What values are you willing to pay for? Does it change for your personal life, versus your work persona? When does ethical stop feeling ethical? This week, Divya and Kahran explore these questions in the context of today’s society, today's technology and the nature of late capitalism.

Kahran shares some of the lessons and thinking that guide his attitudes towards investing, saving and other types of finance in this wide reaching episode that looks at how to leverage your skills and assets to create more freedom. But we begin with a little look back -- how thankful we are to have made it season 2, and how much we've already grown over the last 10 episodes!

Where can we apply GenAI to our work to accelerate progress? We talk about this in conjunction with drugs! and marketing tools! and more! and also touch on the incredible progress in AI of the past few weeks. For our previous thinking on AI, check out ep 8, last season.

As free-thinkers and believers in agency, we were very surprised to realize in this conversation that we believe obedience has its place -- and can be required to create big, complex things that take belief, when sometime's logic and data would tell us something else. Join Kahran and Divya to explore where to use discipline, where to use obedience, and how compliance comes into this mix in this week's episode, one of our favorites.

We always applaud courage but not always daring? Daring is for rogues and courage is for knights, whether they choose to be good or evil. Do we always want to foster courage, but not always daring? Divya and Kahran explore this topic, and share stories, tidbits and a sprinkle of joy of life in-between.

How leveraged are you, and how afraid are you of looking at your assets in your life as being leverage-able? In this episode we think on the word leverage, both from a personal finance side and a social side. How can you leverage what you have, and what does it mean to leverage social connections, as different from capital assets? In our exploration of the word and the concept, we spend some time to define the word, and also define how its typically used. We think about how you can value a company based on how leveraged they are, and what makes something over, or under, leveraged.
As always, stories abound, and we chortle with delight at minutia.

This episode we talk about spaces and how Divya has a resistance towards designing them because of a lack of heuristics and Kahran shares how he thinks about spaces. A major part of being open to changing your mind is the process through which you change your mind and reorient yourself in a new direction. Fortunately we were recording this time when we came across something that one of us changed our mind on. This is a different than usual episode where we do a lot of active problem solving collaboratively, and arrive at some actionable items by the end of our conversation.

What leads to you building trust? Where do you start from in trusting things? Are you like Divya, and start from 0, or like Kahran, and start from +10? Does it change for you depending on the context?
We talk this week about the Westin in Paris, the Oberoi hotels, and other moments that have gone wrong and how those moments have built emotional trust. We also talk about how brands can delight you, including some luxury clothing brands in New Delhi and one of our perennially favorite examples, Nike and the Nike Run Club. Kahran shares some stories about working with his father, Pradeep Singh, and Divya shares how Pradeep has inspired her to run up and down the 11 flights of stairs in her homes.
We think about how the stories we choose to tell build trust, and demonstrate the values of our organizations — and how leaders of organizations can seize control of that journey by being deliberate about the stories they propagate and share.

What drives loyalty? Why do we spend lots of time with some brands, but don’t feel loyalty towards them? What about the opposite — sometimes we feel very loyal to brands we may rarely purchase from? This week we talk about BTS, Nike and other brands that drive lots of loyalty among their customer base. We quickly agree that having multiple points for people to “meet” the brand is important, but what happens after that — what drives a customer down the path of loyalty? Is it always necessary that the customers feels they have disproportionate value being given to them from the relationship to move further down the loyalty journey? Or is there something deeper around values alignment? Divya raises some strong points around expectation setting, and how many brands a customer can be a super fan, or regular fan of, from a capacity point of view. Kahran brings up his experience with finding detergent, and falling in love with the flower brand, Farmerr.in, to strongly push the point that values are what has driven him towards loyalty to brands. We also briefly talk about startups in India in the 1990s, the recent move away from differentiating on cost alone in the last few yeas, and how well understanding their own values has impacted businesses we’ve worked with.

How do we grow to care about things? Does a sense of care result in loyalty? What is the difference between caring and being invested? This week we set off to talk about how people grow to care about brands, things and other people, but end up spending more of the discussion on the why question -- why do people start caring about those brands, things and other people? We also spend some time talking about how we think about what we will grow to care about in the future. We spend a little time on OCD vs OCPD, briefly bring up the show "White Lotus", the book, "Turtles All the Way Down", and AI-generated art as well as ChatGPT, and why we care about seeing joyus as a successful company.
Kahran also shares a few stories of his recent wedding, and Divya has some great metaphors, as always.

How can you better prepare yourself to make decisions, especially when you have been putting off that decision? This week we talk about strategies for making decisions with uncertainty, and share our hypothesis for making what keeps us from making decisions and how (we think) we can get past those key decision points. We also share some thoughts about how we’ve struggled with our own marketing and branding, how cool we think potatoes are, and the idea of having a decision day — a particular day when you know you will make a decision (or multiple decisions) about something.

Are there always more customers? Is there always more attention? Is this way of marketing, and life, sustainable? This week we think about time-bound behaviors! When is a solution right for now, and how does having an end-date make it easier to deal with difficult things? What keeps us from designing with an end date in mind? How does it change when its a personal habit versus a product or a company solution? We discuss this from both of those lenses -- personal and product-design focused -- and think about off-boarding experiences that are done well, and not so well. We also spend time thinking about products that have successfully evolved their product base and their changing needs through the customer lifecycle.

How do you make decisions? What helps and what doesn’t? What stops you from making said decisions and what aids you in making them faster? How do you get your creative work done? Is art never finished, only abandoned or Is it just a matter of removing the pieces of the stone that are not a part of the sculpture. This week we discuss things that we look for when we are making decisions, what mental models we use for that, some small asides on inductive and deductive reasoning, and then get into questions of platonic ideals for ourselves, and our work, and our decisions. We close up with discussion around building right systems for right decisions.

Can taking blood on your hands be a kindness? Is it a niceness? What does it mean to be nice vs. kind? Can kind things be done in a polite way, or is politeness and niceness tied at the hip? This week, we briefly talk about kindness (vs niceness) in ending relationships before getting deeply caught up in kindness in death before turning our attention to unpacking the interplay between niceness and kindness, and have some very interesting insights about how niceness shapes our constructs about motivation and what people “like us” do.

What will happen as we have more and more AI systems as our co-pilots? How will we value things when AI has been involved in the creation? And is this the same trend towards commoditization of higher and higher skilled labor? This week, we talk different AI systems we have met in our lives — DALL-E, the image creation AI, Github’s Copilot, the AI peer programer, and GPT3, the AI text generation tool. We get very excited about the potential for new kinds of art and artists because of these tools, and also spend a few minutes talking about the value and business implications. We also talk about how these systems learn, and spend a few minutes getting really nerdy about the similarities with human brain and how social media has made our neural networks learn faster.

What leads to you feeling successful ? Are they the things the same things that lead to you feeling confident ? This week, we continue the discussion from Episode 3, “Cognitive and Emotional Experiences & Models for Failure,” and discuss what events in our lives have led to feelings of confidence, how other people’s perceptions of us and those events influenced the feelings of confidence, and whether those events were a success or a failure. We illustrate this with some personal anecdotes, and briefly gossip about Adam Neumann and Mark Zuckerberg.

Is the way you do one thing, the way you do everything? It’s a common Buddhist saying but this week, we examine if it is actually true, and we talk about how we learn things: from the people around us, from practice, from exposure and from adapting models from culture. We also explore how persistence and learning are connected to our expectations of outcomes. This was a super fun conversation because we end up diving into things that are core to what joyus is about, and we discuss how we have arrived at some of those learnings in our own lives. And there is some stuff about competing with duolingo, which definitely we have never done ourselves. Nope. Never.

Why is pain helpful? How do we distinguish between different kinds of pain? How can we be cognizant of when we’re acting to protect ourselves, and when those protective instincts becomes routines that guide our thinking? And why does the world have so many golf courses?

What are the expectations of your audience? Can you support those expectations? Are those expectations uniform across the audience? In this episode, Divya and Kahran begin by talking about the presumed expectations of their audience, but quickly realize they themselves have different ways of listening to podcasts. Divya is nearly as taken aback to hear that Kahran binges podcasts, as Kahran is shocked to hear that Divya has a rotating pattern by which she listens to podcasts of different cognitive and emotional intensity. We  discuss Matt Walker's podcast, The Matt Walker Podcast, about sleep, available at https://themattwalkerpodcast.buzzsprout.com, as well as touch on The Knowledge Project, hosted by Shane Parish, https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/ as well as Esther Perel's podcasts, available here: https://www.estherperel.com/podcast. Divya did not reveal the comedic podcasts in her rotation, but we shall push her to tell those secrets as well in a future episode!

What does it mean to accept the data but not the feeling? How does our ability to accept failure influence our ability to do new things? What are better ways to fail? This week we explore different kinds of experiences, and how they shape behavior. We think about why it feels bad when we have failure, and the difference between accepting failure cognitively versus emotionally. We also think together about how it feels to access painful memories, how to reduce trauma when you relive and share it, and finding where to grow. We both also share some deeply personal anecdotes about how we have fought with our siblings, and forced biscuits on past employees, and otherwise behaved foolishly.