Life of the Mind with Akshay Birla

Ilya Zaritskiy arrived in Los Angeles as a refugee from Ukraine. He was a child, in middle school, perhaps. There were tanks on the streets in LA – the 1992 Rodney King riots were happening. Neither he nor his family spoke any English. This podcast is the story of how one immigrant kid used the 18-month 0% APR schemes banks were pushing to buy a UPS franchise, start a PE firm, and buy a bar.

I liken it to trying to build a house by throwing up beams in the air and shooting them with a nail gun and hoping that you can hit them in the right place so that by the time gravity takes its toll it will fall down as a building… otherwise it’s going to fall on your head and break you.

Rohit Chopra is the co-host of the podcast India Explained and Associate Professor at Santa Clara University. We talk about journalism in India and it’s evolution from the days of Doordarshan to the cornucopia of (mostly bad) options available today. Through our conversation I was introduced or reintroduced to a number of people and bodies of work that I either didn’t know about or don’t spend enough time with.

For example, Ashis Nandy, a political psychologist whose work seems very interesting if the titles of his book are anything to go by: The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism; Regimes of Narcissism, Regimes of Despair; Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness. One of these might find a place on my reading list for 2019. Similarly, Palagummi Sainath, has done extensive reporting from rural India and whose work I’m curious to explore more. Particularly, Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts. Urvashi Butalia runs a feminist publishing house in India and whose Poster Women: A Visual History of the Women’s Movement in India I just ordered. The political magazine Economic and Political Weekly, for example, provides a deep and fascinating coverage of India, even though I can rarely find anything I agree with its commentary on.

Rohit’s own book, Technology and Nationalism in India, might be too heavy a read for me but I’m curious to read the upcoming and more accessible books.

This is a fairly left-of-center reading list and I’m looking to balance it out with someone interesting that’s slightly to the right-of-center. Got any suggestions? Send them my way!

Jim Tanner founded Just Good Advice with the goal of providing sound financial advice to ordinary people. In the story that takes him to Just Good Advice, we talk about his first fin-tech company from when the best way to transmit data was the fax machine; Morningstar, where Jim ran the sales team; and the realization for Jim that he wanted to create something to make investing simple for mainstream America: financial advice for the not-1%. We discuss the Value of Financial Advice from a paper written by David Blanchett (spoiler alert: ~1.5%) and the idea that in investing, you get what you don’t pay for (see this blog, and this shiny paper from Vanguard).

Adam Greenberg shares his journey to become a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia via AmeriCorps and other random travel. For someone so young, he’s certainly lived in a lot of places by his own choosing; this conversation was great. We need to all think more about the impact of student debt on the labor market and on civic life and do something about it, but that’s a story for another podcast. If you don’t know where Zambia is, no judgement, but once you see pictures you might want to be scheduling a trip there! And here is Adam’s Instagram account.

Dr Jon Peeples takes us behind the scenes into the world of psychiatry for a fascinating conversation around mental health, being a smarter consumer of psychiatric care, and public health. We talk about encounters in the ER and serving some of the poorest and most vulnerable populations. As he observes,

Prozac is not going to fix homelessness.

On recalibrating as a writer:

So I took a step back and said, why don’t I write something less pretentious but maybe equally awesome?

Additional show notes:

* Upcoming book, Putting the Science in Fiction. Edited by Dan Koboldt.

* Deinstitutionalization and it’s aftermath, an article: What happened to U.S. mental health care after deinstitutionalization?

* Georgia Association of Community Service Boards 

* Artificial Intelligence in predicting schizophrenia: “Automated analysis of free speech predicts psychosis onset in high-risk youths” is that paper that Jon cites in his conversation but there is a lot of other interesting work in this area. The article “How Artificial Intelligence Could Help Diagnose Mental Disorders” from The Atlantic provides a good summary. I also discovered that hackathons around AI and mental health such as this one four years ago.

Brian Hart is the co-founder of Lighthouse DC, a non-profit that helps people transitioning from homelessness in turning empty spaces into homes that are welcoming and functional for their families. We talk about homelessness in the capital of the world’s richest country, how to talk about homelessness to people with a spectrum of views on it, much more.

Tova Levin has worked closely with two of the most prominent economists of our generation – Steven Levitt and John List – serving as Levitt’s Chief of Staff for several years before joining Humana as a leader in their behavioral economics division. We nerd out about so much in economics – Gary Becker (read the Becker-as-criminal story we’re talking about here),  the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Institutional Review Board, and why an insurer cares about behavioral economics. Tova schools me on what we know about crime and punishment (that wonderful feeling of being in the presence of other UChicago people; some of you know what I’m talking about). Then we talk about women in economics and mentoring (we’ve been talking a lot about mentoring recently!). You might be interested in some of her other work: on The HeartStrong Randomized Clinical Trial,  on studying high-capacity givers. Read about the UChicago Charter Schools program here.

Katy Dickinson has been around the tech-block. Hired by Eric Schmidt at Sun Microsystems, she literally wrote the book on the software development lifecycle that Sun used for release of almost 10,000 releases. She is a technologist, entrepreneur, mentor, and writer.

In our conversation Katy talks about her work as a technologist on creating processes:

A process has to not assume that you have world-class people working on it. A process assumes that that not everybody — while they are good-intentioned and competent — [is] perfect. You have to have a system that allows for lack of perfection but can work if you have the best that there is.

and the futility of only having excellent coders:

A good coder is a wonderful thing to have but you have to create something that the customer wants and feels comfortable with. Good coding and user experience are sometimes at odds.

But we spend the most of our conversation talking about mentoring programs that deliver high return-on-investment, and the intersection of religion and technology.

On the importance of example and networking provided by the Grace Hopper Celebration:

While they may be the only women in the room – which has certainly been my experience in 30+ years in the Silicon Valley – there are a lot of rooms.

Other Links:

* The Grace Hopper Celebration: Largest Gathering of Women Technologists in the World

* The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline by Tracy Camp, which analyzes trends in women in technology

* Katy’s Blog

* Mentoring Standard, which has helped designed mentoring programs for the US State Department and includes helpful material to get started, including 9 Questions Before Starting a Mentoring Program

* Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher

Phill Keene builds insides-sales organizations for companies that are selling to other companies (“B2B”). We jam about what it takes to build a successful inside sales organization, staying relevant in a world that’s changing quickly because of technology, podcasting (he co-hosts a very successful podcast, #RealSalesTalk), and what I’d think of as flourishing or living the good life. Some things I really enjoyed:

* The 3,000 phone call rule: you start to learn your market after 3,000 dials. Don’t give up before then

* Power networking: can you do 50 coffees in one year? I might try this

* On LinkedIn shaming: what it means when executives do it

* 3 steps to mentoring junior sales talent: set clear expectations, give them a vision of good, give critical feedback

* Musings on automation and the death of sales

I stumbled upon Avi Patchava because of his recent post, “The 5 unexpected reasons why Indians make it as CEOs of global companies,” and I was surprised that it was so sincerely reasoned. Avi graciously agreed to jam with me  and we talked about his journey from London/McKinsey to InMobi, the tech scene in India (the last podcast I’ve had on that topic was with Azeem here), as well as tech-talent and the failure of Indian pedagogy as practiced in India today.

He is bullish on India as thriving as an AI-exporter:

A big backbone is people that can build these systems… India has an excess supply of people who are trained in those fields – engineering, mathematics, analytics, and increasingly in data science, but the applications in India are limited… so India is become an export market in this field.

The export market notwithstanding, Indian companies are preparing to move from low-skilled to high-skilled technology work:

India is trying to find a pivot in how it engages with the technology world. And I see that on two fronts – India itself is going through a digital revolution – partly from a push from the government to digitize government services… but also more naturally in the consumer tech revolution… Wipro and Infosys have explicit strategies to move into [AI].

But it’s hard to imagine that this is scalable, given India’s education system.

The education system is moving incredibly slowly – much slower than technology and needs of industry demands… and it’s a common frustration across the board in India. You get a workforce in engineering in the millions that’s being produced, and as a whole, cohorts that are coming through have not had a good setup that engenders creative thinking, how to pose inquisitive questions that push of their science and discipline. But… it’s still a numbers game so you still do produce, by sheer luck or the genetic lottery, innovators.

We didn’t get to spend much time on this but we touched on Avi’s writing on the reasons he is bullish on Indian society being able to cope with AI much better than most Western democracies (it’s worth a read: here).

If we are going to see this mass description in jobs and on the economies, how will societies will put up with it? Because… that wave has political ramifications.