Thinking on Thinking: Recent Episodes
Joyus Studio
A bi-weekly production of the experience design studio Joyus, co-founders Divya Tak + Kahran Singh talk about behavior, its impact on work + life, the real-life applications + questions they've struggled with on their entrepreneurial journey — and the fascinating insights they've found at the edge of intent.
Kahran and Nomaan discuss values & capitalism, public and private sectors, and higher education and scientific advacement from the perspective of society.
Open, deeply interesting conversations on how to engage with the community, how to build a different kind of society, and the questions that make life worth living.
Nomaan works with the Saint John Community Coalition: https://sjcommunity.ca/
Kahran and Divya talk about writing in all its different forms: as a craft, for communication, as a means of expression. We talk about writing how to leverage AI while keeping your voice, how the diversity of genres and institutions that have touched you influence your outputs. How can you grow and evolve as a writer?
In this special Singh siblings edition of thinking on thinking, Kahran gets deep with his sister and founder of Armoire about how she navigates expectations, keeps up her motivation, manages her brand all while driving a business with high values.
Kahran and Divya explore how the efforts to be unique can lead to conforming. Exploring the role of ambition, artistic communities and how the costs and perceived costs drive noncomfority.
Preeti Suri, founder of AdventureTripr and TripGenie, talks about building a company in the age of LLMs, how her body has signaled to her about burnout, and the signs that tell her when she needs to spend more time with the family and her son. Kahran and Preeti also talk about connecting with people very different than you, how to use different leadership styles, and ideas for other brown women looking to raise money for their startups.
In the final part of our conversation about figuring out the story, Kahran and Divya get to the bottom of it all. How to actually create a story that people care about? The answer? "Find out why you care about this"
Conclusions are found for Divya in how to tell her story in a resonant and authentic way in this workshop-style episode with Kahran and Divya
In part 2 of this storytelling series, Kahran and Divya find Divya's story live on the air, or at least the parts that feel most important for her to highlight and share.
In this episode, Kahran and Divya discuss why Divya doesn't feel like she is able to find her audience or this podcast's audience. Kahran goes deep into exploring different facets of the problem. This is part 1 of the series.
Divya and Kahran dive in to the luxury Ayurvedic brand Almora Botanica. How to build emotional connection? How do you engage beyond cognitively? How to choose where to reinforce ideas, where to simplify, and how to ground yourself in an investor deck? Also a jump into looking at colors and how the different components of the form reinforce the storytelling.
MachPhy Solutions uses Advanced Thermal Material to transform the economics around cooling -- a revolution for many industries. As they kick off their fundraise, Divya and Kahran break down the strengths and areas for improvement in their investor deck. Curious about how the deck stands today or the details of the fundraise? Get in touch at https://machphy.com/
And DM us to be featured in a future podcast -- artifacts or interview!
Divya and Kahran look at the design, messaging, and user experience of Cranberry.Fit's website, the company co-founded and run by our guest from Season 4, Aditi Dimri. We explore the emotional aspects of marketing related to PMS, the importance of community, and how to build trust with users while balancing clinical and caring communication.
Divya interviews Anuki on leadership, working with the development and corporate sectors and leading people to understanding through communication. Anuki talks about leveraging the public discourse, balancing clients while achieve advocacy goals, and how Anuki looks to build a leading creative agency in Sri Lanka.
In this first video episode, Kahran and Divya break down the deck that Smiqql recently used for their acquisition, looking at what the different parts of the deck are doing and places they could be more successful.
In this new running series, we invite listeners to submit artifacts (decks, websites, pitches, etc.) and we love to unpack them on a future episode to hello@joyus.studio.
Divya and Kahran discuss externalizing motivation and particularly externalizing parts of the hard parts of the creative process, and speak of embodied versus cognitive thinking. And the difference between finding resonance and liking something.
Mentions include: the book I'm Very Into You, which is correspondence between two artists, Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, the early 2010s TED Talk by Elizabeth Gilbert and Plato's allegory of the cave.
Divya and Kahran talk about how culture influences your expectations of absurdist elements in storytelling (and success, ofc) , using the discussion with Remy Siu about 1000xResist as a basis for the conversation.
Internally consistent and logic are often prioritized by western authors unlike studios like Studio Ghibli. This comes from Enlightenment era thinking that has really engrained itself in western culture. Shout outs given to devised theatre, Kathak, workshops with Srikanth Chicu Reddy.
We also workshop Divya's resistance to ephemerality in art, and how new creative methods can lead to new results. Oh, and Kahran may someday do drag.
Remy Siu, Creative Director of 1000xResist, speaks with Divya about the how questions -- how they made such an incredible game that breaks so many molds, how Remy came to run a game studio with a background in composition and dance, how to exist as a performing artists in today, in Vancouver, in Canada, and to an extent in the world, and how to create art across mediums, transposing the lessons from life to new places, to achieve new results and forms.
They talk about devised theater and how the experience in performance art helped the team at sunset visitor to make a game that is deeply emotionally meaningful and uses patterns and systems not used often in games.
You can find Remy on
https://x.com/RemySiu
https://bsky.app/profile/remysiu.com
And you can find 1000xresist and the studio on
https://www.sunsetvisitor.studio/
Kahran shares stories of his grandfather, SSH Rehman, former director of ITC Limited and leader of ITC Hotels, Divya discusses quality years and Bryan Johnson, Also featured: the graphic novel Sandman, success in academic vs success in life. And there is more unpacking of Pradeep Singh's chasing of success and "big hairy audacious goals."
Can you find a sense of purpose without pursuing success?
In a fireside chat format, Kahran shares with Divya his surprise that his father, Pradeep, had never felt successful, as Pradeep shared in our last episode, and Kahran and Divya articulate some of the emulate-able parts of Pradeep's approach to life, along with the nature of the often revised definitions of success and being successful.
What happens after you build a successful company, make a fortune, and achieve the goals you set out to achieve? What is success in the afterwards?
In a conversation spanning success, purpose, motivation and satisfaction, Divya interviews Pradeep Singh, the founder and former CEO of Aditi Technologies, Talisma & Vidyanext / Pengala. Pradeep also was the first product manager of Microsoft Excel, and part of the team that grew Microsoft in its decade-long (~1986-1995) domination and explosive growth post-IPO.
Pradeep is also co-host Kahran Singh's father.
Kahran and Divya break down what it means to be successful -- and to have been successful and no longer be so. When do our cultural definitions permeate our feelings about successful? And when do they preclude achievement in success? What does it mean to have achievement in success? This second episode in the series about success is scintillating, provocative and guaranteed to leave your head scratching.
Success: achieving it, the moving goalposts of it, the feeling of it, in a trait, the way we tell ourselves stories of it and, of course, what is it. This discussion deeply jumps into a topic where Divya and Kahran have spent a lot of time, and bring views from their previously divergent, and now, arguably converging views. We’ll be diving deeper into success this season, and bring this focus to all our interviews, as well as our discussions (and interrogations of each other!)
As we wrap up this season of Thinking on Thinking, we revisit one of our favs from last season. Where we talked to Computational mama about her life and her creative process.
Stay tuned we will be back in season 6 with some amazing things.
In this episode Divya talks to Soumyadeep, recently named Forbes 30 under 30 in Asia for Consumer Tech, about learning visual styles as he builds his AI models for his startup, Dashtoon, breaking down computer vision as a technology and the role of media in driving tech.
You can check out dashtoon here : https://dashtoon.com/
As our motivations change, and especially in doing new things, finding how you can make them slightly easier for yourself can be helpful in accomplishing them. Of course, some things are regardless just hard to do, but between Kahran and Divya there are some diverse approaches and stories abound of how the approaches work in certain situations.
This week Kahran talks to Lena Chaihorsky, founder of Alva10 not about her business but about how her growth as an entrepreneur has helped her in other areas of her life, in feeling joy and satisfaction as well as how she sees herself as a citizen, and the importance of emotional growth.
In this episode, Kahran and Divya break down feelings of trust and feelings of confidence, and look at where they differ and where the nuance is important, especially thinking about consumer businesses and experiences.
Divya talks to Shikhant and Shivi about their travels, journey with the african caravan, teaching kids art, about collaborating with people who are special to you, and more, in this episode filled with interesting stories.
In this episode, Divya and Kahran have a meandering conversation starting around compensation and work into compensation for your life. How can you measure compensation beyond straight up money that you get in exchange for your work? How do you value that type of compensation? And why do tornado chasers chase tornados? What is that compensation?
Kahran chats with Prem and Andrew from Humanly about building the company together, growing, creating avenues for growth for themselves, each other and those who work with them.
You can check out humanly here : https://www.humanly.io/
If you have a podcast topic you'd like for us to talk about, you can reach out to us at hello@joyus.studio
Kahran and Divya talk about authenticity, and get into discussing grace, trust and more.
This one is reminiscent of one of the earlier episodes of Thinking on Thinking where we talk in depth about the nuances of certain ideas.
If you have thoughts about this episode, you can email us at hello@joyus.studio
Ritika and Abhineet, founders of RocketHealth, and sibling duo, talk about learnings on their journey of working together as siblings, to leveraging strengths of each other and how they have found a mission that aligns them both together.
How do you build things together, especially creative work. As Kahran and Divya embark on experimenting with new mediums and on new projects, they discuss their experience of working together for the first time on making comics.
Like most conversations between them, the discussion meanders into discussion about building companies, creativity, the difference between entrepreneurship and creative collaboration, how they see scaling, and their lessons for this experiment.
In this episode of thinking on thinking, Kahran talks to Dina Holzapfel about building a food business with her life partner and the intricacies of what you gain when you sell your business. Of lessons learnt from a long journey of entrepreneurship and much more.
You can find more about Dina here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dinaholzapfel
https://www.instagram.com/iamsparklestheunicorn
You can find out more about Kahran and Joyus at our website Joyus.studio .
Topical for this season, co-founders and hosts Divya and Kahran find themselves in some tension, with Kahran questioning his commitment to the podcast, and wondering about how the rewards in doing something change over time. Also how preconceived notions influence our ability to see options.Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you find him @btrptmusic. Editing by @beatnyk.
Rashmee & Anant, aka the Searats, are married travel influencers. We talk about what it's like to build a business with your partner, being instinct-driven, and how happiness comes from being cringe. And how it feels create a space people feel they can judge you and your relationship, but also maintaining your privacy.
You can follow the Searats on Instagram @travelwithsearats
Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you find him @btrptmusic. Editing by @beatnyk.
As we take a break between the seasons, we revisit episode 29, where we discussed about generative AI and how it has changed out ways of thinking and doing work.
We dive deep into the creative process, and our roadblocks and success there, before pivoting into game design, and the wealth of games that came up in Divya's conversation with Anurati Srivastva and the fascinating ideas from Kahran's conversation with Katieann Vogel.
A fascinating discussion of different games, game design, and approach to creation with Anurati Srivastva.
You can find her collages @mixcontexcual and her website www.anuratisrinivastva.com.
Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you find him @btrptmusic. Editing by @beatnyk.
Katieann Vogel, an ocean poet, speaks with Kahran this week on the path from computer science to becoming an ocean poet, what it means to spend your life in nature and creating, and how to find a sense of stability and centeredness.
You can find Katieann on her website, https://vogelian.com/
Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you find him @btrptmusic. Editing by @beatnyk.
Divya & Kahran come back together on the interesting ideas we learned from Meghana Srinivas & Samhita Arni in episodes 7 & 8 of this season 4: rituals, success, perception and identity.
Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you find him @btrptmusic. Editing by @beatnyk.
Divya and Meghana discuss about Meghana's journey from being a cancer researcher to a startup founder, and her experience of working in an industry that requires a lot of emotional labour and how she finds her balance through rituals. They also discuss her uncanny ability to bring the most nurturing and safe groups together.
Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you find him @btrptmusic. Editing by @beatnyk.
When you write your first NY Times bestseller at the age of 8, do you feel successful all your life? Is there a successful identity? Or is chasing success a Sisyphean task?Kahran and Sam Arni have an incredible conversation, talking about culture, what it means to add value, and how you feel successful, for yourself and also for those around you. Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you can find him @btrptmusic. Editing by @beatnyk.
Kahran and Divya come back together to share their thoughts on our two remarkable guests -- Aditi and Fran -- and how both seem to share a very different view of the notion of identity, and how that has shaped their lives.
Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you can find him @btrptmusic
Divya talks this week with Aditi Dimri, co-founder of http://cranberry.fit, about starting her career in academia and microeconomics before finding her desire to for fulfillment took her to more direct desires to help — first to more actionable projects, and then to starting a company herself! Fascinating to see how small a role a sense of identity played a role in her life, as different then computational mama or Manasi K in our first two episodes this season!
Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you can find him @btrptmusic
Kahran talks this week with Fran Dunaway about her careers before she she started her company, TomboyX, and how she has found her identity outside of her career, or perhaps, better said, found her identity in all of her careers.
Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you can find him @btrptmusic
Divya and Kahran come together to share their insights from the interviews with Manasi Khare in episode 31, and Computational Mama in episode 32.
Theme music is by Akshay Ramuhalli, you can find him @btrptmusic
Divya talks with Computational Mama about her journey into coding; finding herself as a coder after being a designer; ideas of identity; how art, culture and coding intersect, as well as Computational Mama's journey in the moniker being born, having a son, and introducing coding and design to many others, from museums to live streams to workshops in GenAI and also to teaching other mothers about coding and the possibilities for fun within the coding world.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Combs_Through__Theme/
Kahran & Manasi Khare have a sweeping conversation about law, pretending to be someone else, systemic thinking in the Indian context, and what it means to be a patriot.
Manasi Khare is an in-house advocate and formerly was a practicing litigator at a law firm. She has been involved in public policy research with a standing parliamentarian.
She is a lover of the mountains, and lives in Bangalore with her husband Harsh. She can be reached on LinkedIn and loves to connect with people who work for a better India.
With season 4 we will be interviewing guests on their approach to life, thinking and the models they use to make sense of the world.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
In the interlude before starting Season 4, we pull ep 16 from the archive this week. There's some interesting ideas about how to think about sightless, how vignettes shape your experience, and, as always, the role of expectations in outcomes.
We weren't quite as good at editing or audio production back then, but rest assured, Akshay, our sound engineer, will be back for Season 4!
As engineers we do not learn to take responsibility for our users' attention -- and in fact we learn the opposite -- grab more market share at all costs! Where has this perspective taken us? We explore this idea from the view of Meta's choices, but also from the perspective of defaults, and how when we perceive something as a constant, it completely changes our frame of reference when we problem solve.
We end season 3 with this episode, and will be back in 4 weeks with season 4!
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
We've started to seeing difference in the way we think and create since we started using LLMs. From tactical things like remembering ear-worms, to abstract things like how we value ideas, we've found ChatGPT & Midjourney & GenAI have changed the way we think, work and create.Kahran and Divya also discuss thieves cant, translation, learning, curating and accessibility of information.It's one of our first impromptu recordings, and we hope you love it as much as we did recording it!Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
Motivating yourself, especially on self-driven projects, can be hard. Once you finally have something works, how do you keep evolving it?
We talk this week on breaking out of creative ruts and how to evolve, using the podcast as a meta example.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
How do different understandings of 'what you do' affect the course of a company? How do they affect you as a person? Kahran and Divya talk about how they got to joyus studio's single line vision, and share ideas to help others get there with their learnings.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
How do you create pre-experiences to put people in the right mindset for your experience? How do those create expectations you can exceed?
In this wide reaching conversation we discuss Seth Godin, activation energy, fine dining (including Mesa, Eleven Madison Park, and other Michelin 3-star restaurants, tho not by name!) and what it means to create expectations (and how we as designers create them for other people).
We know different learners learn differently, but how do different learners create works, get inspiration, or decide products or services are right for them? The customer journey changes for different types of learners.
This week we look at how we use wish lists, how we solve problems, and how we buy things, both products, goods, and services.
Is it right to have work from home when not everyone can? How do we resolve moral questions about fairness in a post-COVID world?
This week we explore post-COVID work, thinking about how local governments, small businesses, and larger businesses, including tech companies, can navigate questions of costs, morals and what values are worth paying for.
How do things work out for successful people? How do you make things work out for yourself? Is it positive psychology, or can you actually influence outcomes just by trying to make it happen?
We explore these questions, and others, in this episode -- though we start off with Divya doing an amazing job of explaining nuclear physics! Like who knew that every element with an atomic number higher than lead was likely to eventually break down into lead! :-)
Theme music, as always, is by Steve Combs available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
What will happen when we have more and more AI systems as our co-pilots? This week we revisit episode 8 from season 1 to see how our thoughts have changed in the last 6 months, and its incredible to hear how we had to look up Stable Diffision, and GPT3, versus today when these terms just roll off the tongue! (Our conversation on AI continues in the last episode of season 2 - episode 20: Working in Partnership with Generative AI) .
We will be back in 2 weeks with a new episode for Season 3 !
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.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Combs_Through__Theme/.
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.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
We always applaud courage but not always daring? Daring is associated with rogues and more, "chaotic" types, whether they be good or bad. How else do these two words differ in implication, and what are the resultant meanings associated with celebrating courage, and fostering courage, but not always daring?
Divya and Kahran explore this topic, and share stories, tidbits and a sprinkle of life advice in-between.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Combs_Through__Theme/ .
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.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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. Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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 why people start caring about those things versus how they grow closer to them. We spend some time talking about identity, and how things that resonate with our identify are ones we grow closer to, but also about how sometimes things we want are not part of our identify — sometimes we want the outcome of something but don’t see ourselves as the person who does the thing or activity that leads to that outcome — e.g., we want to be fit but don’t see ourselves as someone who exercises regularly.
We also spend some time on the difference between caring about something and being invested in something, and Divya has some great metaphors, as always.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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.
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!
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
We have loved publishing the first season of Thinking on Thinking. We will be back in Jan 2023 with Season 2, where we will dive deeper in ideas around motivation, behavior and more! Also stay tuned to see some our special guests in Season 2!
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.
We bring up the book I’m OK, You’re OK by Thomas Anthony Harris, and the 10,100,1000 model is something you can listen to on this episode of the Jugalbandi Podcast.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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.
We also bring up and discuss both the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process and the several scenes from the book Less, by Andrew Sean Greer.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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.
Also, AI-generated reality TV shows, anyone??
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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.
Also discussed in this episode are Matt Levine’s newsletter, Money Stuff, optimism bias, as discussed in the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the wo men podcast, and the healthyGamerGG YouTube channel.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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?
In this episode, Kahran and Divya discuss pain and the ecosystem that exists around it, both why pain is needed for learning, and where pain and addiction start to intersect. The idea of the mind-body connection comes up in the context of Kahran’s experiences with Forrest Yoga, and Divya talks about some of her experiences while discussing the book Body Keeps Score, available here: https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score
Divya also mentions (and misremembers some of the details) of the study, Rats Prefer Social Interaction to Heroin or Methamphetamine, available here: https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2019/08/rats-prefer-social-interaction-to-heroin-or-methamphetamine
Kahran also briefly mentions the book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts in the context of addiction, available here: https://drgabormate.com/book/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts/
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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!
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
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.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
How do we signal -- to the right people, with the right message, at the right time? How do we choose our in-group?
We talk this week about signaling, what it means, how we do it, what feels weird when people seem part of the "us" group but also part of the "them" group, realizing your family in-group is not actually an in-group, aspirational signaling, signaling versus living your truth, and the way we bias based on signals when being approached for business.
We also briefly discuss Pride signaling, and chuckle about rainbow washed shampoo bottles.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
How do you think about success? What are the components of your success?
This week, we explore how to construct a model for success, defining success, success ecosystems, how Divya would learn something new -- and be successful at it, how success-focused models can deliver in terms of achieving goals (but also warping intentions), and why achieving things sometimes comes with a sense of loss.
We also briefly discuss and mis-remember the specifics of the paper, "High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being," a 2010 paper by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, available here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20823223/ .
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Combs_Through__Theme/ .