Modern Minorities

“Distraction is not a technology problem or a moral failing. The vast majority of distraction is simply that you have not learned the skill of dealing with discomfort. Master internal triggers, or they will become your master.”

Nir Eyal is a best-selling author and instructor working at the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. In a research-driven conversation about his latest book “INDISTRACTABLE - How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life,” we learn about what really drives distraction — which is less about flashy external stimuli, and more about our own internal discomfort. The good news is, it’s not out of reach, by better understanding our internal triggers - it just might be possible to get back to a focus that feels so far gone. The good news is, It's not out of reach, and Nir shares some great tips to get started. 

Indistractable received critical acclaim, winning the Outstanding Works of Literature Award as well as being named one of the Best Business and Leadership Books by The Globe and Mail and Amazon, and among the Best Personal Development Books of the Year by Audible. Nir is also the author of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products” — his books have resonated with readers worldwide, selling over 1 million copies in over 30 languages. 

Nir’s writing and work has been featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Harvard Business Review, The M.I.T. Technology Review, Time Magazine, Psychology Today. Nir co-founded and sold two tech companies since 2003, and invests in habit-forming products that improve users’ lives including Eventbrite (NYSE:EB), Anchor.fm (acquired by Spotify), Kahoot!, Canva, Homelight, Product Hunt, Marco Polo, Byte Foods, FocusMate, Dynamicare, Wise App, and Sunnyside. Nir previously taught in the Business and Design schools at Stanford University, and Nir attended The Stanford Graduate School of Business and Emory University.

This is an episode from friend-of-the-pod Sharad Lal's podcast “HOW TO LIVE” - for lots more great conversations with Sharad and thought leaders, subscribe to How To Live wherever you get your favorite podcasts, or visit howtolive.life 

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“You need to get people registered, you need to get them informed, you need them voting. This is not the work of just one cycle, but this is the work of a generation.”

Wendy Nguyen is Founder and President of AsianAmericansRise.com — a political advocacy nonprofit focused on civic engagement from the Asian American community. Right now, Wendy and her team are most focused on registering voters - and turning out the Asian vote in swing states like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina — and in key congressional races across the country. We’re all concerned about how close this election is going to be, so we’d strongly encourage you to make a donation - large or small - at AsianAmericansRise.com. Their org is 100% volunteer run, so your dollars will go directly getting out the Asian American vote. And with voter registration deadlines fast-approaching, and so much on the line - gun safety, climate change, healthcare access, voting rights and more - coming down to a handful of votes in just a handful of counties this November, every little bit helps ASAP...

Long before Wendy’s work turning out the vote — she was a long-time advocate for AAPI political representation, having co-founded Stand with Asian Americans back in March 2021 in the early days of the Stop Asian Hate movement. She's super passionate about the cause and has a big picture, long-term vision for how our community can come together to drive change. And it’s really cool seeing such a focused, performance-marketing approach that can have a big impact. On top of all that Wendy has two other really important day-jobs, that of a bay area CMO, and that of a mom. Like us, you’ll be blown away by her heart, candor, practicality, and proactiveness.

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 ” I was in survival mode for so long — then I finally dealt with it - shedding all the old stories I told myself that society put on — those stories stick with us and form our identity without us even realizing it.”

Ida Abdalkhani is a longtime FrieMMd of the pod, and a co-host on Raman’s other podcast, “Learnings from Leaders.” Ida is many things...an entrepreneur, marketer, board member, speaker, professor, patent-holder, yoga instructor, published author, and many more things to come. We actually met early in our careers, and our paths have crossed again and again. Ida was one of first “Model” Minorities guests way back when in 2020 — when the world was VERY different. And since then, lots has changed not just everywhere, but in Ida’s life. in a short time Ida dealt with more change and crisis than most of us deal with in decades. And that’s given Ida some new perspective, so we wanted to catch up and understand what was different. You’ll enjoy this candid conversation between old friends reflecting on the change that is around all of us.

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 ”I’ve come to my parents with challenges and they say, keep working hard, keep pushing through it — they're so used to working 12 hour days, making ends meet — it’s interesting to see them understanding my career.”

Raman recently moderated a community conversation on "Building Bridges across Generations" for the inaugural Asians in Marketing and More summit - where we explored the personal and professional expectations of work and family across different generations. We explored how we, as a professional community can support the next generation of leaders. Moderating the panel was a real treat - especially in sharing stories on stage - and getting to know fellow purpose-driven Asian business leaders. 

FEATURING: Amrita Dutta-Gupta (GNC), Chris Schmicker (Shopify), Vanessa Huynh (LabCorp), Paresh Jha (LinkedIn), David Yin (Capital Y Consulting), Lisa Reid (Dear Flor), Jill Kelly (WPP), Jennifer Chen (Connatix), Ranjana Choudhry (Inmar), Aniko DeLaney (Fordham University), Julie Lee (TDW+Co), Elliot Lum (Association of National Advertisers)

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“I was not gonna follow rules if they didn't make any sense to me. There's a healthy sense of curiosity and a willingness to challenge the status quo.”

Sudha Ranganathan is an emotionally intelligent leader. Drew Tarvin is a humor engineer. Both are P&G Alumni, and old friends of Raman’s from different parts of his life. This is a bonus conversation from Raman (+Drew’s) other podcast, Learnings from Leaders. Having worked at companies like Linkedin, Paypal, Affinnova,and Procter & Gamble - in the US and Asia, Sudha’s career has spanned engineering, marketing, and product strategy - but what she really excels at is managing and coaching others. You’ll enjoy this candid conversation diving deep into the significance of emotional intelligence and psychological safety in the workplace — with learnings from her early experiences and struggles as a new leader to her proactive approach to personal development. And comic books may or may not have come up.

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“He bears witness - in a very disarming way - what's really going on in this country.” “It’s often expressed without a single word, vivid enough that It hits a bit differently — It's not sugar coated —  this is what they're up against.”

BURMA CHRONICLES is the 2007 graphic travelogue by French-Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle — which presents a personal and distinctively humorous glimpse into a political hotspot on the other side of the world, where the Delisle balances his ex-pat home-husbandry, the spinning politics a quasi-authoritarian state, and finding a way as a foreign cartoonist amidst a South Asian junta

This is another very special Quarantined CoMMics crossover episode - covering a graphic novel with a very unique Modern Minorities take. Joining is longtime FrieMMd of the Pod (+Ramans other, other podcast co-host) DREW TARVIN, Humor Engineer, who much like the author of this week's comic, happens to be a dude who's a funny-jobbed, home-husbanding ex-pat dad in a foreign land.

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ROAMING is the graphic novel winner of three 2024 EISNER awards for best graphic novel, best writer, and best penciller/inker - by cousins Mariko + Jillian Tamaki. It's a book about three young women touring New York City in the late aughts, and it's both a love letter to New York City and a nostalgic look at the relationship between three friends who are about to follow very different paths in life. You can’t read this book and not see yourself in it at a younger, more awkward phase of your life - whether or not you’ve even spent any time in NYC. 

This is another episode from Raman’s other podcast, Quarantined Comics. And as you already know from our LAST episode - we're big Tamaki fans. We've actually covered some of Mariko’s other award-winning work like Skim, This One Summer, and more on other episodes of Quarantined Comics. So be sure to check out ALL of Mariko Tamaki's work wherever you get your favorite books

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"The idea that a person can't relate to something because it's not directly about them is a misunderstanding of who's been reading books this whole time."

Mariko Tamaki is an award-winning Canadian comics creator and writer — known for works like Skim and This One Summer (with her cousin Jillian Tamaki). Her latest novel is Cold, a haunting YA novel about four students who knew too much and said too little. AND Mariko’s also the Co-founder & Editor of Surely Books - a comics imprint of LGBTQIA+ creators. Mariko’s ALSO known for comics like Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Emiko Superstar, and several prose works of fiction and nonfiction. AND since 2016, Mariko’s been writing for Marvel & DC comics - on powerful books like I Am Not Stafire, and Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass. Mariko’s also only the second woman to write Detective Comics - the 1000+ issue flagship DC series about the Dark Knight. If you can’t tell by now, one of us has been a BIG Mariko Tamaki fan for awhile, and after hearing her approach to writing and sharing personal stories, you soon will be too. 

This is a replay of an earlier chat from 2022 - we’re airing it in honor of Marikos’ winning of the Eisner Award (among comics most prestigious honors) - for the 2023 graphic novel ROAMING - which she co-created with her cousin Jillian. We’ll be airing the Quarantined Comics episode on Roaming next! 

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“The normalization of things being taken away. You see all the things going on in Tehran in 1979 — you see them here as well, which makes it a sad, scary, and timeless tale.”

PERSEPOLIS, by Marjane Satrapi is an award winning, now banned graphic autobiography from the early 2000s about a young girl growing up in Iran, and becoming a woman overseas, returning home, and dealing with everything in between.Originally published in French, Persepolis has sold millions of copies worldwide, and Satrapi also produced an award-winning film of the same name. In Persepolis, we meet young Marjane “Marji” Satrapi growing up in Tehran just before and during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as well as thru the start of the Iran + Iraq War in the 1980s. Her parents are secular, upper-middle class activists, who worry for their precocious daughter's safety in the increasingly conservative and dangerous Iran, so send her off to Austria to become a teenager. Her teen years are fraught with all the drama you can expect from such an experience, but Marji - now becoming a young woman - always maintains the experience of an outsider looking in - with her feet in both worlds. Marji eventually returns to Iran to find that not only has her mother country changed, but she as well. This book was a surprise and illuminating for us in many ways, making us question - what would WE do in such a situation?

This conversation is originally from from Quarantined Comics, where Raman + friends read comics that are so much more than just superheroes. PERSEPOLIS is a very Modern Minorities appropriate work, especially for the times we’re living in, which you’ll get to here us reflect on. Longtime friend of THAT pod Joshua joins from his most excellent podcast RABBIT FIGHTERS, where they pretty much do the same thing, but about movies and music.

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“What happens after we've survived? What's our responsibility to somebody suffering more than I am? For kids it’s like, ‘Let's just go over and help them — like, why wouldn't we?’ “

Veera Hiranandani is an award-winning author of several books for young people - one of the most recent of which is THE NIGHT DIARY - a must read. While the novel is a historical fiction geared for adolescents and young adults, it’s a a heart-warming read that will pull you into a singular story through the eyes of a young girl experiencing one of history’s greatest traumas.. Veera went on to win the prestigious Newbery Award for the book, as well as the 2019 Walter Dean Myers Honor Award, the 2018 Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children's Literature, and several other honors and state reading list awards. Veera’s work speaks to the power of stories to spark conversations. Veera’s written a number of other award-winning books - including “How to Find What You're Not Looking For,” and “The Whole Story of Half a Girl. ”Her latest novel - AMIL & THE AFTER, is a follow-up to The Night Diary and it does what not many other books do - it examines the immediate AFTERMATH of a generational - and historical trauma. Again, through the eyes of a child. Veera’s journey - and story is a one that crosses cultures and generations - and it’s interesting to see how she pulls at the threads of her life to inform her work, and ask lots of hard whys - and why nots.

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