights were. But that meant that we had to contend with the dragon. We had to acknowledge
#
that, look under the carpet and say, yeah, all our rides are for health and fitness and we're
#
pivoting the business. It made it very easy for us. So there is some element of the fact
#
that the global climate with COVID, et cetera, made it easy for us to conduct that pivot where
#
we could tell everybody around us, look, you know, we'd love to do mobility, but it's just
#
how the climate is now. But once pivoted, all the numbers went through the roof, which is,
#
it became extremely apparent that Indians want to cycle and they want to cycle a lot,
#
save for buying the bicycle. There are three unintuitive things here, which we would not have
#
figured out unless you put the bikes in these campuses. The first, like I said, lots of Indians
#
want to get into cycling. And the anecdotal story that we get from everybody is, I went to
#
a decathlon. I stood, I saw the bicycle, but I didn't buy it. And if I say, okay, why didn't
#
you buy it? They say, you know what, it's like 10,000, 15,000 rupees. And I've seen so many
#
bicycles lying in my basement. Now I don't know if I have the, the wherewithal to pick up that
#
habit and ride a bicycle, if so many others have failed, right? And if you have a shared bike,
#
now suddenly there's no asset investment. I'm willing to start cycling immediately.
#
Second, cycling is a group activity. I would never have thought of it this way,
#
but you want to cycle with somebody else, a friend, a spouse, a child. That's fundamentally
#
what the activity is. And you're not able to do it if you buy a bicycle. The leading cause
#
for not riding your bicycle once you buy one is because the person, your friend, your spouse,
#
somebody you love, and you want to share an activity where it doesn't have a bicycle.
#
And most Indians are unwilling to buy two or three per household. They've already bought
#
one for the kid. Now they buy one for themselves, then buy one for the spouse, then it's too many
#
bicycles. Third, repair and maintenance, right? So if I stop riding for two weeks because I
#
undergo a busy spell or I'm sick, and then in two weeks I go down to the basement, the bike is in
#
a state of disrepair, I have to spend an hour fixing it. These are not things that Indians want to do.
#
So all of a sudden a shared bike inside the apartment complex solved these problems.
#
I could simply walk downstairs and it's, it's like a peloton for shared bikes, right? It's
#
not in your house, but it's in your apartment complex. We don't lose any bikes because it's
#
inside the apartment complex. Most of my riders go around the apartment complex perimeter.
#
It's a flat road, good, good infrastructure. So no potholes, no traffic, so on and so forth,
#
safe space. So all those things sort of click together and then voila, we have a business.
#
And that's what we sort of applied to YC with. We raised money on, we've been scaling that business.
#
What sort of strikes me here is that all of these insights that you had, you could only have found
#
them out by trying to do the wrong thing to begin with, which is that, you know, your initial thing
#
is let me solve a problem for me. Your use case is mobility. You know, I got to get from here to
#
there. And you're like, wow, okay, if I have this problem, other students have this problem,
#
let me try to solve it. It is indeed a problem. But as you point out, you discover this much
#
deeper problem. And the only way to do that was by putting bikes on the ground as it were,
#
which strikes me as a great metaphor for how we need to learn about the world, which is that,
#
you know, books aren't enough, courses aren't enough. You actually have to go out there and
#
do stuff and you sort of learn unexpected, unintuitive things when you do that. You
#
mentioned that you could go deeper into the unintuitive learnings that you took out of that
#
period when people were cooped up and all that in terms of their personal fitness and their
#
attitudes and all that. Tell me a few more. Yeah. So, I mean, on that list are these three things,
#
right, which is Indians want to cycle, that you want to cycle in groups, right? So those are
#
some things that are not apparent from the face of it. But I think it's the broader startup story
#
in general. It is ripe with things that are heuristics that sort of don't make sense,
#
but you have to do it in that particular way and suddenly they start making sense. So I can give
#
you a few examples. And I learned a lot of this from doing Y Combinator because they tell the
#
story over and over again. And if you read Peter Thiel's Zero to One, one of the things that he
#
says is that if you know something unintuitive about a space, you could shout it from rooftops
#
and nobody will listen to you. There's no such thing as somebody stealing your idea. Lots of
#
entrepreneurs do this. They keep their idea close to their chest. They don't talk about it. And it's
#
so unintuitive that you have to do the opposite, which is to tell everybody about it and say,
#
hey, I have this idea. And most people won't even believe you. There's no queue of people waiting
#
to steal your idea. Most of them, in fact, are there to naysay and say that this doesn't make
#
any sense. Yeah. So that's one example of an unintuitive truth that the way to progress
#
your belief is to speak about it and meet people and say, and potential competitors.
#
I remember talking to the Yulu founder. Yulu at the time was a competitor. And I don't know,
#
as a first-time entrepreneur, presumed that I had the obligation to stay very silent and did the
#
opposite, where I sort of reached out and we had a conversation. And it was wonderful because he
#
said, Deepak, this is exactly the same data we saw at Yulu, which is it's all health and fitness. So
#
you're on the right track. We chose not to do that. They want to solve micromobility. And so
#
they've moved to e-scooters and other form factors. But all of a sudden I had one, a friend, somebody
#
who I can now rely on, who can rely on me because we've built a relationship upon a somewhat common
#
goal that we're pursuing and a somewhat similar journey we've had over the last few years. And
#
second, that it's validation from somebody else. And all of this could only have happened if I spoke
#
about it. That's unintuitive. Most young founders don't know that. When I did YC, I remember Dalton
#
Gladwell, who's just phenomenal. I think he's a wealth of information and knowledge and wisdom,
#
said, don't reply to an investment analyst. And this was crazy to me. I'd spent three years
#
replying to investment analysts when some random weirdo from some VC firm writes in saying,
#
Hi, Deepak, can I get 30 minutes? I'm interested in a call. I'd always say, yeah, of course,
#
because maybe I fundraised, maybe you give me some money. And we never raised from any investment
#
analyst. I never made the connection that the reason I wasn't fundraising was because I was
#
talking to the wrong people. The investment analyst is the wrong person to talk to. On average,
#
an investment analyst probably gets one, two, three successful deals in the entire year.
#
I'm likely to be in that subset of deals that are not successful. Most successful deals go straight
#
through an LP or somebody very senior at the firm. So if they don't reach out, you're not
#
interesting enough. This guy or this woman is just doing their job, which is to talk to X number of
#
startups a day. And you're just one of those statistics. Super unintuitive, right? Which is,
#
if you remember, I spoke at the previous Ideas of India conference about how incubators are broken.
#
And I didn't touch on this at that talk, but one of the big ways that they're broken is that
#
they do not preach these unintuitive truths. And that is because they do not know it.
#
And lots of founders at these spaces are lost, going down rabbit holes that seem completely
#
reasonable and rational. Just imagine if you receive a message in your inbox from somebody
#
who's never going to give you money, but seems like they are. And you take this to a mentor,
#
and the mentor says, wow, wonderful. You've received a message from, you know, big name BC,
#
reply to them. At no point in that conversation would you say, hey, this feels wrong. This feels
#
like something I shouldn't be doing. It is the explicit, it is only that person who can explicitly
#
advise you in why an unintuitive truth is true, that value lies. And so, okay, Indian incubators
#
in the Indian early stages is just sort of lacking in wisdom in these respects. But I learned this
#
from YC. And then chess and checkers, right? So VCs, or investors in general, are not playing the
#
same game that founders are playing. And we always think it as founders. We think that if I just say,
#
hey, look how much my users love my product, then an investor is going to swoop in and say,
#
that's phenomenal. Here's, you know, $10 million. But founders never think of reframing the entire
#
problem in a way that the investor sees selfish value, which is they need to return investment.
#
That's fundamentally what they're going after. But there's something deeper. The thing that's
#
deeper is that investors don't really know who's going to win. They will never say it,
#
but nobody does. No investor backed, for example, Airbnb for a long time. And even after they got
#
into YC, there were multiple naysayers. And your job as a founder is to make the case that I am one
#
of those possible shooting stars that you simply don't believe in today because you don't know
#
enough. It is to tap into the insecurity that an investor has because at the back of their mind
#
and deep in their hearts, they know that all they're doing is Excel sheeting, right? They've
#
made some assumption of, okay, industry X grows at CAGRY and they've put this into an Excel sheet
#
and they have LPs who demand returns and they promise certain return. They have fund two or
#
fund three or fund X to raise and basis all those variables. They've come to the conclusion that I
#
have to put so many million dollars in these sorts of companies, but they're deeply insecure.
#
They're deeply unsure on whether these things are right or wrong, just like you as a founder
#
are unsure and insecure. It's similar feelings. They only present a face of surety and you want
#
to do the same and you want to present in such a way that it pulls at those strings and makes the
#
case for all the startups they're talking to every day, every year, why you ought to be the one to
#
get their check. And an example of a way to do this, unintuitive, is to not give enough information.
#
Which, and I remember when making my first few pitch decks, right? I'd put everything on there.
#
I'd say, look, here's my business. Here's how fast revenue is growing. Here are my expenses,
#
my gross margins. This is the business that we're going after. I'd say all of that in a single pitch
#
deck. And I'd be so surprised when investors look at that and say, how will pass? And what I learned
#
from YC, for example, was to do exactly the opposite, which is to build intrigue. Each deck
#
is just one line long, right? Getting around campuses is painful. That's the whole first slide.
#
We don't say anything else. We don't explain the solution. We don't say why we're building this.
#
You draw a big circle in the middle of the deck and you say, I don't know, $50 billion industry.
#
You just say that. Don't explain too much around what the industry is, who uses us, so on and so
#
forth. And why, why do we do this? Because investing is like a sales funnel. So there has
#
never been an investor in history who looks at it, or very few, I presume, who has looked at a deck
#
and then sent back an email saying, I will invest X amount of money, right? We know that the next
#
step in the investment journey is getting on a call. And the only purpose of the deck is to get
#
the investor on the call. Founders don't think about decks like this. We think about decks as
#
a way to prove that we're building a great business. And that's not true. A deck is, in fact,
#
a way to get an investor on a call. And the point of the first call is to get them on a second call.
#
And the point of the second call is to get into a due diligence. And the point of the diligence is
#
to get to the term sheet. And you think about the entire fundraising journey as a funnel,
#
as a sales funnel, which is so unintuitive. It's advice I never received from many of the mentors
#
that we were in the early stages when I was still in college listening to. So yeah, here are some
#
examples of how that entire journey is fraught with things that are quite unintuitive. Mind blowing,
#
lots I want to double click on. And first, let's begin with talking about the sense of purpose that
#
drives people to start a company in the first place. Like earlier at breakfast, we were talking
#
about the different ways in which this can play out. And one example you came up with was
#
Angad Duryani, who started his company with a sense of purpose. And he's sticking to that sense
#
of purpose. There are many pivots possible which could be profitable in the short term. But that
#
sense of purpose, having cleaner air in our cities, is such a big thing that he will not compromise on
#
that. And that is a vision. And he goes with that. And equally, there can be other founders who may
#
start with a sense of purpose that is often less grandiose, and could even be something like
#
improved mobility in campuses. But they're okay to pivot, and they're okay to keep pivoting. And
#
I kind of wonder about the mindset one has to have, because I think there is a danger,
#
like if I might draw sort of an analog with the creator economy, I would think that, yeah,
#
you want to be open to change in the same way that this podcast went from being like 20 minute
#
episodes to seven hour episodes. You want to be open to change. But A, the direction of this
#
particular change was deeply unintuitive. The market would never have told me this.
#
I had to do it. And after doing it, I figured out it worked. And the only reason I did it was because
#
I wanted to do it. It was driven by my own sort of curiosities and my own
#
aesthetic sense of what is working. And I think there is a danger of following a market too far,
#
in the sense that then you are constantly trying to second guess what the customer wants,
#
and there is a possibility of a race to the bottom. And at some point you have to have a
#
vision and you have to say that, okay, this is how I'll do it. So how does one think about this,
#
that you begin with purpose. Now, how much should you pivot and when? I think pivoting is great.
#
I, of course, pivoted in almost everything I have done, but I have not just blindly tried to,
#
you know, follow the money as it were. How do you think about this? I mean, there's a ship of
#
thesis quality to it also that a company can become completely different in terms of purpose
#
by just pivoting too much. I love the example. We discussed this quite frequently. I don't know
#
what a company is. It's quite hard. It's ineffable. It's, I don't know, is it the founders? If we leave
#
the company stays, it's not our users. It's not the shareholders. It's nothing. It's just an
#
intersubjective ineffable floating entity. Yeah. So I think pivoting is to walk the narrow path.
#
It is the hardest thing that you can do in the early stage journey because the reductionist
#
way of looking at the startup journey is you start with an idea, you get to product market fit,
#
then you scale the business. And in that first part, the idea to product market fit sort of
#
journey, the most difficult thing to do is to pivot or perhaps second to quitting, which is
#
also something that you have to take a call on some point. If you say that I've been pivoting
#
endlessly, but I haven't. So when to quit is probably just as hard, but it's one of the
#
hardest things that you have to do. And it's for exactly the reason that you mentioned.
#
We have to, we have to balance those two difficult things, which is one, what is the user telling us
#
and how do we know that what they're telling us is true and how do we test that? So, and then you
#
have to get into all these practical problems of how do you build an MVP? How do you test? How do
#
you AB test? How do you observe users? How do you collect feedback, right? NPS, PMF calculations.
#
So all of that is one side of this, this journey. And the second is that you still have to set
#
vision. You as a founder have to say, for example, if we say that, okay, we're building a health and
#
fitness company now and bicycles are the base of it. There has to be vision for what you deliver
#
that is not obvious for the rider. Like how do you build a car instead of building a faster horse,
#
right? So you identify the problem, you need faster mobility. And then a poor founder builds,
#
breeds faster horses. A great founder builds the car or an airplane or something. And maybe an
#
airplane is too futuristic and maybe today it is a car, right? So that walking the narrow path is,
#
I think, the difficult part of the entire journey. I don't think there's any easy answers, but
#
I think you need to get lots of things right to be able to do it. Building good companies
#
is in large degree luck. So you need to have the right co-founders. And I was very blessed to find
#
Rachit and Dakshu are incredible co-founders to have. It's the leading cause of why startups fail.
#
You need to start up at the right time. You may have an idea that's simply too early or too late
#
and not just in time. And you have to explain it. Why is this the right time to build this business
#
as opposed to five years earlier, 10 years earlier? Because if it could have been built 10 years
#
earlier, why has nobody built it? There certainly must be a reasonable explanation. And to get all
#
of that in place, then you need to have those conversations, which is, here's what the data
#
says. Now we spend two hours trying to figure out if the data is right and what it really means,
#
because it seems like it means something, but is that what it really means? And how do we test for
#
this? Then you have to dip your toes into the pool very slowly. Don't dive head first. So you
#
dip a little bit and you see, is this in line with the hypothesis we've laid out? And if no,
#
why not? So it's very complex. The question you've laid out is the early stage journey,
#
and it's that really difficult process. Earlier, we were talking about grit and determination as
#
those criteria by which somebody wins a swimming race, and seems to be approximately what the
#
filter is, which is how many hours you're able to sit at a table and study a book and memorize
#
every single thing and let go of everything else in your life. And then you make a great
#
employer, whatever it is. I think it's also true for founders. So it's become apparent to me in the
#
last few years of building that if there is one criteria that determines success in startup
#
building, it is grit. It is not IQ. In fact, very smart founders tend not to do very well,
#
because they wake up every day and their brain tells them that this is so idiotic. You could
#
just be working a 50 lakh per annum, one crore per annum job, and have everything that your
#
heart desires, if that's what your heart desires, and not have to slave your way through
#
this whole idea to PMF journey. The pre-PMF space is, and I don't think grit is a sufficient
#
condition, but in my estimate, the only necessary condition, which is what also makes good investors,
#
good investors bet on gritty founders. Unintuitive, but investors who ask questions like,
#
give me a five-year projection for your business, are bad investors, because they're not testing
#
for grit. They're testing for ability to do a discounted cashflow. And pre-product market fit,
#
what the hell is a five-year projection? How do you even know what you're building exactly?
#
So you certainly need to be the only necessary condition that I've been able to identify
#
as grit. Everything else is hard. Once you have grit, then you have to be lucky enough to have
#
all the other factors fall into place. Like I said, mentors, co-founders, the broader ecosystem,
#
all of those things have to fall into place, and then you have to walk the narrow path from idea
#
to product market fit. And if you don't get to product market fit, make that harder choice,
#
which is, okay, this is not working, I'm going to quit, and either come up with a new idea,
#
or take a break and come back. I have no easy answer, but I don't think there exists an easy
#
answer. That skill set of how you get to product market fit in a combination of, on one side,
#
your vision, your aspirations, hopes and dreams, the future you lay out in front of you.
#
And on the other side, that which your data reflects and that your user tells you,
#
the bringing together of those two in some sort of poetry is the hard task that entrepreneurs
#
have ahead of them. Just thinking aloud, I mean, any rational founder could both know that grit is
#
important, but would also know that the examples of the gritty people who have made it represent
#
a kind of selection bias, that most gritty people don't make it simply because most people don't
#
make it. And that would, at certain stages, lead to huge amounts of self-doubt. And I'm curious
#
about two kinds of journeys you would have made during this period. One is learning about yourself
#
and growing in yourself the attributes that you feel you need. And two is learning about what it is
#
to have a company where you might begin with just the founders and then you have 10 employees and
#
then you have 30 employees. And as you grow, how do you manage egos? How do you figure out all of
#
that stuff? So take me through both of these and maybe start with yourself. What did you learn
#
about yourself through this process? And at what point of the journey does a realization strike you
#
that it's really about staying the distance? And were there moments of self-doubt where you also
#
confronted the most difficult question, like you said, of should I quit or should I stay?
#
And sometimes, obviously, you should know what the right time to quit is,
#
but sometimes you stay a little bit longer and things work out.
#
Yeah. I think one of something that I left childhood with was the belief that I am somebody
#
who does not quit. I don't know why I hold that belief because there certainly are times when you
#
should quit. That's completely reasonable. But I tied to my ego the success, not even the success,
#
the lack of quitting, which is if I quit, then I am not the person that I am. It became fundamental
#
to my character as a human being. As good luck would have it, not quitting was good in this
#
particular journey. I'm certain that there are some journeys along which I should have
#
quit a lot earlier, or perhaps that I should have quit a lot earlier. But that played a big
#
role in the early days. So when we first started up, I started up with a aforementioned best friend
#
who's gone to Japan. And we had a very hard talk towards the end of college where he wanted to
#
get a job and take a more traditional approach for the first few years,
#
but it's potentially revisited starting up later in his life. And I felt the opposite,
#
which was if there was a time to be super risky, it was now. Much later in life,
#
I don't know what will happen, but today things are reasonably stable that I can plunge.
#
And we had to split. And for a long time, that journey was quite alone, just me building. Luckily,
#
I had a few other mentors and people like that around me. And then a few months in,
#
I met Rachit and Daksh. So then I had the good fortune of finding the right co-founders.
#
I think I didn't quit simply because it was a matter of who I was as a person. It was fundamental
#
to me that if there's one thing that Deepak is, he is not a quitter. So that's my personal answer.
#
But along the way, I think I discovered the boundaries that I had for myself.
#
And a good example is when we first started, we would build day and night. It was a race,
#
not a marathon. And you don't know any better when you first start up that it's going to be a...
#
We were okay. Theoretically, I said, yeah, this is a couple decades. I have no problem with it.
#
But practically, building something for a couple of decades is very hard. It requires
#
quite a bit of discipline, a lot of structure in your life. And we didn't approach it like that.
#
I said, if I work twice as hard as everybody else and twice as long, then I get twice as much
#
work done. And that's the approach that we took. I'm not sure I advise for it or against it today
#
for other founders. Pick what makes the most sense to you. But it worked well for us because
#
otherwise it would take me much longer to get to product market fit and beyond.
#
But today, as founders, we look back and we don't think that's the right way to structure our lives.
#
In fact, we've taken a lot more mellow approach to the day, which is you have to make time for
#
other things, exercise, get your tooling right, take days off if you need it, go on a hike if
#
that's what you want. Do all those things and your journey, your company is better off for it.
#
So that's, for example, something that I learned along the way, which is it makes no sense. And
#
we never actually burnt out. We never came to a place where one of us said, hey, I'm burnt out.
#
But we could see it coming. The three of us have something called the dumpster fire hypothesis,
#
which is all good founders can see the dumpster fire coming. You can. It's down the road. And
#
from where you stand, if you're being honest, you can see that something is on fire. It could be
#
that your attention is shit. It could be that your users don't actually love your product. It could
#
be that running out of money, whatever it is, you can see it coming. When you see new stories of
#
founders who are now not paying their employees or have sort of blown up all their money or
#
fire festival type outcome, those are all founders who refuse to acknowledge the dumpster fire. They
#
saw it and didn't acknowledge it. And I think for us, burning out was one of those dumpster fires.
#
We saw it from afar and we said, if we continue down this path, then we burn ourselves. And so
#
we shouldn't do it. And we've continued to follow that approach till today. So that was a boundary
#
that I think we identified along the way, which is, and sometimes the dumpster fire is so far
#
beyond the horizon that you don't see it. But as you walk towards it, you see it and then you sort
#
of morph. So I think that's something I realized about myself, which is tied to my identity is the
#
fact that I don't quit, which I probably should work on. And I have since become at least
#
acknowledging off that I am this sort of person. And so sometimes when I'm not quitting
#
stubbornly, then I realize that it doesn't come from a rational place, but rather from a place
#
that is simply egotistical. And that there are boundaries and part of the journey is to
#
discover what those boundaries are. When it, so I also think that I don't know to what degree
#
my narration of my story is valuable to other founders. This is super individual. It matters
#
so much what sort of childhood you had and where you grew up and what are those things that you
#
hold so dear to your heart. I've seen lots of founders who are simply dhanda karna hai.
#
And these are founders who do really well, by the way, most of India's top entrepreneurs
#
are just people who want to make money, which is solid, right? But this is not a philosophical
#
expedition. On the contrary, I'd say that everything that you're saying about being a
#
founder and startups, I think I feel like it applies to me also that I need to look ahead in
#
my own life and see the dumpster fires coming. And I can, while you were talking, I was thinking
#
back on dumpster fires I have seen in the past and ignored. So I think it's actually, it's probably,
#
it applies not to less people than you think, but more people than you think. Yeah, perhaps.
#
Right. And because you're thinking about from the broader perspective of not just companies,
#
but just in general. I think that's the sort of person it types at all three of us are.
#
I was saying something, but I forgot the point. Your second question was how does this-
#
The company, in terms of the company, like, just, you know, like you said, for a long time,
#
that journey was solo, but then you have the co-founders. Tell me a little bit about
#
that story, because if I remember correctly from the conversations I've had with you guys,
#
you didn't have to make them co-founders. It's a choice that you made. And why did you make
#
that choice? And then how is it working on that relationship? And then when you start building a
#
company, you start getting employees. It's very different running a company where it's just the
#
three of you to where there are 10 employees, to where there are 30 employees, to maybe thinking
#
ahead now and, you know, thousands of employees. How many do you have right now? We're not a very
#
big team. So our white collar staff, all of our mechanics, all put together about 50 people is
#
how large we are today. It's a good, it's an interesting question. And I think there's an
#
example that is a good analogy, which is a game of Mario Kart or have you played DX Ball growing
#
up? Okay. So, or play Dave? Yeah, yeah, back in the day. Perfect. Okay. Yeah. So you have 10 levels
#
of Dave, right? Each of those levels are different. On one of those levels, you start off playing and
#
the monster looks a particular way and shoots a particular kind of pellet at you and the controls
#
work in a particular way and so on and so forth. And you spend some time trying to figure out
#
that particular level. At some point you master it. And once you do, you go down the chimney
#
and into level two. And level two is suddenly completely different. There's water everywhere,
#
you're floating. Jumping means moving upwards, not downwards. The monster looks different.
#
And suddenly everything that you've learned at the previous level has to change and you have to
#
evolve. And there are, in the analogy, two skill sets here. The first, identifying when a level
#
has changed. That's not so easy. When you build a company, making the call to hire your first
#
employee is the acknowledgement that, hey, this level has changed. Three people or two people or
#
just a single founder is not enough. And then second, how quickly do you learn the rules of
#
the new level? Which is hard because you first have to document the rules of the new level.
#
And a good example is when you are not a funded company, you've not raised any capital. The way
#
that you behave and act is very different than the way you behave and act once you've raised,
#
let's say, money from investors or you even make enough money to start paying other people.
#
The things that you focus on and spend your time on are completely different.
#
Now, again here, I think it's fairly personalized. The recognition that level has changed is very
#
founder-specific. Some may be very ambitious and say, look, I know that this is coming in the
#
future, so I'm going to jump levels right now, hire preemptively. I don't recommend it. In fact,
#
I recommend moving slower than you should and hiring later than you should simply because
#
if you hire too soon, you burn all your money, then you're in trouble. It's okay to go slow.
#
I feel like alarmism about competition is overrated, burning money to grab market share
#
is not a good idea. These are all unintuitive first principles, but you just shouldn't do them.
#
And you learn this from other people. You can literally go on the internet and watch
#
Paul Graham or Michael Siebel or any of the great Indian entrepreneurs speak for an hour and they
#
will all say approximately the same thing. And those truths are true and you can presume that
#
it's true, at least for the sake of your journey. But that second skill of being able to learn
#
rapidly the rules of your new level, that's really hard. And it's so contextual that you
#
can receive vague advice from other people, but that's sort of where the value of an entrepreneur
#
truly shines in the recognition that level has changed and how fast I learned the new rules so
#
I can transition my entire team to that space. For us, we'd spent a lot of time at level one,
#
which is we started off in college and I was happy to even get to revenue and then to get
#
to a bottom line where people were paying us money and we had enough left over for the next month.
#
Then when we pivoted to apartment complexes, I think that was level two-ish for us because
#
all of a sudden it was not strictly profitable in the way that a traditional business is profitable.
#
We had to make capital investments at the outset, a lot more complicated math, a lot of bets had to
#
be made today to reap in some future. That was our level two for us. And then once we raised money
#
and we became a venture-backed business, at least on paper, that became level three.
#
I'm sure there are hundreds of levels ahead of us today, but I don't know if it strictly applies
#
to everybody else, but those two things will still be invariably true for your business.
#
When does the level change? How do you adapt to any changes?
#
And how is it being a boss? How is it dealing with your co-founders, for example,
#
that part of the story where you decide that you want them to be co-founders rather than employees?
#
They joined as employees, both of them. But when you're so early stage, I was the only person
#
running the company practically, and it's not like we had customers, I just had an idea.
#
I don't think the word employee means anything. Everybody does an equal share of work,
#
you distribute, nobody says no to anything, there's no domain you're unwilling to work in.
#
And those are things you test for. You test for whether these people are willing to work
#
across domains, are willing to treat this like their own business. And both of them certainly
#
did. Dux dropped out of college to join Tilt, and Rachit, in fact, joined the Incubation to
#
build his own company, and then joined us to help with some of the hardware, and then said, okay,
#
this is all solid, I like the idea, we should dive deep into this. And both of them joined much
#
before we pivoted to apartment complexes, before we got into YC. So there was no shining star,
#
in fact, it was just a pile of shit. It's quite hard to look at this and say, yeah,
#
this can turn into something that's a true and tried business, and most startups fail.
#
The one thing that I was initially lucky to have was that it was apparent that they both had a
#
very entrepreneurial bent of mind. They didn't want to go down the traditional path of getting
#
a job and all of that. And they were willing to stand up to the pressures that be, societal
#
pressures that say that they ought to do that. They were already willing to be fighty about it
#
and say, look, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul, which was already a very
#
good sign that these are the sorts of people that I could fall in love with. These are the sorts of
#
people who I want to surround myself with in life. And I think maybe a few months into it,
#
it became very clear that all three of us were going to build this together for the long run.
#
It's only good fortune. If I'd met some different type of person or people, I don't know if it
#
would have transpired the exact same way. I don't know if I would have been just as comfortable
#
saying, okay, let's co-found this. But with them, it sort of came to us naturally, and we all shook
#
hands. The wonderful thing about being co-founders with them is we've never had a fight. Never. It's
#
been six years. We've never argued about something. Well, I think argued is wrong. We've never fought.
#
We argue vehemently. And I think that's because underpinning each of those arguments is the
#
recognition that we're all rowing the boat in the same direction. So to go back to an early
#
example that I had, and I've seen founders fall apart over what color the button should be.
#
If I say red, you know that I'm saying it ought to be red because I care deeply about the success
#
of the company. And if you say green, I know that you're saying green because you care deeply about
#
the success of the company. So underpinning that argument that we're having is the acknowledgement
#
that we have a mutual goal. We simply differ on the particulars and how we want to get there,
#
but it has not changed that stick that we've placed so far in the future is in exactly the
#
same spot for you and me, which makes navigating these conversations so easy. And again, that's
#
some providence, some grace that has been issued to me that I've been able to find co-founders
#
who communicate really well and that we can have these conversations. And then I think it became
#
very important for us to learn how to argue, which means that if we disagree about something,
#
color of the button per se, for example, and what sorts of solutions can we get to? And are we
#
arguing about things that shouldn't be argued about? Can we just toss a coin and say, okay,
#
it's red and move on with it? Or are these things that we have to A-B test? So half the app will
#
ship with feature one, half the app with feature two. We'll come back in two weeks, test the data.
#
Can it be shipped chronologically? That is today we ship one and then two weeks later two, and then
#
we see which of those have proved to be better. And so that is a learning game where depending
#
on the case, we've sort of learned each other's temperaments and how we behave and how we interact
#
with each other. Finally, I think it also really helped I live with my co-founders. We started
#
living together right out of college when we started building the company. And to this date,
#
we have a three BHK in Khamnali in Bangalore where we live. And so, I mean, we work from home. It's
#
a fully remote company. We work in our boxes the entire day and having a shared space with them
#
where I can walk into the other person's room and say, hey, what the fuck, this broke. And then the
#
other person says, yeah, but so and so. And then we're able to sort of hash that out and fix it.
#
It's just wonderful. Lots of founders don't have it so easy. And we certainly do. And we're lucky
#
that way. So I don't know if again transpires exactly to all your listeners or anybody building
#
a business, but this has been our experience. I learned this phrase again from Jeff Bezos's
#
episode with Lex Redmond, which was disagree and commit, where he will say he will often
#
have an argument as a CEO, and he might disagree, but he will realize that at some point, the matter
#
has to be resolved. And sometimes when he sees the conviction of the other person, he will say,
#
fine, I disagree, but now I will commit, which means I will never come back to you and say that,
#
hey, fuck, you know, I said this, or I knew this would happen, or I knew it wouldn't work.
#
You disagree and commit, which seems a sort of a beautiful way to resolve arguments outside the
#
context of a company as well. I think it's something in any relationship. And again,
#
I heard this in some podcasts, I forget who, but it was in the context of personal relationships
#
where this person was talking about how he and his wife hash out arguments. And he said,
#
the way we do it is each of us assigns a number out of 10 to it, how intensely we feel about it.
#
And if hers is 9 and mine is 6, I'll just give up and vice versa. And the only real problem is when
#
they are both 9 and what do you do? And I guess in the heat of battle, everything can seem like an
#
11 out of 10. So, you know, before we go in for a break, a sort of a final question about the
#
company that struck me, that when you speak about having alignment on a goal, you know,
#
how do you define that goal? Because the goal could be something as narrow as help people
#
become fitter by, you know, shared bicycles, or it could be something much broader as in make
#
India fitter, you know, so what is that goal? How do you think about that goal?
#
Again, I think two ways to do this. You, we learned advice to set two week goals,
#
two week goals are the best way to build a business. We broadly do that. You could be
#
monthly, quarterly, whatever it is, but you want to set a goal for what and the way to do this is
#
to pick a key metric. So this is my mathematical answer to the question, right? It's not so
#
philosophical. You set a numerical goal saying I'd like to grow at X percent week on week,
#
or this is the metric to hit. And the hard part in that is finding the key metric.
#
The best key metric is revenue, because that's what you want to grow. But if it's not revenue,
#
it could be anything else. You pick a key metric and across domains. So for customer support,
#
the metric will be different than from sales, than from operations, whatever. And then it's
#
not so difficult. Once you picked a key metric, and you all agree on how fast you want to grow,
#
and how all these various functions intermingle, then you can set numerical goals and you can end
#
up achieving them. But those numerical goals still have to be subservient to some long term goal,
#
which is I think what your question is. And given that we're the sorts of founders who've
#
been pivoting quite comfortably, I think our long term goal is, if I think for example about the
#
bike share for health and fitness, that's sort of the ethos of what's being built today.
#
It's to bring that to as many people as possible. So as to as many Indians as possible,
#
we'd like to deliver cycling in a new form factor. The unintuitive bit here is that people want to
#
cycle, but they don't want to buy a bicycle. And the startup or the company that overthrows
#
a 200, 300, 400 year old retail cycle model is not another retail cycle startup. It's not somebody
#
who's manufacturing a new kind of bicycle. It's somebody who delivers the same experience in a
#
completely new form factor. And all of a sudden, millions of people who want to get into cycling,
#
but never wanted to buy the bicycle are now willing to ride a bicycle. And of course,
#
you layer it with an app and gamification, leaderboards, all the nice things that come
#
with having software on top of this. So I think we've agreed on that, which is we have a whole new
#
form factor to deliver bicycling in. We know that Indians want to get into cycling and we'd like to
#
move as aggressively as possible to get these bikes into all those spaces where then people
#
can come and unlock and ride and have those wonderful experiences. So that long-term vision
#
has been agreed upon because it feels so exciting to have figured out something about the market
#
that nobody else knew before. Nobody else knew that you could put shared bikes in an apartment
#
complex and suddenly people stop buying bicycles and riding them more frequently. And then once you
#
know that, you have to do all the math, which is how much money have I raised? How much debt can I
#
possibly get? How do we finance our assets? How many employees can be hired? What does the balance
#
sheet look like? Do your monthly review. So you have some numerical underpinnings. And then using
#
that, you say, okay, if our goal is to grow as aggressively as possible, what is the most aggressive
#
safe number that we can pick for this month, the next month, the next quarter, the next year,
#
so on and so forth. And then you put that number in place. You revisit it frequently.
#
And then from that number, everything else flows, which is then what are the numbers for revenue,
#
for, let's say, growth, retention, all of the other little bits that fall into place.
#
Yeah, so I mean, I know that companies have all these mission statement, vision statement, right?
#
It seems a bit cliche. In fact, we've been asked to write down ours and we've never been able to.
#
But broadly, I think it's that. I think we've discovered a new way to deliver cycling to people,
#
which we love doing. How do we grow that as aggressively as possible?
#
Marvelous. Let's take a quick commercial break. And on the other side of the break,
#
we shall continue. Thank you.
#
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just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Welcome back to The Scene and The Unseen. I'm still here with Deepak Vyas. And in a sense,
#
there is a feel of Groundhog Day to my welcoming you back because we made a false start after the
#
break a little while back. And what happened was we made a false start. We started speaking
#
about something and then I started sneezing like a maniac and I just sneezed for five minutes and
#
we had to stop that. And in between we said, let's wait for a while and etc, etc. And it was
#
terrible. And I wondered what I had done to deserve this. Surely I must have committed
#
some sin in my past life or perhaps in the past hour. But here we are, we have restarted and
#
hopefully my antihistamine is sort of kicking in. I want to start by sort of, you know, just zooming
#
out of the narrow frame of worldly activities as it were, which we were talking about earlier and
#
talking about something that has sort of preoccupied me a lot over the last few years in a
#
sort of a very low intensity way in the sense that it's there at the back of my mind. I care
#
deeply about it, but I haven't actually intensely sat down and studied it and thought about it a
#
lot, but I know that I have to, which is moral philosophy. And you mentioned that that was one
#
of the things that you came to early in your life, you know, thinking about what is good and what is
#
not. So, you know, take me a little bit through that journey. Not so early, to be honest. In fact,
#
when you're in a very empirical space, which is, and I took a very science-based early few years,
#
I don't think metaphysics is a large part of that discourse. It's all real in the world physics.
#
And you never question why something is moral. You can just say something like,
#
yes, rape is bad. And it's as simple as that, right? It does not need justification. And while
#
it's easy for more black and white topics, it becomes harder when there is a gradient. And when
#
presented with that gradient, then you are forced to reconcile all your first principles, right?
#
So that's sort of how I came to it. I think it's been a few years of reading. I'm quite a newbie
#
to this entire space, so I'm sure many of your listeners are significantly more well-read,
#
well-versed. But the thing that I find to be most interesting in all of this is to dig into why a
#
person believes what they believe. And speaking, of course, philosophically or even politically,
#
why do you hold those first principles that you hold? They must tie to some belief in some sort
#
of moral landscape. And we were talking at breakfast about how sometimes words just don't
#
mean the sorts of things that we intend for them to mean. A moral landscape is codified by a good
#
and a bad. Something is good in that it is better than something that is bad, in that it is worse
#
than something that it is good. And you put these two poles apart and you build a moral landscape.
#
The first challenge, I think, is that the words themselves don't do any justice. So good can be
#
used in lots of ways. You are my good friend. The sandwich was good. I saw a good movie and so on
#
and so forth. So the word good means something else. And of course, that he or she is a good
#
person. I was also saying that if you remember that good could mean something about the moral
#
landscape itself. So you could say that here is a moral landscape. And you, for example, may say,
#
I think that consent is good. So two people should be able to shake hands on something and be able
#
to execute that. And coercion is bad. So we've drawn some sort of a landscape here. And then
#
you could say that that moral landscape itself is a good moral landscape. So you're saying that some
#
good is good, as opposed to a good being bad, which is all kinds of muddy. And I think it's
#
a consequence of just not having the right sorts of words to describe this moral landscape.
#
So broadly, that has intrigued me quite a bit. And this spills over to everything else,
#
your interpersonal relationships, how you conduct your day, your week, your life,
#
how you build a business, how you interact with customers, employees, all of that is in some way
#
impacted by what you at your core think of as a moral landscape. One way to go about answering
#
this is to use the man behind your face that we'd spoken about earlier, that intuitive sense from
#
deep within you, that is an arrow and points towards what you think is good or better,
#
which is fine. And it seems to be what most people do. And I don't really have a strong
#
refutation to why we ought not do it, except that it is not objective. There is no reason,
#
there is no reasonable reason that your intuition is right. Just like a psychopath may have the
#
intuition and deep, deep earning intuition to kill 50 people or serial killer or any of those
#
things. And we can point at their intuitions and say that it is bad. There is no reason why your
#
intuition is good or bad, which is not to say that a psychopath is a great person to model your life
#
after. But that is the question. How do you model your own life and your interactions with others
#
and all the other things that come with having to decode a moral space? I think as far as
#
nebulousness of language is concerned, I couldn't agree with you more. Swapna Little did this great
#
episode with me where she told me about how history is both the events of the past as well
#
as a study of the events of the past. And conflating one with the other can often be so
#
dangerous. And there is that whole Wittgensteinian notion that there are many things in the world
#
that cannot be described. And of course, his injunction therefore was to shut up about them.
#
But there are many things that some languages describes but not others, which is a sideways
#
point, one of the benefits of being multilingual. And I keep referring on this podcast to Borges's
#
short story about a map of the world where a good map of the world has to be as big as the world
#
itself. And obviously, my addition to that is that it's out of date the next moment because the world
#
is constantly changing. No, but I ask this sort of question of morality because our public discourse
#
has also become incredibly judgmental. And it's become incredibly judgmental in a sense that
#
morality, good and bad are constantly being invoked. And if you disagree with someone,
#
they're not only wrong, but they're also bad. And that's what our discourse driven by social media
#
has perhaps degenerated to. And to me, that seems driven not by a quest for truth or virtue, but by
#
vanity. Like when you pass judgment on someone, what are you saying? You're saying you're better
#
than that person. That is driven by vanity. You want to project yourself as someone who is more
#
knowledgeable or more quote unquote virtuous. And when I think of instincts, our instincts
#
evolved in prehistoric times in various sort of ways for particular reasons. And even the man
#
behind the face therefore is not so appealing to me. Like W. E. H. Leckie wrote this great book,
#
circa I think 1899 or so, called History of European Morals, where he coined the term the
#
expanding circle. And his point was that, intuitively, we are born caring only for our
#
family, everyone else is another. From there, that expands to perhaps include the extended family,
#
to include the tribe, to include the nation once you have a conception of that. And eventually,
#
the argument is that it should expand to include all of mankind. In fact, Peter Singer wrote a book
#
called The Expanding Circle, where he's saying it should go to animals as well. Right now, whatever
#
one makes of that, the truth is none of this is intuitive. We learn to behave in these ways. But
#
given circumstance, I think I would argue we default to what Hannah Arendt called the banality
#
of evil, that each of us can do the most terrible things, no matter what positions of virtue we
#
might otherwise take. So I think about that. And what worries me particularly is how virtue is so
#
tied in with communities and groups. Like the way that I look at the world, and I think you
#
broadly share the same way, and I once meant to write a book about it, perhaps I will someday,
#
I've been thinking about it for years, is where I ask myself two fundamental questions. One is,
#
how should I live my life in terms of relating to other people and all that? And the other is,
#
what should be the relation between society and the state? And most people will consider these
#
two questions to be in different domains, but my answer for both is the same, and that is consent.
#
And at its heart is individual freedom, that that is how individuals flourish and societies flourish
#
if we have freedom as a centerpiece of that. And I would argue in our personal lives, we are all
#
libertarian because, you know, three of us will go to a restaurant and we won't order for the other
#
person or force the other person to pay. But when it comes to the state and society, we turn a blind
#
eye on coercion immediately. But my, you know, to both you and me, that might seem a common
#
sensical approach, but it is actually very much the minority approach, because most people think
#
more in terms of group rights and individual rights. When people talk of welfare, like when
#
you talk of utilitarianism, they're thinking of the welfare of society. And as both on the right
#
and the left, the right will, of course, you know, think in terms of groups and think in terms of
#
group rights. But so does the left these days. Like to me, wokeism begins where liberalism ends.
#
If liberalism in its classical sense is about the individual, wokeism is about building narratives
#
of victimhood and oppression on the basis of groups and on the basis of group identities.
#
And therefore it is incredibly simplistic and reductive. It reduces every man to either one
#
identity or a basket of identities, but does not acknowledge the, you know, the individual autonomy
#
or agency of the individual. Somehow you are either a victim or an oppressor always.
#
And I find, you know, all of this sort of deeply disturbing. What are your thoughts on these?
#
Yeah, a few things that came to mind as you were talking. The first, I was recently listening to
#
Peter Singer speak, and he mentioned that he eats oysters, which stood out to me because
#
this is a gentleman who, since the 1980s at least, has been espousing, I mean, effectively
#
the father of modern veganism. And also probably the person to make popular the idea that you could
#
be speciesist in some way. But who also advocated once for killing infants, like actually born
#
infants, if humanity would benefit from that, a controversial position he took. And I think the
#
oyster eating position is fairly controversial among his followers as well. But I'm able to
#
appreciate the rigor in his first principle thinking, which is he says, look, at the base
#
of it all. I'm a utilitarian. And from all the data we know about things that feel or don't feel,
#
oysters don't feel. In killing an oyster, and zoologists can confirm this according to whatever
#
research they have done in his belief, they don't really suffer. And so it is akin to eating a plant.
#
Right. And so there is some rigor in his ability to hold the first principle all the way through,
#
despite alienating a certain subset of his followers. Yeah. So I think that that ties back
#
to what we're talking about earlier, which is what are your first principles? And for some people,
#
it's as simple as saying, look, I'm a utilitarian. And they're happy to get into the weeds and what
#
that means. And for some people, it's a lot more complicated where it's issue based, and they have
#
lots of first principles, and they all compete. And I find myself in this category quite frequently,
#
in which case I have to assign a hierarchy to my values. And sometimes those hierarchies change
#
from issue to issue. And sometimes the value itself is questioned when a new issue arises,
#
and so on and so forth. But this is that, and I don't think it's solvable. For tens of thousands
#
of years, we've been thinking about this very deeply, which is also why I understand political
#
positions. We could sit and debate forever, but we still have to do things in the real world.
#
And if you remember Aristotle's philosopher king or Plato, I think, for the philosopher king,
#
I've been arguing for a long time for philosopher CEOs, because it's also very important for people
#
who lead organizations today that they have enough sway over, for example, how cronyism plays out
#
in a state, because there is a second party to this, that it's important to have the right
#
first principles, right again being subjective and just like good. Yeah, so broadly, I agree with you,
#
but I don't have any clear answers. And I agree with you also on the fact that intuition is
#
not an easy answer. I feel like it's one of the best that we have. You could use well-being as
#
well. So this is the Sam Harris position, which is morality by definition is one that enhances
#
well-being. And so any subset of beliefs or policy that continues to enhance well-being is good.
#
We'll of course run into all the same problems, which is what is well-being? How do you quantify
#
it? Well-being for whom? How many crickets makes a grasshopper? How many pigeons makes a cow?
#
And we will probably never get to the answers to those questions. But I'm finding great pleasure
#
in exploring those questions. And then of course, looking in the mirror and seeing
#
if I have similar faults and flaws. Can you talk about an actual sort of conflict you face
#
between what you call the hierarchy of values? Like I imagine one typical conflict that might be is if
#
you value freedom, but you also value life, right? And I value consent more than anything else. And
#
therefore I'm pro-choice because you know, you might talk to me about the importance of life and
#
the life of the little fetus that might be within a woman. But to me, the woman's consent is paramount.
#
She owns her body. That's her right to self-ownership. But that is again, my subjective
#
sort of set of values where I'm saying that I'm putting consent on top. There's no objective way
#
to commit a set of values. So what kind of sort of conflicting situations have you faced?
#
Right. Yeah. Good question. I think that I know that the abortion discussion is a minefield and
#
both of us men sitting in a room discussing abortion is probably compounding that. And as an
#
aside, this is why when people resort to a book as a way to justify a position, whatever that book
#
is, secular or not, I don't think it's the whole answer that needs to be fleshed out. There is a
#
first principle in the book that justifies that position and you still have to defend that first
#
principle. Okay. So this is a good example. I think that the ability for someone who's pregnant
#
to be able to revoke consent at any moment in time and say, I no longer want a person inside of me,
#
is something that people who hold consent dear will say makes complete sense. It makes complete
#
sense that you should be able to revoke consent. We do it all the time. And people who think that
#
life is a pinnacle value on that hierarchy and we've taken a long time to flesh that one out as
#
well. There's a game I played with a friend called name the trait, which is if you are in a lake and
#
equidistant from you is a drowning child and drowning pig. Most people, almost all people
#
will swim towards the child and save the child. No questions asked. Okay. But we have to go
#
backwards. So I mean, at some point, if equidistant from you, there was a man and a woman, most people
#
would have swum towards the man because there was some hierarchy, even legally speaking, in value
#
assigned to sex and gender. Then that became race. So we stopped being sexist, we stopped being racist.
#
And the question is, why don't you stop being speciesist? Why is a pig more or less valuable
#
than a child? And then so on and so forth. These sorts of arbitrary positions are possible.
#
But insofar as the last few hundred years have gone, we've arrived at this place where we say
#
all human beings are equal, not to the individual. To you, of course, somebody may be more or less
#
valuable than somebody else. For some people, their dog is significantly more valuable than
#
a human being. But as a collective group of people, we've pinnacolized this value.
#
So it's taken us a long time to get here in the first place. And the same is true for consent.
#
It was fairly hard. I mean, when you were speaking with Rahul Mathan, the example that he gave of,
#
for example, living wall to wall, peering into each other's houses, all of that was
#
I don't think even the ability to execute consent was so clearly laid out. And we've made quite a
#
bit of, if the word is progress, progress on that. So in the abortion question, people who hold that
#
value to life as pinnacle will say that whenever it is life, whatever that is, it could be a heartbeat,
#
the first couple of cells, whatever it is, then it's a human being. And so
#
what's disappointing though is the reduction of these positions to sloganeering, which is,
#
on one side, you'll say something like abortion is murder. On the other side, you'll say something
#
like my body, my choice. It misses the philosophy underpinning this nuanced understanding of what
#
the other person is saying. And then of course, and invariably all of this has real life consequences.
#
I mean, real people have to struggle with, for example, not being able to get abortions,
#
being forced to carry a child term, right? So on and so forth, or having to contend with the fact
#
if you feel so deeply about life that there are fetuses that are quote unquote dying, right?
#
Not easy. And I think that I'm one of those people who have these conflicting first principles.
#
I think consent is super important. I'd like to be treated in a way that is non-coercive. I'd like
#
to be asked before something is done to me, of me. I also hold my own life as extremely valuable
#
in that I should be able to relinquish it at my own consent, as opposed to somebody else choosing
#
for me. The quality of my life should be in my own control, so on and so forth.
#
Yeah, so that's a good example. It's a good example of where you have two conflicting
#
first principles. And when we have these contentious discussions, I think it's very important,
#
and that's why I do this, to figure out what the other person's first principles are.
#
I mean, if you remember before, I was talking about how when we all build a company, we're
#
all going the same direction. If you're not, then you can never agree on the color of a button.
#
So before policy, I think at the outset is to lay out first principles and sort of discuss that
#
in detail. It gives a very deep appreciation to somebody else's perspective in that, okay,
#
maybe I don't agree or you favor one of these principles higher in the hierarchy than I do,
#
but I understand it because I'm not too different. I also have my own first principles. They're also
#
arbitrary in some way. They also drive towards some ends that I feel are more important.
#
That makes for a deeper discourse. It's why I stay off social media. I don't have an account,
#
but I don't really do anything on these accounts. I don't know how much you can fit in 140 characters
#
or these really short posts. Nuances like this, I think, where you and I sit down and we do hours,
#
and maybe at the end of it, we come away with some deep appreciation for the other person's
#
perspective and some way to find common middle ground. At this point, I must inform our listeners
#
that in the last two conferences where we have spent a lot of time together, especially in the
#
last one, I remember on probably the fourth day we were together across these two conferences,
#
you kept coming to me and saying, let's find something we disagree on. And you would say
#
something controversial and I would be like, but I agree, or I would say something controversial and
#
you would be like, I agree, which includes antinatalism and consent and a vast swath of
#
things. But I'm confident, like right now, you had the hope that we can disagree about free will,
#
but it turns out both of us agree there is no free will. And therefore, I guess we have no choice,
#
but to find something else. And I said, no choice, but to find something else too.
#
Another question, you use the term philosopher-CEO, do we need one? And I actually think in a manner
#
of speaking, I think Bezos is one. I also think Musk is one, whether you like his philosophy or
#
not, he's a thinker. And Paul Graham, of course, is a great philosopher. I don't know if he's a
#
CEO, philosopher-investor perhaps of sorts. Sam Altman is a philosopher-CEO now that he is a CEO.
#
And I wonder to what extent that quality of thinking about other stuff than just business,
#
actually how much that plays a part in business. Because I have a friend of mine who is at the CXO
#
suite of a top company in India, and he keeps complaining that, boss, whenever I go out with
#
my other senior colleagues, there is nothing to talk about. They are not reading books. They are
#
not listening to music. It's Bollywood or cricket or random politics. There's simply nothing there.
#
There's no higher order there. And I wonder to what extent the higher order is necessary and to
#
what extent it's a self-indulgence that may get in the way of clear thinking and instrumental acting.
#
No, I can hear Stephen Fry. Higher than what? Lower than what? Fair enough. But I understand
#
what you're trying to ask, given all the limitations that we have in English. I think it makes things
#
more clear. And this is why I keep making these disclaimers. Even through this podcast,
#
I keep saying things like, look, it makes sense to me, but I don't know if it makes sense to you.
#
If I haven't made the disclaimer yet, all of the things I believe in today are likely to change.
#
My favorite thing is to have my mind changed. I absolutely love the process when that happens.
#
And so I hope that in how many other years you and I speak again next, if we do, many of the things
#
that I believe in today, I still don't believe in at that stage, or I change my mind, or I have some
#
nuance that I didn't have today. The minute you attempt to learn, to dive into this world of,
#
it's a combination of self-introspection and trying to put the world in order,
#
you get thrown into an abyss. It's absolute pandemonium and chaos. And so it takes a few
#
years, a few years of grappling with this. But soon you come away with very clear, that person
#
behind your face sort of becomes clearer and clearer and has more reasonable justification
#
for something than previously held belief and so on and so forth. And that helps a lot in building
#
a good company. It helps in the people you hire, the policies you write, how you respond to crises.
#
I think a lot about how there was a 40 million year period in the evolution of the earth,
#
when there was nothing on earth except grass. Nothing, no trees, very small microorganisms,
#
just grass for 40 million years. That's an incredibly long amount of time. We're probably
#
around for a couple dozen years. And in learning about that and then reading through philosophy
#
on just significance, it gives me deep appreciation for my process of building a company.
#
Because when something is set on fire and something is about to break, I realize that
#
it's a very small thing. And this is similar to what people who go trekking feel as well, right?
#
Where the further you go in civilization, the more and more you realize that all of these problems
#
are, they're really fun. They're very meaningful to solve. They give you short-term purpose and
#
stay from nihilism and all of those beautiful things happen. But it puts into perspective
#
the things that you are contending with. It makes people very real. So of course you could
#
take a very solipsistic first position and say, I don't even know that the other people are real.
#
So I know I'm real. I don't even know if what I'm experiencing is true. It could be an illusion,
#
but that I experience is something that I'm not able to really break away from.
#
But I have to make an assumption. The assumption is you are like me. And you feel the same things
#
I feel. You think the same. You have the internal monologue that I have. And then as somebody who's
#
leading a team or you're speaking with an individual person, you can put into context
#
that all this is a decrease of maybe 2% in revenue, but this is a real person with a real problem.
#
Very early on, for example, we had a holiday policy question and we were looking at other
#
companies in India and you'd have really bizarre holiday policies. Things like you can only take
#
X number of days off in a year. And the reasons that you could take a day off were prescribed
#
in the policy document. Strange things like if a family member died. And I never understood
#
why you couldn't take a day off if a friend died or a dog died. Each person is different.
#
And I wouldn't like to be treated in a way where there is a prescription for why I can and cannot
#
take a holiday. And so we didn't do it. We said these are all real people. And so we have to be
#
able to allow for them to take days off when they want to. That's a very small example of a policy,
#
internal policy. But all of this is pre-described. And in the things that we spoke about earlier,
#
whether or not you bribe somebody, who you're willing to take money from,
#
all of these questions that you will inevitably face as you're building a company
#
are best answered through philosophical reading.
#
Okay. So I have a question for you, right? Because we were saying that
#
you and I seem to agree on lots of things, which I'm sure is true. I think I have my own version
#
to this answer, to this question, but I'd love to pick your brain. We agree that free will
#
does not exist. Lots of the things that we, practically everything that we do
#
does not come from a quote unquote free place. If you listen to Daniel Dennett talk about this,
#
I think he says that the philosopher types have abstracted this too much.
#
So in the practical day-to-day experience of doing things, we do feel free and we do feel like we
#
have a conscious choice, even if it is severely influenced by various other things. Then you have
#
the libertarian first position, which is I should be able to contract and consent off my own free
#
will. Do you feel like these two things are contradictory in some way?
#
So firstly, just to clarify, I believe within the free will debate, the term libertarian is used in
#
a very different way from what it is used outside the free will debate. So I'm guessing that your
#
question is really about the general all purpose libertarian way where you value agency and consent
#
and all of that. And your question is what is the point of agency and consent if you don't have free
#
will anyway. My sort of position on free will always has been that, yeah, I don't see how it
#
is feasible, how it is remotely rational to believe that we have free will. We obviously don't.
#
I'll link in the show notes to both Sam Harris's book on it and Robert Sapolsky just has a book on
#
it called Determined. And I've read his previous book, Behave, but not Determined, but it's also
#
about how there is no free will. Now, logically, I don't see how there can be free will. If you
#
know the position of every atom in the universe and how every neuron is firing and whatever,
#
if you had the perfect information, you would know that the next second is determined and the
#
second after that and so on and so forth. Now, of course, we have a lack of knowledge, so we think
#
in probabilistic ways about the world. And also there have been various books which have shown that
#
our brain has decided what to do before our conscious mind even knows it. And often our
#
conscious mind is only rationalizing why we do what we do. So I don't think there is free will,
#
but I believe that we must behave and perhaps we don't have a choice but to behave as if there is
#
free will. Because where the hell are we going? If we go to a court and say that, oh, there is no
#
free will, so it's not his fault that he killed someone and it's not his fault that he embezzled
#
someone and you are getting nowhere with determinism like that. So I think we must behave as if there
#
is free will. Otherwise, I don't understand what one is to do. I believe in Determined,
#
Sapolsky does talk about the implications on our behavior of the knowledge that there is no free
#
will. I haven't read Determined, so I'm looking forward to sort of reading that and continuing
#
the argument. But my sort of, and maybe it's a cop out, but my position really is that we don't
#
have free will, but we must behave as if we do and so on. What's your take on it?
#
Yeah, it's an, I mean, so first, just to add to what you said, you said that if we'd known
#
every position of every atom in the universe, so on and so forth, but a physicist would look at
#
that and say, look, at the quantum level, everything is probabilistic. It's impossible to know. And so
#
you cannot have a computer model unless you compute it.
#
Okay. But that's a question really about knowledge. Of course it is unknowable,
#
but that doesn't mean it's not determined. Exactly. So this is what I agree with,
#
which is even if it is random, it is not in your control, right? And so the fact of randomness
#
does not take away from the fact of determinism. Okay, fair enough. So I wanted to sort of add that
#
as an aside. No, it's been an interesting question on my mind as well. To what degree do we do? I
#
mean, if you believe so strongly in the need to consent and somebody were to consensually pick
#
up a cigarette and develop a smoking habit and grow a cancer and then die of it significantly
#
earlier than they would if the evil state came in and regulated tobacco and said absolutely no
#
cigarettes for anybody, which they, for example, do for your cocaine habit, then... That was a joke,
#
gentlemen, because I don't have a cocaine habit. Okay. I mean, I see a table with a lot of white
#
powder. It could be practically anything, but fair enough. If he says it's not cocaine, it's not
#
cocaine. And I'm not partaking, I promise. I mean, I can see how somebody could use your belief,
#
our belief in the fact that it looks like there is no free will to push very anti-libertarian
#
positions and say that they have no choice in making these horrible decisions. And we have to
#
step in as the state and prevent them from doing all of these things, which it's just been part of
#
my recent reading. And I've been quite interested in sort of those ways of arguing these things.
#
I know a lot of this is fairly abstracted and in the sky, but I enjoy them. I enjoy these thought
#
experiments. There's one that I recently heard of, which takes on utilitarianism as an idea.
#
And it says something like, if you had two choices, it's a thought experiment,
#
of course, it's not real, where one, you could kill somebody and live the rest of your life
#
thinking that you didn't, or two, you could not kill this person, but live the rest of your life
#
thinking that you did. Which of the two would you pick? And it's an example that I thought was very
#
good at dismantling the utilitarian approach, because most people on that side of the spectrum
#
would say something like, we shouldn't kill people. Like that's under the category of bad
#
in whatever moral landscape they have, but it will make you feel horrible forever.
#
And if what you're optimizing for is your ability not to feel this deep and intense guilt for the
#
rest of your life, then you would, in fact, kill the person and live your life in the knowledge
#
that you had in them, that you'd save their life, in fact, where they can practically manifest in
#
the real world. I don't think so, but still fairly interesting. So yeah, all of this is slightly
#
an abstract study. And then we start to figure out ways to bring that into the world you and I live
#
No, I love that bit about, I love the thought experiment you just posed. And I think the added
#
nuance to that is that a utilitarian might choose the option where they haven't killed someone,
#
but live the rest of their lives believing that they do. But the belief that they have killed
#
someone could actually change the person that they are and make them more likely to kill someone in
#
the future because hey, they've already done it. Because they will then, they might then to get
#
away from the guilt, find a way to rationalize the killing that they have done. And therefore,
#
that strips them of that veneer that kind of helps them think of themselves as good people
#
who do not kill. And my issue with, I can see how the state could use a logic of no free will
#
to intervene in an individual case, that okay, Deepak is going to harm himself, the state will
#
step in and it will stop him and he has no free will, so the state has to do it. But once you
#
give in to the principle that the state can intervene, then you must assume that that
#
power that you have given to the state will be used by the worst people imaginable in the
#
worst ways possible. All of which is perhaps inevitable, but it is also, I think, important
#
for us to fight it and behave as if we actually are fighting it. Of course. You know that the two
#
of us agree on lots of these things. I'm simply positing that in reading these more abstract sort
#
of discussions and discourses, these are quite interesting and I really enjoy these. I quite
#
enjoy, because anything that's contrarian looks a little bit weird or wonky and then suddenly has
#
some underpinnings to it, where somebody says something completely outrageous and I say,
#
that's crazy, how could that be true? Or how could you even possibly justify that it is true? And
#
they use these weird tricks and tips, weird tricks to be able to put that argument together. I love
#
the process and I love being able to do it myself if I could. So here's a thought experiment for you,
#
right? An alien civilization has invaded the planet. They are far more powerful than us.
#
On day one, they destroy New York. On day two, they destroy Paris. On day three, they look at
#
Delhi and they say, fuck it, they're destroying themselves and they go destroy Sydney instead.
#
And then the planet obviously then gets together and they're like, you know, they send their
#
representative, hopefully not with Orange hair, up to talk to the aliens. And the aliens say,
#
okay, we'll make a deal. Here's the deal. On our planet, we don't have oxygen. Our oxygen is
#
basically pain. So pain is what keeps us going. So rather than cause large amounts of pain at a
#
go, like blowing up cities and all, which is fun. We like explosions, but what we'll do is we'll
#
harvest your pain in a very small way. We'll let all of you live and we'll let all of you proceed
#
as if nothing happened. But once a month, you have to pick an eight-year-old boy, a eight-year-old
#
child and send that child to us. And we will torture the child in unspeakable ways. And eventually,
#
of course, the kid will die, but only after a month of pain when we move on to the next kid.
#
So as a planet, what do you choose to do? And rejecting the offer means certain annihilation.
#
Accepting the offer means you choose an eight-year-old every month. So what do you do?
#
I love it. Have you read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas?
#
Someone recommended the book to me once. It's a short, it's like a five-page story.
#
So I will tell you the story because it is practically the same question. And I love these
#
fables. I absolutely enjoy when people present these in abstract stories. There is in this story
#
a town that is in a state of absolute utopia. Everybody is happy. They have all the resources
#
that they want. And it's not the sort of boring happiness that you would think of. They're happy
#
in a way where they also have these little challenges that come along that make them happier.
#
But there's something to put their mind to. They feel well utilized through the entire day.
#
The sort of utopian space where for most humans or for all humans in that civilization,
#
they live a great life. They would change nothing about their day and time. And the author goes
#
almost two, three pages in intricate detail on exactly why this city is so wonderful to live in.
#
And he says, but there's a catch. In a bunk or a cellar, in some basement under the city,
#
there is a child who is in a small room. It's like a broom room. So a few feet wide. And this
#
child is in the most deplorable of states. And the child must stay there. If the child leaves,
#
the city falls apart. And every once in a while, people come to visit the child. You can. There is
#
nothing preventing you from coming to visit the child. So you can walk down and you can peer
#
through the window and see the child extremely malnourished, smaller than it should be,
#
practically no food, in a genuine state of suffering. But the child does not know any
#
better. It does not know that it suffers. It just knows this one existence. Many people choose not
#
to go. They choose not to look at the child. But some do. And they go and look at the child. And
#
of those few who do, there are some who can't stop thinking about it. And so it could happen a day
#
later, a week later, a month later. But they wake up one morning and they walk away. They leave the
#
city. They go south or north or east. They don't know where they're going. But they can no longer
#
stay in that utopian space. And they head for the forest. They head for the mountains. No one knows
#
where they go. And these are the ones who leave Omelas. And the question is, would you leave? If
#
you were one of the people and you went down, would you go down at all? Would you look through
#
the window? Would you see the child? If you did, would you continue to think about it? And if you
#
did, would you leave? That's the question. And I think it's similar to this, which is-
#
It's similar. I mean, my short answer to that is that I am in Omelas, but there is no way to go.
#
I want to leave, but there is no way to go. But anyway, and I can't help the kid.
#
But would you fix Omelas such that the child is liberated, but all of us, collective species,
#
falls down some number of percentage points in well-being and-
#
If it was up to me, of course. If it was up to me, it's not, like Mohit told you,
#
it's not even a choice. If you can, you must. But to go back to the one I threw at you.
#
Yeah. I think my answer is similar, which is, but okay. This is the challenge with well-being as the
#
center of your argument, which is you have to pick between, and how do you compare how many
#
lives to how many lives, how many people to how many people? I think it's a thought experiment
#
for a reason that isn't a clear answer. To simplify it for listeners, the way that
#
I think about the question that I posed is that it's really a classic example of
#
a utilitarian framework and a deontological framework. And a deontological framework is
#
you come from first principles. Your first principle might be that consent is paramount,
#
or you can't hurt anyone, and et cetera, et cetera. It could be any first principle whatsoever.
#
And a utilitarian framework is greatest good for the greatest number, to put it really simply.
#
There are many variations to that. So a utilitarian would straight away say, yeah, yeah, of course,
#
the eight-year-old. Someone like me has trouble reconciling to that. But even if I say that,
#
fine, the eight-year-old is maybe going to go anywhere if the whole species goes.
#
So you decide to do it. My question is, supposing I keep upping the number,
#
it's not one eight-year-old a month. It's 10 eight-year-olds every day, or it's X people.
#
At what number? This is the trolley problem in another way. Yeah, a type of trolley problem.
#
I also think that the answer that we arrive at in this room, speaking into microphones that are
#
probably going to be listened to by hundreds of people, thousands of people, your millions
#
and millions of followers, is different than what I would probably do in the circumstance.
#
When handed in that particular, if I was really there, I cannot say for certain that whatever
#
answer I articulate now is what I will do in that space and time. I'd like to think that I'd stick
#
to my first principles. It's how I've sort of governed myself up until now. But no situation
#
has been as dire and drastic. And I'm happy to hope and think that that's who I would be. And
#
that I would say, look, no one is sacrificed. Take us all if you must, including the child
#
who would be dying anyway. This is also the fable of the dragon tyrant, which you spoke to Vitalik
#
about, which asks a similar question, except he's trying to solve death. But you've struck
#
at the heart of it. You've struck at the heart of how it's so hard to arrive at moral first
#
positions. And everything we do is built on top of that. The way we relate with ourselves, our
#
peers, the people around us, family, and how the state relates with us, what we allow the state to
#
do to us. All of those things rest on first principles that we have. And maybe my current
#
thinking is, it's not so important to prescribe answers. And it's not easy to because millions
#
of years have passed and we've not really been able to come to great answers. It is important
#
to keep asking the questions. Lots of people do not go down the rabbit hole. They don't end up
#
here and say, hey, I really don't know what the answer is. That's really hard. And even being
#
able to get there, I think impacts policy all the way up. Because then you can start saying things
#
like, yeah, you're doing this, but your justification is not solid. It's grounded on something subjective.
#
Can we talk about that? Can we try and rip it apart? So even getting this far is a good start
#
for me. I hope over the next few years, I'm able to get further. But this is as far as I've gotten
#
right now. Here's another thought experiment question for you. And I'm beginning to think
#
if we'll have a different answer here, maybe this is where we find difference. But I wrote a newsletter
#
post where I mentioned this experiment as well. Supposing you are stranded on a desert island
#
with one more person, you know, you'll be rescued at some point, but you haven't been rescued yet.
#
And food has run out. And now the only way for you to stay alive is to kill and eat the other person.
#
Kill and eat the other person. My first principle for self-preservation in my own life
#
supersedes my principle on the other person's consent.
#
So here's the thing, supposing the other person is me, and we know by now that you and I agree on
#
everything. And therefore you know that I'm also going to think along these lines and kill and eat
#
you as soon as the food runs out. It therefore becomes optimal for me to kill and eat you before
#
you kill and eat me. And it makes it optimal for you to preempt that and it makes it optimal for
#
me to preempt that preemption. So basically the game theoretically optimal solution, the course
#
of action is a moment we are on that island long before the food runs out. We have to have a fight
#
to the death. Is that what is going to happen? That's, that's, I mean, again, interesting,
#
but not practical. It's not what will happen because human nature has other, right. But also
#
we won't really, so on the game theory front, right, I was listening to, okay, so someone
#
recently talked about why we hold so many nuclear weapons. We have tens of thousands of them and we
#
don't need so many to blow the other person up. And through the Cold War, for example, the states
#
had tens of thousands as did the Soviet Union. And the answer is game theory, which is, and if you
#
ask them individually, they'll say something like, I really don't want to have to deal with the
#
overhead of so many nukes. They're on my property. They could kill my people. It's almost certain
#
destruction, but I have to, I have no choice in the matter, like the other, the other person.
#
And then, and then vice versa. I think it's similar to what you're asking, which is,
#
do we start holding the nukes today itself or, and I think in the early stage of being on the
#
island, we'll spend some time attempting to figure out if there are other ways to do it.
#
We will believe that there is some, some ingenuity within us that could drive towards a better
#
solution than consuming the other person. We may even speak about it. I have a conversation saying,
#
hey, listen, we've done the math. You are like me and I am like you. And we know that we're likely
#
to consume each other. So how about we sort of handle it in this particular way? And it could
#
be that I give you my arm and you give me yours. So we each eat our own arm. I think I prefer
#
eating my own arm than yours. All the others fleshier than mine. So I will, I will probably
#
optimize for that. Disadvantages of not being on keto. Right. But, and this is what I'm hopeful
#
about. While you can build the hypothetical and it's really fun and interesting. And I mean,
#
we could have dozens go back and forth. There are these very beautiful middle grounds, which is,
#
you know, knowing that we're going to gain theorize our way out of this. And that could
#
lead to terrible circumstances. How do we use human wisdom and intuition to try and negate that
#
and figure out better paths to getting out of this. And that's why I said before that, if anything,
#
the place that I would love to get to is a place where I'm questioning these things very deeply,
#
because even getting there is a start on being able to get to an answer if that exists at all.
#
So let's, let's go back to the startup ecosystem. And like, when I say startup ecosystem,
#
I mean ecosystem. A part of the ecosystem is also incubators. You've had an early experience
#
with them. You gave a very powerful presentation on what often goes wrong with many of the
#
incubators that you have seen. And I guess you can contrast it with Y Combinator. So
#
a lot of lessons in there. So tell me a little bit more about that.
#
Yeah. The first question to ask is what is an incubator? We've done about half a dozen
#
incubator programs to date. University incubators, state run incubators, corporate incubators. And
#
the reason I did that presentation. So in fact, Shruti had reached out saying, is there something
#
that you've been ranting about for the longest time? And I said, yeah, how India's incubators
#
are broken. And she said, okay, let's then try and put together a presentation is because there is
#
a definition mismatch between what founders think and expect an incubator is, and what incubation
#
administrators in India think an incubator is. So if I can recall from memory, the first page of the
#
first page of the technology business incubator, TBI, which is a state run incubation scheme.
#
The first page of the policy document reads business incubation has been globally recognized
#
as an important tool for job creation and economic development. The first objective objective of TBI
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is to create jobs, wealth, and improve the economy in alignment with national priorities.
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The phase product market fit appears zero times in any scheme document anywhere.
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What do founders think an incubator is or should do? We think that an incubator gets us from idea
#
to product market fit a lot faster than we would ourselves without the incubator. And that's such
#
a simple and intuitive idea, right? Which is, if you remember from, from earlier, I mentioned that
#
you could broadly divide a startup journey into idea, then product market fit, then you replicate
#
and scale. So finding product market fit is sort of what unlocks a lot of future, a lot of the
#
future. Suddenly the future is not hazy anymore set in stone, because if I know what I'm building
#
is needed by users, then I can raise capital, I can hire employees, I can make future bets,
#
I can invest today, I can do all those things because I know that there is a future and I can
#
approximately chart it out. I can't do that before product market fit. And so the acceleration of
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that journey is incredibly valuable. If somebody is able to get me there, if I wouldn't by myself,
#
for example, take a year, and you can get me there in three months, I'm willing to give you
#
5% of my company, because that's so incredibly valuable to me. Okay. So that's the definition
#
of what an incubator should be. In the Indian space, the way an incubator typically presents
#
is a room in a university or a room in a corporate office, which is strange because nothing about
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what I said, idea to product market fit requires a room, right? Or that it be in a university or
#
corporate office. And this is partly because the mindset around building these incubators is that
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we don't have an entrepreneurial bent of mind as a country for whatever reasons.
#
There are some students who may be able to take that course, they simply need to be coached into
#
it. This is that presumption. And so a university will start an incubator, they may receive grants
#
from the state to build that incubator and then bring in students. And broadly what I'm talking
#
about is very valid for young entrepreneurs. I was mentioning to you earlier that I recently
#
found out that I'm older than something like 60, 70% of India's population. The great entrepreneurs
#
of our lifetimes are still in school and college. And this is the experience that they will go
#
through, right? Which is they will go to college and it will present as a room in that university
#
or in a nearby corporate office. And it is typically staffed with people who
#
are not entrepreneurs themselves. These are corporate employees or academy professors.
#
And this nature of the incubator is problematic. So in a bunch of ways,
#
the first incubators don't give you guaranteed capital. This is so bizarre to me because if
#
you believe in an entrepreneur and you believe in what they're building, why would you not give them
#
money? 99% of India's incubators offer no guaranteed capital. So what do they do instead?
#
They either offer selective capital, which is I may finance you if I so choose to,
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or two, I will connect you to somebody who can finance you, right? That's sort of the-
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And they take a percentage for that.
#
Well, sometimes they ask you to pay to be incubated. There are incubators in India where
#
you have to pay them. This is, I think, the start of the breakage. You need to put your money by
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your mouth is if you believe in an entrepreneur, you need to give them money. Advice without capital
#
is not useful advice, but young entrepreneurs don't know this. If you think about the average
#
17, 18-year-old who's just finished this whole IIT, NIT, triad, gets into an engineering school,
#
or could be other types of schools, other curriculums, there is two existing sort of
#
pillars. The first is you have the sir culture, which is whenever somebody comes, you say,
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yes, sir, yes, sir, okay, sir, I'll do this, I'll do that, or yes, ma'am, I'll do this.
#
And second, you have the assumption that that authority, whatever they say, is true and right.
#
And so when they don't give you money, but they give you advice, it's not like you respond saying,
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you haven't given me money, so I'm not going to do what you're saying. And oftentimes, the person
#
giving advice in an academic incubator is your professor. It's the person who also grades your
#
papers and things like that. So you can't even say no if you want it to. And this is what we
#
went through as well. They're very well-meaning. They're not being malicious in their advice.
#
It's just they don't know any better. All the unintuitive things we spoke about don't present.
#
That's problem number one. There's no guaranteed capital. It's selective. Problem number two,
#
all of this money is doled out as grants and not as capital against equity. This is a problem as
#
well because the people giving out the grants are not entrepreneurs themselves. They don't really
#
understand deeply how our businesses are built or how the landscape is set up. And they tend to
#
finance those companies that seem the most academically exciting, or we'll get them a
#
PhD paper, make them look better in their own organization. The most exciting idea,
#
which is why you see headlines like IIT, Madras, children building, flying restaurant. Something
#
totally bizarre, which you look at and say, this is so crazy. Who wants to go to a flying restaurant?
#
But it doesn't matter. What's happened internally in the organization is that the student has
#
thought up of the idea. And again, typically what happens with engineers, at least,
#
is that we build before we sell. So we have no evidence that the market really wants it. We
#
just think it's a cool thing to build and that's the sort of experience we're going after. Then
#
you take it to a professor and the professor says, wow, this is a great idea. I'd love to write about
#
this and put it in a paper, whatever. The professor will give you a grant that comes out of the state
#
budget. I think the Startup India seed fund is 1,200 crores over four years. It's quite a bit of
#
money. So you'll get like a 15 lakh rupee grant. Then you sit and build a prototype that cannot be
#
scaled, that nobody wants, nothing at all. Your dean sees it and says, wow, this is cool. Let me
#
call Times of India or some local press. They come down and do a full photo op. You have
#
an article published. And then this goes into your resume. Some companies see this and wow,
#
this is a great, innovative employee. And you get hired and you work as an employee for the rest
#
of your life. It does exactly the opposite of what you intend for it to do. And all the entrepreneurs
#
who want to build well-meaning businesses that sound boring, but solve your problems, never get
#
into the incubators in the first place. So that's problem number two. It's all rolled out as grants.
#
It should be capital against equity. Now, of course, I can hear the question forming in your
#
brain, which is why would the state own equity in your company? That is even more dystopian than
#
what the current circumstances. I agree. But we live in a country, unfortunately, where the state
#
does a lot of incubation. This negatively impacts a lot of the early stage incubation spaces because
#
lots of private interests who want to get into the early stage space simply don't
#
because the state has already pumped so much money and it's a skewed market. Okay.
#
Problem number three, the terms are opaque. So we did the counting of this in August last year.
#
Only state-run incubators, that's TBIs. I think something like 20% of them don't have a working
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website. The website doesn't load. So forget everything else. Forget the quality of
#
incubation, yada, yada. The website itself does not load. But the number of websites across
#
incubators, corporate, private, all of them put together that have an agreement on the website
#
that you can read, which is the agreement that you are expected to sign if you do get into the
#
incubator is something like three or four incubators in the entire country that have an agreement on
#
their website. And this process is super opaque. So as a student, you apply with an idea or a young
#
entrepreneur, you apply with an idea. They say, okay, this is interesting, but I won't give you money.
#
So come and sit in my classroom and you spend hours in the classroom listening to whatever it
#
is that they're saying, because they think that entrepreneurship can be taught. Then you have to
#
listen to what they say in order to unlock the future capital, because not everybody in that room
#
is going to get money. In every incubator, some small subset of people will get the money. And
#
the insight here is lots of founders are building companies that their incubators want, not the
#
companies that their users want, which is horrible. It's the exact opposite of what entrepreneurship
#
should be. Then they may select you as one of the people to get the money. And then they present
#
you with the terms. This is often a 21 page long legal agreement that has all sorts of terms you've
#
never heard about before. You don't have your own own lawyer and there's a sunk cost. I'm already so
#
many months in and you're between the devil and a hard place. And you have to pick one of the two.
#
And usually you just sign whatever it is that they give you. And those are horrible terms. This is
#
evil by whatever definition I'm sort of basing this, this, this model exposition. It is evil
#
that incubators do this to young founders. And many get lost along the way and never start up.
#
It's billions of dollars or rupees of money for the country in general that's lost because of this.
#
And then finally, it breaks good heart's law in lots of ways. So good heart's law is when a measure
#
becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The way we used to measure inventiveness as a
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country was we'd look at the number of patents being filed. It was a great idea. You could look
#
at how inventive the country was being. Now top down, this is the metric that you're supposed to
#
hit. So today incubators bias for those entrepreneurs who can file a patent. And even if you can't,
#
they will force you to file one. You spend the first three or four months of your incubation
#
writing a patent document, which is bizarre because some products don't suffer from
#
defensibility. There is no reason to employ the power of the state to defend your hardware design
#
or whatever it is. But the incubator has no choice. They have to send reports monthly, annually
#
to the state. You can read the scheme documents, but there are centrally governing agencies. And
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these are registered. You have registered incubator today. And so invariably, I'm going to
#
force my entrepreneurs to the same thing with mentorship as well. Number of hours of mentorship
#
is tracked by the state. There's a leaderboard of who does better and who does worse. And so invariably
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I'm going to force entrepreneurs to sit in classrooms and teach them from MBA textbooks,
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things that have no relevance to the ability to build a company, but that helped me tick off the
#
box in my report back upstairs. So this is sort of broadly what the problem is in Indian incubation.
#
And I think a good incubator is one that is super selective. So it takes very few companies
#
that they really believe in, gives them money at the outset, gives them money at transparent terms.
#
The terms are downloadable from the website and something simple like a safe or some convertible
#
simple instrument. And then stays out of your business where they say, look, there is no advice
#
unless asked for. And once I've given you money, I'm not going to give you shit advice or guesswork
#
advice. I'm going to likely reach out to somebody who is in a similar space, do the hard work of
#
connecting you. So like I said, no, no, no, no, no mal intention here. Nobody's attempting to
#
ruin the ecosystem. It's all well intentioned, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
#
First of all, I'm just kind of blown away that I had no idea that the state puts money,
#
taxpayers money into incubators and startups and all that. That is simply not the business of the
#
state. And I can't imagine anything successful coming out of it either. What was your experience
#
in the incubator that you were part of? That was not a state incubator, right? That was
#
we've done six. So I've done corporate, I've done academic, I've done state as well. Yeah.
#
And this also extends to competitions, by the way, the state runs lots of startup competitions
#
and other people do as well. And all of it is rubbish. It's problematic because it provides
#
incorrect signal to startups. When a startup can win a competition, they're usually able to
#
wow the judges. Who are these judges? IAS officers, people in the bureaucracy. And even if it is an
#
entrepreneur, it's likely somebody who's pre-tech, which is the manufacturing business,
#
right? They don't know what an API is, for example. So to be able to wow them is not relevant.
#
Product market fit is proven with your users. When people are willing to pay for what you're
#
selling and they're willing to pay you even more if you want to up the price, then you know that
#
I have something worth selling, right? So, okay, my criticism incubators extend certainly to startup
#
competitions as well. And entrepreneurs waste unknowingly lots of time on this, where they
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announce so proudly that here I've won like three startup competitions, but it doesn't mean
#
anything until you find product market fit and build a real business. It's just a distraction
#
along the way. And yes, the state does finance incubators. So our experience was something like
#
this. When we did the corporate incubators, it was very apparent that the corporate incubators
#
exist squarely for the enrichment of the corporate. And we will usually present as the seeking of
#
vendors. So they will say that you can be incubated with me. And the end result of this incubation
#
is that you and I can collaborate on something. So let's say that it's an automobile company
#
who's joined an incubator and sort of running the incubator. The reason they're putting money into
#
this and their employees on this is because they're looking for new innovations in that space. So you
#
create a new kind of dash cam, then they will say, okay, fine, we will work together. That's
#
what you can seek to win. So if you're an entrepreneur and that company is likely the best
#
buyer for your product, then go ahead and get incubated. Be very selfish about this,
#
but otherwise don't go because they don't really care about you. And be wary that that purchase
#
order will present in two years or three years. The hierarchy of corporates is only second to
#
that of the state. It's quite slow moving and they have no incentives. It's all small money to them
#
in contrast to the primary business that they're already running day in and day out. So broadly,
#
that's my experience with corporates. And the employees who are giving you advice, it's usually
#
somebody who's like a VP or senior VP, whatever, are genuinely smart people. They've just never
#
built a business. And all the unintuitive things about starting up that every entrepreneur who
#
goes through the journey will come to realize, they have not realized those things. And they
#
will not be able to impart that wisdom to you, which means you and them, completely well-meaning,
#
will go down rabbit holes that are intuitive and you will waste time. So don't take advice. Second,
#
academic incubators. Academic incubators, like I said, is effectively a proxy for writing more
#
papers. These are professors who want to publish more and they will use the funds to help
#
entrepreneurs. And the few that get through and still build a big business are doing it because
#
they would have done it anyway. They're not doing it because this is not causal. And third, state run.
#
State run is how you think all state enterprises work. So to give you an example, in the early
#
days, we tried to put a bike share on the streets of Nasik because we were working in the Nasik
#
smart city. The smart city mission had just been announced, if you remember, 2014-15 is when after
#
the BJP came into power and they had quite a bit of money in the bank. And so we went to them and
#
said, hey, a smart city should consist of a shared bike. And we were still doing mobility at the point.
#
So can we explore this? And immediately it was apparent that all they cared about is the photo op.
#
The photo op and the article in the newspaper is sort of what drives all of this. There's a lot of,
#
you know, call commissioners are angry. So tomorrow the commissioner will come. So please make sure
#
that you're ready for the commissioner. You should so on and so forth. This is a, I mean,
#
they are entrenched in their own interests. And rightly so. Fair enough. You're climbing
#
the bureaucratic ladder, but this is not particularly valuable to entrepreneurs.
#
We decided to step away and say, okay, we're not doing the public bike share simply because
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this is one of those factors that we don't think is conducive for us. And more entrepreneurs should
#
probably do that. But state run incubators have the interest of the state in mind. And again,
#
to remind you about what the incubation scheme document said, the incubation is so that they can
#
grow the economy, grow jobs in the national interest. And what this reminds me of is if
#
you read the last lecture, Randy Bosch, I was trying to remember his name. He talks about the
#
head fake, look right, go left. And he says, if you want your child to learn teamwork, you don't
#
send your child to teamwork classes. You send them to football classes. They never become a great
#
footballer, but they learn teamwork along the way. And the way to solve for those things, if you are
#
the state, economy, the jobs, if you care deeply about that, and of course, I'm going to assume
#
well intentioned, you do care about that. The way to do it is to allow entrepreneurs to get to
#
product market fit fast and build great businesses. And if they do that invariably along the way,
#
all the other problems that you're trying to solve will be solved. These are effects of a good
#
market. These are not the ends that ought to be pursued. And in the pursuit of those ends,
#
you end up missing the mark entirely, which I think is what's happening over here.
#
Is there like a crowding out effect where because these moribund incubators with completely the
#
wrong incentives, take up so much space within the ecosystem, that a you're losing a lot of
#
startups who are, you know, being misdirected early on because you're going down these
#
particular paths and see there aren't more private incubators or more, you know, I mean,
#
whereas India's YC, for example. Yes. So is there a crowding out effect also?
#
Yes to all of that. I mean, I can't say this because I haven't looked at the data. I'm sure
#
that it perhaps exists empirically, but we don't really invite a lot of global participation.
#
So incubators who have figured out how to do this well and profitably abroad don't really
#
present in India. They present in other geographies, but not really in India.
#
I can't say exactly why, but I presume there is something regulatory here that is preventing
#
that from happening. But again, I have to compete with the state. So I'm probably not going to do
#
that as quickly. And all of this is being said from the perspective of me being a founder and me
#
falling in love with other founders and their journeys. It's the most exciting thing. And you
#
would know, right? You've started your own podcast. It's a business. It's such a wonderful process to
#
go from something that's just in my head all the way to an enterprise that works and delivers value
#
for other people. And it's so heartbreaking to watch the disillusionment that they end up facing
#
in two or three. And some of these incubators, the incubation period is like two years, three
#
years, that entrepreneurs would join and never leave. They're just sitting in those rooms day
#
in and day out. And they've effectively become subservient to the people who run those incubators.
#
It's genuinely heartbreaking to watch. Like I said earlier, and this is how I started out
#
the presentation as well. I think that billions of dollars and thousands of entrepreneurs have
#
been lost to bad incubation. And I care deeply about this. I'd like to fix it. If anyone listening
#
also cares about fixing it, please write to me. I'm at Deepak at tilt.bike and we can try and
#
figure out something. But the question I'm asking now is for young entrepreneurs who are just
#
starting out, how do we redirect them to those incubators that are valuable or in my opinion,
#
the better route, skip incubators entirely, and instead look for good angel investors?
#
Because India has lots of wealthy individuals who are willing to put a few lakh rupees,
#
a few dozen lakh rupees into smart entrepreneurs. And those are probably better ways to go about
#
this than to join your college incubator, which is invariably what is happening.
#
Let's dig a little deep into, you know, what advice you would give young entrepreneurs. One
#
is of course is that fine, watch out for incubators like this. And, you know, don't go there. But
#
apart from that, what are the lessons you've learned during your journey that can kind of
#
help them? Like what are the intuitive beliefs that are wrong? And what are the unintuitive
#
beliefs that extend not just, you know, for your industry, which you earlier spoke about,
#
but which extend across the startup space? I think first, there is no value to short term
#
thinking. It's what we default to. It's the monkey brain in us that says, think for immediate benefit.
#
Something as simple as let's say you're building product X and a customer comes along and says,
#
look, I'll give you some amount of money and you're zero revenue at this stage, right? You've never
#
tasted revenue and says, but you have to pivot your business in a way that is a consultancy to
#
me. Right. So I want like five unique features that are, you know, an overhead for you for the
#
rest of your, your lifetime. It's very easy to default to saying, yeah, okay, I'll do it. Right.
#
Unless of course those features are genuinely meaningful for the entire user base, in which
#
case please build it. But if it's not, and you know that this is a one-off case and this person's
#
just being a bully because you're a young founder, lots of founders or a first time founder, I won't
#
even use the word young. Lots of founders do it. They default to doing it. And I don't think it's
#
a good idea. It's okay to be a little bit gritty and it's okay to say that, yeah, all I'm losing
#
is money. But, but it will all pay off. This is the, the, the matrix that says that we,
#
there is some short-term sacrifice, but there is long-term gain, long-term gain. And to believe in,
#
to believe in that is, is I think a good way to behave. The startup journey also is,
#
is so difficult on you as an individual. There will be many nights when you will be unable to
#
fall asleep simply because you don't know how you'll make next payroll or where the company is
#
heading or if it's heading anywhere at all. You would have spoken to some, some VC who says,
#
you know, your market is too small or nobody will ever want your product. And that, that will weigh
#
heavily on your mind because for them it's a one-hour call, but for you it is your life's or
#
your currently your life's mission. And this is where I think two things help. The first philosophy
#
where it's, it's okay, it's okay to fail and you should make a peace with that. In fact,
#
it's likely that you will fail. That is the startup journey and that you can, what we spoke
#
about a 40 million year period where we had nothing but grass. It's, it's not as, it's not
#
as life and death. If you think about yourself from the future, let's say you are 60 years old.
#
If you get that far and you were to ask yourself for advice, I'm sure that that person would not
#
say, Hey, don't sleep tonight and sit and worry about this problem. They'd say, you know what,
#
it works out in the long run. It's all fine. You're just building a company at the end of the day.
#
So make sure you have fun doing it. And you have a, you, you respect all those first principles
#
that you've put in place and then use that to execute. Second, surround yourself with all the
#
right people. It's hard to find them. Start with co-founders. I don't know how I would have built
#
this if I didn't have co-founders. It's excessively lonely otherwise. And there are some days when you
#
simply don't feel like building your business because you wake up and it's too hard or everything's
#
on fire or you just don't have any space left in your brain, right? But your co-founders will not
#
feel that way on that day. And so they will lift you up and they will build instead of you. And
#
they'll give you a little bit of time to recoup and you will do that in return for them. So finding
#
very good co-founders, we know this empirically, all the data points towards us that is a remedy
#
for success. And then mentors as well. So find people who believe in you, are ethical, willing
#
to guide you on your journey, so on and so forth. It's not easy, but if you're thinking about this
#
as a multiple decades mission, then I think all of these priorities will set in place and start
#
paying dividends in the long run. My mind just went back to incubators and I thought that if there
#
was a podcast incubator, I'd be screwed because no podcast incubator would ever agree to a podcast
#
more than half an hour. They would talk of short attention spans. They would insist on getting a
#
particular kind of guest who can supposedly get particular kinds of eyeballs. And I never get out
#
of that mess. And the worst would be if I believed it myself, which I did in the start. But then you
#
keep experimenting and you keep trying new things and you change, but you know, a constrained
#
environment like that of an incubator doesn't allow that. I'm also thinking of the long game,
#
right? Now, when I was a professional poker player, you are always playing the hands that you are
#
dealt. And if they're shitty, they're shitty. You just take the most plus EV approach possible,
#
which is often folding. And that's just the way it is. But what saves you is that you can put in
#
volume in the sense you, if I'm a poker player, I, you know, at one time online, I used to play
#
eight, 10 tables at a time. You can multi-table. So your sample size is enormous. You're dealt a
#
lot of hands in life. You really aren't dealt so many hands, you know, the opportunity costs for
#
any course of action, whether it is quitting or whether it is continuing can be really hard.
#
And I think about that sometimes because there is always this cliched advice that is given to
#
people that follow your heart, follow your dream. And you'll obviously have the selection bias of
#
seeing the people who made it after following their heart and following their dream. But what
#
you don't see is thousands of dreams that were shattered, the millions of hearts that were broken,
#
you know, the, like I like to say, the cafes of Versova are full of middle-aged men whose
#
film careers vanished on them, right? And now they are doing different Jogaru things to survive.
#
And how do you deal with self-doubt hitting? And sometimes do you think that like, if there are
#
a million parallel universes where your life has gone in different directions,
#
in all the parallel universes in which you are an entrepreneur, you are probably tackling different
#
problems. You're not necessarily tackling the same problem. This comes from the happenstance
#
of being on a university where there is a campus like that and you are using cycles and the thought.
#
So if it wasn't this particular problem that you were addressing, what are the other kind of
#
problems that would attract you? For example, do you sometimes, like I'm sure you keep getting
#
ideas, but you are doing this, you're married to this. So you continue with Tilt and inshallah,
#
it seems to be doing well. But what are the other kind of problems that attract you as a natural
#
course of things? Like what was the last startup idea you had? I think on a weekly basis, Ratchad
#
Daksha and I discussed one new idea. They're usually terrible, but it's really fun to go down
#
the rabbit hole of how we would build it if we ought to build it. It's inevitable. And especially
#
once you start up, then you start seeing problems everywhere because you found a really unique
#
problem. And that cements in you the belief that if I found one, there ought to be many.
#
And then you keep looking for them and you keep finding them. I think the last one that we debated
#
was to build a CRM to fundraise. So entrepreneurs today fundraise on Excel sheets. I fundraise on
#
an Excel sheet. Y Combinator formally recommends an Excel sheet format to fundraise. And Excel
#
sheet is a terrible way to fundraise because I can't really follow up with people. There's no
#
simple click and go to the LinkedIn profile. I can't know if I'm talking to the wrong person.
#
With the advent of AI, I'm sure that an AI assistant would help me quite a bit. For example,
#
saying things like slide four could be improved in this way, or you are talking to investors from
#
this geography who seem to have a higher proclivity to investing in you. So focus your efforts on
#
that. And here's a list of 10 of the top investors from there who will invest and so on and so forth.
#
So CRM to help founders fundraise. I thought the idea was super interesting because I love
#
founders. I really enjoy engaging with them day in and day out and listening to all their ideas.
#
So I really enjoyed doing sales on an idea like this. And they have a great time building
#
the entire product and so on and so forth. And so skill sets also match in terms of an idea like
#
this. It's quite easy actually to come up with these ideas. It's execution that's really hard.
#
Would something like this as a side project and attempt you?
#
I don't like if it's just building an app, for example.
#
Nothing is just building an app. All of it is so complex. I mean, you have to build the initial
#
MVP and then launch. And then let's say your users don't like something. You have to change
#
it. You have to A-B test, look at all the data. None of it is a side project. I mean, how you do
#
some things. So if you do it, you have to do it really well and they have to love your product
#
instinctively and so on and so forth. No, but there's also the unseen, which is I've been,
#
I mean, I've articulated to you very beautifully why this idea will work. And I'm sure you fall
#
in love with it. So you're an investor. I'm sure I could, if you were an investor, I could, you know,
#
convince you into putting a little bit of money into this. But practically as an entrepreneur,
#
I'm sure that there are so many unseen difficulties, all the things I haven't thought
#
of yet that will emerge on that journey. And none of this is going to entice me to dropping
#
tilt and start off on a whole new business. But yeah, we think about new ideas all the time.
#
Personally, I think that if I, so I stumbled into entrepreneurship, I did not even know what a
#
private limited company was and we sort of ended up building one. I will certainly like to solve
#
problems. Of late, I'm more interested in these sorts of problems, things around philosophy,
#
policy, relationships between individual people, people in the state, so on and so forth.
#
Those interest me quite a bit that, that I feel like I have a bias to action bias to do exactly
#
what I'm not sure. But some of these problems are so large and impact so many people that
#
small improvements like a five, 10% improvement is millions of people doing significantly better.
#
For example, we've the incubator problem is a good example, right? Now I know the problem exists.
#
It's not spoken about frequently. In fact, I've never heard somebody on a public platform talk
#
about this. And that's because all of the people doing policy or the successful entrepreneurs of
#
our generation didn't go through them. It's a fairly recent phenomenon. And so fixing India's
#
incubators is a very meaningful thing to do. I think that falls more in line with like a side
#
project, right? Because it's easier to do and it's only a few hours of work, that sort of thing.
#
Yeah. So that's an example and impacting it even by 10, 15. If 10% of entrepreneurs are deviated
#
away from the wrong sorts of incubators and instead build a company in a way that doesn't
#
involve them losing time on those enterprises, that is a genuine and tangible difference to
#
the economy and to themselves as individuals. And so that's an example. And how do you think
#
of exit? Like there will be entrepreneurs who will just say that I want to solve this problem,
#
like Angad with clean air. Yes. That I want India to have clean air and period and I'll do what it
#
takes and I'll play the long game. And there will be entrepreneurs who will think,
#
and equally there could be entrepreneurs who want to build a big public company and are just open
#
to going wherever it goes. So what was your sort of vision for where you want to go with this? Was
#
it aligned with Rachit and Daksh? What were the kind of motivations with that regard? Like do you
#
think of exit or do you think of just doing this for the rest of your life? What is the mindset
#
there? We are surprised we got this far. The odds are certainly against us. Startups by this stage
#
have already failed. Even raise a few rounds in capital is already hard enough. If you told
#
me when I was 18, 19 and starting till then it was called pedal that we would get this far,
#
it's a kidding me. I remember the first time we crossed 3000 rupees in revenue in a month,
#
I told my dad about it on a call. And he tells me later, many years later, that I was very concerned
#
because you are celebrating 3000 rupees in revenue. And I cut the call and I spoke to mom and said,
#
this is crazy. He thinks that this is a success of some sort because of such small amounts of
#
money. And for every zero added to that number, we've always looked at it and said, wow, I can't
#
believe we got this far. Even where I'm sitting today, I look at, for example, our graphs and say,
#
I have no idea how I'll quadruple this or 10x this because there are so many challenges that
#
only I know about because I'm on my daily calls and I'm talking to my team and I know all of the
#
things that are on file. But now I have conviction that it can certainly happen because it has
#
happened multiple times before in my own journey that it will continue to happen going forward.
#
We don't think about exit per se. I don't think entrepreneurs should. The way they should think
#
about it is to be able to create those double thank you moments. A double thank you moment
#
is certainly not restricted to a coffee shop. It is also as large as two corporates working
#
with one another that I provide meaningful value to you and you to me. And we have a double thank
#
you in that. And even more valuably, our users have a double thank you in that they say, wow,
#
I'm so glad that you all collaborated. So that's probably the route that most entrepreneurs
#
find themselves on when they invariably exit, which is, you know, you buy me or I buy you,
#
but we've spent enough time collaborating that these products make a lot of sense together.
#
These services make a lot of sense together. And if those collaborations don't really reach
#
that sort of a space, then you end up going public. And I don't know if we want to do that.
#
I don't know if we'll get that far even. We never consider that very deeply, but
#
I don't think these are worrying questions. The worrying question is, are my riders happy
#
with riding tilt? What does their feedback say? How are our numbers looking? I think
#
we want to stay fairly myopic in those respects. And then in the long run,
#
are we bringing cycling to more and more people? Because that seems to be what we've agreed that
#
we want to do. And if those two things are happening well, then we keep doing it.
#
So from the satisfaction of your riders, let's kind of move back to the personal domain.
#
What I have started doing this year, and I feel like it's working for me, is I have built something
#
called the Satisfaction Index. The idea behind that is that every day at the end of the day,
#
I'll decide how satisfying a day I had, and I'll rank it out of 10. And purely based on my
#
subjective feeling of satisfaction, though obviously every day that I have a scene on
#
scene recording or an everything is everything recording or even put up a newsletter is straight
#
away 10 on 10. But I can't get more. And that's one way of looking at it. Now, one of my friends,
#
Sudhir Sarnobar, got taken in by this and he started an Excel sheet. And he has a bunch of
#
parameters for himself. So he's created 12 parameters for himself. And his gig is if he
#
does any one of those things, he'll give himself two points, but the maximum is 10. So he doesn't
#
get 24. And three of them are fitness parameters. So if he misses any of them, he gets a minus two.
#
So there is that. And he's been refining it and changing some two pointer to a one pointer and
#
etc, etc. And even I have been thinking about mine in terms of in terms of the balance between
#
productivity and learning, because what I want to do is not just be productive, but also spend some
#
time learning something new, whether it is mainly reading something or, you know, sitting through
#
an online course of some sort, etc, etc. And I find it's been motivated because I'm filling
#
the Excel sheet every day. And therefore, in the middle of the day, I'll ask myself, okay,
#
how can I improve my score today? Though, obviously, at the end of this recording,
#
it would just straight away be a 10. But it just puts me in that work mode, which is great.
#
And right now, I think I've sorted the productivity, but I need to sort the learning out.
#
So my question for you is given the different approaches that Sudhir and I took to building
#
our separate this thing, can I ask you to think aloud with me on how you would construct a
#
satisfaction index for you in terms of defining what a good day is?
#
Phenomenal questions. Yeah, I'm thinking about the habits that I have through my day,
#
because I think they have been intentionally constructed. I've put together my day in a
#
particular way. Highest on that list, I think, is reading, for sure. But it also matters reading
#
what. And for the longest time, I was reading a lot of literature that I agreed with. And awfully,
#
I've been attempting to read a lot of literature that I disagree with, because this whole, you
#
know, finding the first principles perspective. And I tried to read every night. So that would
#
certainly be on my on my list. Luckily for me, because I grew up in a house where dad used to
#
read a lot. And I started reading very young. Have you been to bookworm, by the way, the older bookworm
#
that used to be on? I've been to bookworm on this road. So before that, the bookworm used to be
#
where the current metro station is. Dear listener, we are at Church Street. And once I recorded with
#
Ram Guha here four or five years ago, and he said, Where are you going after the recording?
#
So I said, I'm going to the best bookstore in the world. And he said, What is that? And I said,
#
Blossoms. And he said, You fool. That is not even the best bookstore on Church Street.
#
And he meant bookworm. But I'm sorry, just to give perspective. I agree with him over here. I
#
prefer bookworm to Blossoms. There used to be an old bookworm store. And dad used to take me there
#
once a week or once in two weeks. And they had a process where you could borrow a book,
#
and then return the same book to them. And they sort of give you a, so you borrow at 100 or you
#
buy at 100. You give it back to them at 80 and so on and so forth. And tons of reading came out of
#
that one bookworm store. It no longer exists, unfortunately. So reading for sure, but that's
#
been a habit for such a long time that I don't think it's possible that I don't do it. I don't
#
think I can go to sleep if I don't read a book. Even if it's a single page, I have to. And then
#
I find myself falling asleep. So that's certainly part of the day. The second is fitness. So you
#
know I dance, which means I'm either dancing or at the gym one day, through the day, but five to
#
six days of every week. The gym bit is interesting. So you know Julian Shapiro, and he's written a
#
piece called How to Build Muscle. When I was growing up, I was very skinny. So you've not
#
seen photos of me as a younger person, but just skin and bones. And when I came back to Bangalore
#
about a year and a half, two years ago, I took the call that all right, enough is enough. It's
#
time to put on some muscle. And his workout plan made a lot of sense to me. It's very well researched.
#
You can link it in the show notes if anybody wants to go down that road. But I have struggled
#
keeping weight on my body. And so I follow that program. I do three days a week. And that helps
#
a ton on putting on weight. I didn't think I'd fall in love with gymming, but I have. It's a
#
very fun process. And I've suddenly started learning about all the little muscles across
#
my entire body. There's a stoic quote, which I can't remember exactly, which talks about
#
how wasted a life is if you have not been able to find all of those muscles and the strength that
#
you are capable of. And over the last year and a half, two years, I've been discovering that.
#
So three days a week, gymming and two or three days a week, I go dancing. I've been dancing
#
since I was 13, 14 years old. I still continue the habit and I'm trying to learn as many new
#
forms as I can. So as long as it's a dance of some form, I will learn it and I will enjoy it.
#
I'm often the only guy in the room. Lots of women dance and not enough men dance, unfortunately.
#
Good way to meet people. But it's a really fun and I love the process. It's one of those
#
experiences where you simply stop thinking mathematically or rationally or reasonably
#
and you are only in a state of movement. It's continuous flow and it also requires some amount
#
of logical thinking because you have to memorize the steps and you have to think about how you're
#
going wrong. You have to watch yourself in the mirror and figure out if the way the instructor
#
is doing it is not similar to how you're doing it and why. So some amount of left brain, but broadly,
#
I think it's a very expressive form. So those are my two things that I do for health and fitness
#
and I don't think that it will stay on my list that we're building here together. So that's
#
reading and that's fitness. The third, I think, is speaking to somebody within my inner circle.
#
It could be family, could be friends, whoever it is. And especially because I've been attempting
#
very consciously to make more friends, which means I have to maintain those relationships.
#
So I have since made two or three very good friends. I'm very grateful for that existence
#
and we have conversations like this, in fact, in many of our private talks. And so I attempt to
#
connect with somebody at least once a day. I typically tend to go home. That's where my
#
parents live a few times a week at the worst, which means I spend some time with my family as well.
#
And those things will feature on this list. Beyond that, I think there are lots of company related
#
things, which is, have I done certain things that I certainly have to from a company perspective? But
#
those are very technical. They go into metrics that I'm responsible for, how we've moved those
#
metrics. I use Todoist. I know you're big on productivity tools. Todoist has worked very well
#
for me. And so I'm also sort of checking to see if I haven't slacked off on those responsibilities
#
that I've set for myself and so on and so forth. I can't think of very much else. Are there things
#
on your list that I've missed that you think has to be on everybody's list?
#
So I need to make a proper detailed list like Sudhir's list. But Sudhir's list, if I remember
#
correctly, and I hope he won't mind my giving up, giving away some of it, includes what you
#
just mentioned that one phone call every day to someone in the family or intimate friends and
#
talk to them for X number of minutes. I forget that is. Another item on his list is meet a new
#
person. Meet a new person and talk to them, which is really interesting. I love the thought behind
#
that scares the shit out of me because I'm, you know, not that kind of person. But I sort of
#
like that. And one of his fitness ones is eat no carbs.
#
So as you were speaking, I think food and nutrition and sleep, those are two things
#
that I certainly have on the list. So I don't know if you and I have ever spoken about this,
#
but I have been lucid dreaming all my life. So I have intense lucid dreams since I was a child.
#
I have the memory of being able to lucid dream. Most nights I lucid dream. And I also have a lot
#
of sleep paralysis. It just sort of exists. And I tend to sleep a lot. I tend to sleep nine,
#
10 hours on average per night. And so this part of my life I've had to take very seriously
#
because it's not like I can resolve the fact that I lucid dream, but I can, I can control it really
#
well, which means lighting in the evening, for example, has to stay dim. Then my brain,
#
you know, clicks into, okay, it's time to sleep mode. I have to sleep on time every day. I tend
#
to sleep at approximately the same time, then sleep the entire nine, 10 hours, which is what
#
I usually have to sleep to be able to be well rested, all of that. So sleep for sure. And
#
nutrition. Can you elaborate on, you actually, we've had a long conversation about both sleep
#
paralysis and lucid dreaming. And I found it incredibly fascinating, but for the sake of
#
the listeners, like what is lucid dreaming? Of course. So a lucid dream is a dream that you have
#
control over somewhat, which is, you know, that you are dreaming and you have some ability to
#
orchestrate the happenings in the dream. It's not always that you can control everything because
#
your subconscious is still at play and it's always creating new and weird things in the dream,
#
sometimes in contrast to what your conscious wills or wishes will happen. But that's
#
approximately what lucid dream is. Now, most of us lucid dream, you must as well. Lots of people
#
don't remember the lucid dreams when they wake up and they don't lucid dream every night. It's
#
infrequent. Sleep paralysis, the, what's happening behind the scenes on sleep paralysis is when you
#
go to bed, your brain puts your body in a state of paralysis by choice, because you are about
#
to dream. And when you dream, you are likely to move like a dog, you know, running when it's
#
dreaming. And to prevent you from moving too much or excessively, your body goes into a state of
#
paralysis, right? Now, what's supposed to happen is when you wake up, before you wake up, so a few
#
minutes before you wake up, your brain is supposed to exit your body from a state of paralysis.
#
And then you can go about your day, not even knowing that you were paralyzed. It happens to
#
all of us when we sleep. If you experience sleep paralysis, it is simply the experience
#
where you wake up before your body has left a state of paralysis. This happens very frequently
#
middle of the night where your eyes open up. So they're wide open, but you can't really move
#
the rest of your body. And as a child, it used to terrify me. And of course, understandably,
#
right? Cause I'm awake, but the rest of my body seems not to move. And I wish I was stuck in a
#
dream or even an illusive dream, but I'm not, I know that I'm awake. Through history, the experience
#
of sleep paralysis has presented in very interesting ways. The most common is the illusion,
#
hallucination is probably the better word, of an old woman sitting on your chest, fearing you down.
#
We can see this, I think, on paintings and certain old architecture, but they draw an old
#
hag on your chest. And the reason that happens is because your brain attempts to fill the gap. So
#
you wake up, your eyes are open, but you can't move your body. And part of not being able to move
#
your body is that you can't breathe in very deeply, right? Your rib cage is frozen in place,
#
but you're afraid it's the natural reaction. You're scared that you've woken up and you find
#
yourself unable to move. And as a consequence, you try to breathe very deeply. And when you do,
#
you find that your rib cage is preventing the expansion of your lungs. Now your brain has to
#
attempt to answer this. It has to say, it has to in some way explain why this is happening to you.
#
And it does so through the illusion of an old woman sitting on your chest. Why old? Why woman?
#
I don't know. I think this ties in some deep way to what we're afraid of and not afraid of.
#
But you have your own old hag.
#
Yes, I've experienced the old hag a few times at least. And this is when I was younger.
#
As I grew older, so I in fact conducted a series of experiments around this.
#
I went on the internet as one does with problems like this. And the voodoo part of the internet
#
recommended that or said that this is to do with astral projections. So this is a literal example
#
of, for example, when you have an out-of-body experience, your soul leaves your body and
#
something else could, for example, come into your body. These are the sorts of hypotheses that are
#
bound on the internet. And so I wanted to test this. And the way I did that was in one of my
#
sleep paralysis slash out-of-body experiences, I levitated out of my body, turned around,
#
could see myself sleeping on the bed, went to the bookshelf and moved a book. I switched a book
#
from one place to another. Then I woke up and I checked if the book had moved and it had not.
#
And then I concluded that, okay, this is not real. And I'm a child still at this stage.
#
Is it a combination then of sleep paralysis and a lucid dream?
#
No, the out-of-body experience is completely a lucid dream.
#
The sleep paralysis is separate where you wake up and you also see shadowy figures.
#
What happens is you wake up and you're sort of frozen in place, but your eyeballs can move.
#
And you can look left, for example, to the edge of the room in a corner,
#
but there's no light there and it's completely dark. And your brain has to come up with some
#
way to explain it. And it creates a shadowy figure who darts between all the corners of the room,
#
simply because when you look to the corner, the shadowy figure follows to the other corners.
#
You've seen the shadowy figure.
#
Of course. But most people who have sleep paralysis experience all of these things.
#
It's just your brain hallucinating to fill the gaps. And it's a brain that is still in some part of
#
the dream world. So it's still sort of dreaming, but your eyes awake and this is an inevitable
#
consequence. And the minute I figured out that this is not real, it is simply in my mind. So
#
it's real in the way that it's a hallucination. They stopped happening. I had no hags, no shadowy
#
creatures. I just sort of opened my eyes and I realized that I was sleep paralyzed. And the
#
easiest way to exit is to go back to sleep. And so I close my eyes and go back to sleep. And a few
#
minutes later I'd be awake and it was all fine. Can you lucid dream at will? Yes. I mean, not
#
theoretically, through practice, it's possible. Lots of people who want to get into lucid dreaming
#
do this. I know all this because of all the literature I've read around this. The way to do
#
it is you have to lie on your back. It's easier to lucid dream when you're on your back than when
#
you're on your stomach. Close your eyes and attempt to fall asleep. Now, as you fall asleep, keep
#
kicking yourself awake. So every few minutes you sort of have to remember, here I am falling asleep
#
and then attempt to wake up. Don't open your eyes, but within your mind, attempt to wake up.
#
If you do this for long enough and practice for some amount of time, you should be able to wake
#
up inside a dream where you wake up, but you are asleep. And lucid dreams are wonderful. Once I
#
figured out that it is only my brain and a hallucination and does not have any real world
#
consequences, then I've done all sorts of interesting and wonderful things in lucid dreams.
#
For example, you get to create characters who will never leave. They will always stay there.
#
It's as if you cross a curtain when you sleep and you wake up in another world where a story
#
can continue night after night. Wow, so you can build a recurring story with the same characters.
#
100%. And there are spaces that my brain has created. It's not conscious, of course.
#
So for example, there is a very tall mountain where it's always raining. It never ceases to rain.
#
And it's quite an arduous journey up the mountain. I think I've only made it up in my memory two or
#
three times in total. And right on top, there is a hut. And by the time I reach that, I'm soaked and
#
drenched. And the hut is very warm. There's candles inside and it's a warm space. And in the hut is a
#
very old man. And I can present to him a question that I've been contending with, struggling with
#
for a long time. And usually I get very meaningful answers. It could be something as, I can give you
#
an example. Last year, there was an employee on team who we were finding to be quite problematic.
#
And we weren't sure whether we have to let this person go or not. And I was really struggling
#
with it because this person was performing incredibly well, but was not aligning with lots
#
of the value, culture side of the business that we were building. And we'd spent a lot of time
#
talking about internally, we would take a dent as a business if we were to let this person go.
#
And I couldn't really arrive at an answer by myself. It was plaguing me and troubling me,
#
and on a subconscious level. And this is one of the questions that we had a long conversation
#
about me and myself, I guess, the future version of myself, the old man, whatever, whatever the
#
archetype here is. And it was very valuable for me because I realized that the answer, of course,
#
was let the person go. And to arrive at that answer, I think meant that I had to let go of,
#
you know, okay, I can't report the best numbers next month, right? Or I will actually have to
#
struggle on this. I have to work 20% more to fill up the gaps. Hiring will be a pain in the ass,
#
of course. But the answer was let the person go. And to be able to have that conversation with
#
myself in an honest way, on top of a mountain where it's raining outside and candles inside,
#
is a very fun experience. And I can imagine when you let the person go, he asks you,
#
but why are you sacking me? And you say, because I had a dream last night and an old man on top
#
of a mountain where it was raining, in a warm hut with candles, told me to let you go. So you
#
can also have sex in your lucid dream if you want to, with anyone you want. Hypothetically,
#
a person who's lucid dreaming could have sex in their lucid dream, yes. Hypothetically,
#
you never have. Yeah, I know. But I did not presume that your podcast delves into these
#
tabloid subjects. So I had an episode with Devanshu Dutta and most people would have missed it
#
because the first one hour was talk about really boring subjects. But after that, we spoke for an
#
hour and a half about sex and porn and all of that, and it was quite wild. So people should
#
certainly check it out. So you can essentially, like tonight when you go back, you can enter a
#
lucid dream and you can do whatever you want. No, but I don't do it at will. I've never entered a lucid
#
dream at will. It just happens. I mean, whatever, fortunately, unfortunately, that is just- And you
#
have these recurrent places and kinds of characters. Not always, but quite frequently,
#
there are recurring places. There's a cityscape. There is like, oh, my school. Yeah. One of the
#
places is, and it's actually an amalgamation of the various places I studied, which is one sort
#
of mixed scape, right? Where I get to meet people from my childhood, my classmates, people I haven't
#
spoken to in forever. They still present as young versions of themselves in my last memory of who
#
that person was. They sound the same, which is so weird to me because if I had to at will come up
#
with how somebody sounded, like their voice, I wouldn't be able to. If I closed my eyes and tried
#
to remember how a classmate of mine sounded, for example. What a lucid dream you can. Yes. And I'm
#
sure there's some box somewhere in my brain where that data point is stored on how somebody sounds
#
and it sort of yanked out from there when I have to have a conversation with this person. Do you
#
have a sleep tracker? No, I don't. Like I wear a sleep tracker, for example, which tells me the
#
quality of my sleep every night. And when the REM comes and REM is when the dreams happen, right?
#
And the REM always is bunched towards the end, which is why I keep telling people that if eight
#
hours is your natural sleep, then sleeping for seven doesn't mean you've done most of it. You've
#
actually probably blocked out half the REM. And so, yeah. So what are the theories behind lucid dreaming?
#
Like, is it good for you? Is it bad for you? Can it be problematic? No, I don't. I mean, I think all
#
it does is ruin quality of sleep. So you have to sleep a lot more because you're just a lot more
#
tired when you wake up. I feel like my brain has done work even when I'm sleeping, where it's doing
#
all this talking and thinking and conversing and all of that. But sleeping more fixes it. And that's
#
been good enough for me. The theory behind lucid dreaming, I think broadly links to the theory
#
behind dreaming itself, which is it is in preparation for some horrible things that could happen in the
#
real world. So if you dream, for example, the death of a loved one, then the hypothesis, as far as I
#
know, again, it's not a subject matter that I have any expertise in. It's all basic reading.
#
When it eventually happens that somebody does die, the same person does die, you've already gone
#
through the experience once or twice or a dozen times, and you are just better equipped to deal
#
with that experience. So that's sort of the, if I'm not wrong, one of the reasons why it seems like
#
we dream, which is that dreams allow you to create these circumstances that could happen in the real
#
world. You contend with those circumstances. And then when it happens in the real world, if it does,
#
then you're ready for them or better prepared for them. That seems very post-facto and a little
#
stretched out. And most of my dreams have nothing to do with preparing me for anything. So I sort
#
of wonder where it is from, but let's quickly go back to your satisfaction index. I think I took a
#
digression away from that. So there's reading, there's physical working out, there's nutrition,
#
there is sleep, and there is the office stuff. And talking to loved ones. And then, yeah. So,
#
wow. All right. So, you know, we've, I've taken a lot of your time today and I'm already feeling
#
guilty and I need to let you go back to your company because we all need tilt. But sort of
#
a final question to kind of end this with for me and my listeners, give recommendations of books,
#
films, music that have meant a lot to you and that you'd like to share with everyone.
#
Or if you want to ask me something, you're welcome to.
#
Oh, of course. Don't know, but at the end of this podcast, and this is for your,
#
for your gentle readers, we will be going outside and then teaching you how to ride a bicycle.
#
Yeah. I don't know how to ride a bicycle. Yes. Amit does not know how to ride a bicycle. I think
#
it is incorrigible given that we are friends. I have taken it upon myself to teach you how to
#
ride a bike. It is not difficult. And you can expect on Amit's Twitter, a photo or a video of
#
him riding a bicycle. Incredibly unlikely, partly because while my cold has been, my sneezing has
#
been, my allergy or whatever it was has been controlled with antihistamines. I'm now getting
#
a bit of a bad headache and all of that. So you can see that I'm ready, but I will sportingly,
#
you know, now that you've got the cycle, I will. Wonderful. Come with you and.
#
Okay. So now on books. You have not read the Brothers Karamazov. I remember when we spoke
#
the last time. Oh, you have. As a child, Ostrowski was the first serious author I was into. Did I
#
tell you my origin story of literature? No. In the sense the origin story of my introduction
#
to literature. My dad had thousands of books lying around and such serendipity, I think is
#
invaluable for a kid. I was deeply lucky in that way. And I used to read the normal thing that kids
#
read. And then one day I came across this book called, and I think it was an Everyman's Library
#
edition of the House of the Dead. And it sounded like funky. It sounded like fun. And I read it
#
and it was of course an account of Dostoevsky's years in Siberia. And yeah, and I was 10 years
#
old. And from there, I think that year I read all of Dostoevsky, all of Shakespeare, a whole bunch of
#
other stuff, much of which I was obviously too young to absorb properly. Like my favorite Shakespeare
#
play in those days was Titus Andronicus, possibly because it had the most violence.
#
And today that seems bizarre to me. Why would I think like that? But yeah, I was very fortunate
#
to sort of have that introduction. Wonderful. That is a good question. For people who do read
#
vociferously, what is your origin story on reading? Mine involves reading in the bathroom
#
and yours. Yeah, okay. On this question, I've actually compiled a list because I know this is
#
your last question, always to all your folks. Oh my God, you're preparing.
#
Pardon? You're prepared. I didn't expect this. Yeah. So the company that we build is incorporated
#
Feynman Technology Private Limited after Richard Feynman, who because of my love for physics,
#
I absolutely adore. Everything Feynman has written is worth reading, especially in particular,
#
a collection of letters that were compiled after his death, which I'm sure you've read,
#
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. It's a wonderful book. Some of the letters
#
in particular in that book are really fun to read and give you a deep insight into one Feynman
#
himself. But how philosophy is probably not limited. He's a physicist. Okay, a lot of ways
#
we would consider him a philosopher, but he thought so deeply about various subjects across
#
the width and breadth of his times. And I thought it was a very wonderful read. On my list, I've
#
actually written The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Wow. So it's amazing that it's amazing
#
that it came up, but you certainly should read it. I love everything magical realism. So I started
#
off with One Hundred Years Solitude with Salman Rushdie. But if you think that magical realism
#
is your kind of reading, I would strongly recommend Quixote by Salman Rushdie. It's very beautifully
#
written. I liked it more than Midnight's Children. If you like George Orwell, you must have read
#
V. I don't actually recall reading V. Yeah, so it's by a Russian author and it was published
#
before Orwell wrote 1984. And there is the theory that Orwell stole 1984 from this Russian author
#
and from this book. I don't know if true or not, but I thought it was better than 1984. So you
#
certainly should. In fact, we can walk down to Bookworm after this and get you a copy. We will
#
not walk down, my friend. We will cycle down. You just expressed so much enthusiasm. I only
#
have one bicycle, so you can cycle and run after you. It's interesting that for the longest time
#
till well into my adulthood, I was ashamed of telling people I didn't know how to cycle.
#
And now I don't give a shit. Like, yeah, I don't know. So what can you do 8 hour podcast?
#
Wonderful. No, but we'll fix that. Okay. When I was growing up, I read a lot of P.G. Wodehouse.
#
I recommend it very strongly. He's hilarious. Again, this came from my dad because he used
#
to read a lot of Wodehouse. Yeah, that's sort of my immediate recommendations. Have you read
#
The Egg by Andy Weir? No. Can I tell you the story quickly? It's very short. Tell me the story
#
quickly. And you were going to read out a poem by someone you wanted to introduce me to. Tim
#
mentioned it. It's too blasphemous. And I feel like, I know, I know you're already saying that
#
if people come this far in your podcast, then they've come far enough and they wouldn't mind
#
the blasphemy. Give me the blasphemy. But I think we leave this to the next podcast. I'm very sure.
#
It's a poem. It's a beat poem called Storm by Tim Minchin. I listened to it when I was 16, 17.
#
I found it on some random 4chan thread. And then from there, they sort of ended up listening to
#
everything he's ever written. All of these are very interesting first positions. These are people
#
who vehemently believe in something that is contrarian and then are so articulate in their
#
ability to express that viewpoint in a way that convinces you into at least some of the things
#
that they believe in. The Egg by Andy Weir is a story about a man who dies in a car crash.
#
He wakes up and he finds himself in heaven. In front of him is God, white-robed, bearded,
#
as God would be. And he says, what just happened? And God says, well, you died. And he says, that's
#
horrible. You know, how did I die? And he says, well, car crash. If you remember you were driving,
#
then you got hit and you died. And the man says, all right, well, I can come to terms with that.
#
Now that I'm dead, what is this? Is this heaven? And God thinks for a bit and says, yeah, well,
#
perhaps it is heaven. And he says, okay, great. Now, what about my wife? What about my kids?
#
What about my family? And so God says, you know, they're fine. I mean, they're heartbroken,
#
of course, the fact that you died. But they take a few years and they all get over it. Your kids
#
grow up to become, you know, meaningful citizens. They all are fine. The fact that you died is,
#
of course, sorrowful to them, but does not impact them further than that. And he wipes
#
the sweat off his brow and he says, my gosh, thank you. That's so wonderful to hear that my
#
family is going to be fine despite the fact that I died. Then after a bit of thinking, he says, all
#
right, what happens now? And God looks on square in the eye and says, well, you're going back.
#
And the man leaps and he says, well, the Hindus were right. You're reincarnating me. I go back.
#
And again, God is quite puzzled by the question. And he says, well, you know, in a way,
#
all of them were right. And he says, all right, wonderful. So where do I go back to?
#
And he says, you're going to be a tribal woman in the early 15th century or something. I don't know
#
what the exact detail in the book is. And he says, oh, so I'm going back in time. And again,
#
God is quizzed by the question and says, yeah, well, I guess compared to where you are right now,
#
you're going back in time. And now the man comes to an odd realization. He says, well, then I would
#
have met myself at some point, because if I can go back in time and forward in time, then I certainly
#
would have met myself. And God says, yeah, it happens all the time. And the man says, what do
#
you mean all the time? And God says, well, they're all you. Jesus was you and Hitler was you and all
#
the juicy torture was you. Every auto driver, every person you interact with, every family member,
#
the people you fell in love with, got married to, every friend you had, all of them were you.
#
And he says, okay, why? Why is all of this happening? And the end of the book is quite nice
#
where he says, well, this is an egg. And that's why the story is called the egg. And he says
#
that this is some rite of passage, that you are still me, right? I know you call me God,
#
but you and I are not that dissimilar. The only thing separating us is the fact that you have to
#
go through this. And of course, it's a made up story. But I think about it very frequently,
#
because if I end up treating everybody I meet as potentially me in another life, and I know that
#
invariably the suffering I cause will be my suffering, the happiness I cause will be my
#
happiness. It audience me well in the world, to whatever degree good and bad and well and poor
#
mean anything at all. So I recommend reading the book. I read as a child, I was probably 16, 17,
#
but it stuck with me the entire way. It's a fantastic parable. And I'll turn it into a
#
thought experiment and answer your question. Supposing you die, like you have a big meeting
#
for tilt, and things are going really well. And you have some important meeting where important
#
things will happen, and everybody is looking forward to that. And you take a lube break before
#
that. And you collapse, and you die, and you wake up, and you've got a man in white with a beard
#
there. And he's saying that, look, you're in heaven. Heaven is incredible. But I offer you the choice
#
that you can go back if you want, now. But then when you die again, you'll go straight to hell.
#
So what are you going to do? It depends what is in heaven. Is it just a vast, wide... At this moment,
#
you don't know. I have no knowledge. You have no knowledge. Then I have no evidence that hell is
#
bad either. You don't have any evidence that hell is bad. Yeah, fair enough. Then I think, I mean,
#
given that I know nothing about hell and nothing about heaven, but certainly everything about
#
earth, I'm happy to toss that coin. And you'll come back. Yeah, but under the assumption that
#
hell and heaven in this hypothesis are equally great, or equally bad. What would there have to
#
be in heaven for you to want to stay there and not come back? Yeah, that's, I mean, if it's similar
#
enough to earth, then it is probably an equal sort of experience. I'm more concerned about hell,
#
which is, if it is the Abrahamic interpretation of endless torture and burning and suffering,
#
that's horrible enough for me to say, you know what, I'm going to hang around here. I don't want
#
to burn for eternity, whatever that means. But given the lack of definition within this example,
#
explicitly this example, I'd probably do one more trip to earth. So again, I'll refer to the
#
Bezos interview with Armand Lex Frieden for the third time. And he was asked about how it felt
#
looking down on earth when he went to space. And he quoted the astronaut Jim Lovell as saying,
#
the first time he saw earth from outside, as saying that, you know, at that moment,
#
I realized that you don't go to heaven when you die, you go to heaven when you're born.
#
And I'm just thinking that any heaven would actually be hell, because I can't in my mind
#
imagine a heaven which is, I mean, it is a doing and the striving that makes life worth living,
#
right? If you are in a steady state where you're in a super comfortable room with air condition
#
and beautiful music and angels and endless seafood platters, after that first moment,
#
after it normalizes, it is kind of hell, isn't it? I'm just thinking aloud.
#
Yes, and to tie it all back to the conversation we've had so far,
#
I think the reason is because there is the absence of a journey.
#
There's the absence of a journey. Exactly. That's what makes it hell.
#
And another thing when you were telling me the X story reminded me of this tweet I saw the other
#
day. If I find it, I'll link it from the show notes, but I may not find it. About how this
#
person was saying that, you know, if you think you're so important, think about life for 100
#
years from now. Somebody else will be living in your house. You know, if any of your things are
#
there, I mean, none of your things are there, they'll have no significance to anyone. They'll
#
all have been thrown away. They'll be decaying or they'll be biodegradable waste. Everything
#
you ever built is gone. Everything is kind of finished. And that is so true that, you know,
#
you don't even have to look at the cosmic scale of things after the universe is gone.
#
You can just go a little bit back or a little bit forward and you realize that it's,
#
you know, everything is. It's outrageously comforting.
#
I've always found great comfort in the fact of our insignificance, or at least the seeming
#
fact of our insignificance. It means you can try so many different things. It means that the
#
landscape is open and not rigidly shut with clear rules about what you ought to do and ought not
#
to do. That you can ask questions and discover answers and paint your way through life. Right?
#
All of it is a canvas and it's yours to paint. Or to whatever degree that your will is predetermined
#
allows you to paint it in such a way. Yes, when I was very young, I remember there was like an
#
English class in school and we were asked to speak about any subject and I spoke about death. And I
#
sort of had everybody take a beat and think about how they would die. How do you think you're going
#
to die? And when do you think you're going to die? And again, this is a very sort of stoic
#
principle that I've seen that, you know, emulated with them, where you also think through how
#
everybody you love will die. Everybody in your life, the people who care deeply about the people
#
you hate, for example, like the people who say horrible things to you. And they will eventually
#
die as well. All of us will. And at best you will be remembered as a caricature of yourself.
#
When you think about some great historic personality, you can say it's like a Martin
#
Luther King, right? The image that forms in your head of a Martin Luther King is quite,
#
is a caricature. It's five days of his life compressed into a single story or a Henry Ford
#
who we spoke about. I mean, I remember reading about Henry Ford and I was so shocked by how
#
complex his life was and how all of us just remember him as guy who made the car, right?
#
And in a thousand years, not even Henry Ford, he will become a caricature of the caricature and so
#
on and so forth. It is all insignificant in the end. And that is so ultimately comforting. It
#
means that I have so much autonomy to do the things that I want to do with no due concern for
#
being remembered, being famous, which is why when we started off this podcast, I was saying,
#
I'm feeling quite nervous. It's my first time speaking publicly to a larger group,
#
very large group, given your following. And then when we went for a break, I was telling you that
#
I was quite puzzled by my nervousness because I have forever taken solace in this insignificance
#
that if somebody listens to them and says Deepak is an idiot, so what? They will die and so will I.
#
And the thought will die with them. Everybody's interpretation of you is just signals in their
#
brain. It's that simple and that meaningless and that should be comforting. So yeah, I agree
#
deeply with what you said. I remember when John Nash and his wife died in a car accident a couple
#
of years ago, and I remember thinking what a waste that none of it matters. The Nobel Prize
#
doesn't matter. The work doesn't matter. The schizophrenia doesn't matter. None of it matters.
#
Everything comes down to that last horrifying instance when he realizes he's having an accident
#
and whatever he goes through in that last moment. That is the whole life. There is nothing else.
#
You know, it all boils down to that. You can live the best kind of life, but you're going to go in
#
pain. Like David Sinclair and his book Lifespan has a great passage about this. And I think there's
#
a fundamental truth there that even if you die in your sleep, you don't know the kind of pain
#
you're going through where your organs are failing one by one. It's horrible. I mean,
#
you escape that if you're in a plane crash and it's an instant or you're in a craft which implodes
#
way under the sea, though even there you might have an inclination just before it does. You might
#
have a sense just before it does that it's going to happen. So have you followed out this exercise?
#
Have you thought about your own death? Yes, certainly. Especially when I was younger,
#
I did the exercise because I read deeply into it and realized that it's a good way to
#
to ground yourself. You have to lay a center of gravity. Once you have center of gravity,
#
it becomes very easy to do everything else because you're not easily swayed. And part of
#
that is coming to terms with mortality. The interesting bit about this is I don't agree
#
with you on two fronts. The first, I don't think I'm horrified or will be horrified at the time of
#
my death. Now, there are some things I cannot help. If someone cuts me off at a junction,
#
I feel anger bubbling from deep inside me. I can't help it. It's subconscious. It comes from
#
somewhere else. But what I do with the anger that I feel, that is in my control. And similarly,
#
I'm sure that if I were heading towards another car or truck or the plane was crashing, I would
#
feel fear certainly because I cannot help it. It is instinctive and subconscious. But what I do with
#
that fear and whether I acknowledge it, whether I shoo it away, a very nice quote I read recently
#
when you feel nervous and your butterflies in your stomach, you say, get your butterflies in
#
formation, which is you cannot help but have butterflies. So we don't want to pretend like
#
that does not happen, but it is how quickly can you get them in formation and course correct.
#
I don't think that I will let the fear terrify me. I think I'm quite happy to face death when
#
it comes. And I'm saying this on theory, but like I said earlier, I don't know what I do in the
#
actual situation. I'd like to believe that this is how I would act. And then you'd said something
#
else which I seem to have forgotten. But on the original point, the solace that comes from the
#
fact that you're going to die is what frees up your ability to live in a carefree way today.
#
So it's a good thing. I don't know what I'd do if there was a way to become immortal. I don't know
#
if I'd pick it. I haven't thought too deeply about it. I'd love to hear your answer. Would you pick
#
it? But what that does to my philosophy on this, which is, is it still equally insignificant?
#
And if it is, well, and if it is what you do with an infinite lifespan, it's an interesting
#
thought experiment, but I haven't really gone on that. I'll answer that question since you asked,
#
but before that, you know, your musings on death reminded me of like, I think in regards to how
#
we are with death, then this is not a difference of opinion, but I guess a different personality
#
that I'll be more like John von Neumann and you'll be more like Enrico Fermi. Do you have any idea
#
what I'm talking about? No. Okay. So Subramaniam Chandrasekhar once spoke about how von Neumann
#
and Fermi died and both of them knew they were going to die before they actually did.
#
And these are his words. This is in an interview. This was posted by this wonderful Twitter. I don't
#
know if I can call him a friend because I've never met him, Ashutosh Joglekar on Twitter.
#
And so he posted this beautiful page from some book where Chandrasekhar is saying that the two
#
cases are marked by contrast. Von Neumann could not accept the fact that his death was
#
inevitable. He turned to Catholic religion, got himself baptized, was in constant panic
#
and was very demanding of Clara. Fermi was very different. The day after the operation,
#
when it became clear he would die, Herbert Anderson and I went to see Fermi in the hospital.
#
Let me read to you what I have written. So now this is Subramaniam Chandrasekhar quoting
#
Subramaniam Chandrasekhar where he says, it was of course very difficult to know what to say or how
#
to open a conversation when all of us knew what the surgery had shown. Fermi resolved the gloom
#
by turning to me and saying, and these are Fermi's words, for a man past 50 nothing essentially new
#
can happen and the loss is not as great as one might think. Now you tell me, will I be an elephant
#
next time? So good. And I absolutely love this. I wish to, you know, get to the stage where I can
#
have Fermi's spirit. But you know, I wonder, you know, maybe you'll be the Von Neumann and I'll be
#
the Fermi. Exactly. There is no way to know until it actually happens. There's no way to know.
#
And the thought of like, I would embrace immortality simply because of my Bengali
#
instinct for procrastination. It means that I have to deal with the inevitability of mortality a
#
little later than I would like to. So just for that reason, I'm not sure life would be particularly
#
pleasurable. And if healthspan doesn't follow lifespan in the case of immortality, it could
#
essentially be an immortality of dementia, which is even worse. What would I do with a life when
#
I'm not even sort of aware of myself? We didn't speak about many things, including our shared
#
atheism, another matter on which we don't disagree. But rather than go there, I'll, you know, earlier
#
when you were chatting, something reminded me of a question. Somebody asked me about something that
#
Ajay said in an episode of Everything is Everything, where he was talking about how he once had to
#
teach something. And he realized that so many people wanted him to teach it that he said,
#
this became my dharma, that I would teach this. And somebody pointed that out to me and I jokingly
#
told them that Ajay and I are both atheists with a sense of dharma. And they asked me to do an
#
episode on that. I don't think Ajay will do that anytime. But I am struck by that sense of dharma
#
that certainly in the context of the limited things that I do, I do feel that there is a
#
purpose. I do feel it's important, grandiose as it might sound, immodest as it might sound,
#
that I do feel that there is a larger purpose, I feel, when it comes to doing something like
#
this podcast, for example. And I think dharma is also something that one can think of in the
#
context of professions. Like my friend Suyash Rai and I have had many discussions on this,
#
that how do you get that sense of dharma, where most people will not feel it. But if you are that
#
kind of person, then if you're a journalist, you will feel there is a certain duty involved in that
#
and you have to follow it out. If you're a doctor, of course, quite obviously, and in a cliched way,
#
and so on and so forth. So do you think of your having some kind of dharma in the work that you
#
do in the life that you live? Before I answer that, I think you've missed the most important
#
upside of being able to be immortal potentially, which is your podcast don't have to stop eight
#
hours. You could do 24 day long podcasts, totally insane. Anyway, on that question,
#
I think broadly, I mean, of course, the answer is yes. But we were talking about this earlier,
#
I think different kinds of entrepreneurs, some people genuinely want to solve some very large
#
and difficult problem. Angad is the perfect example because he wants to clean the air
#
and that's so noble. And he's found a way to do it that generates profit and can be scaled and so
#
on and so forth. And some people go out looking for a problem to solve, which I feel is more like
#
the entrepreneurs that we were, which is we started off and said, hey, I want to do something with my
#
life that is not getting a job. We know that I suddenly discovered that there was this instrument
#
of being able to form a private limited company and equity and all of those things to be able
#
to accomplish these goals. And then we can run on and try and build it. Maybe, and at the heart of
#
both of these types of entrepreneurs, although they seem distinct at the face of it, is still
#
the selfish motive, which is when I go to bed at night, I want to feel great about how I've
#
conducted my day. And if I feel that way every night for months and years, then it's a good way
#
to live my life. So I'm still sort of solving my daily problem, albeit in different ways.
#
So embedded in that is some sort of a dharma. So I can see that point of view. But yeah,
#
perhaps my philosophy does not extend to such a degree that I can give a more nuanced answer on
#
this. Yeah. So, I mean, great time talking to you today. I mean, the next time you lucid dream,
#
not the next time, but maybe one day when you have that lucid dream and you're on that mountain and
#
it's raining and you climb and you climb and you climb. And finally, just when you're about to
#
give up, you see the hut and you go near the hut and you can see the candles from a distance and
#
you enter the hut and it is warm and there is that old man. And then you sit down and then
#
after a while you get up to go, because you realize that you have to get back to the real
#
world. And the old man says, no, stay here. So I don't know why I said that, but it's an interesting
#
parable, but maybe such a day will come. But is that a morbid note to end on? No, no, it's absolutely
#
possible. The only caveat is that eventually I will wake up. The only caveat is that eventually
#
you wake up. I hope you do. So Deepak, thanks. This has been a blast and you have to come here
#
again because you have, you promised to read out a particular poem next time. So I shall-
#
We should do, not support it actually, maybe next time.
#
We should do our next recording on the cycles side by side.
#
Thank you for listening.
