Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / ContraMinds Recap: Best Of 2024 on Ultralearning, Innovation, Resilience, Overcoming Alcohol Addiction, Communication, and AI.

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ContraMinds Recap: Best Of 2024 on Ultralearning, Innovation, Resilience, Overcoming Alcohol Addiction, Communication, and AI. · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_10: It's often the answers that make most of us think.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_10: However, in our conversations with our esteemed guests in 2024, their questions made us think.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_10: It triggered a flurry of thoughts and ideas that questioned some of the beliefs and assumptions we have always taken for granted or never challenged ourselves to ask them.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_10: It could be the simplest of questions, but asking questions helps us challenge the status quo and consider alternatives.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_10: It also allows us to discover and solve big problems or solutions we have never considered.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_10: Let's listen to the questions that made us think in 2024.
• 0:49
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• 0:54
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• 1:02
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• 1:12
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• 1:28
  SPEAKER_10: Dr.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_10: Nigel Payne on Learn to Ask the Why's.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_10: Why are people returning the products?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_07: Now and Bezos gives the example of a product that was being returned.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_07: So one product that was an expensive product.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_07: The Amazon was that something like a third of the products were being returned for a refund, which Amazon do automatically.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_07: And they they looked at this and they got in touch with the supplier and said, There's something wrong with your product.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_07: I want you to deal with this, you know, that I want you to get it fixed, otherwise we're going to stop selling it.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_07: So the supplier says, nothing wrong with the product.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_07: Anyway, the huge argument.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_07: Bezos gets involved and he says, Well, why are people returning it?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_07: And when it came down to it, the problem was they're returning it because there were faults in the in the product.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_07: When you found out what those faults were, you found they weren't to do with the way the product left the factory, they were the way the product was shipped.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_07: When you begin to look at the way the product was shipped, you then began to see that some of the packaging allowed extra pressures to be put on parts of the product.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_07: The packaging wasn't universally bad, but it was it allowed extra pressure to be put on some parts of the product.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_07: That in turn, when you looked at that, it created weaknesses in the product.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_07: When you looked at that, it meant that products were much more likely to fail.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_07: Some products were much more likely to fail.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_07: So Bizo's suggestion was working with the manufacturer was to change the packaging, to make it more robust and to protect the product more.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_07: And they went from 33% returns down to practically zero by changing something that is cheap and simple.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_07: Whereas at the beginning it was, it's your product that's wrong, modify your product.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_07: And the manufacturer could have gone ahead and modified the product again and again and again, would have done nothing to the returns.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_07: So it's only when he got down to that level that he realized that something pretty basic was going wrong, but it was invisible until you asked the questions.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_07: You asked those whys.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_07: So I I think the CEOs should ask the six, the Jeff Bezos' six whys.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_07: Don't take an answer from the first person who says, We got a problem here, this is the solution.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_07: Find out what the solution really is.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_07: That is systems thinking.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_10: Brandon Hendrickson on.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_10: Understand where you stand today.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_10: Where I was when I discovered the work of Kieran Egan.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_11: I think the way to talk about that is to say a little bit about where I was when I discovered the work of Kieran Egan.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_11: Um I'm now diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, and looking back, I see that I had an ADHD-fueled childhood where I would just get really interested in some new topic and go to the library and read a dozen or three dozen books about that topic.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_11: And I was able to connect, because I sort of developed this well-rounded understanding of the world, I was able to find what was exciting about any of the topics that I was learning in school, with almost no exceptions.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_11: The exceptions were the interesting things, the hard things.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_11: Um, but then I got really good grades when I was in high school, and I got uh a free ride to an undergraduate education, um, a really great honors college where I was trained in the great books tradition.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_11: And um, and uh so three years into college, the university sent me a letter and said, You really are obligated right now to declare what the topic is that you are studying.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_11: And so I picked World of Religions.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_11: Um uh and then after two years of that, I realized when I was right up when I was about to graduate, I realized, wait a second, I can't get a job with a degree in World of Religions.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_11: What am I gonna do?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_11: Um, and uh and got a very practical degree in history, which is obviously not actually a practical degree either.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_11: And so I figured that, okay, what do I need to do to actually understand education?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_11: Is I I need to go back to school.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_11: I need to get a degree in this.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_11: So I enrolled in a uh on paper, very good master's program in uh the social and cultural foundations of education.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_11: Sort of aiming toward a philosophy of education sort of element, but also integrated with um with how education actually works through history and through sociology and through economics and all of those things.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_11: When I was in an academic library and I was looking for one book, and I happened to run across this book by this thinker who I'd never heard about before, named Kieran Egan, called Getting It Wrong From the Beginning.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_11: Is it is it okay actually if I share my screen with this and show this book?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_11: Okay.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_11: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget by Kieran Egan.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_11: Um and uh and I read it and it it asked the questions that nobody else was asking.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_11: And shown how the last hundred years had been this fruitless war.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_11: And he identified the problem of school.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_11: Everything in the world is interesting, but we portray the world in schools to students as mostly as dull.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_11: Um, but we are surrounded by mystery and what we know is fascinating.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_11: And my quest in doing that book review contest from last year was to spend about three months of my life where I did absolutely nothing else except for study his book, summarize his book paragraph by paragraph, do workshops on his book, use the tools that he talked about to better express what his ideas actually were.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_11: And I did a, I would say, fair job of it.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_11: What I've devoted the rest of my life to is continue to unpack uh his ideas and more importantly bring them into action, actually getting homeschoolers, uh helping homeschoolers uh uh make turn his ideas into things that they can practically do, actually helping people who found micro schools um uh turn his ideas into things they can practically do, which is the purpose then of the Substack that I opened when I found out that my book review was one of the ten finalists.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_10: Dr.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_10: Vignish Devaraj on decipher what is the quality of your life.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_10: How can I add more life to the rest of my years?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_05: See, Ayurveda is a documentation of how humans interacted with his surroundings.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_05: So at that time, the Rishis and people who observed how human beings is being interacting with the surroundings and how that is impacting him, and what could be done to improve it, what could not be done to improve it.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_05: So many things that are written are still useful, many things that were written at that point of time, we don't need it anymore because the times have changed.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_05: However, certain fundamentals are relevant and it will be relevant for the future as well.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_05: It's like you know, our body is a very ancient design, it's uh lack of years of design, but our surroundings are upgrading like a lot.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_05: Today I can sit and talk with you.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, which is just a few decades ago, it was impossible.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_05: We will see it in James Bond movies, and before that, it would be some imagination.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_05: However, modern medicine they had the breakthrough with antibiotics, painkillers, steroids, immunosuppressants, so and blood thinners.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_05: This was a revolutionary uh discovery that led to enhance the longevity of human beings.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_05: Because in the past we were very afraid of infectious diseases to what extent it can kill, and the germ theory it helped people to come up with antibiotics and kill the germs, and it'll change.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_05: So, on one hand, modern medicine is a result of humanity's question: how can I prevent human beings' death?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_05: Because when you when they keep seeing people dying, they want to know how how to prevent death.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_05: So, everything when you go to an allopathy doctor, the first thing that their mind is, how can I continue this person being alive and how can I prevent pain?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_05: These are the two things they will look, and then the quality of life will come.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_05: However, if you look at Ayurveda, there was no antibiotics, there was no microscope.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_05: It was very considered to be with your all your six senses, and I mean your sixth sense and your understanding of how you perceive nature and how things are changing.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_05: So there were many herbs, there were many minerals, there were many lifestyles, and accordingly, they documented okay, if a person stayed awake very late at night, he has a tendency to have a spectrum of disease called Vadharaktam.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_05: This was documented a few centuries ago.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_05: Now, if you look at Vatharektham, it is the most appropriate correlation of today's autoimmune diseases that are mentioned in the allopathic medical textbooks.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_05: Now, autoimmune diseases, it is something where a disease is caused and we do not know what is the origin of it because we are trying to look at what is the single most cause that is contributing to it.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_05: However, if you are not sleeping for two or three days, it's quite difficult to understand that through a blood test or an MRI or an X-ray.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_05: It will be a subjective uh parameter analysis to understand if somebody is sleep-deprived, and that when you compound it, it will have an impact on your health in your hormones, in your immune system.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_05: So in Ayurvedic textbooks, it was written centuries ago.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_05: There are two types of diseases diseases because of malnourishment and disease because of overconsumption.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_05: And as the quality of life in a community gets better, that the nature of disease will also shift.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_05: And that is why today we have more people falling sick because of overconsumption rather than diseases of malnourishment.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_05: So allopathic system has been phenomenal in treating diseases of malnourishment, diseases that are infectious in nature, near death experience.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_05: Somebody is having stroke, somebody is having heart attack, somebody is having an accidental case.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_05: But when it comes to enhancing the quality of your life, so if I have to put it bluntly, allopathy is an answer to the question, how can I enhance the longevity of a human being?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_05: And Ayurveda is an answer to the question, how can I add more life to the rest of my years?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_05: So it is uh in today's world, we are not designed to live in such a comfortable, uh abundant life.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_05: We are actually designed to live with a lot of challenges and scarcity.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_05: That is how the human body is designed, and in such a way, Ayurveda helps to bring back those uh ancient roots that we are actually uh you know designed for.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_05: So that is where it is becoming more and more relevant today.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_10: Scott H.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_10: Young on knowing how to remain motivated over the long term.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_10: How is mastery motivation different from performance motivation?
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_08: Um, there is a distinction in a lot of the learning research on um what are called like mastery motivations versus uh it's usually called performance motivations.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_08: So the classic context of that is like if you have a group of students in a math class, right?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_08: There's going to be some students that are mostly motivated to get an A in the class, and there's going to be some students that are motivated to learn the material.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_08: So learning the material is the mastery motivation, getting the A in the class is the performance motivation.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_08: And, you know, in general, they kind of talk about like the mastery motivation is probably better in the long term, especially in a classroom environment where, you know, the getting an A in the class usually doesn't fully capture the learning objectives of the course.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_08: So it's possible to get an A in the class and have maybe a more superficial understanding that's desired.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_08: And at the same time, you know, you can do things that will allow you to get the A that are not going to be good for setting you up for long-term mastery.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_08: So, you know, maybe just memorizing things that you were supposed to have really understood, um, cramming so that, you know, you're gonna forget it right away, but it'll help you on the test.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_08: These are things where these kind of motivations can be in contrast.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_08: I mean, my basic assumption is that pretty much anyone who is reading a book like this has a mastery motivation.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_08: I mean, if you had a performance motivation, the easiest way to pass a test is to like get someone who can help you learn that particular test, right?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_08: Is it's someone who can be like, okay, well, this is exactly how you practice for this particular exam.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_08: And these are the little tricks and little like, you know, hooks that you can use to cheat your way into getting a better mark than your actual understanding would normally allow.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_08: Whereas, you know, the kind of person is going to sit through and read a, you know, a fairly densely cited, popular um nonfiction book about learning about mastery is someone who wants to improve for itself, who wants to have that as a goal.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_08: So I I have the privilege, I think, of being able to talk to an audience that largely has the right motivation.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_08: And I think you're you're even listening to Pagas's, you've made it in a few minutes, you care about mastery.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_08: You're not just like, you know, okay, I want to just narrowly get by on this particular class or this particular exam, even if that is also a goal of yours.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_08: And so I think um the mastery motivation is something that binds uh my readers and my audience together.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_08: And I think the mastery motivation is so powerful because a lot of what you're dealing with, I think, in a lot of educational research in that context is the problem that a lot of students are just not motivated, that a lot of students don't really care about what you're teaching them.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_08: And so you have this problem of like, uh, well, you're not only trying to teach them the right way, but you're trying to teach them in a way that like using carrots and sticks to get them to do the work.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_08: And, you know, we even talk about that in there's a chapter I write on um uh on mastery learning, which is a uh is a sort of a philosophy of teaching classes, which avoids using um assignments and quizzes for grades, so that you know, if you fail one, that you're having like hampered your ability to pass the overall class.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_08: But obviously, I understand why teachers do that, because if you don't assign points for intermediate homework or quizzes, students won't try to study for it because they have a performance incentive.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_08: So I think you know, that is the real benefit, the real joy of being able to write a book like this is that you're essentially filtering out to only target an audience that actually cares about mastery.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_10: Moses Gorepity on helping people with what they can become.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_10: What will you do when you grow up and set up expectations?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_06: One of the first things that we do uh in transforming persons with disability, we start with a very, very simple thing called expectation.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_06: When I was growing up, uh Swami when I was seven, and people used to come to my house, relatives and all that, they used to ask my sister, hey, what will you become when you grow up?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_06: But I never heard that question to be here.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_06: Why?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_06: Because people are saying, oh, Moses is here, you know, maybe already going through the lot of medical interventions.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_06: There is no expectation from me.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_06: It's not that they they don't want me to succeed in life, but people genuinely concerned you know he's going through operations and this and that and all that.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_06: Will I ask him what will he become in the future?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_06: That's not the question.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_06: So, what does that do to a visually impaired or a person with disability?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_06: You know, when you have a sibling uh you know who is constantly sent to say to the neighbor store store in the neighborhood to get something, you are not getting going there, you are not getting that opportunity.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_06: What it does is that you will you will slowly miss those life experiences of going out and buying that bread and coming back, and in the process you ask for a change, take a change, whatever that whole transaction experience you are losing.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_06: Therefore, there's a threat that sometimes persons with disabilities can put in that self-prison where they themselves start seeing themselves as somebody who needs help.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_03: Perfect.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_06: So we need to first break that we at Enable India and with our partners, what we do is that we first, when they come to us, we ask them to form the rules.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_06: And we say that including trainers, we will follow that rules.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_06: What does it mean?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_06: That we are telling them we expect you to form the rules, we expect you to control the training.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_06: So our enablement with the candidate starts with expectations.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_06: That's the first step.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_06: In our training programs, we actually focus on building attitude.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_06: Can you you know we we talk about you are you know, say you are a deaf or a person with physical disability, spinal cord injury.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_06: When you overcome your challenges, can you start thinking about how you can contribute to the society?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_06: So in our training programs, we say the 40 hours of mandatory community work, people say, What?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_06: I am blind.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_06: How will I contribute?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_06: That's something you need to find out.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_06: So people form small groups of their own uh and they take up the causes that are close to their hearts and start contributing back.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_06: For example, one of the bat yeah, one of the batches in um in Kerala went to a government hospital and saw that the parents uh you know were not bringing children for vaccination because there's no breastfeeding booth or the cabin in the hospital.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_06: They wanted to build that and uh they went to hospital and said, Oh, we need money.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_06: We don't have money.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_06: So they they worked and built a you know this breastfeeding uh booth uh so that the you know parents can bring their young children for vaccination.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_06: So they did that.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_06: Somebody else took up a project of uh rescuing dogs, somebody else took up a uh you know, project of teaching computers or transgenders, so on so forth.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_06: I mean people will take up things so it's shifting from oh I am a I'm blind, I am deaf, I am this, to no, I am an active contributor, I am taking charge, I am a volunteer, I am a con I am a change maker.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_06: So this is the s another shift that we do in our training programs.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_06: Um about expectation where where we learned is the one of our first placements with the deaf.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_06: We place the person, the company was very happy with the deaf, and second, you know, first day he goes to work and he did well.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_06: The manager is very happy, second day he doesn't go.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_06: The company manager calls us saying that why he has not come to us, why what happened, anything wrong?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_06: Then we found out this guy is sitting at home and watching a cricket match.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_06: Because he he thought, oh why why should I I mean nobody told him that he has to inform.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_06: There's no expectation, right?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_06: So he was from childhood, he was just you know, nobody isn't talking to at home because all the communication to him is eat, sleep.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_06: That's all right.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_06: The parents are also not making communication because they don't know sign language.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_06: So there's no expectation, there's no conversation with them.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_06: So we build expectations, we we prepare people to think beyond themselves.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_06: Brilliant.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_06: Right?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_06: So that's the real crux of our our our programs, you know, where then obviously of course you give all the things required to to work in a company, you know, getting them ready for a job.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_10: Professor Vasant Dar on being an incumbent, why you must not get comfortable?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_10: Why do you really need search?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_09: So so this was something I I wrote about and uh I guess just a little more than a year ago, yeah, after the emergence of Chat GPT, where I said that you know, I I point to the fact that sometimes uh technologies get disrupted, right?
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_09: And that search had been improving steadily, you know, slowly and steadily over a long period of time, you know, and you know, Google was a dominant player.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_09: In search, you know, Bing was like a distant number two, right?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_09: So and what happens in markets like that, you know, in the and so search is sort of becoming mature, but you know, there's a framework called the innovator's dilemma by Clay Christensen, right?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_09: Which describes it really well, which is that incumbents get comfortable and and that they're catering to a market and they forget to see a threat that is emerging that might be a lot inferior, but it appeals to some people, and then it suddenly starts appealing to the entire market.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_09: Um, and that's the way conversational AI sort of emerged.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_09: Emerged as a tool, right?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_09: It got people's attention and it it captured people's imagination, and suddenly that was the buzzword.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_09: And so, why do you really need search?
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_09: You know, boring plain search when you've got conversational AI.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_09: So, yeah, I mean, and the ironic thing is that the architecture, this whole transformer architecture that underlies large language models was you know developed at Google.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_09: Um, you know, but Google was like too slow to actually capitalize on it, whereas OpenAI being this you know much more, you know, much smaller uh you know company with no liability was able to sort of release it into the wild and actually have people play with it.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_09: And it was brilliant for Microsoft to have taken a large stake in this because Microsoft couldn't have done this by themselves, right?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_09: I mean their previous attempt at a chat port was a disaster.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_09: Um they're not that kind of company, whereas you know, through OpenAI, they could do it without incurring any kind of risk.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_09: Um, but to come back and sort of answer your question and bring it full circle, uh, yeah, I think going forward we'll probably see search, traditional search more or less disappear and be replaced by you know a much better intelligence in the form of sort of conversational AI.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_10: Anton Howe's on observing where the migration flows happen.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_10: Why innovation is still happening in America?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_12: I think it's still America.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_12: Okay.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_12: I've I I I think for if you'd asked me 10 years ago, I'd have said maybe China, maybe somewhere in India.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_12: But I think still America, right?
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_12: There's no.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_12: It looked for a while like it was China, but I think.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_12: I mean, again, just look at the migration flows, right?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_12: It tells you where everyone's going, right?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_12: The moment people can move to America to go to Silica Valley, or to it could be Miami or or Austin, Texas, or somewhere like that.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_12: America seems to keep uh creating the conditions that makes it attractive, right?
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_12: They've got it, but remember, they've got a big advantage already, because they're already the place to be.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_12: It's hard to overcome that advantage.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_12: London, I think, gets overcome partly out of bad luck.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_12: Um, partly, I think, because of kind of the opportunities that America could already offer from the get-go.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_12: Um but also, I mean, the First World War probably has a big impact.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_12: You know, Britain goes from being in 1914, Britain is Britain is the equivalent today of China for being the manufacturer of the world, Saudi Arabia for being the main energy source of the world, because it's really all the world's coal that's been produced still in Britain, uh, and and New York because it's it's the financial centre of the world in 1914.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_12: By 1918?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_12: But by 1918, this has changed, right?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_12: Like the First World War radically changes it, and Britain becomes a debtor to the United States.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_12: So that the centre of gravity, I think, is officially shifted by the First World War.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_12: Um, but I think you can already see that America's trajectory is very kind of rapidly changing and overtaking by around 1900-1910.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_12: Um, you see that in GDP per capita statistics, but I think in a way those are a bit misleading.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_12: Like in terms of just centre of activity, it definitely shifts in that period.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_12: So for it to shift again, I think you'd need America to somehow kind of fumble the ball, you know, just like drop the ball in some way.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_12: But look at look at look at its energy energy prices.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_12: They're so they're really kind of going all out in terms of creating the infrastructure, they've got plentiful natural gas, they're probably going to still create a lot of nuclear power, they're gonna have all of the stuff for cheap energy, which is essential to industry, but not just industry, but like to anyone, just living, right?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_12: You need energy to do all of these things.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_12: They've got so much money going into research and development to the extent that we still rely on basically American pharmaceutical companies to produce all of our drugs in terms of inventing new ones and curing new diseases.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_12: Um and again, the migration flows.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_12: And I think China looked like it could be a contender until the last few years, really, when it was like, uh, you know, people suddenly start having their doubts about what the state might or might not want to do.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_12: Um seemingly not prioritizing the economy anymore, prioritizing global strategic, geostrategic things, or their COVID response, all these kinds of things became made it seem like it wasn't going to become the new place where things would be done.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_12: But who knows?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_12: I mean, this is this is just my conjecture.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, no, no, I think I think I think it's a very, very beautiful point that you make.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_10: Raj Dundapani on learning to know what it takes to build the long game.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_10: How do you build tenacity and avoid instant gratification?
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_14: But I'll tell you what I have learned observing Sridhar Vembu, observing this company, uh Zoho Corporation, evolve over time.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_14: Uh how do you build tenacity?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_14: How do you build that uh playing the long game, the marathon sustenance effort?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_14: Uh one lesson I have learned is leaving money on the table.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_14: Right?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_14: Instant gratification is whatever comes, take it, and demand the next money come for all immediately.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_14: Versus, even if there is money on the table, even if there is an opportunity to milk the customer dry, give them the opportunity to say, wait, I'll I would like to pay later.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_14: I would not like to subscribe for this.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_14: We have a product called Zoho Concierge, it's a desk, and that desk is manned by a team of people whose important job is to analyze your business.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_14: Wait for it, is to analyze your business and recommend only those products from Zoho that will really make sense to you and not the whole bouquet of products you will be made to buy if you go the proper way, right?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_14: So it is almost like it is counter marketing.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_14: Yeah, we are saying we will come to your side of the desk.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_14: It won't be a sales call.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_14: We will understand your business, tell us everything about you, and we will show you how to save money from Zoho.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_14: We I I love that strategy.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_14: So that is the same thing that we have continued even inside our team at Zoho schools.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_14: There'll be some questions like, uh, why are we not having this?
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_14: We can easily have this.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_14: Why is it not being declared as a day off?
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_14: Or why are we not celebrating and so on?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_14: The the if you dig deeper, you will notice that there is this philosophical uh DNA strand which says uh it is okay to once in a while miss something.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_14: Right?
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_14: There is this time-driven versus event driven.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_14: Time driven is it's one o'clock uh time for lunch.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_14: Event driven is I'm hungry, it's probably 11 o'clock.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_14: I am hungry, it's probably two o'clock, but only when I'm hungry, I go for lunch.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_14: So if you can move from being a slave to the clock to being an attentive listener to events, that is an important mind shift, from being time-driven to being event-driven.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_14: And that helps you build sustainable models.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_14: Fantastic.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_10: Professor David Nutt on Understand How to Cope with Stress, how to deal with setbacks, and not be preoccupied with failure.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: When we look into the brains and do measures of various measures, we can see that people with mental illnesses, you know, there are signatures in the brain which are different from people who don't have them.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: Why do they get them?
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: They get them through some of them, some genetic, a lot of it's due to upbringing, stress, poverty, and then a lot of it is due to subsequent stress, trauma.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a lot, you know, a lot of people get trauma, either get assaulted, to have accidents happen to them.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: So trauma.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: So chronic stress is one of the major features, and one of the major predisposing features.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, we can see those changes occur in the brain.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: So what we need to be doing is we need to be uh training children to be resilient, how to cope with stress, how to deal with those setbacks and not to become preoccupied with failure, etc.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we also need to uh well as make sure that people, when they get ill, they get help quickly because the longer you go on being ill, the harder it is usually to rectify them.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_10: Kiati butt on practicing how to be there in the moment.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_10: When are people making changes in their expression or gestures or posture of the body?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_13: I think the first and the most important practice is to just listen.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_13: So many of us most of the times are eager to share our side of the story that uh we don't take a step back to try and listen to what the other person is trying to communicate.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_13: Now, listening is in two ways.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_13: One is obviously the verbal communication, but it's also the non-verbal communication.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_13: So if you take a pledge that you know today when I'm in a meeting, I'm with my daughter, or I am with my uh mother, or I'm with my colleague, with my boss, whoever it is.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_13: Okay, because all of us have got different uh environments in which we function.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_13: Uh, all you do is try and be there in the moment.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_13: Try and listen to what the other person is trying to communicate.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_13: Okay, for example, you asked a question, at least wait for the person to respond, be it through their body language, be it through their words.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_13: If you are ready that okay, as soon as I ask this question, this is the next set of instructions that I want to give, then you're not really listening to what the other person is saying, right?
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_13: So many organizations spend millions and millions of their you know money on just this aspect because they did not listen into what the person was saying.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_13: There were conflicts happening, but the leader was not observing, they were not listening to what's there.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_13: So, coming back, you listen to what uh is happening.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_13: If you feel that you want to learn more about uh body language, you can start by looking at one part of the body at a time.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_13: Okay, so for example, you think that okay, today let me just focus on face, is also a lot of things happening on the face, but let's just say that you know, broadly, you say, Let me just start by focusing on the face.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_13: Now, face is something most of us inadvertently look at.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_13: Okay, so while I'm looking at you, I don't want to just look at how many times you're nodding back at me, I want to be able to see how many times is that eyebrow moving, and when I'm seeing that eyebrow move, I will try and think what in that conversation made you react in that manner.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_13: Okay, so little by little you try and see different parts of the body, you try and see when people are making those changes in their expressions, their gestures, the posture of the body, and you remember this one mantra that when people are going to be comfortable, they are trying to open up, and when they are not comfortable, they are trying to go and close down.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_13: What are they doing to open up?
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_13: What are they doing to close down?
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_13: Those are the things you start observing little by little, okay.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_13: And most important is to introspect how am I sitting in this meeting?
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_13: Am I looking tensed?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_13: Which is why the other person is looking tensed.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_13: Okay, so once you start understanding yourself also well, that also helps.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_13: So, three things to do one is to just try and listen into what's happening in that conversation without being in a hurry to talk or multitasking on your phone or your devices.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_13: Second one is to look at different parts of the body and look at how people are opening up, shutting down, and the third is to look at yourself a little more closely than you were previously.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_13: So once you do these things, I think you will naturally become good at observing.
• 35:09
  unknown: Okay.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_10: R Sri Doran, knowing how to empower and motivate your people.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_10: Why the CMO has to speak the language of results?
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: The CMO has to speak the language of results.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not talking about business language.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: If he wants to get the best out of agencies, he must know how to motivate the agency.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: See, results is his accountability, is his problem.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: Agency is the means to his end.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: You have to motivate the team to fight the war, right?
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: How does a general talk to the soldiers?
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: He's not talking to them about strategy.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: He says kill them.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_04: But uh but do today's agencies, if I have to say kill them, what skill set should I have to ensure that I kill them?
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_04: Because that's really one of the problems that is there in terms of competency.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: So what happens is first, you as a leader must know your target, right?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: You must know how to empower your people and give them the weapons and give them the freedom.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: And if there is a mistake, it says not to worry.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: Unlike war, they could have got killed.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: In this case, they'll not get killed, right?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: So if something goes wrong, then you come back and analyze and say it's not about what went wrong, it is about why didn't why did we not achieve what we wanted to achieve?
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_02: For instance, we wanted to achieve hundred, we have achieved only 50.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, how did we achieve that 50?
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: What did we do right with these 50 people?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: So we learn.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: What happened for the rest of the guys?
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: Why did we not achieve that?
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'll find out.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: Then what is the lesson in it?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: Then then retune and go back.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: I was telling you about spectrum home computers.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_02: We thought the target values wrong and the wrong, the right kind of audience bought them, but we didn't know.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: But when we went to the consumer back, we realized that the guys who are aspirational are buying, investing in these home computers.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: The rich guys thought that they didn't need it, so they kept it in the goddess cupboard.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_02: Blood donation, I mentioned to you.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: People who want to save other people's lives want to donate blood.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: That's the right kind of people.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: So we need to see what is the key motivation behind why people do what they do.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very important issue.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_02: We are not paying enough attention to that.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_10: Elena and I are on building what it takes to create a sustainable food ecosystem.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_10: What impact does a large-scale industrial food system have on humans right now?
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: What Slow Food does is we provide an alternative.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so not all farmers have been and are able to go into that industrial food system.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: One, they don't have the land.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Two, they don't have the technology, and three, they may not have the education to do it.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: What Slow Food does is working with the small-scale farmer, family farmer, to ensure that they can sustain what they're doing.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: So they have a sustainable production food system to ensure that they are not a part of the equation that moves to a city because the farming does not provide an economic benefit.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: It also has a plus in that it provides social continuity and also cultural continuity.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, if everybody or all farmers are to move to cities, you lose your social binding, your family unit, but you also lose your culture.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: And we get standardized in that food production, which means we get standardized in both our culture and our social environments.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, Slow Food's not saying industrial food systems need to come into the context of small scale.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Slow Food's saying if you are a large-scale farmer due to circumstances that it started in the 50s and the 60s, there is a way that you can convert that you are producing more in balance with nature.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: With balance in nature is that you had take an ecological approach rather than a monocultural industrial approach where you add chemicals, you add fertilizers, you destroy your soil, you mass produce.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: And if we're looking at that food production, that large-scale globalized foods production, you can say that 20% of our global climate, global emissions, carbon emissions are actually coming from agriculture and that agricultural system.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: So we need to take a we need to take a an awareness check in regards to what impact agriculture's large-scale industrial food system impact is having on us as humans right now.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: Obesity, climate change, soil destruction, erosion, deserification, you know, all of that included, to what can we, as individuals, farmers or consumers, steps we can take to actually make an impact to be able to change that cycle.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that when we're talking about fair and that large scale, we're not talking about change tomorrow.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about what we can do individually and globally to ensure that we all take a part in that in that conversation.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, our own food health.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: If we're talking about all the food-related diseases at this moment in time, you can take all of them back to what we eat.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: Diabetes, some cancers.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's all interrelated.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_10: As we move into 2025, if we can work on improving our skills in the fine art of asking questions, it will allow us to gain new perspectives, identify opportunities, and see problems through a new lens.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_10: Here's wishing you all a happy new year and a fantastic 2025.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks for listening to this episode.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_03: For selected links and detailed show notes, visit www.contraminds.com.
• 41:05
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• 41:11
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• 41:17
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• 41:19
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• 41:22
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