[From Pixabay]
Good morning,
Over the last two years, we have discovered new ways to live and work. But there have been casualties as well. One of these includes engaging in meaningful conversation with thoughtful people. The reason it matters is that the ground beneath our feet is shifting. It is impossible to decode the shifts when in isolation or by reading. Deep listening is both a part of learning as much as it is a primal need.
Perhaps, that explains why there is an explosion in consumers and creators of podcasts. When The Hindustan Times looked at the landscape last year, they discovered that Indians are the world’s third largest consumers of this genre of storytelling after the Americans and Chinese. When asked why, people they spoke to said they wanted to consume news, listen in to discussions and interviews that matter without having to look at the screen.
We believe this data has merit. This emerged as we exchanged notes with each other on our personal habits. Most of us on the team have started to invest pockets of time when on a walk or attending to routine chores for instance, to listen to podcasts across genres. While podcasts have been around for many years, we have now started to take them seriously. Our experience suggests the time invested in listening to compelling podcasts have helped us expand our minds.
That is why we have listed a few resources that contain some great conversations we have come to love.
Do you have a favourite go-to podcast(s)? We’d love to hear about the places you like to look at.
6 podcast resources to make sense of the world
(In no particular order)
1. The Knowledge Project
Hosted by Shane Parrish, founder of the Farnam Street blog, The Knowledge Project (TKP) is something we look forward to for the diversity of themes that are explored, the intellectual bandwidth of the speakers, the sharpness of the questions and the depth of the answers.
What makes all this exciting for us is that the themes include conversations with people from domains as diverse as business, technology, science, decision making, relationships, media, sport, philosophy and even art and food. A thread that binds all these conversations is to explore the world as they see it. On listening to it, we emerge richer.
Recommendations
Here are three conversations from the archives of TKP we particularly liked and recommend.
- Marc Andreessen: Interview with an icon
- Learning how to learn with Barbara Oakley
- Getting better by being wrong with Annie Duke
2. Brave New World
Earlier this week, Vasant Dhar, professor of business at the NYU Stern School of Business, sent an email on the raison d'etre for his podcast. “Despite the wonderful advances—the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, and Crypto—some things feel bizarre about the world that’s unfolding, don’t they? What are the right questions that can help us identify dystopian outcomes and avoid them? What does it mean for us and our kids?
“I started my podcast, Brave New World, to explore just these subjects.”
By way of example, Dhar’s conversation last month with Albert Wenger, managing partner at the New York-based Union Square Ventures, had our attention. Wenger argues that the current rules we live by are outdated in a world that has embraced digital and is competing for people’s attention, the most precious resource. This is why people continue to search for meaning as individuals and societies. However, Wenger points out that if we continue to live by rules that were created in the Industrial Era when capital was scarce, this search will be futile. Between them, Dhar and Wenger explore just how must people navigate the times we live in and craft a new set of rules.
Recommendation
3. Conversations with Tyler
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/
To describe Tyler Cowen as an economist would be unfair. He is a polymath, genuinely curious about people, their stories and the world around. Cowen asks questions that matter most, listens deeply, and for the life of us, we are still to figure out how he reaches out to discover the people that he does.
On listening to him engage with the 83-year-old Steward Brand on starting curious and staying curious because Stewart “doesn’t understand why older people let their curiosity fade, when in many ways it’s the best time to set off on new intellectual pursuits,” we emerged energised.
For that matter, we couldn’t stop listening to Cowen in conversation with Ana Vidovic, a Croatia-born classical guitarist acclaimed as a child prodigy and now considered one of the world’s greatest. Are people such as her born or made? He asks questions that may not occur to most of us.
What happens as you age? What’s the hardest thing about keeping your nails in shape? How do you know when a concert hall is too large?
This is what we call genuine curiosity. If only we could be as shamelessly curious!
Recommendations
- Stewart Brand on Starting Things and Staying Curious
- Ana Vidovic on Prodigies, Performance, and Perseverance
4. Exponential View
https://hbr.org/2019/04/podcast-exponential-view
Most of us who have migrated from the analog to the digital age instinctively understand that various technologies—artificial intelligence, automation, genetics, energy—are developing at an exponential speed. Looking at the unintended consequences of some of these technologies, especially social and mobile, we also know that society is struggling to keep pace with technology. Azeem Azhar, who runs a hugely popular newsletter called Exponential View, also anchors a podcast in partnership with Harvard Business Review, exploring some of these topics in depth. While there are good podcasts on tech, on business, and on politics, what makes Exponential View stand out is the ease with which it weaves all these strands together.
Recommendation
5. Ideas of India, Shruti Rajagopalan
https://open.spotify.com/show/6kK8CBITnvLtfIYbb8Y5O4
In Ideas of India, Shruti Rajagopalan, a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, talks to a range of people to surface interesting insights about the country that have emerged mostly from academic research. Academic research tends to be somewhat decoupled from the real world. But the podcast does a very good job of connecting the world of ideas with the messiness of political drama and social conflicts that play out day after day.
Recommendation
6. The Tim Ferriss Show
Tim Ferriss, the author of Four Hour series (Workweek, Body and Chef), has been in the podcast business for many years now. A 2016 piece in Observer calls him the Oprah of Podcasts. Many love to hate him for what they see as blatant self promotion and commercialisation. And of course the length of some of the episodes. But, if you set aside all these, and listen to his podcasts, there is a good chance you will pick up more than a few ideas that you will find useful. He has published two books based on these conversations—Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors—condensing some of “the tactics, tools, and routines” of successful people.
Recommendation
