Scrat you're gonna try to crop a shot. I'd like to but I don't think I'll be able to Because it'd be better if it was mean you can do it in webcam settings if you had that Yeah, and that's not gonna happen. Whoa stop that you're making us all Stop stop hamming it up stop it with the physical comedy All right Yeah, let's get an audio program underway. Shall we let's do it here? We go Hey, this is Chet Page and you are listening to the Daily Tech News show This show is entirely sponsored by listeners like you if you would like to help contribute to the show head on over to patreon.com Slash ace detect. That's patreon.com slash a CEDT ECT give this man some more chairs This is the Daily Tech news for Thursday, August 6th 2015 on time married joining me today mr. Justin Robert young on the campaign trail in Ohio. I am yeah The Republican debates are the first Republican debates of this primary season are this evening in Cleveland So to deploy to deploy our best resources me and John Teesdale one of the co-creators of the brand new game The contender available on Kickstarter a game of political debate. It's cards against humanity meets politics Are here in Cincinnati which? Real geographical screw up by us. Well, they both begin with C. It's understandable I mean we were about as far away from the actual debates as the actual debates are from any kind of relevancy to our lives So I think there's there might be a poetic justice there. Well said well said we got tech news to talk about Including a very provocative keynote speech from the black hat conference. Let's start off with some headlines And gadget reports that HBO now works with Google's Chromecast stick for iOS and Android It's also expected to update today for Android I think it already is there for iOS travel channel and food network also join the Chromecast team next up for HBO now They say Amazon Fire TV devices What we still don't know about is Roku although an HBO spokesperson said the company wants to bring HBO now to all Services that currently support HBO go so if you wanted to go buy a Chromecast, but we're waiting on HBO now is the time You know, do you kind of worry that that Roku just might be a little too? It seems like this is this is such a Rapidly maturing space and Roku doesn't seem to have a Major person at the wheel to make these kind of deals happen Does that make you do you get that feeling like like maybe they're just not quite there My honest reaction is it might seem like that I get where you're coming from But things like that sometimes seem like it and aren't true. You know I'm saying like sure I is there is it really just cuz like oh well HBO now isn't on there But I mean they've got Hulu they got Netflix they get Netflix updates pretty much along with the other boxes I don't know well. They were wrong. I just don't know are they they were spun out from Netflix Weren't they initially like way when Netflix was the original partner when they launched Okay, the Roku Netflix player cuz they didn't have any other apps. Yes, they weren't part of Netflix Well, you know, I love it cuz I love my Roku But I really just hope that they continue to thrive. Well, you know, I'll Gigantic players are also in the space and if it gets more important every day If Roku ends up being the last on the block to get this actually usually Apple TV is the later one to get stuff HBO now is an exception because Apple got in there and struck a good deal but then I guess that's the thing is now as We see these over the air or start over the top services become more and more of the norm and you see things like You know Disney begin to have its stock price affected by the mother of all cable subscribe cable subscription fee Per the cash cows ESPN start to suffer a little bit that this is going to be a rapidly You know that this is gonna go from from old West shantytown to Metropolis really quick And if I'm gonna play Roku fanboy for a moment, we have Thousands more apps than any other set top box out there. We were one of the first to get sling TV We are one of the first to get fill in the blank five other things that I had my PR department research We are well positioned. In fact, we are best positioned for that frontier of which you Justin Yeah, I mean there's that if you want to be a Homer like that's definitely anything you could say Speaking of rapidly developing areas of internet content Apple said Thursday that Apple music has more than a hundred Sorry 11 million members during its free trial period two million people have chosen the free Family a trial plan for comparison Spotify has more than 20 million paid subscribers worldwide Apple also announced a new high for its app store with 1.7 billion transactions That's not a lot. I'm gonna be honest with you That's not a lot for a lot of subscribers for a free trial period. I mean You got Spotify over there with 20 million and granted Apple's not gonna come with 20 million right out of the gate But they should be closer to that I think because you figure a lot of these trial people are as soon as they get charged For the first time are just gonna drop right off Yes, and no, I mean this is you know with the evolving over the top kind of eco space It's been interesting to watch what that You know that that burn and return rate kind of is especially on on free trials You know 11 million compared to I mean if Spotify is the industry leader at 20 and they have half that in free trials right now Before you know you gotta figure Apple also has the built-in advantage that every year They're gonna release a new iPhone and every year there's going to be new people that get it and on that screen that that when they first launch It will say hey, would you like to start a free trial of Apple music? Or if they continue to do it past that so I don't know I mean I guess I don't know enough about that space to say whether or not it's good or bad But it certainly means they are a player and if right now they are the clear number two to Spotify Then it's better than being you know the clear number three behind Spotify and title or Google music Are they number two? I didn't say anything about that and I definitely would call them number two with these are all trial period still at this point Well, I mean But how many so so Spotify is 20 million paid 21 million paid Yeah, Apple has 11 million total and they're all free right now right now. They're all free. Yeah, we'll see See net reports Microsoft's latest version of Outlook for iOS supports the Apple watch Users can glance at email get notifications of new messages and use preset replies Even emojis and dictation as you can with most things to respond and ours technical notes that Microsoft also announced today It is open sourcing large parts of project Island would its set of libraries and development tools that make it easy to port iOS apps to Windows the first code release is available on github under the MIT license So, you know if you're an Outlook user and you're an Apple watch user I don't know how big that Venn diagram is but this is great news And it's you know more of satcham and out there making sure that as much Microsoft product works with as many different things as possible Yeah Had to change the impression because the last one got political Yeah, we officially dropped the IA off of satcham and no, yeah, he's the satcham and yeah Reuters reports that HTC said it will cut jobs and discontinue models as part of its strategy to focus on high-end Devices and developing markets like India CFO Shailen Chang said the cuts will be across the board and that they will be significant Cost reductions would extend to the first quarter of 2016 But no further details were given man the piece of this that caught my eye Is HTC saying we're gonna send sell high-end phones to India as our big bet That's not to say there's not a lot of folks willing to spend some money on high-end phones in India but That's not where the big growth market is And there are a lot of competition for high-end phones in the world So I don't know that I would stake the future of my company on that particular strategy It certainly is counterintuitive, you know, and so crazy just my work factor Is that what you're saying the hope for HTC is that they are not too clever by half and they You know really shoot themselves in the foot But I can understand where they're coming from when you look at the fact that you know Apple sells whatever Amount of smartphones they do and yet make like upwards of 75% of the profit in the market You know the dream of selling the high-end phone is certainly something that I can understand to be appealing But I agree with you the the emerging market I don't know if that's gonna be the place that they're going to you know stake their claim I mean I get the logic which is like well everybody's trying to sell the mid-range phones in India So we'll just jump head to the high-end phones. They don't have a terrible brand for that though No, they don't they make really good high-end phones. That's the really sad part is the HTC one has been universally praised as a great phone Yeah It's just you know, where do you go from here? Almost a third of Britain's access the web using a smartphone according to the next web That number is a full 10 percentage points higher than the previous year according to data provided to the Guardian by Ofcom Demand for video and availability of higher mobile connection speeds are cited as a couple of the reasons to see that increase Other highlights from the report show 19% of Britain's use tablets to access the web Two-thirds of adults have a smartphone and the average time spent online with a smartphone is one hour and 54 minutes You know it Have we really appreciated like in in our tech space because I feel like we were we are just the the proverbial boiling frog that the great democratization of mobile data and and and smartphones has just Really been like that the defining characteristic of our age, you know It's kind of what Scott and I were talking about yesterday except in reverse We were talking about is this a problem that it has become the defining piece of technology of our age But you're absolutely right like this is the great equalizer people who would never in a million years Pick up a laptop for themselves Definitely have smart phones and if you look at what it's done to the debate about the digital divide that before it was like All right, we got a wire of the Ozarks, you know, we had we had to have our own Ohio Valley You know your project to make sure that we get internet to everybody who can or to disenfranchise or poor communities and Now it's like well, let's just see if we can get a you know some sort of a repeater out there So the phones that they already have can just get better and faster internet Yeah, it was the first way that my sister had living out in the country Was able to get reliable decent internet with somebody beam and Ymax out in the out in the rural areas Tech crunch reports that IBM announced it will pay a billion dollars for merge health care a medical imaging company IBM plans to fold the technology in to the Watson health unit, which has been focusing on natural language procession or processing IBM wants the Watson supercomputer to start learning pictures and video and what better way than with billions of images of bodily organs For its future human slay the peaceful human counterparts Ah Yes, Watson use your powers for good But seriously the amount of imaging data that's available to medical practitioners today, especially radiologists apparently is Overwhelming it's not that they can't look at an image and be able to tell what's there It's that there's too much image the images are too high resolution. There's too many of them And not too many of them in a bad way It's that it's really hard to wrap your head around all the data that can be done And so something like Watson which is already proven to be very helpful in diagnostics if it can actually analyze images and point doctors in the right Direction say look here first. Yeah, it's not trying to do the job of the doctors for them But it's could provide a great assistance in cutting down the tediousness of having to sort through all of the images You know in it is yet another great example of us kind of And we're just so close we are we are so close to big data being big Relevancy to us on a more on a more retail and understandable level that you look at this And it's not far from from you know us just seeing major breakthroughs with a lot of this computing power Yeah, absolutely. No, this is really exciting stuff And this is the kind of medical technology that that does get me excited where it's actually helping doctors do their jobs Better not that I don't get excited about You know some biotech stuff or or even though the robotics and everything But but just just making people smarter is what this feels like We have a great subreddit at daily tech news show dot reddit comm in fact today Scotty Rowland One of the folks who manages that subred he's got started the subreddit is gonna kick off an AMA series I'm gonna be the first one on there So if you're around at 6 p.m. Eastern time 3 p.m. Pacific and want to jump in there with some questions Please do but every day we ask for people 24 hours a day to get in there and vote on Stories being submitted or even submit some of your own Abituella condolce he Again, I want to thank him for submitting so many Good good links because he's a he yeah, I'm like what I said yesterday on the show Sorry Sweet Yeah, well, you know wrong with that No writers has a report of the financial time story that Kevin Mahaffey CTO of lookout and Mark Rogers Principal security researcher at Cloudflare will detail how they hacked a Tesla at Defconn on Friday The researchers had to connect a laptop from inside the car So it's not a remote hack But they were able to shut the car down at low speed of around five miles per hour screens went black music turned off The handbrake came on they gave Tesla credit for having some pretty good firewalls Tesla, for instance Does not connect its entertainment system to its drive system? They said that there was a pretty graceful way that the car came to a stop once it actually had been hacked Recode reports Tesla says they have patched the flaw in an over-the-air update man, and we are gonna talk a lot more about Defconn, but Do you get the sense that especially this year and it has been increasing every year since the Prism leaks that Defconn is kind of becoming this major newsmaking event year-on-year No, no, I don't I Really don't I'm not even playing. I'm not even playing devil's advocate here Like I feel like exactly the same number of stories are coming out of Defconn and black hat has always come out The difference is if I'm CNN a browser got hacked a Car got hacked. Whoa, so I guess in that sense Their bigger stories that feel more relevant to people because yeah, we're getting a lot more car hacks now So and I guess that but that's my point. Okay, it's not that black They're not a Defconn has changed Defconn in many ways that the big boy never left, you know They've been providing these same great news at low prices for years don't come back The difference is we're ready to hear what's happening at Defconn And we understand it and is relevant to us in a way that it really really hasn't been before Yeah, I think that's fair to say for sure a lot more people are in tune not just because it's about cars Right that that makes it easier for people to identify Also because of what you said about prism and Snowden revelations where people are thinking about these issues more I think that's a good point and you were able to rope in big bold face buzz feed click bait names like Google Apple Yahoo face Yeah that kind of stuff But here we go Star Fury Zeta submitted a ZD net article from black hat that fire I researchers tau way and you long Zhang have four methods to remotely steal fingerprints from Android phones the hack works on the HTC one max Sorry India and Samsung Galaxy s5 phones because the fingerprint sensors are guarded by system privilege rather than root Affected vendors have issued patches for their vulnerabilities That's that's another trend that I'm noticing which I think is different is a lot more of these vulnerabilities have already been patched There's a lot more responsible disclosure and a lot more vendors actually responding to responsible disclosure In fact, there's probably the same amount of responsible disclosure just more response to it than in the past And that's a good thing you want to hear about these kinds of hacks They're like hey we found this thing it was really bad, but you know what there's a patch for it So you can go protect yourself about it just points out how important it is to keep your system up to date and That just shows you what that increased relevancy and news media attention can do for you because now if you are HTC or Samsung You are not just guarding against you like oh whatever make your noise in your nerd conferences You know kids whatever this is major news and especially on the heels of some of the other Android vulnerabilities Can be dangerously looked at as a trend if you want it is quite hard enough and and pulling back to two things You said before one is you know the rising tide of mobile device usage Makes these sorts of things become more relevant to people because instead of saying oh, that's my nerdy friends problem because he uses computers It's my problem because I I use a phone and my phone has a fingerprint sensor. Wait a minute. I thought that was safe Yeah Yeah, Kevin Kipper sent us the torrent freak post updating citizens of the United Kingdom What is and is not legal after the High Court overturned the legalization of copying for private use remember the High Court said no You cannot pass legislation making it legal for you to copy something for a private use So the UK Intellectual Property Office specifically has issued some guidance saying that a CD Ripped to an mp3 player is not permitted that makes itunes essentially illegal Also creating backups without permission from a copyright holder is precluded which makes Backing up your computer or using things like Dropbox essentially illegal In fact any use of a computer which regularly makes copies of its own data into RAM Probably could be considered illegal. So subjects of the crown legally should just stop using computers you know UK this is why we had to break up 200 plus years ago, you know, we saw this coming He has a giant American flag behind him. Yeah, I know I'm just gonna start chaining USA at some point Of course, this is great bait for us the the tech nerds set to you know wave our fists Angrily and say look at the dummies over there looking are you catching the UK Intellectual Property Office like trolling here? Intellectual Property Office was the one implementing the new legislation said yeah You have the right to do backups the High Court steps in and says no, that's all right UK Property Office like fine Then y'all are illegal. Yeah, they made me say it Yeah, well, I mean and they should I mean this if you are going to make this a kitchen table issue And this is going to be this is a sillier Element of this that we're going to get to a more serious side in our discussion topic But if you want to make these issues Relevant you need to make them what is referred to in politics as kitchen table issues and so Whether or not there is a minutiae of you know What the High Court will decide in terms of copyright law boring snooze wake me up when you're done talking iTunes is illegal What I have iTunes am I a criminal now all of a sudden it's a kitchen table issue So I I appreciate that this is being talked about in these kind of terms because if they're not then we just Continue to get things like like the DMCA that are overreaching and don't make a whole lot of sense and stifle You know productivity even for people like me who are very very very Focused on copyright holders keeping the rights to make money on their on their material Yeah, this is this is absolutely beyond the pale believe that they might be called tea service tables in Sorry They're not I just made that all right, so at Did black hat which we black hat and Def Con kind of run right into each other black hat is more of the industrial Government related you'll get a lot more employees of government at black hat So they have had government people speaking, you know famously and Defending the government surveillance programs this year They invited Jennifer Granick director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society former EFF Lawyer she gave the keynote and talked about the danger of the Centralization of the internet in the name of security and convenience. She said it increasingly facilitates surveillance Censorship and control she talked about how we have level three for fiber Google for search engines and Android there's a choke points for regulation everywhere whether they're governmental or not and She says we need to get rid of secret law We have secret law in this country and it's an abomination in the face of democracy and those are those are laws most famously usually it's like some kind of You can't travel TSA law and they say and you say well show me the regulation that says that and and they won't yeah That that famously happened to John Gilmore an engineer and and civil liberties fighter on the internet so If I were to summarize this what she's saying is that Bad actors pull off bad things and we all want to fight that y'all hack on the office of personnel management hack on Sony But then the government comes in and cracks down with tough laws Somebody else gets prosecuted as a result of those laws and those laws are things like the digital millennium copyright actor the computer fraud and abuse act So you get weave Convicted because he was incrementing URLs He was just changing URLs pretty innocent behavior You get a 14-year-old charge with a felony for changing a background image on a teacher's computer the inspiration for the crackdowns However aren't touched those bad actors overseas those bad actors that we don't know where they're coming from They aren't subject to our law and in the same time these new laws make it more difficult for security researchers and as she called it tinkerers To find new vulnerabilities, which is just what we're talking about finding these vulnerabilities This is what makes products safer and secret law that says well you better not do that because it's against the law But we're not gonna tell you why Just has a huge chilling effect where security researchers like well I'm not gonna I'm not gonna bother with it and we find fewer problems with our code Which makes it less secure which makes it more vulnerable to the bad actors who aren't subject to our laws in the first place I mean beautifully stated We have two major problems there are two two issues with with this this speech in particular one is a system problem She lays out very credibly where there are choke points in which you can put big gigantic regulations And you can effectively clamp down on the internet which was designed to be a decentralized rooting around You know inefficient or a hampered path so we can continue to run wild and free through the grassy meadow of amazing digital awesomeness and then There is the law element and and this and this secret law stuff and everything you said is so prescient and so true and It I'm going to I'm just gonna go out there on a limb and and say that a lot of this is Stuff that was made secret because people didn't want to pay attention to it initially And we could and the government could get away with not having to explain it because again There were only so many people who were going to ask and they did not have much power This is the point This is the time and this is the rallying cry that we need to hear so more and more we can say wait a minute Why are these things happening? Why are these CEOs of? Major companies like Google and Apple and Facebook not allowed to talk about the what they have done for the prism You know the prism system although by you know, whatever indications they would very much like to be as transparent as possible These are things that are not clear We don't know and it is a very I think a poignant that today We are going to have a bunch of people that are running for the presidency of the United States up on stage answering questions And I would love on both sides of the aisle for there to be a Yes, or no question. Is this something that you think is necessary and why? Because you need to justify and I think that there are arguments that some of these have good rule that there is good ruling, but why? When it comes to something that is so invaluable to the economy and the freedom of Of not only American citizenry, but the world are we not being clear and can you know clear with?  We're not talking about black helicopters. We're not talking about secret governments We're talking about mostly policy papers and and and interpretations So most famously during president Bush's administration There was an interpretation of the Patriot Act that said you will prosecute people under these particular Interpretation we believe this is our legal access and they wouldn't let anybody see what that access was So it was tantamount to a secret law and I think that's mostly the kind of thing She's talking about was in the technology community the computer fraud and abuse act has very similar aspects to it where it's very vague it's a very wide-ranging most people say overreaching and It can be used as a weapon to say well, you know, you do that. We'll go after you with computer fraud and abuse act Which it there should be a computer fraud and abuse act But it shouldn't be so wide-ranging and so overreaching that people who are just trying to test systems Yeah, the good of those systems Are either hauled into jail Scared into not doing their work or just get out of the business altogether and that has in fact happened Now she has three really relevant quotes here. John Gilmore as I mentioned before Famously has said the net interpret censorship as damage and routes around it You know, that's the source of me always talking about the internet routes around, right? She points out Tim Wu in his book the master switch talks about the historical progression of information technology as hobby to industry free to controlled open to closed and that we are at that transition point with the internet right now and She says we need to either work very hard to fight against that kind of centralization Both privately with companies like Google but also publicly with with the government and we here's a quote from her We need to be ready to smash it apart and make something new and better and and That is what I have always taken from from like that that that master switch quote Is that it goes from open to closed because oftentimes it becomes less relevant that that the most relevant is the most open Because that is what we like because that oftentimes breeds the greatest efficiency What I I think is something that that needs to be understood in this topic is something that you just brought up This makes for weak systems. We are lesser We are weaker when we keep too much under wraps when we keep too much in the darkness This is the reason why you know, you know when when the wiki leaks of Issue happened and this is not the same thing specifically, but I think the same philosophically There were people inside the Pentagon that we're saying yeah We knew we were gonna get burnt by this because we just classify too much There's too much that we put in to classification And therefore more people have to have classified access and therefore we put ourselves at risk to have things fall out into the public eye that there is a Toll there is a damage to not being transparent on everything that we can and that is I think What is legitimately there to be argued is are we keeping in in a in a tide of rising? Technological technological literacy Are we doing ourselves a great disservice by not putting these rules and regulations out in the sunshine? Where they where they effectively belong and and that was the promise of the internet right is it will bring more transparency? It will decentralize things and it has to a point But what I think Granik and several other people Consistently are pointing out is we're letting it slip away. We're letting it be centralized and we're participating in that By saying you know what? I'm gonna put all my data with Google You know what I'm gonna do all my postings on Facebook You know what when the government passes these laws on surveillance? I'm gonna covetch about it, but I'm really not gonna do much to to fight it And I'm not gonna do much to protect myself And I'm not gonna worry about encryption and I'm not gonna you know and she goes on and on some of the points I think she makes her a little a little more extreme than others I think people are actually are very concerned with privacy and security But where she has a point is that they want someone to provide that solution and though Someone's maybe the very people they shouldn't be trusting to provide those solutions So it it's a fair point. She brings up and I don't think she has an answer in her keynote But I don't think she meant to I think what she's saying is hey wake up call Ladies and gentlemen, this this is something we are going to lose a huge advantage that we have gained if we don't pay attention And and I think there is and I mean this metaphorically and not literally a bit of a political grandstanding here I mean that this was like you said a conference that by all accounts is a little bit more Tilted toward a favorable idea of some of the government You know regulations that the head of the NSA was the keynote speaker there last year and got a favorable response So I think that there was a reason why this came out as fire and brimstone as as as it did And it was as dire of a warning as it was but There are some really legitimate points here and and and it's if we're not going to make it something that we talk about Then then these laws they it doesn't matter whether they're secret or not, you know Like they're they're they're just going to be irrelevant to people because that you know, it's just a Ghost in the wind. Yeah, and while accounts. She's getting Amazing response. She packed the room people were cheering One great quote I saw a tweet from Neil Rubin king on this dark reading calm story People are more afraid of sharks than cows, but cows kill ten times more be afraid of the right things And I think that's where I want to leave this is you know a lot of times We're afraid of sharks right and the government does this over and over like look out for that, you know Threat over there in this case, so you know cyber attacks We need to defend against that threat over there And those are sharks meanwhile We've got all kinds of cows around that could totally gore us and kill us if we're not careful with them They're not dangerous in and of themselves, but we're not being careful with them So we need to take care of our cows Not to mention, you know, they're they're farts that, you know, erode the ozone layer Yeah, absolutely just by existing although they're tasty All right, let's move on to our pick of the day dual pick of the day podcasting apps One from Corey and one from Nate Corey says I found a podcasting service that gives you more social and discovery options for podcasts than I've ever seen before called Knomad K-N-O-M-A-D At K-N-O-M-A-D.com. It's currently only on iOS, but it's making its way cataloging and indexing shows best part It is I finally have a large play pause button to use in my car. The interface is really great DTS frogpads diamond club shows are on there as well And then Nate wants to recommend podcast attic he says created by an independent not a big company Every feature is available with the free version They only charge if you want to remove advertising And we got a link to the google play store if you want to check out podcast addict as well Man that is you know trying to discuss somebody's method for listening to podcast because it is such a personal medium You know is is like trying to discuss religion sometimes like so just Take that as you will if you like what you do There's no need to write in an email or send back on twitter that you love what you love We all love what we love and we can enjoy it as long as we are all listening to daily tech news show You're cool by us. Yeah, just a couple other ideas. That's all But do send your picks for all kinds of things to feedback at daily tech news show dot com You can find my picks at daily tech news show dot com slash picks Uh, so yesterday kind of related to today's topic We were talking about computer literacy and we got a lot of great feedback from this Comey says when I help people with computer issues if they say something like I don't know I touched something and it died Then I can't help them He says if they say when I dragged the icon instead of clicking and it showed an error dialogue Then I know I can help them knowing the very basic basic terminology and how to describe what you experienced Is an important communication skill in any field of knowledge and comey says I think that's the literacy part of computer literacy Yeah, you know It's I I I agree with half of that more than I agree with the second half I think that there is a need to understand some of the specific dialogue But more than that I think that there is a need for people to understand that very often what they think happened Did not happen with with with technology It is so easy to get lost in the woods and I found myself to be immediately 75% made of stat uh You know a more computer literate them the the second that I realized that I did not know what I was doing And to try to explain it to somebody Uh beyond just the most basic I did x and then why uh terms was going to Only further confuse the situation rich from lovely cleveland compares it to where cars were in the 50s and 60s. He says Uh, you need shop class. You don't need to be able to completely rebuild an engine But you should be able to do basic maintenance and he says as devices become more sophisticated I think they'll require more specialized knowledges and tools Putting it into the purview of commodified specialists, but that implies an inherent reliability So we you know progressing to the point where we don't need to be able to understand how computers Work in every aspect of them, uh, could be a good thing. He says Paul said I was listening to that email that spawned the fascinating discussion yesterday's episode And there was mention of rotary dialed telephones. I can speak directly to that I was giving an intro to technical writing presentation at the local writers conference in may Rotary telephones was part of the example roughly half of my attendees had no experience with a rotary dialed telephone Two of which had never even seen one in their lifetime suffice to say I felt old Yeah, dude Uh, and then finally yaru in rainy melasia, uh talking about touch devices says Usage in the working world is only going to increase for touch devices But i'm not convinced that they'll replace the traditional mouse and keyboard altogether This is because strangely enough physical keyboards and mice Are and can be more efficient in many cases for a lot of people just by the nature of their shape Very interesting. I you know, I have to say The only thing that would replace a keyboard for me like I hate touch screen keyboards I much prefer physical keyboard because I can feel where I'm going and I you know, I just type faster on it Uh, the only thing that would replace it for me would be sub vocalization If I don't have to say anything out loud I can just make the movements so i'm not bothering anybody nobody can hear what i'm saying But it makes the word show up or moves the cursor around I could see that that's a maybe a longer way down the road But that's the only thing I could think of anyway. Yeah, I just always think with that kind of stuff that you know You know, it's like the the quickest way to make god laugh is enhancing your plans out loud Like, you know, the the quickest way to look like an idiot in 10 years is to announce what you believe the near future is going to be Especially in this climate Totally no, it's going to be something entirely different than what I just described but yeah It's going to take something that really makes it easy For me to enter that text without anyone else being easily able to see what i'm doing and me You know Bothering them uh Dwayne from germany again wrote in and said you and veronica asked and microsoft delivered Translation for ios and android at the correlating watches. I says it looks pretty cool on the watches too Uh, that is awesome Yeah, so thanks microsoft. Uh, veronica and I will come up with another list of things we would like you to create And that is it to the top Folks, if you haven't checked out the contender card game You haven't fully entered This current election cycle and if you are saying good, I don't want to be part of this election cycle The contender is the only thing that will actually help you bear the next couple years Uh, oh dude. Yeah, listen, we are just again This is the very very very very tip of the iceberg not one but two political debates happening tonight With the a field of 47 000 republican candidates all arguing at once They the the contender you know and i've talked about it a little bit on the show It is it is now live go ahead and check it out the contender Dot us slash kickstarter is the short link that you need to See everything and if you are watching live Then go ahead and check us out right after we are done We will be on diamond club dot tv and we will be watching both debates There is an undercard and a main event for the debates today And we're going to be watching both of them and creating new cards that we will release to everybody For free this uh this evening once everything is all done so We got a bunch of really fun things that we're going to do So go ahead and check us out But the contender kickstarter has been a gigantic success and I got to thank So many of the listeners for dt and 2 dtns for that You know the diamond club and frog pants community came out in a major way when this thing launched So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much to everybody who backed and if you didn't check us out The contender dot us slash kickstarter as raved about by fast company daily dot and and so many more It's uh, you know, I don't know. I think it's fun, but I made it. So yeah, it is fun. I didn't make it I could still say that Thank you to all of our bosses That's not most of you But those of you who actually do pitch in and help create the show so that the others can enjoy it You guys are amazing. Uh, those of you who can't pitch in or don't pitch in It's fine. Here's what I want you to do. That's the that's the a big chunk of you out there that are that are like, you know What I'll let somebody else carry me for a while totally fine All I want you to do is go tell one other person today that you think might enjoy this show To check out daily tech news show somebody who doesn't know about it. Just do that and you're clean. You're good You're fine Your consciousness is totally clear Just just go tell one other person like hey go check out daily tech news show dot com I think you'd really like it and then understand that's why there was only one set of footprints in the sand Go check out our uh, ask me anything that i'll be doing this afternoon in the subreddit daily tech news show dot reddit dot com Our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com. Give us call 51259 daily That's 5932459 listen to the show live monday through friday at 4 30 p.m Eastern player dot alpha gig radio dot com and visit our website daily tech news show dot com back tomorrow with Lamar wilson and len parolton talk to you then The show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com Diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this brover And that bosses Is what you just made happen. You're the best. Oh my god. Uh, all right. Well, I hate to drop out here But uh, I got a I got a rock and roll live. You got an election to run I understand we got we got to turn on fox news and get get get a cranking. So uh, Ram and rick perry are probably already You know spit and hot fire. Uh, we're we're gonna have to go check it out. All right, man Go do good work amiclub.tv as soon as tom is over Excellent Bye That was a good show. What should we call it? Uh, well, I think we should call it um Ibe m medical is the top vote getter right now with ibe medical ibe medical ibe medical Uh, I want to cast hbo now that one's good too. I like that HTC later. Uh, sad but true That one's pretty good. Yeah Pull my fingerprint I like that DRM deranged rights management. Yeah, it's true enough Uh Legal loopholes lack logical legislation get in there on showbot.tv do some voting. Let us know which one you like The such a man. He's the such a man. This is why we broke up in 1776 Car hacks have a knack to pack black hat flak. Wow Poetic oh my gosh, that was uh, I see well played. I see you. Yeah. Yeah Yeah Don't let the cows kill the internet I like that one too that one's main topic.  I know that was our one repeater That's okay. We don't totally overlap out of that. That's fine Um But my story my bio cow story was the actual accurate one As opposed to the one that was allowed to be ginned up to keep the right right You he had no fear of being brodyed while he was doing tell it anyway So you can get the uh, you can get the story behind the story story behind the story Which is involves less guns. Yeah Yeah, I thought there were parts of that missing. Oh, I never revealed to Justin that I was wearing the uh The jacket for his wedding. Oh, right. I don't know if he realized that All right time it's it's go time. It's time to pick a title Um Well, I think I like the one about the cows The internet is full of cows Or don't let the cows kill the internet.  Yeah That was a good one Floored up I'm just exporting. You know what though? I think I'm gonna uh, jump out of here a little earlier Even though I'm still editing so that we can make room for jury To get going with the election coverage on diamondclub.tv and also To get prepped for the subreddit AMA So if you're watching live go check that out daily tech news show at reddit.com. I'll tweet out a direct link and If not, you can still jump in there and see things. Who knows? Maybe I'll swing back through and answer questions even after the main period So Maybe I'll learn how to see an AMA You will you will you will be


Bus air and have announced that a number of bus routes will be discontinued following the latest budget cuts. The Dublin-Clammel, Atlone to Westport and Dublin Dairy Routes have been axed in order to make savings of 1.1 million euros. They've also announced the possibility of an all-out strike. There was a mixed response to the news from the students here at DCU. I suppose it was a success for the Dublin bus so like that is kind of you know as a whole like a successful thing right like that you know it worked for the last guys so it might work for them but like it doesn't personally affect me either like plus the bus or services like where we're from we're from Tipperary and they're absolutely like shocking down there like it's really really bad like there's like one bus a day to wherever you need to go like there's nothing so and like I think the prices are like kind of crazy. Yeah like I live in Routes so it does affect me like I come in and out here on the Dublin bus or bus air and sorry but I support the strike because like I think that like the transport sector is really underfunded and while it does inconvenience me I'm like broadly supportive of the strike anyway. Yeah well coming from Raskam and trying to get the bus up in the weekends if there's no bus running by I've no real other way of getting up I've no way to get into town to get a train a year depending on lifts or buses and if there's no bus I can't really go to college. Well it does personally affect me because I travel up and down from Mayo every week so I use either the train or the bus whichever is easier. I don't know much about the strikes to be honest but if it's more money for the bus drivers then I'm up for it. I think it's a bit silly that they're going on strike at the moment with the company making such a loss but I do understand at the same time you know they do need to express their kind of opinion on the wage decreases for them but I do think they'll they should go back and talk to bus air management and come to a compromise on the matter. It is affecting an awful lot of rural routes coming up in the town to Dublin so hopefully they can come to a compromise very soon. Approximately 110,000 bus passengers will be affected if the proposed bus strikes go ahead. The CAO of bus airing Ray Hurnen stated that the strike would cost the company half a million euro a day. Colleen Brady DCUTV News


Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you are joining us from, my name is Abhijit Bhathuri. I work as a talented branding coach. And in this podcast, I actually showcase careers of people. You know, when you ask everyone, or you can ask anyone, how did you land up being where you are today? The answer is so fascinating. And that is really what got me hooked on to writing more than studying about careers. And eventually, of course, as I was a career coach, it gave me a chance to interview a lot of people and learn from them. Today, the person that I am going to bring on as my guest is somebody who has something in common with me, which I'll come to right at the end. But you know, what was also interesting is this person's belief in himself changed because he got the third rank in a general knowledge test in school. And that sort of really set the person thinking that maybe I'm destined for better things. But this person has an amazing amount of knowledge and interest in all kinds of music, starting from Kannada music to Hindustani music and rock and roll and Brazilian and Greek music. And you know, we'll talk a little bit about that as well. He actually is better known for some of the fascinating books that he's written. I was recommending this and, you know, in a show that I was doing on LinkedIn Live with another guest of mine. And I said that both books are brilliant and I love them. I completely recommend that. But I am going to today introduce him as a person who was my super, super senior at XLRI and ladies and gentlemen, wait for this. On to the show. Don't go. Huggy. So good to have you on the show, Huggy. Huggy has a complicated person name, which is Haya Griva Rao. For the benefit of uneducated people like me, what does Haya Griva mean? I know it's the name of God, but what? Yes, it is. Haya Griva is supposed to be an incarnation of Vishnu in this incarnation. You know, anyway, it has to do with saving knowledge from the Asura. That's kind of what the story is. So usually it's a name particular in certain communities in southern India. So in some communities, we worship Ganesh as the God of knowledge in other communities, Haya Griva is. And by the way, and by the way, while I'm at it, I may as well tell people as to how I got to be called Huggy. Due to a random chance event, I had a great uncle who went to Yale. And then he married a wonderful American woman called Mary Camp. He and Mary Rao came to India and lived in Bangalore actually for 50 years. So she had a little bit of difficulty in enunciating Haya Griva. It sort of got shortened to Huggy. I think she gave me a great gift. Don't you think so, Amiji? I completely agree. It's so much easier to say Huggy. And so I'm going to sort of stick to that. And you also describe yourself with Huggy. Please do that. And you know, you're, of course, the talent and branding expert. And it is an interesting branding queue, we finally saw say. Completely it is. And Huggy, you are, of course, besides, of course, your journey as an Oscar. And we talk about all of that. Huggy and I both went to XLRI.  Huggy was the gold medalist. I was also the same list, but at the other end of this list. But Nemla Nesic, an amazing journey that everyone has at XLRI. Huggy is no different. Was it when you decided that you wanted to pursue your career as an academic? I wish I could share this with viewers that it was my decision. It really was. When I went to XL, I was very young kid. I'd come from a small town, Bishaka Patna. I was good at studying and taking tests and things like that. But I didn't have a whole lot of exposure. And I go to XLRI, like many other people do in those days. I'm talking about 78 to 80. We all wanted to be executives. And I too wanted to be an executive. But then 75% of more of my classmates suggested I was better suited to the profession of being a professor. When I would ask them, they say, you know, you love the research behind, you know, anything that is taught in class. But most of all, you like to complicate things. And you can never complicate things in the real world of your business. So you'd never make it. Well, I thought to myself, isn't it real? When 75% of your classmates are kind of telling me that, clearly they're seeing something in me that I'm unable to see myself. And I think this is sort of a point I want to make about careers. And that is careers are about realizing possible sets. And one of the difficulties all of us have is sometimes we can't see our possible. We become too narrow, too constricted.   And you got to say, let me find out what preparing for this career is all about. And here I'm equally grateful to the faculty and the then dean, Sudha's Roy.  It's really not that interesting. And I'm thinking of doing my PhD. And maybe I should actually do some independent studies. And right then, look at another random event. G2 Sync comes to XLR from work. And Sudha says, why don't you talk to G2? And so I go talk to G2 and say, hey, can you help me with an independent study? He's spent over a couple of terms. And G2, of course, made sure I learned his first year docking readings at the Water School. But most of all, G2 gave me another gift. Every week I remember I had to go to his room. He used to stay in the dorms at that time. He was unmarried. But he had, of course, a much more luxurious room. And he had a fantastic sound system. And he learned classical music. And that was where it was the first time I listened to Beethoven's 9th or 3rd Brahms and Bach, many of which were conducted by Herbert von Karaj. Prior to that, I must tell you, I had no idea of western classical music. So when I think of my own sort of career, what kind of described it as a lot of random draws or chance events that had nothing to do with me, that occurred, and that created openings, and that presented a possible self to me. And so that was, I think, sounds great gift because it created a safe enough environment where you could buy on any self that you wanted. You wanted to be a rock musician, go for it. You wanted to be an actor, go for it. And I think that kind of wonderful permissiveness was something I had not income. And it was fun being with people much older than me. And because I was the youngest, they were very generous with me. I still remember a wonderful friend of mine now in Sydney, Australia, Mohamed Braham, affectionately called Mopes. He looked at me and said, Huggie, I was around and studying when you were but a gleam in your mother's eye. Guys, yeah, that's an incredible state word. And you know, you have been teaching at Stanford now. Do you think that the students who come in today are more clear about their career plans? I certainly, I'm still unclear about what I want to do. But I just see a dramatic difference. Perhaps age and time have made me nostalgic and seeing the past through like the cause of wonderful nostalgia. But really, when we were there in 7880, we were only just grateful to be there. The second thing is I don't think anybody thought about a career. I don't think anybody thought about strategy and this, that and the other. We just had a great time and there was something called placement season where vaguely you had to strategize. Because you could only go for so many final interviews and this, that, you remember. And that was the only time you had to think about it. But then my impression was we all got jobs within, like in those days, it wasn't within two days, but maybe within a week or 10 days, you know, is what I vaguely recall. It all happened very fast. And then you had one more turn. I wish I could say that we spent the one more turn preparing for New York jobs. But that was the last thing on our minds. We just had more fun. And so I think there was no instrumentalities the way I would say it. It's like, oh, I don't need to get to know Abhijit because Abhijit's like a, you know, will get me into connection with this network or that network. It just didn't, those kind of thoughts never crossed any, at least my mind at that stage. But the students now, at least the ones I see at step, they're much not kind of, as you implied, focused, goal-driven and so on. And the way I would kind of describe it is, at the time when I was at XLRR, I didn't realize like choosing a job. I vaguely sensed it, but I couldn't formalize it, Abhijit. But you kind of realized instinctively that choosing a job wasn't just choosing a set of activities in an employer. You really were choosing a version of yourself. I don't think we did that deliberately. I must confess, I kind of sleepwalked into, as you can recall from the story. But the kids I see at Stanford Business School, they're very explicit about the kind of self they've chosen. Most of them come to Stanford because they want to choose an entrepreneurial version of themselves. And so they have their stories, but it's wonderfully inspiring, you know. So I teach a class, for example, here called The Future of Work. And I was challenging our MBA students who take it. It's a lab for future of work-related startup hypotheses. And I said, look, you know, The Future of Work doesn't mean the future of work for people who work in, you know, Microsoft or Google or, for that matter, Goldman Sachs or the TPG or anything like that. There are a lot of frontline workers. What's the future of work for them? What can you do for them? And it's amazing how our students actually responded to that. Some of them now have startups trying to improve the world of work for the hourly work. It's amazing. I feel very touched by it. So they have a lot more drive. They know they're going on a 10-year startup journey. It's like very different kind of orientation, very different. Is it better to be focused in today's context? You know, you talk about the future of work and I'm just intrigued. Would you say that it's a better idea that you know exactly which direction you want to go and what do you want to do? Why do you want to do it, all of that? Or is it a better idea to be around a little bit, sample a bunch of things and then make up your own mind about what works best for you? It's a great question. I think the way I would respond to it is it's kind of different strokes for different folks. So the way I'm interpreting your question, Abhijit, then, hey, do you kind of want to be a little bit of an explorer or do you kind of want to be somebody you've got a map and you know where to get to and that's kind of what you're going to do? I think I would kind of prefer a little more exploration. One is I've done that myself. I find it certainly kind of helpful. But the other thing is you don't want to get a prematurely commit to a version of yourself without checking out what the possibilities are. It's kind of like you're asking me, hey, how do you want to eat in a restaurant? Do you want to look at the menu of possibilities when they give you the menu or do you just say, Navy, I'd like come here just to kind of have an omelet done legally in Dosa and that's all I care about. And I really don't care about the other things. I would find that to be sort of hard to give you an example. The other day we were at Los Angeles and we were in there's a man, my wife and I, we'd gone for our birthday and we were at this restaurant. And suddenly we see a thing which was, if you can believe it, tuna poke with crispy rocks. And when you really look at it, you quickly realize all that they did was brilliantly combine tuna poke with the Indian bale. Now, you know, I'm eating bale, but obviously it's a different kind of bale. You see what I mean? So if you only say I want bale, you probably would never get this kind of dish and other possibilities like that. So my preference always is for a little bit of exploration and the earlier you do the exploration, the better because the cost of a mistake is lower. Does it mean that when, you know, you scale up your career and you've written this absolutely fantastic book which is called Scaling Up Excellence. Getting to more without settling for less. Professor Bob Sutton was also on my show some time back, we had it. And another brilliant book, The Friction Project. I've loved your books. And I'm going to sort of ask you a question and you can sort of point to either of the books and really talk about it. You know, when you said that you sample some ideas, opportunities, possible sense, I like that phrasing and I'm going to steal that, that I think that you look at things that I can do. You look at the possibilities. The more you are able to imagine the easier it becomes. So, you know, I think that's one part of it. But how do you scale it up from there? Because I might aspire to this graduate dream I have for myself. How do I achieve it? So how do I remove friction along the career journey and how do I scale it up? So, you know, that's a great question, Abiji. The way I'm going to answer your question about how do you scale yourself? And that is like the core question. Because what do I mean by scaling ourselves? I mean all of us having a bigger footprint and hopefully a better footprint. Most of us think of scale as having a bigger footprint, not a better footprint. We really need to have a better footprint. Now, from my perspective, one way to kind of think about it is, you really got to carefully think about and this kind of channel some of the arguments we make in our friction book is what you want to do is you actually want to choose jobs so that your curious and generous self is activated. And the key to kind of doing that is to make sure you're doing jobs where a lot of bad friction is kind of removed.  You know, for us, friction, when I say odds, I mean Bob Sutton and I, friction in organizations is kind of like cholesterol. We got good cholesterol and we got bad cholesterol. We got good bacteria, we got bad bacteria. It's the same thing with friction. Some obstacles infuriate people and not only do they infuriate people, what they do is they overwhelm us so that they prevent us from being curious. You really want to avoid organizations like that and frankly jobs. At the same time, all of us know as human beings we can easily choose a more overconfident and more myopic version. So you need jobs with good friction that is obstacles that slows down that make us deliberate and think through a lot more clearly and better. There are a range of ways to do it. Pay careful attention every time you're looking at a job. What are the obstacles involved in the job? And if you ask me, the real role of leaders is to be trustees of other people's stuff. The most important thing is you need both focus and flow. Flow has to do with initiative, energy, all of those kinds of things. When you're taking bad friction out, people flow a lot more easily. They can do things on their own. They don't need to check with the boss. You can kind of really act as an owner. On the other hand, you need to get people to focus, to look carefully at things, to slow down, to consider alternative hypotheses and that's kind of where you need to put in good friction. So my view is the real thing of a leader is carefully to think about, what obstacles am I going to take out so that the right things become easier to do and what obstacles do I put in so that the wrong things become. And the most important thing is when you're in a job, you are allowed to be curious and generous.  Let me give you an example. And now I wish I could tell you it was my own sagacity and ingenuity. It so happened that when I joined the Tata's, I was with the Tata Management Training Center in Pune with Francis Minesis, who was my first boss. Francis was like a very good boss, you know, and I'm very grateful to him because he gave me opportunities that I don't think anybody would have gotten at my age. I was like 20 and a half or 20 while. And I don't know how he would do all of this. Before I knew this, I would be writing a note for Mr. Coley of TCS or Mr. Tobaccoana. The amazing thing that surprised me is they would read my notes and read me out for two hours, telling why all of the things I put down in the note were so far into the future and completely implausible in the press. And it was like an education, you know? And I would wonder, why are they wasting their time on a job like me? And I could just say, man, they don't make any sense. No, but they really wanted to educate me. And for that, you know, you remain very, very grateful, very, very thoughtful and different executives change your life. We had two other colleagues in Pune, Ram Narayan and Mila Khan. They had come from America because they'd done their PhDs and they joined Tata still with Francis Minesis. So I was with them and they never treated me as like a rookie or anything. They saw that I'd done G2's one-year doctoral readings and I was reasonably familiar and they really gave me enormous opportunity. I remember going to IPC and that was the first time I realized a lot of what I knew about organizations completely ignored society and was kind of like, in that sense, like very limited and kind of restrained, you know? Because IPCL is no longer there. It's now part, I think, of the Reminds rule. But I remember going to IPCL and the first thing I remember meeting was a mechanical engineer who asked me to come to a meeting of mechanical engineers and they presented a regression analysis showing how mechanical engineers were punished in the promotion process. Like, if you go to the chemical engineer, they say, we're not becoming factory managers. There's a chemical company, the electronics guys are named Tiger. What are you talking about? Chemical engineering, mechanical engineering. Everything is electronics like we should be the factory. On the one hand, that is half. On the other, the HR department, I think was like, a lot of Bengalis were there. The finance department had a lot of Tamilians.  You know, it was like India in lineage. And then you had a lot of trade unions. I forget the number of trade unions they had with the workers in the shop floor and the head of the Office of Association was a guy from IMA. And I said, you know, why didn't you create this association? So the guy looked at it and said, all of us think our immediate superiors are bosoms. We need to talk to Dr. Dr. Ganguly. And this is the only way we get access to. And we're thinking to myself, like, how do you run an organization? And Ganguly, of course, was a brilliant guy. He was a PhD in chemistry from Imperial College. And I must have been 21. He asked me, he says, so young man, I mean, what do you think I should do? So I looked at him and I said, Dr. Ganguly, the chairman is facing IPCR. They actually are Indian miniature. You have professional competition amongst the professions. You have competition amongst language groups. This is kind of India. And you know, if you ask me, the only way I would is for you to build more plans. And he smiles and he says, why more plans? I said, more faculty manager jobs and more this and that. So he lifts it up and he says, so you think the answer lies in you, Delhi? I said, you're a better judge of that, like I wouldn't know. And he knew this all along, and which is why they actually were starting the modern restaurant gas cracker initiative, which was a huge initiative, created many more opportunities. And I think things like that, they kind of blow your mind, you know? They completely blow your mind. And you kind of realize that you can't sort of think of like Mickey Mouse versions of organizational change. Some organizations are so complex that, you know, you've got to think of other ways of doing things. And it's not like doing the conventional things that people do. So my point is, what you really need are tough assignments that put you at the edge of your knowledge. You're not doing things you know. You're kind of doing most of the things that you don't know. And I think that's like the important point. So I'm straying a little bit, but the point I want to make is do jobs, pay attention to the structure of obstacles, make sure you don't get stuck in jobs with a lot of bad friends. That all that you're doing is, you're waiting like Godot for approval from the boss or filling farms or some other mind ambiguity. But at the same time, you know, don't think that if you're on a job without any speed bumps and stop signs and traffic stops and all that, that's not a good thing either because rushing headlong into action without reflection is often a path to disaster. So you really need to look at both and you got to luck out on mentors. In the end, what you really rely on is the generosity of people. Even when I came and did my PhD, my PhD was not something I kind of considered in a very rational way. I'm going to apply to 20 places. I just loved Ram and Neelakant, the senior colleagues I alluded to you and they came from Case Western Reserve University and they said, you should really go there. And before I knew it, I was admitted, I was going there. And I go there after six months, I quickly realized, you know, they do some interesting things, but maybe all the things they do, they don't interest me. And so I had a choice that I dropped from the program and go to another program. But then I realized, even if I go to another program, formal coursework is going to be one and a half years to two years. So after that, you're on your own, basically, working with advisors, of course. And that was when I raised the most important thing is, you got to be able to teach yourself. And here again, the generosity of colleagues plays a role. And there was another graduate who was on the verge of, became an assistant professor. He joined my committee. His name was Mohan Redding. And he was a man much older than I was, much more in folk, but at no point did he ever say, hey, these ideas are crazy. They're outlandish. He would always listen to me and much to our surprise, we even wrote a couple of papers together and kind of did fun things like that. And then I eventually chose a dissertation topic for which I didn't do any coursework. It turned out, I was sitting next to the accident of office allocation. I was sitting next to people in operations research. There were a lot of Indians in that lot of Turkish people, a lot of Algerian stuff.  So I'm looking there and you know, wondering what to do and suddenly there is this voice that comes and says, honey, what are you doing? Yeah, like trying to understand these positive rate models and parametric distributions of arrival times. He said, I can teach you. He looked at him and I said, how do you know this? And he said, well, I'm from IIT Bombay and my undergrad thesis was on the failure pattern of gearboxes in 5000 BST buses. So immediately he pulls up the data. He teaches me things and it was amazing. So it does take a village to create a career is the point I want to make. And then all these chance events that all kind of come up together and we tell ourselves stories where we're the heroes of the stories and I wish I could tell you such stories, but it's funny you and I are talking about careers. Ethnologically career means a road or a race so at least in French in it. And the answer actually also defines it as your journey through life. Yeah, that exactly. That is exactly the point. And I think you hit the right thing on the main which is it's journey and not a destiny. I think we're in the moment we think of careers as destiny. How do you sort of make sure that at different stages in your life as you go through obstacles and everything? How do you make sure that you continue to have that kind of mindset that you think about it like a journey, not a destination? Well, the first thing is you kind of realize that at least in my case and I would say that's maybe generalizes to other professions too. What is my job as a professor? Abhiji, for me fundamentally it is to be curious. It is to be chat. It is to incubate curiosity and generosity in our stories. And so what you do in your job is it's all about being curious and generous on the job asking questions, looking at research possibilities. Take, for example, the process to write a paper. It takes about six, seven months of hard work and research and analysis and you're trying to make your results go away because other people will be skeptical of what you've done and you want to kind of make sure it meets a high standard of rigor. So, need patience and you can't say I'm going to write this article and I'm going to actually publish it in this journal. Oftentimes, when we begin a research project we don't even know which journal we're going to send. All that you're thinking is is this a good question? And for me, the way I think about investing in good questions is does this question confuse me? And if I talked about the research that I'm studying or doing if I talked to my mom or my grandmother will they understand it and will they be interested? Of course, my wife is a professor too of gerontology and she understands research. I have to tell you Abhijeet and our listeners and the audience I've given some papers to my wife the person who loves me the most and she's fallen asleep on some of my papers.  It's not like pursuing every idea that you have you got to kill a bunch of good ideas so you put energy into greater ideas and I think that's really what to mine mine continually renews the career most of all continually renews your curious and the generous some of these things now I learned from my PhDs too they go to many more advanced classes in computational linguistics than I have I don't have the time to do that I wish I did I study on my own but in a research project we're all doing this together I know what they're doing and every time I do any of these new techniques or whatever it is I always say a prayer to my mom who was a high school math teacher she really taught me some foundations though I didn't appreciate her at that time now I do obviously so the reason I'm sort of sharing all of this is so many things going to a career so many things going to a journey and I think the reason you go in a journey is your period your name is all about you know conserving knowledge protecting knowledge Haya Griba the you know the deity is actually doing this and you are also you know pursuing academic which is interesting because there is also sometimes I wonder that people how does that name influence the choice of careers and I wonder whether that happens couple of things sir just for the benefit of our listeners you know talking to professor Haya Griba Rao better known as Hagi Rao Hagi is written there's two fabulous books one is called Killing Up Excellence the other is the book which I recently read which is called The Fiction Project brilliant books I absolutely recommend that you take a look at both of them and we are today sort of really talking about some of the things that I learned in this conversation I've summarized for you down there in the ticker below that teach yourself you know what you don't know be ready to learn and teach yourself I love that phrase which Hagi talked about which is that you become an accident of office allocation you know he happened to be allocated an office next to somebody from a completely different team and that led to some opportunities and that it takes sometimes a village to create a career so so many people play a role in career the other line that I really took away today was that you know how do you treat your career like a journey and not a destination and of course the last one which I love the phrase you kill a good idea so that you can pursue a better idea you know and everybody says kill a bad idea yeah we all know that but the counter-intuitive thing today for me was kill a good idea so that you can pursue a better idea right right and the picture dialed down on two more things we spoke about the Frickschild project but I want to just share an insight from our scaling book and one of the things that our book on scaling talks about Abhijit is scaling is not more of the same scaling is reinvention I wrote a case study on the chief technology officer at Uber he was the CTO he's no known with the CTO a brilliant Vietnamese guy called Tuan and I remember asking him hey online have you worked for Uber and you know he said four years but it feels as though I worked for 16 different companies it was like startled by what he was implying is each year has four quarters in each quarter Uber was a different company and if we take that analogy to our lives and indeed our careers the most important thing is a career means reinvention I mean look at you Abhijit you're a great example of this kind of reinvention I mean sometimes when I sort of think about the avatar idea in Indian myth and philosophy I love the avatar concept because it kind of gives you flexibility for this reinvention but in order to reinvent oneself you need escape velocity otherwise you're going to be doing the same thing you were with Wipro and then you had to get the escape velocity to leave and do your own thing you know and I think all of us need to figure out in this journey a very important thing is making sure you're generating or paying attention to getting escape velocity because otherwise the gravitational pull of what you're always doing is a huge problem that makes us myopic so that's like one piece we poured ourselves into our jobs most of us do our jobs come soon and there was this young lady who told me this with a quiver in her voice Abhijit she looked at me and said Professor Ra poured myself into my job a lot of the job is doing bullshit work that exhausts and I said and she looked at me and that was when she had a quiver in the voice and she said when I go home she said I have nothing but the scraps of myself for life well I think that is stand and tragic that people build lives like this how can you build a life and a career and all that you've got are scraps for your family scraps of yourself for me in my own way I like to practice curiosity curiosity and generosity are not weights they're practices you got to do that otherwise you lose it and you know it's not like you have it and then that's it it's not like a bank bank it's like you've got to constantly replenish them and so what do I mean by so can you imagine coming in my case if I came home tired and my wife too being a professor she can zoom tired what kind of dinner are we going to have you want to say man let's actually make something quickest and fast which is probably going to be unhealthy unsatisfying so how do you create curiosity in fact we had this conversation during the pandemic so she was saying aren't you bored eating the same food I said that's a really good point she said what do you think mission do I said one one way to eat interesting food is to do randomization you said randomization how are you going to do randomization I said pretty simple I got an atlas we have an old fashioned physical atlas open the map of the world and close your eyes take your left or right index finger zap it on a point in the atlas we'll cook food from there so she closes and I zaps it turns out it's in West Sumatra he looks at me and says West Sumatra oh my god what are we going to do and it's in wait a minute West Sumatra was a bit like on the traffic path of how that went Indian traders and I'm sure there's a lot of influence and we found out there's a dish called the rendang that was specifically designed to last for voyages and I said let's kind of redo our version of the rendang we don't need to do the West Sumatran version so we did it and we loved it but the amazing thing though I legit was I never planned to do this after cooking the dish it spent like a week or two weeks reading about Hindu maritime empires in Indonesia and the great battle between the Sri Vidya empire and the clever ambush conducted by the Chola Navy in the Malacca straits that's how the Sri Vidya empire got destroyed and you know how would you like even come across them she was saying you know the odd you know and you're getting tied the Greek thought even Greek thought can you know you keep eating the same thing anybody will get tired of anything and I said you know well maybe we can do something a little different she said what would that be I said you know everybody thinks Vasco to Agama was the guy who to discover India I mean amongst the Portuguese and all then maybe he was the guy to discover and what they would obviously learn the sailors in Kenya who knew this people it turns out the first Western to discover India was in 100 B.C. it was a guy called Hippolus he'd figured out the monsoon structure so you start in Greece the southwestern monsoons will slingshot you into Kerala you wait until November the northeastern monsoons will slingshot you back to Greek I said imagine you're in Hippolus you're in Kerala you're missing Greek what would you make it's an interesting thought experiment right suddenly it opens up kind of possibilities you know half the herbs that you get in the Greek islands you can never get them in Kerala but there are new things what would you do you get simple thing like a Musaka how would you make it very different so my point is curiosity and generosity aren't just at like work it's in life and one of the things I talk about is make sure you recruit your best self at work at home that you don't do yeah I also know that you've got a huge sort of knowledge about different kinds of music you listen to a lot of different forms of music talk to me about your interest in that and you know how did you how did you build that I appreciate music I don't know how to sing I think the last time my sang was in grade eight in Kintri Vidyame and the Mrs. Sunderam who was the music teacher said I have to sing a song and they said what does Shloka do she said you have to sing this from a fill I'm thinking to myself oh my god this is like a tall order Mrs. Sunderam was a spencer of 50 years at that time so this was the time of Arath Abhijit I'm giving you my age here I must have been a boy of eight or 10 or whatever it is and I'm looking at Mrs. Sunderam and saying Rukputera Mastana Mrs. Sunderam said stop immediately I'm going to give you a pass grade please never sing this song again she said she of course was a baron but the thing is sell expose me to many different pieces of music like Jitu there the rock and roll and all of that but the other thing you see I think people kind of are doorways like you know when I've lived in America and then now for like close to 40 years one of the things we all do is we talk with our parents and I discovered that you know the conversations of my mom were like becoming mom how are you like I was doing yesterday then you can't let me this conversation is going nowhere like I'm asking a series of pro-comer questions and she's replying in kind and it's kind of uninteresting and then I knew that my mother loved karnatic music and then I had you know I need to create another channel of composition so then what I would do is like we're doing the now we would do it on FaceTime or WhatsApp or one of the two or Skype or whatever play a piece of karnatic music and I say mom do you remember the raga sometimes she would sometimes she would forget but what I realized was just the act of me playing the music allowed her to tell me find stories about her child and that made her happy when you really think about careers and you know all of this we're all about our stories I mean I take your stories so we aren't going to be a unique human thing you are basically you might but like otherwise they might make anybody else take away my story and I think the thing we have to think about is life is actually about constructing our story and continually editing it's not like you write a story and they buy you know I've done it once and that's kind of it but you're you know constantly editing the story and that's kind of the reinvention that's sort of what in many ways your wonderful book career 3.0 kind of gets at that because we learning the ability to edit and re-edit so in short it's kind of funny we think of ourselves as authors of our stories and of course we are in one sense but other people are authors too but we are editors and chief of our story and so I love that life you do well I'm glad you do you know because that's kind of who we are right you're the editor and chief of your story and that's kind of what being in charge of your career you know there is actually a professor Professor Wilson at the University of Virginia and the technique he uses for people who are abecks and convicts and so on is the way to get them not to repeat the crime is to help them understand the story and give them the freedom in the agency to change their story to edit and so let's think of ourselves as editors of our story wow that's really powerful and that applies you know in multiple ways if you see yourself as you know as whatever I you know I started my career in June resources and I never ever thought that I would be a writer and that I sort of you know had to go at writing media media and there was great fun and I enjoyed that process that opened up a different chapter of my life altogether on that I recall reading that lovely book of viewers and the way when I read it it seemed to me that what you were doing is you were getting escape velocity if you will out of your role and out of the excel experience and you had to write the book and say you know when you know I'm awakening my skeptical curiosity skepticism is one form of curiosity similarly when I thought that you know would I ever become an entrepreneur and I know you teach entrepreneurs at Stanford I always you know grew up with this phrase that was always told that you know oh Bengalis can never be entrepreneurs and I thought gosh that's a challenge and I must try it out someday and I'm sort of so excited about that whole possibility of being an entrepreneur and that's really something but I sort of found that you can weave yourself in and out of different career journeys like you know to be an employee at some stage to be self-employed to be back as an employee back as an entrepreneur really that's exactly it and all the time we're reinventing ourselves because if you don't reinvent yourself we become kind of stagnant I'm kind of boring you know I want to leave our viewers with a story of an extraordinary woman who reinvented us we went to New Zealand you know we were doing some kind of cruise and you know there was a young Indian girl and she was just by herself she looked at my wife and me and decided we were kind of Indians too my wife is a wonderfully generous person who loves to talk to and eat sometimes I kind of say like do you really need to do that but then other times I always tell her I'm so glad you did because I learned about something I never knew anyway back to this young girl so she asked us how did you meet and we tell her we met in grand school and this and that and she was so we said what brings you here to New Zealand and she must have been 20 and she was a hot-rending still her parents were in the travel agency kind of business international travel she was like a Jain she got married to a guy who was a schizofer and nobody told her that her husband was going to be a schizofer her parents didn't know that the in-laws obviously conceded and here's this woman who was married and you think I got to take her to this block for the next 40 years and it's like I had no vote in the process fortunately her parents were amazing they said you don't need to do that we made a mistake you should take over the travel business and what was the travel business she was doing she would actually target to high net worth Jain families and orchestrate vacations to places where Hindi movies had been shot New Zealand was one such target wow she said that's what brought her to New Zealand I said but what brings you to this city she said oh I came here to she was 20 well 21 she said I came here to negotiate with the Hilton and I said negotiate what and she said well I'm coming with the 50 or 60 very particular vegetarian Jains and we come with our own Maharaj who actually cooks and so we want to stay at your hotel but we want lunch and dinner and breakfast prepared by our own chef and the first reaction of the hotel apparently was to sing non and then this young woman asked what would you have said if I had belonged to the Jewish community and said that I came here with 50 people belonging to the Jewish community and we only want to eat kosher food ordinary people can't make kosher food you have to be blessed by the rabbi et cetera et cetera you would probably say yes to the credit of that hotel they changed their policies there she was unbelievable I mean no you're not insane you know 20 years you're going to be stuck with this guy you didn't know from Adam and now you're set free what do you do and I was like very impressed with her you know and then later I told my wife I'm so glad you chatted with her I think a lot of life is linked that we we admire people and I was once giving a talk in Bombay about scaling up excellence I think at this company any wise and you would know of the company and lovely people Vidya and Raseh Shah are the founders lovely lovely people so I get off the car and you know they have a beautiful terrorist something I'm like some 150 executives I was supposed to give a little talk and there's another lady who stops whose car stops or and she gets out of the car and she said ah Professor Rao Bhasan Bani Kibi I you've come here to give a speech I said yes and I said what brings you here so with pride she tells me many Bhasan Bani Kibi I've come here to give a speech she said wonderful and what is the topic you're talking she looks at me smiles and says the right to pee I said excuse me I knew what she said but I didn't want to reach the conclusion that the second time she smiled and said right to pee and I said excuse me and then she knew that I didn't want to commit to an understanding and she then turns to me in Hindi Pishabh Karnika Haq if I remember so she's like come on and I said oh my god I said Pishabh she said and then she goes before me I want tears in my eyes she grew up in a Muhalla in Mumbai but I didn't know this in the community of Angela in the Bhasan community she belonged to after puberty you couldn't yet use the bathroom there was no bathroom inside the house you had to go out and after puberty you had to ask your dad's permission to go out we can imagine then to go and pee or to go to the bathroom like I don't know about you but like I would think of that as a serious kind of limited freedom I mean in the end you can't eat and you're not free to take a leak or go to the bathroom I mean I don't know what kind of freedom you're talking it gets manny then then thinks oh I can do this on my own and much to her consternation she has to ask her husbands to approve she fires the husband and she launched a movement to get the municipal authorities in Bombay to build 200 bathrooms for women so I just stood up after her and I said I don't think I can talk what is it I can tell you about scaling up look at how she's scaled a dream into a movement I'm always very aware that you don't learn just from other professors other executives you learn from just about anybody I think the more we kind of realize that I think the more open we are it's not just you know people in companies and people who are like opinion gurus or whatever you know it's like anybody can teach us in fact you know there's a lovely tumbrie I'm a big fan of the tumbrie music from India and I fucking the exact in the words and the tumbrie features of course you know the tumbrie is a song form of a music sure sure mostly Krishna and Radha and various other things in this tumbrie Krishna crosses the river and there is the boatman who helps him cross the river at the end of the journey when Krishna reaches the other bank Krishna is taking out money to pay the boat and that is when the boatman kind of said something which was I thought phenomenally inside so he tells Krishna How can this happen?  I take people from one shore of the river to the other you you take people from one shore of life to one Oh lovely you little beautiful thing he says How can I take money from you? Some don't do to ek hi biradri me look at how brilliantly it reduces the distance between Krishna and the boatman I know I always have loved that tumbrie it sort of speaks to me and learning and listening and you learn all kinds of crazy things I'll gardener Felipe you know often we sit and chat and it tells me stories of how they make Biria with goat in Mexico I said how do you make it? and he said well the little kids chase the goat around and they said really why do they do that? and he came up with a theory that I'd never heard before he said you know if you want to be chase a boat for a long time a lot of the toxin toxins come out as sweat and so the animal actually is a better animal thing now I don't know whether it's right or wrong but it had the wonderful quality of being close yeah and the careers are you know our journey through life is all about exploring different stories that we hear and we are all made up of stories you know so yes that is of course so powerful we are coming up at the end of the earth and I think it's been fantastic you know hearing your own career journey looking at all these lovely books and some of the things that you shared which you know I'm going to really keep out there I've made those notes some of the things will always stay with me that you know how do you treat your career like a journey and not a destination kill the good idea to pursue something better curiosity and generosity are practices not traits thank you so very much for sharing this indeed very grateful and that's one of the best things about doing this podcast is I get a chance to learn from people I would have otherwise never met in my life you know so and likewise and likewise and I think but that's the point of conversation right to exchange story but when message your audience is remember be the editor-in-chief of your store and make sure you don't bring curiosity and generosity just to work make sure you bring them home absolutely thank you so much once again I appreciate your taking time to do this absolutely thank you if you have any questions you have my email there drop me an email and we'll be in touch