Innovation, Serendipity and Comedian Philosophers

Leaning In

My Recent Podcast

My most recent podcast was with Soumitra Dutta, the new dean of the business school at Oxford University. In addition to being a leader in academia, Soumitra was been studying what makes countries innovative. I’ve traveled the globe over the years, and I notice the changes each time I visit a place. What drives innovation? What has made America and Europe innovative? What about India? Or China? Has the digital revolution changed what innovation means and how it manifests itself? What can leaders and governments learn from history and from each other to make their societies better in terms of the things that matter to them?

Tune in for some answers to these interesting questions.

Home, Home Again, I like to Be Here When I Can

I just got back home after a wonderful trip to Kashmir and a class reunion at my boarding school in the Himalayan foothills. It’s always great to be back in New York. There’s something special about the energy that the earth exudes in Manhattan. The author Russell Shorto describes Manhattan’s history in his book The Island at the Center of the World. I can imagine the energy the early settlers felt when they arrived.

The colors upstate are just screaming, as you can see in the picture I took when I walked out of from my bedroom this morning. No filters, just the raw colors of fall less than a hundred miles north of Manhattan.

While I was at my boarding school, The Lawrence School Sanawar, I gave a talk to the seniors about how to prepare for the world of AI and tech. I borrowed a piece of advice from Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, who talked about the role liberal education on my podcast last year. Roth’s advice is to “maximize serendipitous encounters.” This includes things like taking courses you wouldn’t normally, meeting people in the cafeteria that you wouldn’t otherwise, or someone nudging you into that “aha moment.” John Sexton, the former president of NYU, encourages students to “try playing another octave.”  

I tried to take Roth’s and Sexton’s thinking a step forward, and discussed how to be prepared to recognize serendipitous encounters. After all, you can’t capitalize on something you don’t even recognize as an opportunity.

I also borrowed liberally about how to make decisions from my other guests such as Phil Tetlock and Daniel Kahneman. For example, what are the common traps we fall into when making decisions, because of our biases and lack of consistency? Be aware of such traps, they caution, and develop a thinking process that circumvents such traps. I wish someone had made me more aware about the nature of decision-making when I was 16.

I also caught up with my classmates after a very long time. What was notable is that no one was fat! It made me wonder whether our physical regimen during childhood had anything to do with it. We would be jolted out of bed at 5:30 every morning to the sound of a bugle or bell, quickly down a dog biscuit with some tea, go on a timed two mile run where honor was at stake, climb ropes, and spar a few rounds with boxing gloves, all before breakfast. We were perpetually hungry. All of our fat cells were probably melted into oblivion before we turned 17. That’s my theory anyway.

In passing, I noticed that India isn’t quite as woke as we are in America. A friend of my nephew Arjun, dropped in for dinner one evening and asked, “hey uncle, has Arjun always been this fat?”

Arjun isn’t fat at all, but I hadn’t heard the word in a while. In America, it can only be applied to things like paychecks, never people. I’m with John McWhorter on this one. We’ve become so overly sensitive. On the other hand, perhaps India is tilted a little too heavily towards the other side – people had no compunction about telling me I look old, or that my hair is very white.  I’m not offended by something that obvious, but if someone called me ugly, I might protest. Where’s the right balance?  

The Wrath of Globalization on Kids

I started my talk in Sanawar by mentioning how, in the 60 and 70s, we would read the newspaper perhaps once or twice a month, whereas now, kids are perpetually connected to the outside world via personal devices.

As I spoke the words, I was struck by its larger implications, which I’ve discussed with several on my podcast guests, including Jonathan Haidt and Sinan Aral. We used to grow up locally, largely unaware about the outside world until much later in life. We focused on learning the three Rs: reading, (w)riting, and (a)rithmetic. The most important people in our lives other than our parents were our classmates, and especially our teachers. My English and Math teachers in boarding school had a huge influence on my life, comparable to my mentors in graduate school in the US.

Awareness about the outer world was gradual as we got older – a theme explored by the writer Amitav Ghosh in his wonderful novel “The Shadow Lines.” We were influenced by movies, cartoons, and literature created by the previous generation. That gave us a connection to the past. Kids are now consuming content that was created in the last few days somewhere in the world. I think teachers have less of an impact, and kids have less of a connection with older wisdom. I don’t think most thirteen-year olds are ready to be on a global parade. It’s particularly bad for girls, who become prey to social voting and realize that likes are inversely proportional to things like the clothes they have on. I could go on, but some things just aren’t working. If anything, they’re getting worse.

So, what should we do, as teens, parents and teachers? My colleague Adam Alter has some obvious suggestions to combat our ever increasing array of seductive addictions. It begins with parents. As Adam notes, “distracted parents raise distracted  children,” so beware of your own addictions, and ration and monitor your kids’ exposure. Check out Adam’s session on Brave New World, and Anna Lembke’s suggestions for “Beating dopamine.”

The larger challenge here seems to be one of providing kids a natural and more balanced path from being local, that is, relatively sheltered, to becoming global, exposed to its full range of bright and dark influences. China might be onto something here, in limiting kids’ time on the Internet. But in liberal democracies, this responsibility falls on parents, who have a hard time getting it right.

Hijabs, Abortion, and Religion

A close boarding school friend of mine with whom I spent a few days at the reunion told me she really enjoys my podcasts and newsletters. She likes the analysis and balance I provide. But, she said, she’d like me to lean in sometimes, and present my own opinion about the issues I discuss.

My opinion?! As a scientist, I try to limit my opinion. I prefer to start with data. My family is always amused when I ask about what the data say about something. Besides, I’m a big Lebowski fan, and “the dude” has had a major impact on my thinking with this line “that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

But, wtf, I’m going to lean in a little this time on something that is front and center in the news recently: women’s rights. This time, it’s playing out in terms of abortion and hijabs. It’s particularly refreshing to see Iranian women comedians expressing the conundrum facing the “morality police” who want women to cover themselves so they aren’t harmed. If they refuse, the police is free to arrest, beat and torture them. One comedian asks, isn’t wearing one’s hair uncovered a human right?

The abortion debate raging in America is best described by the late American philosopher George Carlin, who also dissects tough moral issues through humor. Carlin marvels at how anti-abortionists protect you from conception to fetus, but once you arrive, you’re on your own. When they refer to the sanctity of life, it’s really the sanctity of certain types of life, which they decide. Where do you draw the line? Is a woman who has more than one period a serial killer, he asks? Should a fetus be part of the census? Carlin boils it down to this: these people aren’t pro-life, they are anti-women.

Clearly, religion is at the core of this issue, which Carlin calls the biggest bullshit story ever told:

There’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do every day, and there are 10 things he doesn’t want you to do. If you do, he has a special place when he will send you to scream and choke until the end of time. But he loves you. And he always needs money. He’s all powerful, all knowing, all wise, but just can’t handle money. Religion takes in billions of dollars, never pays taxes, and always needs more.

I couldn’t express it better than George Carlin.

There are six wise Catholics on the US Supreme court. I think they should tune into George Carlin. In the meantime, let’s do our bit in working towards making religion personal. The comedian Benny Hill always ended his show with “may your God go with you.” That’s good advice, and my lean for the day.