Kahran and Nomaan discuss values & capitalism, public and private sectors, and higher education and scientific advacement from the perspective of society.
Open, deeply interesting conversations on how to engage with the community, how to build a different kind of society, and the questions that make life worth living.
Nomaan works with the Saint John Community Coalition: https://sjcommunity.ca/
There would be a number that we felt was the number where we could do something else. And then there was a period where we both hit that number, and it was a change in my life.
Once you know what you can command, it constrains your options, because you're thinking: if I can do this, why should I be doing something of lesser value?
My name is No Man and I do a bunch of activities called the free markets where everything is free. There's no money involved. Sometimes we have services, sometimes we have other things. But the idea with the whole thing is to bring people together in a common space and get some conversations going, build a shared understanding of things. So yeah, I'm involved in lots of projects like that. I feel also worth mentioning you are an avid climber. We just climbed Kilimanjaro together.
We did. We did. I do love the outdoors and hiking and yeah, going on little climbs and stuff. So yeah, yes. Cool. I have this really good friend who I think I've talked about to you before and on the podcast before who was part of the co-founders at Rover. At the time they started, there was a bunch of different brands at this point. Rover has really become the brand for that kind of category.
And my friend and I, we lived together for years and we over those years, right? Like we were young, I think we were in our late 20s. And so we spent a lot of time like thinking about life, like getting a little bit high, having some marijuana, right? And like thinking about life. And we had arrived at these notions of saying that there would be a number that we felt like was the number where we could do something else. And I remember we both, there were some,
you know, very clever calculations we did. We'd arrived at somewhere around like a little over $11 million. And then there was a period where we both hit that number, right? I want to say it was like maybe in the 2020 to 2023 era. So a couple of years ago now. And I feel like it was a change in my life, right? Like I was able to kind of look and say like, okay, you know, like, do I want to do things the way I have been doing them? Or is there a different? And for my friend,
I feel like it was not so much, right? Like, like, I think he has a knowledge of how much he can command. And so as he's kind of going back and forth between what options make sense for him to do next, even as he has thinking it makes sense for him to move on from the role he's been in, there's this knowledge of saying, you know, I can command this sort of value, right? Like, and now I think it kind of constrains your option because you're thinking like, hey,
if I can do this, why should I be doing something that is of lesser value? Sure. And so that was the kind of question that I was kind of curious about that I feel absolutely, I think it would be like many people would agree with you that creating optionalities only possible when you have kind of the space to think about it, right? And when you're worried about like, you know, getting food or getting shelter, like, it's hard to feel like you have options, like, it's like, what option is
going to help me get the things I really need. But I'm curious about your thoughts on like, how we are in this situation where even once those things are met, it feels like you almost are, like, you owe it to something bigger than yourself to use your talents to the fullest. And then that fullestness I feel is measured in part by how much the society rewards you. This is where I come from. So I'm just curious about your thoughts on this. Yes, you're like, you're using the word
of value a little bit in multiple ways, I feel one is just pure monetary value. Okay. And then there is the value to society, which is more of a nebulous concept, I think. So like, for example, I could be an Amazon executive and make a lot of money, maybe. I could, I don't know, do something like Rover, which also maybe makes slightly lesser money and is more risk, but I feel like it brings more value to something else. But then even in there, like, your notion of value
will depend on where on that ladder you are, I think. Yeah. For example, in my city, right, if I started a kayak business here, I know that only people over a certain income level can afford to do that. Okay. Right. So I know that I'm willing to those people. Otherwise, I just cannot run the business. And if I make it super cheap, or if I, the price range is at a level where I'm targeting everyone, I just cannot run the business. Because you're saying the costs of running that business
are ones where it's a low margin business and you would need to have a certain volume in order to make the business successful. Is that what you're saying? Okay. Yeah, I'm with you. Yes. So I'm just saying, like, if, if I'm thinking of that as value, then I also go in with the understanding that, okay, this is creating value for a certain class of people. I understand what you're saying. This is kind of a pushback. One of my business partners at Therese Monos was kind of giving me
up when I was telling them about Clydo, where they were saying that, you know, this seems great. And like, I'm excited for you as like, like consulting thing. But we were just talking about like, you know, is this the thing that we would like to do? Because both of my partners at Therese Monos are like kind of thinking about one of them was at Amazon, one of them was in a financial institution, they're both like, we need a new, a new gig. And they were just kind of talking about how the next
move they want to do is not about helping those kind of, you know, 100 million Indians or kind of, you know, 200 million Indians who are at that kind of top level in India to be able to get something, you know, like, it's great to be able to help them with 15 minute delivery or one hour delivery and be able to help them with their kind of the fashion needs that they might have in that, like be able to have this kind of service that exists. But it's not adding like for society in India, this is not
going to move the needle in any way. And what's right there, my partner at Therese Monos was saying was that this is something that she knows that as she thinks about her next move, she really wants to make sure that's that she's moving the needle on that. That's kind of what you were getting at. Is that am I hearing you right? Something like that. Yes. Okay. Because I wonder like to use your kayak example, like there's certain people, yes, who it's the price that feels
difficult, but there's other people who's like the knowledge, you know, like the notion of like kayaking, like I never made this motion and like, will I drown? What kind of things make me drown? Like there's an educational component to making something feel accessible. Yes, I agree. Do you feel like the value, the way you're defining value here is expanded when you're expanding the target, the addressable market, which maybe because of like, you're doing an
education component, maybe you are because you're being able to push on the price. But like, do you feel that if I'm understanding you right part of like value is by saying that, hey, today we looked at it as saying that this addressable market for this was only, you know, the upper echelons of society. But in the approach we're taking, we're making it more accessible to more people. Yeah, that's a way to talk about value. I would purely actually just say the more people that
have access to it, the more value you create in my mind. So if you're creating anything, whether that's kayak or housing or anything, if it's accessible to the maximum number of people, then that's more value. That's more relevant to people. Even if it's a smaller degree of value to right, like, you know, if you're adding maybe one to a thousand people, that's better than adding 110 people. That's kind of what you're saying.
I don't know if I would quantify it exactly like that. But yes, I think it's in the right. What would you, how would you clarify? Like, what would, if you were going to clarify, what would you say? If not, what I just said, I guess kayak would be a weird example. But like, if you're, if you're a run a building company, for example, and you build, I don't know, apartments or condos or something like this, and I, you could build like a hundred of them. And if you're renting them out,
and you hold on to the ownership and none of them are affordable, then that's not building value, because that's not accessible to most people. And I would say, for example, if you were using government grants, or you were using whatever foundation money or whatever money, and you were building a hundred co-ops, which are accessible to people, that would be way more value, immeasurably more value. Because again, I'm thinking in terms of number of people that
things are accessible to. And also to keep in mind that when we're talking about people, we're not just talking about individuals, when one individual does well, their family does well, their children do well, and it's kind of a generational, you know, effect of like a pylon effect of things. And the opposite is also true. Like when an individual doesn't do well, their family is in poverty, they don't know who well their kids don't do well, and so on.
Interesting. So then do you feel like the model I feel I see in India sometimes with these private public partnerships where the private company will run in for a while, right? Maybe they'll do the country, I'll think about a road, right? So maybe they will build the road, they'll run the tolling of the road for, you know, 50 years or something. And then that would refer to the government authority who had commissioned it. That would feel, that feels good. I think the devil is in the
details in those situations. And the problem with public private partnerships is usually that they are really, really mired in corruption. And it's not that the idea is bad, like in principle, it's like the idea when we say market solves everything. In principle, it's a nice idea. Even though the road got built, like let's say we're losing 20% to graft. No, but overall, you're losing a lot of taxpayer money into and you know, then when I say corruption,
what that also means is you have inflated budgets for these projects. You have delayed timelines, you have companies that are defaulting on timelines that they have given inflated amounts of money for raw materials, for contractors, things like this and the public pays for all this stuff. If you had to sum it up as a number, I don't know if you could just for my own sense, like I don't have like I ballpark, is this like a 50% you think net cost and like
the overall thing or you think we're talking like, like the net cost of right, if you summed up like, you know, bad materials, like delays, right, like, you know, fraudulent contracts, do you feel like this costs the cup like, like double the cost of what the thing would cost otherwise or like even just a rough scale 10x? I would say it would easily be double, maybe even more. Sometimes even just delays will, because they will also do things like for example,
the highway is going through a village and they've never consulted the village. So then there'll be a highway blockade, there'll be a protest, which will delay the project by two or three years, which will add on to the costs. And I would say this is the government's fault for not doing that in advance or not finding an alternative if the community doesn't want it. So I'm adding all of those costs and then there can be if there's been police violence, there will be a lawsuit and you
pay for the lawyer. So there's like secondary costs. And all of that is taxpayer money. Yeah. So between the incompetence of it, between the bad planning between the bulldozing of public opinion, between corruption, you're losing a lot of money in these partnerships. And again, like I said, in principle, in the spirit of red sure, it's a nice idea. But in practice, it almost never is. Because there's not appropriate constraints on behavior that might exist if people were more
directly accountable. And there's accountability gets hidden in this. Right? Yes. Yes. I mean, in a situation where the line between the capitalist and the politician is extremely thin, it's really hard to have that accountability. Another actually really good example of this is colleges in India. Okay. And there's been, I don't know, in the last two decades, I would say, or three decades, there's been like a blossoming of engineering colleges and private schools. And public
universities and schools have been drastically defunded in the name of like not being efficient, etc, etc. But it's a loop, you don't fund them enough, and there's not well paid teachers or teachers run off to private schools, and then you say they're not efficient, so you do fund them further. Anyway, but if you look in the ownership structure, a lot of the private colleges, private schools are actually relatives of politicians or politicians who are running these things.
Hmm. So it's in their interest to kind of say that private education is great, not to regulate tuition, defund public education, some more and more people are funneled into private education, things like this. And again, you might say, Oh, what's wrong with a person wanting to run a school? Nothing wrong on paper. But the nexus of decision makers being the same people who are running the school is problematic. No, that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if a little
bit we're running, we're living through this moment where we have these public goods, right? Like we have these things that exist in the comments that we're not valuing as much, right? Like there was a moment where we were really right, we knew that public education was a thing that we valued as a society and we like got it built into society. And now I feel that there's, we're not looking at it as being as valuable. But I wonder if that will swing once it starts to
feel like it's not like these things that were guaranteed, do you fight for them when they feel like they're going to be taken away versus when it feels like things are great, then people don't really pay attention to it. Like I wonder, so like the school boards in the US are this interesting thing where for a long time, no one came about cared about the school boards at all. And then they started to become controversial because the school board started to push these agendas around
like what kind of books should be taught, what kind of books should not be allowed. And now suddenly people are interested in school boards again, right? Like I see people in my social media feeds who are like running for these kind of like not major political jobs, almost like nonsense political jobs, right? Which is not true because they do matter, but they're the kinds which you would do as a second role, which also is very common in the US, which I didn't know and I don't
think is common in other countries as much where it's like, like certain jobs don't pay enough, they, certain political jobs don't pay enough. Like if you're the water and sewer commissioner, like you're going to have to have another job or you're independently wealthy. Oh, yes, right. You know, and then that's just like an interesting situation because if you need to make more money as the water and sewer commissioner, an obvious route to make
money in the water and sewer commissioner is the people who want approvals from the water and sewer commissioner, you know, so it's just an interesting choice to me that we like existed that. But coming back to the point I was getting at, do you feel like that is kind of true also? Or do you feel like I feel in the US, I grew up in a little bit of like a lot of these things were one three generations ago, right? And I feel like in India, almost nothing was one,
three or four generations ago because independence was three generations ago, you know, so like everything, I don't know if that's a fair statement, but if you like everything was established and being taken away in like a relatively short period. Yeah, I mean, I think India is like a slower version of the US in these changes. Okay. Meaning like these things happened in the US first, and then they came to India,
and they're still coming to India in a way like expensive education, for example, was a thing in the US before it was a thing in India. Like I went through free education and I'm not even that old and that was recently. So, but like of our friends, do you think most of them went through free education? Some of them, yeah. Interesting. Like Mansi did, not in law school, but yeah, in school. And she didn't go to like she went to a government school. That's what it means to be free.
Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Like when I was in school, the fee was 45 rupees per year. Can you imagine something like that? 45 rupees? Wow. It's wild to think about now. And like how much would your books have been at that point? Just for like a sake of comparison? Like under 100? Okay. But more like the books you were spending for that year were more than your tuition or like enrollment cost. Yes. It was kind of the point I was getting at. Interesting. Yes. But the books, the thing about
the books was because there used to be, I don't know if this is still the case, they used to be regulated by the NCRT. So random publishers couldn't just decide the price of books. It was regulated at the central government level. So, and it was deliberately kept cheap because of that. And they, I think they even had like a central publishing system where they would just mass publish those books and which is also why it was cheap. Yeah. Also means there's like very little
incentive for anyone to try and make a new book. Sure. Yes. So there's definitely in more inertia and that kind of stuff, which I will, I'm not idolizing that in any way. It has its own problems. I guess I'm just talking about accessibility, the level of accessibility. So yeah, anyway, this changes that you're talking about. I do think there's like this kind of happens in cycles, and some places it happens quicker than other places. And US of course tends to be the front
runner with these things because US is such a powerhouse in everything. And especially when it comes to the economy, American ideas get transplanted everywhere else just because they are part of the World Bank, they're part of the International Monetary Fund, they're part of the NATO Alliance. So wherever they go, their financial policies go with them. So I think like in India, you can kind of trace it back to the early 90s, where all these policies of deregulation, private
partnerships, private stuff in education and healthcare, they started coming in the early 90s. And in the US, in the 80s or the late 70s with Nixon and Reagan, so I feel like it's just follow-up from all that, like the fallout to the rest of the world from what the US started doing. So yeah, I mean, you could say we devalue public stuff or the commons, but I think it comes through policy. Interesting. And it gets pushed in different ways. It's not like everything happens at once,
right? It gets pushed and slowly gets normalized. Things which would have been ridiculous, I don't know, 20 years ago suddenly feel like, oh, this is how it is. Interesting. What are your thoughts about, I was just trying to figure out who is the guy who talks about the tragedy of the commons? William Lloyd, I guess, 1833. I don't think I've read that book, but I know of it. Yeah. I mean, basically that, you know, people are self-interested and deplete public resources. Do you feel,
yeah, go ahead. I wouldn't agree with that statement. Okay. I think actually humans are very capable of cooperating with each other and maintaining public resources, as people have done for centuries. We didn't have a depletion of resources and climate change until in the last, until the last 200 years, basically. Well, do we have the capacity? What do you mean capacity? Like, I think our ability to consume energy now at an individual level is much higher than it was
at any point in history. But I wouldn't, I guess I wouldn't center it on the individual. That's fair. I think most energies consumed actually by corporations and the military industrial complex. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes. So we have bigger military complexes than we've ever had. That statement would be true. Correct. But I wouldn't say as communities, our ability to manage resources was bad. I think we were pretty good with doing that. In fact, we were very sustainable with
doing that. And again, this is not to idolize everything in old societies, but I'm just saying, I think they were very cognizant of what they had, and they knew how to use it sustainably, as opposed to now, which I think we kind of run away with. Interesting. As in, if you thought about each society as being a closed loop, there was more cognizance of what was available in that loop. And now we don't really think of society like
individual, you know, I don't think of New York as being a closed loop, right? Like we have all these ties to other societies. And therefore, my need to be cognizant of the inputs and outputs, my micro-society level is less, right? Like I can ship my trash away from someone else, and I can import energy from Vermont, you know? That's kind of what you're getting at. Yes. But I also want to center it away from the individual and focus on the systemic
stuff that goes on behind the scenes, right? You're sending your crash off to, I don't know, Indonesia, because there is a system around you that allows you to do that. If you were responsible for your own trash, you would be way more mindful of it, you know what I mean? So, I think there's like the network of things we rely on, which we take for granted, and those network of things hide the true cost of our consumption from us.
Okay. Like if you had to murder a chicken and raise a chicken every time you ate a chicken, you would be way more careful with your chicken consumption. But now you just go to supermarket, you buy the chicken breast and you roast it, and you don't think about where the meat comes from, you know what I mean? Because there's that system that exists. Yeah. I mean, but that is what underpins in so many ways as being able to kind of reach for
the bigger kind of advancements that we have been able to reach for, right? Like the reason why my husband, like Gaurav, is able to spend all day doing research is because he doesn't have to go out and kill a chicken, you know? And because there are so many people like him being able to kind of like do this research, we have seen the advancements that we have seen in terms of, you know, propulsion and efficiency and like, you know, even building construction. Like we're able to do more with
less and therefore one would argue be able to support the population that we seem to be trying to have on this planet as a as a CCCs. We are able to support that with like much less landmass than we once thought. Like it now seems much more likely that we're going to be relatively concentrated in these like urban centers with some amount of people on these other places. But like the notions that we were going to like someday overpopulate the planet no longer seem
to just be likely because we don't need seem to need this space to grow crops or to house our people that we once did. There's so many threats to pull on in that in that description. Just thinking where I should start. Well, I think to begin with, like there's a, I think the threat of overpopulation was not a real threat in any meaningful way. Okay. Just like I think nature just has its way of like when a species gets overpopulated, it dies out due to different things,
maybe due to disease, maybe due to predators, maybe due to killing each other, you know, whatever, maybe due to lack of resources. So I don't think like in the natural sense, we would have run into that problem. There was definitely a problem food, I guess, but even that problem came in after we got into civilized, like humans have been around for 80, 90,000 years. Correct. And what we're talking about here is like 3000 years or 4000 years. So humans lived in smaller communities for way longer.
And you know, some of them died out for sure. I'm not saying nobody died out, but these communities existed in their natural environment for very long time, just like other species exist. I don't even want to say just human. Anyway, so all that to say, so like, I think there's a conversation to be had when we talk about like advancements and the ability to do higher order things. There is a conversation to be had about what is the cost of those things. And I do think we pay a very high
cost of those things. And I also don't think the lens of like research or science can be talked about without talking about things like colonialism. Okay, they're extremely tied into like, for example, the reason the British Empire kind of focused its energy into navigation and building navigational tools was very much tied to colonialism. There was a lot of interest in, for example, building a clock that could keep time on the sea, because they wanted to go to other places. And it was it
cannot be separated. Like talking about science as if this is an abstract thing that we just think about for our intellectual curiosity, I think is very misleading. I think there's a reason we do things like a lot of, for example, money that gets funneled into tech stuff is either funded from the Department of Defense, which is now the Department of War, I guess, a lot of that stuff, a lot of stuff that gets developed at universities initially is eventually channeled into these kinds of
technologies. So I don't think like talking about science as this abstract thing is, is fair at all. That like the questions of what research should be or what advancement should be are questions that we need to answer as communities as people. And the way it has happened is somebody else decides what is the interesting topic to research on. And then what are the consequences of that is an afterthought, right? Like with all the technology that went into extracting fossil fuels, what's
going to happen with that was an afterthought. And you can give many examples of that. And I think that was because there was someone else deciding and not the community deciding what needs to happen. Well, you know, there's that very famous quote of Ford, it's Ford, right? Who like if I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. I think that's Ford being Ford. Well, I think people would have said faster cranes, actually.
Okay, fair, right. But the notion being that like, and I would say I even I found this in my work, right? Like that people's ability, especially people who are deep into the thing, their ability to kind of imagine a paradigm shift of like, I've been solving this in a certain way. And it could be done in a different way. Thank you so much, right? So in 2012, I had this German client, and it was the dawn of parallax. And I don't know if you remember parallax as like a web
technology, but basically it meant like when one thing was happening, you could have other things happenings. In our moment, when we were scrolling down, these like different bubbles would come in from the side. And I don't know if you remember, there was a moment in like about 10, 15 years ago, this was all the rage, you know, it was like, Oh, you're scrolling down, but like this little thing will come in this way. And like, right. And then as you scroll down more, it'll like,
you know, extend and like this little present will open or something, right? But this notion that you'd have these cute little animations that would happen as you went down on the page. Now, for me, my ability to kind of like look at that in a certain context, then imagine how it would happen in a different context is relatively high. Because this is the work I do, right? It's thinking about like, how do you apply these different ideas or technologies in different spaces?
But for our clients, it was just like, Oh, this is what a web page is. And a web page is like, you know, a vertical scroll of information. And maybe, you know, we can section it or hide toggle it in and out different ways. But the notion that you would be able to do something that felt fundamentally different, which was to like, to have like this feeling of funness that hadn't existed before was really not there. And if I'd asked them or told them like, Hey,
would I like to, I'd love to make this feel a little bit more fun, like in the existing paradigms that would have meant like colors or sauce or sizes, or maybe, you know, like a cute image. But the notion of like animation being able to be added in this way was just not something that they would have thought about. And not like they were deep into the work that was being done. So their ability to kind of look and see like, Hey, maybe these things happening in different
sector or different place are applicable for me was low. So I don't know, right? Like from that point of view, I do think, right, like when you're deep into a role, the skill set required to be able to take a step out of that and see, could I could this be done? It's a different skill set. And I think it's something that I'm good at. I feel like it's something that you are good at from my sense of you. But I don't think it's something that everyone is good at.
But I don't see how that contradicts what I said. I don't think everyone has to be good at everything. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that it doesn't feel crazy to me. The notion that like excess profits at a society level, which I feel like is what we're talking about is like saying, Hey, you know, we built these efficiencies. And if you go all the way back, we built the efficiencies in how we're being able to harvest food. So now 90% of our society does not
need to be involved in food. Okay, so now we have these efficiencies or like excess value profit, if you will, right, that's been created at all these different stages, right, from the actual growing of the food to the manufacturer to the processing, right, we've created all these things. So now it's like, now that society has become more efficient, and we can afford to have people doing other things, who should decide what those things are. And what I'm saying is that while
I agree at like a, like a moral or kind of like social level that it feels like, yes, the like the society should decide as its own. I also think it's a specialized skill set to try and think, like before we're thinking, and I feel that my sense, and maybe I've just become, you know, more jaded and disheartened about democracy as I'm getting older. But my sense is that I don't have the kind of confidence I once had that like, people as a whole will look forward enough and not
kind of just look at like, where are, you know, how do we build a faster, faster train, if you will, versus thinking that there's maybe a new automotive paradigm, like possibility. I think there's like a couple of things. One is like this notion of efficiency. I mean, I do think anyone who's an expert, like you said, if you're an expert in a domain, you do see those things that other people might not see. But I think expertise should not be conflated with
authority. And I think like if Ford was, Ford was not, you know, an engineer, but like if his engineer came to him and was like, I just, I made this amazing machine that's going to speed up the vehicle we have. Great. And let's put that out there. But that's, that doesn't give that person the authority to now impose this on everyone else. Okay. That's an expertise. Yeah. And I think what tends to happen, like Ford is a good example, because in that case, what did happen
is the Ford company was responsible for the dismantling of the public transit system in many places in the US and in Canada. And that is where they exercised or they colluded with state power to do that in order to make a profit in order to make money for what they were building. It's not that what they were building was bad. Cars would have come into the market in some form anyway, over time, but maybe they wouldn't have made as much money for Ford as they did.
I see. Or to give you maybe a different but very similar example, the, you know, the streets didn't used to be for vehicles. I'm sure you know this, right? Yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah, right. And then we banned people from the streets effectively so that cars could run unimpeded because people were getting hit by the cars, right? So it was in the name of safety that we said now the cars must be only for people, the roads must only be for cars. I see. So that's
kind of what you're saying. A few decades later, we have the suburban hellscape that is North America. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, or like, you know, my friends and I, I love this story, but my dear friend Kelly, we were going to a concert. I think we went to a baseball game, but there was like, we were all very young, right? So we're all like 15, 16, which I think mattered. And so Kelly walked across the street and all of us followed her and all six of us or something, we all got a
ticket for jaywalking. And it's like the cops normally would never bother giving tickets. But in Seattle, you get tickets for jaywalking. And then also, right, they feel like impressionable kids, if we give them a ticket now, they will never jaywalking. And it's true. I think about it, right? Like now when I cross the road, I do sometimes think about it. I'm like, oh, it's red. It's absurd because like, there's no cars coming. What are you waiting for? Like we can use our eyes.
So I guess this is like another argument about what you were saying earlier. So you might say that, okay, people want more cars, or you might say people don't know what they want. But I think there's these subtle policy level decisions that push people in certain directions. So you build everything, for example, to encourage cars and to discourage biking or walking. And of course, everybody's going to want cars because you've made it impossible for people to like, I live in a city
where public transit is terrible. And I hate cars, right? I don't want to drive a car. I don't want to be in a car, but I have to just because the city is fucked up. And yeah, so that's what I mean. Like if when you say people kind of people get incentivized because of these policy decisions, which are again, informed by someone who wants to make money off those policy decisions, even though that's terrible for most people, a good public transit system would have been incredible, and
probably way more advanced by now if it had been allowed to exist at the time. But now we're in a position where we're fighting politicians over, I don't have a bus for this route or that route. That's the level we're fighting it. No, which is sad. Whereas you feel like it would be better if like the master plan for the city reflected that there's we need to have transportation can be solved in many ways and cars are just one of them. And instead of that master plan having this,
it's like on an individual level, we're having to try and make the case that like this road needs a bus. Is that I'm getting you right? Yes. And I'm not even saying cars are one of them. I'm just saying there's this already inbuilt incredible imbalance in power, where a car company has way more lobbying power in decision making than as an individual who's a pedestrian or a bicyclist. Interesting. In a different way, though, hasn't this become the inertia we were describing earlier
in the conversation? It's this inertia with different stakeholders. I mean, I guess you could think of it as inertia, but I think of it as policy only because this is a well-established thing that cars and trains in the long run are better for people are more economical for cities and countries and just a better way even socially for people to meet each other and be in community. Just to clarify what you meant buses and trains, but yeah, I got you. Yes, buses, trains, pedestrian
roads, more people are more foot traffic, things like this, which is why everybody loves Europe and everybody wants to go to vacation in Europe. And we talk about streets where that are walkable and these little markets and patio cafes and things like this. So this is like a this not in a controversial take is all I'm saying. So, you know, when you come to a city like this and someone says car, we need a car to go around, the policy can solve that problem very easily.
Instead of getting tied up into debates of different stakeholders and this and that. Other cities have done this. This is not like a new idea that I just discovered. Yeah. Yeah. No, I hear you on that. But what I'm saying is like, I think the same way we were talking about how in a in a society that is trying to figure out what sort of like, what's to stay with transportation, but let's sort of transportation make sense in the future.
And let's say this is a society that, you know, maybe let's imagine like, you know, rural village and like kind of like muddy upper this right. So now it's like maybe a society where some people have like scooters, there's maybe a couple of people with cars, the roads are probably not paved, right? There's a lot of like freedom happening on the streets in the right people play in the village, like it's not entirely just for transportation. And now they're trying to imagine
what kind of, you know, the world of the future looks like. And I feel like we kind of agreed that there would be some about of inertia around like, you know, people are comfortable with where things are. And so they're willing just to kind of contemplate, especially ones that might feel like a step change. Like, you know, maybe let's say that there's a potential for like, like automotive, sorry, like self driving, like rickshaws or something, right? That like, you know, they're
super slow, but you know, you could put your child in it and know they're going to get to work or something, whatever, right? But the ability to kind of contemplate something like that feels like far away because we really understand this world that we're in. I'm just wondering, like, is there a parallel to the world that we exist in in so many kind of like moderate or whatever, I'll say Western societies, right? Where it's like, they cars, like it's an inertia around a different moment.
And sure, a big component of that inertia is the lobbying that like car manufacturers have done. But that's taking the place of something else, like there was something else that delivered that inertia. And more this is a commentary on how society gets into these vested interests, have this state that they want to hold things where they are versus it kind of being a commentary on saying how inherently like the system of lobbying is bad, because there was there was a different
lobby before it was maybe just unorganized. I think it's a question of how much the power differential is. And I think there has been a lot of concentration of wealth in the last, let's say 50 years, a lot more than before. And this is like, you know, income inequality has gone up dramatically. Is it more than before though, if you remember, like the princes era, right? Like, you know, when they were Maharaja, they were definitely much more concentrated
in wealth than like, I'm not even going there because that we were not pretending to be democracies back then. I see. It was understood that guy is in charge and he's going to decide anyway. We were not saying we're going to listen to everyone. Right. So that was a different situation. Okay. Now we because we pretend to be democracies and we play, we do this dance of like, we're listening to everyone and we're taking everybody's opinions. But in practice, the way it works is
there's fewer and fewer, there's a lot of merging that happens. So there's, for example, in Canada, there's like two or three companies that run all the telephone and internet networks. There's Bell, there's Rogers, and there's one more I forget the name. And these companies don't let anyone else come into the market. And because of that, there's extreme concentration of lobbying, right? Any policy that gets made about these kinds of stuff will go through Bell and Rogers.
Same for grocery stores, same for other, I guess, you know, industries, broad industries. So when that happens, it's just not a fair, the table is extremely skewed in one direction. And it's very hard to, if you're on the other side, if you're not on the heavy Bobby side, it's really hard to get your opinion across, which is why like, you know, something new project gets proposed, for example, and there's hundreds of people in the street protesting the project, and the project
still gets approved. That tells you there's five, literally five people in the room, their opinion counts more than 5,000 people on the street. And this happens all the time. Projects get approved like this all the time. I was reading about this tunnel that's going to be built in Salzburg, because this guy has like this extremely wealthy man has bought a house on top of a hill. And so in order for him to like reach his underground parking garage, or something, they're going to
build a tunnel into the hill, which like, ostensibly will be for the public, but it will only go to one place, which is his parking garage. And like all these people are like, this is going to undermine like, you know, the integrity of the hill and like, you know, other people live on this hill, like it's going to have impact to their homes. And it's looking like the project, it's still going to be approved. Right. It just everyone's grumbling about like, what has he done to pay the, you know,
Austria, civil civil council or whatever. Yeah, I see. I see. This is why I know what you're saying. I mean, again, it's I think it's one of those like ideas like the public-private partnership, which is great on paper. Yes, everybody should get their opinions across to the decision makers. But in practice, the only opinions that count are the opinions that have the power and the capital to count. switching gears a little bit to this question I had a few minutes ago.
But as someone who like, like your kind of education system was very much like my sense is like, like it's the excess profits that are generated by society that allow for hard science research to happen. And do you feel like like it is a benefit now as you look at it, like do you feel like it's a benefit to do the kind of research you did? And what was it that and now is it part of like the way you're now thinking about society that has led you to pursue a different kind of
vocation? And maybe as you answer, give like a two second recap of what your PhD is in, just for our listeners who have no idea. Yeah, I guess there's different things in that too. Okay, my PhD, my education was in physics and theoretical physics, which is very math heavy. And my PhD was in this area called quantum gravity, which mostly studies things around black holes or early universe situations. So, you know, abstract kind of math,
the physics stuff with a little bit of programming, I guess. And so that's my background. Now your question was around like the ability to do this kind of research, right? Like in retrospect, I think there was this admiration that was given to intellectual achievement. Okay. My dad was like a English teacher. So there was always this admiration of the intellectual man who reads a lot of literature is very, very wise and knows about the knows about all this stuff.
And I feel like all through my childhood and teenage years, I learned to run after that. So I think that led me to just pick the toughest thing I could think of, you know what I mean, which was just not to say the stuff was not interesting. But more, I think I was just motivated to run after that kind of intellectual achievement. Because it felt hard. Yeah, it felt challenging. And it earned the admiration of people around me.
I understand. Right. And I think it is kind of a masculine thing, I think, because as a masculine, I mean, my father is like the most masculine person you'll meet, right? The provider, the intellectually smart, the stoic, the not not concerned about the petty details of the world and things like this. Anyway, so I think that was kind of my mental picture at the time. And I chased that for a long time, which is why I did it. And I now looking back, I think if I was
21 again, I wouldn't do it again. Yeah. So and I think a lot of kind of hard. It means the PhD altogether, or you would have done something else. I would have done something else. Like you would have chased the intellectual high of it, I think the way I did. Because it felt too not practical. Is that what you're saying? It's nothing to do with the practicality of it. In fact, the intellectual high comes from doing
this kind of abstract stuff. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So the intellectual high came at the expense of it being practical. I suppose. Yes. You could say that. Yeah. So if you had done an area, if we looked at, you know, my husband, who is one of your good friends, his work now can be very applicable to, like he's doing some really specific thing, like looking at like tires and looking at how can we reformulate some of the additives and tires so they don't
break down as quickly with heavier vehicles, like thanks to electric cars. Right? And that's like a very specific application, real world application of the type of things he learned in his PhD. Does that feel less intellectual? Like would that feel less this thing you're talking about? I guess I, yes, on a surface level, yes. But I think I think about signs and STEM subjects more broadly these days, in terms of how they tend to be disconnected from communities. And
I like, because now I teach, right? I teach math students and physics students. And I know universities are these places where there's this silo created where science and STEM stuff is taught in like isolation from anything else. Right? So you're training the expert to do the domain specific thing. And everybody likes to behave as if we exist in a vacuum and none of this stuff is tied to anything else. And I don't like that. I don't think it's true. And I don't think
science students should be taught in that way. And that way meaning in isolation, like in isolation. If these concepts were taught in a more like, like tangible way, that would be cool. Or more for example, for example, taking your husband's example, say you live in New York City, and there was a need in your community of developing a kind of rubber, which solved a certain problem. Okay, then your husband's work made a lot of sense. And people would be jumping
around to see what he's doing. Yeah, right. As opposed to you're working in a lab that's run by a company that's kind of chasing its own profits and trying to create something for the US military. Right? I'm not saying your husband is doing that. I'm just extrapolating. Right? So I think a lot of STEM stuff exists in that kind of vacuum, right? Like when you go to a STEM, let's say you're doing computer science degree, your dream job is to get a job with Google. Yeah. And you have no sense of
like what the what the so your thought to solve a technical problem, right? You have no sense where that fits into the bigger picture, what Google does, or what Google's economics is, what Google's social policies are, how Google treats other people, all that kind of stuff. There's a whole world of social structure that exists around Google, and it's decision making. So you are very deliberately taught not to think about all that. You see your technical problem, you solve it, you take a fat
paycheck and you go home. That's the logic. And I think that's a terrible way of like training people. I see. It gives you like a bunch of people who are domain experts, but who have no clue about the world. I see. They've been taught to not look for the problems in society and to apply their skills, but instead that someone will give you a problem that you should be researching. And then do or like look at it in this extremely parochial way, where you're solving this technical problem.
Like, AI actually is a good example, right? So people who work on AI will be taught to solve lots of pattern recognition optimization type problems. And they're very good at it. These are mathematicians, these are computer scientists, physicists, lots of those types of people, they're very good at it. But then they have no connection with how open AI, for example, is pushing AI or how another AI company like maybe a weapons company is using that on Palestinians, for example,
right? And it is absurd to me that the person who is building that tech has no connection with those decisions. And it's taught to think about it in this vacuum where you're like, you just solve this technical problem and let us deal with what we do with it. Well, yeah, though, like, even if we took like the university or teaching at level, right, like you're the technical problem in this case, is you are teaching, right? But then like the profits from your teaching are supporting the
university, but you're not directing the direction of the university, right? So like, I'm wondering, is that true at every level in every sector? It is true in every sector. And I'm saying it is very deliberate. I would like to have more of a say in the in the direction of the university, but I don't. Because even the university, there's usually a board of governors who are mostly industry people, bankers, city officials, people like that. They are very rarely actual academics.
So there's this whole class of like a managerial kind of finance level people whose job is to make sure that the investments of the university are taken care of. Yeah, I hear you on that. I just, I'm when I was thinking about is so yeah, I'm part of the campus steering committee for the university I'm doing my NFA at. And so we, we met yesterday, we meet like every not that often, every six weeks, I would say six to eight weeks. And there were five of us, maybe six of the 12,
right? And it's supposed to be like three students, or maybe it's four students, like four faculty, four staff and like, and I think all of the students at this point have dropped out completely, except for me, right? And I think some of the staff have dropped right? And it's just getting people to kind of show up to these bigger questions is very hard. Right? Like, it's not the priority, right? The priority is the things that individually impact me. And I'm wondering, how do you build
that collective feeling, right? Like, I feel I feel have it. And I think you have it from the conversations we have had where you're like, yes, you know, these are the things in the society I live in. And for this society persist, or these institutions I care about to be to be what I feel is better or more or just, you know, add more value to the people that they serve, like it requires investment and time and thinking, right? Like from me and from the people like,
but I don't feel like I neither do I feel like that is very common, nor do I feel I've been successfully able to engineer that or catalyze it in anyone other than people who already have it. I don't know if that's your experience also, it is, but I will also again, disconnected from like individuals and talk about something structural. Okay. And I think structurally, we are very used to being disempowered. Yeah. Right. We don't have agency in a lot of things.
And that starts like at home, at school, at university, we're always start be the good boy and do this or do that. And the only way you achieve success is by putting your head down and kind of just going with the flow. So I think we don't really always know how to use our agency. And we don't feel empowered to use our agency. And the structures we operate in, whether that's university or school and whatever that is community, you are always in a position where you don't
feel like you can do anything. Right? So this kind of like, I don't know about your specific university, but there's committees like this in my university. And what they are is mostly performative. They don't actually have power. They might meet, they might write a report, they might make recommendations, and the board will put it aside. And it's mostly a box checking exercise of, oh, yes, we have this committee for inclusion. We have this committee for racism.
We have this committee for climate change, you know, whatever, there's a committee for everything. And the committee is always one queer person, one woman, one African person and stuff like this. And it's almost always a box checking exercise. And personally, I'm not interested in being in these committees. I never go to these committee meetings, because I know what's going to happen. They're going to talk about a bunch of polite stuff. And maybe sometimes somebody will say
something more radical, but it doesn't matter, because even if you do the committee doesn't actually have any power. Right? And I think that's the experience of most people, which is why you see a lot of apathy. I think that's where that comes from, because people know, okay, what's the point? I better just go home and watch Netflix instead. You know, I think that's the experience of a lot of people, which is not to excuse that behavior. I'm just saying, structurally, there's
very little power that's given to people, ordinary people. That's interesting. You're making me think about something I hadn't thought about for a long time. But when I was in middle school and high school, my sister was the first year of that school, and she's three grades older than me. So by the time we were there, I think we were one of the first, because they added a grade every year, so they started with just seventh and eighth. And
then, you know, as the kids got older, they started offering nine, 10, right? So we were one of the first school students that went through all 12, all six grades from seven to 12. And because of that, a lot of the things that we tried to do had not been done. And so we built a lot of the things. Like my friend, Jessica, she really wanted us to have a school camp. So like three or four of us, we planned a school camp, and then there was a school camp. And I wanted to
have like, we had this like peace pool that got gifted to us. So we had this whole like peace pool initiation ceremony. We like released doves and like had like made like a waterfall with like a prism. It was, I mean, a rainbow with a prism. It was cute. Right? And like, but there were all these moments where like, we had these ideas and some of them were crazy. Like we did a lock in where we like kept the students overnight in the school and like played games all night.
Like, right. And these were things, but we saw them over and over again, where we had these ideas. And then we like worked with our friends or we worked with like the administration, and we saw them through. And now it just, it made me think about a little bit that, that I think now my willingness to kind of do these things, I wonder how much it's influenced by that kind of early experience was I think that's not typical, right? A lot of people had much more, you know, like,
yeah, like I want to change this one thing in my neighborhood and instead, like everyone's like, huh, good job, child, you've written a petition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this petition is the problem, right? Like this, this is what I mean. We are always taught to like, defer to authority. You want to do something, talk to the higher ups, you want to change something, talk to the politician, do something in the university, talk to the vice president of so and so. So, like,
a lot of that kind of the agency is taken away. Yeah. And kids are great for that because kids have a lot of agency and kids kind of try to do that. And depending on like your experience seems really nice. But typically that agency is kind of beaten out of you. Yeah, figuratively, sometimes literally. So maybe to bring us full circle, though, that this to me would bring you to believing in a more individual approach to life. It's just interesting that you personally have
not kind of concluded from this and saying that like, Oh, these communal structures, these kind of like ways that we bring together have these inherent flaws. It's better for me almost to carve out like a separate existence where maybe I start off as an individual contributor and then, you know, attract other like minded people, but we're building almost an alternative that doesn't, I guess actually now I'm saying all this, I suppose in some ways this is what you're doing.
Yes. Yeah, you're describing it well. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I'm happy to chat about my projects, if anyone is interested in that. And the whole point is to enable people to do these things in their own communities. Yeah. Right. So if you want like Skillshare stuff, you want advice on how to start up something, I'm happy to chat about any of it. Maybe you need some help in building and growing your personal brand. This is a thing that Joya does. I want to do that is the question.
Well, you know, I think we have one client who is a dancer who we're helping her do it, part because she wants the world. Yeah, because she wants the world to understand Kathak and understand Kathak not just as like, you know, this beautiful thing, but as like a deeply rigorous and spiritual in some ways, you know, dance and art form. And so I feel it's, you're right, like you, I think would love to see a certain kind of world be more existent. And one
of those ways is by, by having a thing that people can check out and understand. So a brand around that angle is more what I meant. I suppose like, I guess when we go around, so when we go to Halifax or Montreal or stuff like this, we do workshops and talk to people and help people set up things and learn from them how they set up things. So locally, I feel like it happens pretty well. And I don't know if on the internet, I'm also not much of an internet person. So I don't
know, it's just not very appealing to me, I guess. I mean, this is a whole separate conversation we could have and really with it. Yeah, but, but brands like, you know, they predate the internet and like the value of a brand is, I think more around communicating what it is that you stand for and helping you find like-minded people than it being entirely just around like, I don't know, being shiny and memorable. I am, I tend to be very shy about putting myself at the center of things.
I like to talk about ideas, but not necessarily like, this is my idea. You know what I mean? What about the coalition? I mean, it could be around like- I'm ready to talk about the coalition. No, I'm saying what about the brand being around the coalition, you know, and maybe you're like, just, you're just a part of that, but it's more like- Also, I mean, locally, the coalition is pretty well known. Like if you asked anybody here about
the coalition, they would know about it. But not online as much or like- Not online, I guess, because I suppose we don't really have a presence in other places necessarily. Like local, like Halifax people would, some people would know or Predictant people would know, but not in Seattle, you know? Yeah, I don't know. It just reminds me, and I know we were trying to wrap up, but it just reminds me a little bit about like, Pretham for years operated just in
India. And then in the last like four years, they have started to really go to other countries and been like, we've deeply understood things about education. Like, you know, when their core concepts is teaching at the right level. And so if you teach people at the level they're at, instead of just saying like, oh, you're 10 years old, you should be in third standard, like your ability to drive improvement in their learning is so much higher. And so they've been taking that to countries,
I believe, in East Africa, if I'm not mistaken, and just the uptake has been crazy. Like some governments have been like, oh my God, we've been looking for a program like this. And it's just been so interesting how like they've been fighting tooth and nail for some gains in India that like people are so ecstatic about like helping them achieve in other countries, they should never consider that like their learnings were something that could be shopping to the rest of the world
or just even making accessible to the rest of the world, keep shopping aside, you know. So from that point of view, I was thinking. That kind of is also way like it's huge. Now, but there was a point, you know, 30 years ago that it was not. It only becomes from years of work and years of slow growth.
I guess. Well, there's, I mean, this is going to be another topic for some other day. But I'm also a firm believer in decentralized way of doing things. So I will never imagine like the coalition being this huge body that has like branches in different cities or anything like that. I just don't imagine that what I do want to see is cities having their own coalitions and doing their own things that are locally relevant to them. Like we are doing things that are locally
relevant to this city might not be relevant to another city at all. I'd be curious of how you would think about that, but we should talk about it at some point. Because it's like what a little, the big thing, one of the big things of the model is that you find these groups, it's usually women in a community and they are creating a lot of the learning artifacts. They're creating a lot of like what curriculum makes sense. The thing that
is very centralized is the data, right? So what data do we collect? And then how do we track that data? And the notion was is that like the ability for building data collection and data analysis as a skill made sense across, whereas the need to like have the teaching at the level that, you know, of the community was much higher. But you didn't necessarily need to have these like data experts at the level of every community. But the data was such a key part of telling the
story and being able to, you know, that's how Pratham has had partnerships with J-PAL and like, and these organizations where people are like, Oh yeah, you can do interventions. It basically, it's like how to, you know, delivering value, but also playing in the world that we exist in. Yeah, I suppose. I guess I honestly, I don't know much about them. But from the way you're describing it, it also seems to me that the data and doing these stories
and reports is important because they work with so many players, like across different places. Yeah. Like if I think about our work, we do like keep track of certain things, but we're not very keen on like collecting data in that way. And that's partly because the organizations we work with are all local. And they kind of, I mean, I literally know those people personally. And so I don't feel the need to like tell them, Oh, this is what we're doing. And this is the data or anything
like that. We just talk and people know they show up at our events, we go to their events and stuff Yeah, no, it's, it's that question of like, you know, if you want to get funding from blank organization, and they want to know like, you know, have you done a double blind like intervention? Like then you, yeah, that's when you start to be able to meet the data and be like, yes, we had this village in Punjab, and we had this other village and MP, and you know, we did
this intervention in both places. And here's the way it differs. But yeah, I think, I think that's a, it's a, it's a scale question that starts to come when you're trying to get funding, frankly, I think it's a big thing about funding. Yeah. Anyway, I feel like there's so many things we could branch off into right now, even we can always do a part two. Yeah, it can do a middle one for the middle of season eight. And then part three for the end of season eight. So
no, this is very fun.