#E59 Finding Hope and Breaking Patterns in a Technological World With Sundar Raman
Read the HYPERSCALE transcript
[00:02] Briar: Welcome to Hyperscale, my friend Sundar. By the way, this is his second time on the show, but we had a good five hour chat a few weeks ago, didn't we? And we were like, you know what? We need to bring our conversation back on the podcast.
[00:17] Sundar: Actually, I forgot about that. I was just like, wow. It's been a while since we chatted, but it's only been like two weeks.
[00:22] Briar: It's true. I just loved how, as I was like driving off in the Uber, you were like, oh, wow, we just spoke for like five hours.
[00:30] Sundar: Oh my God. Yeah. Do we still have stuff to talk about, or this is the end of the conversation now, we're like, oh, okay. We have to make up stuff.
[00:38] Briar: Exactly. But I think one of the things that I appreciate about you, Sundar, is that every single topic that we approach, I feel like we explore it, and you've got a very nuanced way of thinking and I really appreciate that about you, because I think sometimes these days people are just so black or white. They're like, oh, this or, oh, that. But you're kind of like, let's take a step back. Let's think about this.
[01:02] Sundar: We need a catalyst. Like you're sort of like a, how can I say? You are the acid to my fat or maybe it's like the spark to my fire or whatever.
[01:15] Briar: I'm happy you called me the acid and you're the fat.
[01:18] Sundar: Well, could have gone the other way, but things might have gotten thrown at me, so yeah. But most of the time it's like you need a person who you can have a good conversation with. So we had fun.
[01:29] Briar: We do. You're an excellent conversationalist and I think something that's always surprised me about you is you are obviously in the technology space, and yet quite often when I talk to you, you are, I don't know, you're more grounded than what I would expect.
[01:46] Sundar: It's sort of like spirulina somewhere.
[01:50] Briar: You're wearing green as well. What I think I mean by this is quite often when I speak to quite futuristic or technological people, they're like tech, tech, tech and a lot of what you think about and a lot of what you give time and attention to is very much almost coming back down to nature, isn't it?
[02:10] Sundar: Yeah. I think that some of it is because I come from a different perspective of what tech means, gesturing here. I'm not sure if that's getting picked up on the radio. But we have a tendency to think of technology very much from the lens of digital in our current generation. And that's not the case. I mean, we know like so many things are technology, and I think we're right at that cusp right now, which is really wonderful where biological systems are going to start entering into this conversation of what technology is. And that was very complicated to do for a while. I think, historically technology has been something that was malleable. It went between a lot of different domains. And that was what was always interesting for me. It's not like I want to go and do engineering for the sake of like building a circuit, it's engineering to solve a problem and that problem can be solved in so many different ways. So anyway, yeah, my perspective on what technology is not let's say one dimensional but it is a facilitator for a lot of other stuff. So that's where I come at it from.
[03:17] Briar: And when you think about the future, I know that the last time we spoke, you had kind of strayed a little bit more to the dystopian side of things. Tell the listeners about this. You were telling me that I had actually started to make you feel a little bit more optimistic.
[03:33] Sundar: Oh, okay. And do you think that has continued since the previous conversation?
[03:37] Briar: I don't know, you tell the listeners like, what's your thoughts? So you're talking about technology solving problems. What are the problems that you've seen?
[03:45] Sundar: What's insane is that since our last on air conversation, how much has changed because it's been a year and a bit?
[03:54] Briar: I think it's probably been a good two years.
[03:55] Sundar: Okay. Maybe two years. So in the last two years, there've been things that we would not, when we started that conversation, we didn't even realize that some of this stuff was going to happen. I mean, this is sort of a cliché at this point. Everyone goes, oh my God, like the world has changed so much. I am both incredibly hopeful and incredibly scared of where we're going and maybe that's always the case, maybe we've always lived at that intersection. But I think yeah, the future holds a lot of opportunity, let's say, to not put it into either black or white for now. But yeah, I think the most interesting part of it, or the thing that I find that we could actually have a really interesting path forward is that for every step that seems to be dystopian, there's a group that is trying to go, Hey, we can actually do some cool stuff out of this.
[04:56] Sundar: I was just reading this morning about how, there are groups that are making more and more open source tools to just directly compete with the closed source world of what AI and stuff is. And for me that's hopeful because it's like, at the end of the day, it's just human beings. We can make the things that we want to make, but we have to have a tremendous amount of faith in our capacity. I think last time you brought out of me that we should be kind to each other, and now I feel like maybe taking that one step further to be like, instill hope in everyone else. Maybe that's the way that we have to go. Not just be kind, but actually actively put hope back into the system or something.
[05:35] Briar: Well, I guess if people don't have hope, we don't really have anything, do we? Like, if people aren't really feeling hope, then they're not going to step up and feel like perhaps they can create a meaningful impact in a way. I think sometimes if you feel like you don't have hope, you don't do anything. You don't take action.
[05:55] Sundar: Yeah. That's true. And it is very easy to fall into like, a sense of foreboding, let's say. But let's be like this, like I find that oftentimes I come open the fridge in my place and I'm like, my God, there's nothing in here to cook with. And then you can do this thing, which a friend of mine told me about, which is an insane proposition, but it is like, you take the pictures of the stuff in your fridge, and then you ask chat GPT to make a recipe for you. This sounds pretty hopeful for me. It's like, where you start from nothing and something will solve a problem for you without you having to like, just spin around. It's a kind of not great example, but all we need oftentimes is this little reagent.
[06:42] Sundar: Like, we need something that takes us down a little path. And you take that first step and then other things start happening. I think the place that a lot of us find ourselves in the world today is, it feels very bleak and each person's action seems almost like, it's such a minuscule thing and the problems in front of us are totally insurmountable. But on the other hand, it really is every individual action has tremendous impact, and you just don't know what it is. I think on some level, that is the most hopeful thing that I could possibly imagine, because you just go, actually, like the thing that you were mentioning this morning or earlier about your dress this morning. So you had this choice to make between blue and black, who knows what decision, process went in the universe, but by you selecting this blue dress, you getting to the studio and finding another blue mannequin that matched your dress.
[07:50] Briar: Oh it was amazing.
[07:52] Sundar: That's how kind of crazy it is. Like every step you go, my completely useless decision here, who cares?
[08:01] Briar: I really felt like the fashion gods whispered to me this morning.
[08:05] Sundar: And maybe that's happening all the time. I think it's the other way around. It's like, whoever put the mannequin out there was like, oh god, I got to move this thing. And they move it. And then like, you guys post something probably on Instagram that has the mannequin, they're like, oh my god, my mannequin is famous. Maybe that's the other side of it.
[08:23] Briar: I think that people really need to remember as well is that like, there's always been something going wrong in the past. Like the world is always ending according to the media. I think the problem in today's society is we just can't get away from it because we're constantly spending time on social media. Whereas in the past where we could just close the newspaper or turn off the tv, it's almost like we can't get away from the negativity. I was reading a very interesting book. My dear friend Dr. Max Moore, who's a philosopher, gave it to me when I last saw him in Arizona. And it basically debunks a lot of this pessimistic thinking that we have without realizing with real facts and data. So for instance, if we think back to the 1800s, our existence was very labor intensive.
[09:12] Briar: We often died. In fact, dying of a tooth cavity was the third common cause of death. So many babies died. Like that was just very common. And often we didn't live past 40 or 50 years old, and there certainly wasn't a lot of the luxuries that we see today, such as power and coffees, spice pumpkin lattes and dresses that we can buy from Revolve online. Like there was just none of this kind of stuff. And of course, there are some very real concerns in the world today, but I think we need to remember that overall it is a lot better than what it used to be. And that's according to data.
[09:49] Sundar: I think that's a good point. I mean, in some cases it does feel very bleak because there's not a path out. I would say as much as social media is just painful sometimes, having to constantly run away from the saber tooth tiger or the bear or the snakes or the whatever, that was their social media back then. There was a certain amount of excitement in being able to outrun a saber tooth tiger. Today that won't kill you in the same way. Maybe it'll rot your mind, but your point is well taken. I think part of it is also a sense of where people can contribute. I think we spin because we don't know how we fit into a system.
[10:41] Sundar: A lot of people get sucked into just looking at social media, whatever. It's like, pick the ill of our time. And there's not a way that you can connect with another person and go, Hey, actually let's do something together. Even if it is online, it doesn't really matter. I think humans are very much tuned towards, I want to have something that feels productive, or I want to feel like I created something together with someone. That vehicle is something I think we don't have a lot of opportunity for. I was talking to some friends of mine about like, okay, in Dubai, I think, which it's an amazing place for opportunities, but finding people to intersect with is incredibly difficult. And that's true of a lot of major cities. I'm sure you've heard the statistic of like, how many people feel lonely and things like that.
[11:32] Briar: Oh yeah it's a real problem.
[11:33] Sundar: So it becomes like a mental deterioration that we're all accelerating because as this propagates, more and more people feel even more distanced from each other. And in a way, we can certainly go social media is the reason for this, or like the reason that we cannot talk to each other, but I actually don't think that's true. I think there's a more fundamental thing, which is we haven't created mechanisms where we are actually okay with talking to each other. It's not because of social media. Social media is sort of the artifact of us already having gone down that path, I think, I could be totally wrong, but if we had, for example, remove all tables from restaurants, they're only allowed to sit at communal tables. Mechanisms like this allow us to kind of collaborate a little bit more.
[12:23] Sundar: But we also need that very much nowadays because the tools for isolated building are much more, I guess much more easy to access now. And by that I mean, you can sit at your computer and you can make an entire business. There's a lot of talk about the one person unicorn companies now, which apparently is the next stage of the future for those people who care about that kind of thing. But it sounds like not particularly fun, because building a billion dollar company with one other person is like, who really cares? But building it with a million people, even if you're only making a thousand dollars, that has this kind of like, Hey, we did this thing together as a group, we did it for a community. And that community building aspect really is again, like one step, go out and reach out and touch someone, it's this thing of like trying to create humanity again.
[13:19] Briar: Loneliness is, like I've been lonely before in the past, and it is honestly truly awful. I remember when I first started my business, I honestly felt like I couldn't relate to anybody I was meeting. I think quite often I was looking for friendship in the wrong places. I was looking for it at brunches, or perhaps I was looking for people that fit or looked a certain kind of mold that I thought I would relate to. But actually then I realized I was just like a massive nerd, and I stopped trying to perhaps think of this ideal friend and start to look for my friends elsewhere, like in the form of my clients or networking, or we met on my podcast I think the first time, didn't we? No. We met at GITEX, which by the way, we should repeat.
[14:08] Briar: We met on a panel at GITEX and we had such an amazing conversation, and that obviously prompted us to reconnect. But yeah, loneliness is awful. And so many people are so lonely. And there's data that shows that people in the UK and the US where perhaps there isn't that kind of community, that kind of family support, when they go off to retirement homes, they quite often die from loneliness and looking at the Blue Zones. I don't know if you've learned a lot about the Blue Zones, but these are places around the world where people live really long lives and they don't have a lot of technology. They obviously eat a lot of really healthy, fresh food. Quite often it's a Mediterranean diet, but community and purpose is a big part of what they do. So a lot of these older people, maybe in their seventies or eighties, like they've got a purpose, whether it's leading the walking group or growing things in their garden to give to the community. Like, it very much has that feel. And they say that this is a big part of longevity.
[15:11] Sundar: Yeah, I would believe that. I guess, a lot of this research sounds great. I mean, how can I put it, the tangible part of this is the problem, like, everyone is tired at the end of the day because, like after a day of work, the last thing I want to do is deal with another human being. I mean, I would much rather sit and read, or, I mean, this is where social media comes in. I would rather scroll Instagram and whether or not that has an impact on me, it's kind of irrelevant. I don't want to sit and cook. But if, for example, people came over and they were like, let's make dinner. That itself changes the space that we're in. Let's do something together. Let's go play a game. Let's go do some activity that doesn't require a lot of let's say social overhead because I think also people, they need time to kind of switch gears, change their context and things like that. And they feel like if I go out I have to spend the extra energy in order to just get to this normalized state where I can have a conversation with someone.
[16:19] Briar: I think, especially here in Dubai, quite often going out, is going out to dinner, and then that adds a whole new layer, especially for a female like me. It's like, oh, well, I've got to look cute.
[16:28] Sundar: Well, these are occupational hazards, slips. I think you would do that anyway no matter what. I don't think that the restaurant is the problem as you know. You and I have met in non-restaurant context, and it's the same way.
[16:43] Briar: It's true, I don't even own pair of jeans, but yeah carry on.
[16:46] Sundar: Exactly. But I get your point. But also, yeah, there's this overhead of like, I'm going to go sit somewhere and like, there's this, okay, we have to like think about what we're doing and then like, we have to be nice to each other and all this other stuff. And the context of community is not literally about two people sitting in front of each other. I mean, oftentimes I think that the purpose of structures like religion were there in order to just get people together. Maybe we've always been this way and we needed a structure that said, Hey, actually stop being on your own because it's not healthy for you. Or the community come together into a place, and then they had to like, come up with an activity. I think we need to create some other dynamic like that, that goes, you come together with a purpose, whatever that purpose is.
[17:30] Sundar: And these kind of purposeful engagements can have residual impact for a lot of different things. You actually leave that remnant in the space around you. And this is where I think like these ideas of hopefulness, like communities that are in the blue zone, did you call it? These blue zones, when people do that, the space itself allows for other people to continue to do this. I think we leave these tracers in the environment, maybe sounds like completely like a new age concept, but that might be the mechanisms that we have to figure out how to facilitate in order to like move forward farther.
[18:10] Briar: So this reminds me of when I was back in a resort about eight months ago or something like this. And I'd seen, I can't even remember where the resort was, I think it was in Australia, but I'd seen these two kids like chase each other, like really fast through the resort. And I thought to myself, oh my God, if I started running like these children just having fun, people would either A, think there was something wrong with me, or B, think that I was in some kind of of trouble. And it really made me wonder like, why? Like, why don't we just run and have this playfulness? Like, is it the way that society is constructed? And I remember sending you a message about it, kind of pondering about it because I always appreciate your nuanced thinking. And it reminded me, I think at one point of time you were telling me about how you really wanted to set, like this game of fun up for adults or something like this, where we can come together and, just be.
[19:07] Sundar: Be silly. I think we don't have enough points of being silly. I think that's a big one because once you're in this rut. In a way I don't even have the words around how some of these feelings work. Because I think we could be in environmental ruts that feed from our mental state. And what I mean by that is it's very hard to take a different road going from point A to point B everyday. When you're going from, let's say, home to work, the tendency is to go on the same road because you're used to it and you go into autopilot and this is it. Like, you don't even think about it some days. And I'm sure there are people who are listening who wake up one day and they're like, how did I get from home to work and back?
[20:00] Sundar: I don't remember any of the steps in between because you're lost in something else. Your body just goes into like muscle memory and you just go, you do this thing and you get back. And I have had this happen in New York City where I had to take, subways and walk and all this other stuff, and suddenly I'm like, wait, how did I get home? I think the thing that it requires for us to do is constantly shift perspectives. There's this article I read many, many years ago about this research that some builders had done about how your mind remains fresh as you get older. So one of the things they found is if you have rooms that have a slight angle and the walls are not exactly rectilinear or like, there's some sort of distortion in your space, you're constantly kind of reacting to it both with your mind and your body, and it keeps you younger that it actually gets you to like, think differently.
[21:00] Sundar: I think kids have this because they haven't figured out how the world works yet. So young children you'll see are constantly like, fidgeting and moving around and like being kind of goofy. And adults get set in a way, and they build the roads in the way that they are set. And they go, ah, okay, I need a place, functionally this looks like a box. Okay, I'm going to make a lot of boxes that look the same way, and therefore we are tuned to work that way. Kids don't know this yet. So they'll keep going, like between chairs or tables at a restaurant, they will try and take an alley. They'll never go straight on the beach, and things like this. As we get older, we forget some of that stuff.
[21:45] Sundar: And it's possible also to change that very easily. I found myself doing this. I walk to work everyday, and if I just take a different path once every few days, but I have to consciously think about it, I go, okay, like, I am not going to go down this way. Yes, I'm going to be sweating my ass off before I get to work, but it's fine, take an extra shirt. And that actually changes the perspective just a little bit. And every so often I see a blue mannequin. But I go, man, I should have worn the blue dress today. But that those points of just changes in where we are, or also like incredibly important for us. We're way off on tangent. But the point in this is that I think even these ideas of what does loneliness look like is because sometimes you're just in the same rut and like the entire system is set up for you to just be on a highway. I need to be in my lane. Everyone else just needs to be in their lane and there's no way to intersect.
[22:39] Briar: Do you think part of this comes from maybe how our schools are constructed? Because when I think about like young boys, for instance, with ADHD, I just think how stupid is it that these young boys, all of this energy, like they want to be out running around and stuff like this, yet we put them on the mat and we medicate them and we say sit there for three hours. Like, that to me is just quite backwards, really.
[23:05] Sundar: Well, they fulfill the promise of an industrialized future, right? I mean, I think if you go the other way around and I think until now we haven't had the opportunity for several decades, maybe even like a little bit over a century to reverse the traction that we have had. And by that, I mean, if you want to create factories and you want to create money and like kind of a society that is driven by this mechanization, then you need to feed people into this. I don't know. It's like this churn. I was going to say a slaughterhouse, because this is basically the dumbing of the mind in this process. If you want to get them to work a different way, you have to now change so many different things.
[23:53] Sundar: And I think we have the opportunity now, like people can work from anywhere they want. The infrastructure is getting set up for you to move away from the confines of the rigid grid system that we work within. And so I think now we can go, oh, okay, like we don't have to meet the same kind of parameters that we were in before, and we can actually go, okay, like, it grows sort of like roots of grass. You can create roads that go almost anywhere, and maybe that will create greater efficiencies than we ever realized. In a way, one of the problems we have, let's just talk about like a super dumb thing, like traffic. If everyone goes on the same highway, and we think the reason that we have traffic is because we don't have enough lanes, it kind of doesn't make any sense because you go, well, if you're adding more lanes, you're just going to add more people into those lanes. Of course, this is what we're going to do.
[24:47] Sundar: If we're told that you have to be in those lanes at a particular time, then you're going to add more people into the lane. So you're going to create more traffic in those lanes. If you have a whole bunch of different paths, yes, initially you're going to have a little bit of friction because people don't know how to get from point A to point B, but that friction actually reduces the amount of congestion in specific paths. Obviously there's a lot of stuff that we have to do. There's a social engineering process in order to circumvent that. But this is how nature really works. Rivers aren't straight because there's a lot of detriment in that system. They have to create oxbows, they have to create these kind of curves and stuff like that. And as we create curves in our life, I think it gives us the opportunity to do new things. Those technologies now are ready for us to do that without it being diminishing in our environment. So I think there's an opportunity for us to like, start being silly, is the point.
[25:46] Briar: Yeah. I think that's a really interesting point. And you're right. For kids growing up, their life is very novel. There's a lot of excitement. I remember daydreaming all the time when I was a child about the kind of person I might become when I was older, who I might marry, or what kind of career I would have or how it would be. And I think as adults, we don't daydream enough. We're not curious enough, we're not excited enough. We're not thinking of possibility.
[26:14] Sundar: You told me something that, actually, I'm going to throw this question back at you, which is, you had a narrative that was imposed on you of like how you were expected to be, what you were expected to wear and all that. You kind of manufactured your own fairytale. So I would say like, don't you think that is part of the process or how would you reframe what children are thinking so that they can go down their own path?
[26:41] Briar: Yeah. I think I was telling you about the fact that on my school mufty days, so the day that you could wear whatever you want. I would of course wear pink sequin skirts, cowboy boots, pink top, pink cowboy hats, and be looking quite cute. But because I was growing up in this country school, it was a very small town kind of community and the idea was you would if you looked like crap, basically. So you would wear like your little stubbies that the All Blacks wear, your gum boots and that very much was the community feel. And I did feel very out of place. And a lot of the children did stare and ridicule me to the point that I would start off my day feeling very positive because I was wearing something that I felt reflected me, and it was very authentically me.
[27:32] Briar: But then come lunchtime, I'd be hiding in a classroom just because of that whole like, oh, look at her, look at her sort of thing. I think the interesting part is I was just in the wrong place. And it's interesting when you think about a fish. A fish is so good in water, but then you take the fish out of water and it naturally dies. To me, I was a fish. I was dying in Darfield because I felt like I couldn't be myself. But when I moved to New York and I saw all of the craziness around me, people very much authentically expressing themselves and feeling their creativity, then that's really what inspired me to kind of recreate myself.
[28:15] Briar: And, at first it started small. It started with getting like a little haircut and getting a few more piercings in my ears and perhaps wearing some different shoes and then wearing a bit more color. And then I just really liked the feeling that wearing like bright red would give me, walking into a room and rather than feeling like, oh, I'm shying away. I want to hide in the corner. Like, back then, like being really small. I kind of liked showing up as my authentic self. And the more I showed up as my authentic self, the more people could see that I was showing up at my authentic self. And they're like, oh my God, I love what you're wearing and sort of thing. Ad then over time the fashion just got bigger and bigger and bigger to the point that now I work for myself. And it's not uncommon for my team to find a sequins or sparkles around our office. And that's okay because no one's there to tell me that it's not. I posted a conversation about this on my Instagram recently, and someone told me that CEO should stand for colorful executive officer. And I thought, why not?
[29:22] Sundar: Yeah. I think this is absolutely true. Everyone's like, oh my God, this is so boring to see CEOs. And you just go, this is the world that we're building. Like, what happened to like childhood or childish changes, like experimentation comes out of like being in a mindset that is not black t-shirt and jeans. I mean, not that there's anything specifically wrong with it, but in the era of where there was a black turtleneck and jeans, it was actually breaking from another tradition. And now that has become the tradition. So we keep like reinforcing the same thing that we had previously, which is kind of funny.
[30:01] Briar: But it's very true. After Covid we started seeing less suits, more casual clothes being the norm. And it constantly evolves. I love looking back over old pictures from like the 1940s and the fashion that they used to wear. Like the little top hats and all of this. But yeah, we're right. Like what's wrong with me showing up wearing a particular kind of fashion? I was speaking to Georgia on my podcast earlier, and she had seen a comment on my YouTube from someone saying like, oh, people can't take you seriously because you are wearing some sequins or something. And I thought, well, that's not true at all. That's your opinion. Like, you look at the people that I'm speaking to, a lot of which are very smart, philosophical medical science experts. And all of them very much appreciate the fact that I'm turning up and wearing something a little bit different because they appreciate the self-expression. And also they know as well that like, we're not all the same. Like, who said that we all have to be the same. Like, that's not even a thing.
[31:05] Sundar: Yeah. I mean, what would you say to like kids today that feel like they need to conform in order to move forward? I mean, you've obviously broken that mold.
[31:19] Briar: Well, I think it's the kids that don't conform that end up being a little bit successful when they're older. So even if they are feeling a little bit down in the dumps about how people are perhaps reacting to them, maybe they do feel a bit like and then think about, they feel a bit out of place and things like, just bide your time. When you get older you will very authentically be yourself. But I think the unfortunate part is that a lot of the time over the years and it's kind of what you were saying before, like things just kind of get drilled out of us or banged out of us. It's like, no, sit on the mat. Do this, do this. This is how you should think. This is how you should conform.
[32:00] Briar: This is what society wants you to be. And I think a lot of people get stuck. I have so many people messaging me on social media being like, oh my God, I can't believe you were able to leave New Zealand and leave Darfield and kind of live life on your own terms. It's really amazing just to see how you've almost like reinvented yourself over the years. One minute you've got your personal branding company, which obviously I still have, the next minute you're in the metaverse, now you've got your Roblox game. You're very much in the future, you're constantly evolving. But I think for a lot of these people, yeah, they get stuck in and stagnant and they don't feel like they can take that first step that you described before. And I think quite often it literally is just that little first step.
[32:42] Briar: That first step is the hardest where you say, listen, I'm going to live life on my terms. I don't care what other people think. And by the way, when you can start to block out what other people think, I think that's when you realize how much power you have. I remember when I was moving to New York and I was so frightened about moving to New York because like, I had no money, no job, and there was a lot of things that could go seriously wrong. And I had this little naggy voice in my head telling me all these things all the time. And I was like, you know what? I'm not going to talk to my parents. I'm not going to talk to my friends. They keep bringing up all of these, very scary things, which may well could be a possibility, but I'm just going to focus and not listen.
[33:23] Sundar: Yeah. I was thinking that, the level of courage that you have really is pretty impressive.
[33:34] Briar: I think I got my courage though because I literally hit rock bottom. I was so over how my life was, and I really just could not understand the meaning of it. It was not exciting. I was stuck in the rat race. I was working three jobs, part-time jobs, just trying to make ends meet. And when you've got nothing on the table to lose, suddenly big decisions seem a lot easier.
[34:05] Sundar: But even like getting past the derision of the mufty days, you get to a certain point and you're like.
[34:14] Briar: I love that you say mufty.
[34:15] Sundar: Yeah, mufty mufty
[34:17] Briar: In New Zealand, we say mufty.
[34:18] Sundar: Mufty musty days.
[34:19] Briar: You're probably saying it with the New Zealand accent.
[34:21] Sundar: Mufty days. So Mufty days, what is a mufty day? Anyway, whatever. We'll get to that later. It doesn't matter. But you put yourself in a room and you try and like get away from people, but you get back out and you do it. And actually, I want to bring this back to your question about, how do I think about the future? I spend far too much time, like trying to think where we go because there are a lot of kids in my life now, and they're not mine just for the record, but not that there's anything wrong with that, but I mean, I've been thinking about what, like what happens to the next generation, like what are the tools that I wish I had when I was young because the world changed pretty dramatically in my lifetime.
[35:09] Sundar: I think back and I go, my God, like I was there when the internet happened, and I got to use some of the first generation of internet tools in the early nineties, and that went to a certain point, hit a peak, went away. And then new things have constantly happened since then. And now we're at an incredible, brave new world situation. And how do kids grapple with that as they go forward? It's just a bunch of tools. Like they've been given fire and a hammer at the same time, and they have to figure out what they're going to do. I think if we don't instill an idea of breaking the norm or being comfortable completely screwing up, like everyone's going to laugh at you. It's okay. If you don't know how to get past that, I think there's a very large opportunity that we will lose because we won't know how to create something with this tool that we have.
[36:08] Sundar: And a very clear data point in that is that the rate at which AI is changing or evolving, it's also a clear indication that we're very much pattern based. So everything that AI knows is because of the patterns that we have created. If we break the patterns, the AI doesn't know what we are. Now, this is obviously overstating the system, because the system is much more complex than that. But if we come up with new ways, even things that we haven't documented yet, then we have an opportunity to use these AI or automation systems in order to do the mundane. And we can go off like experimenting with things that we didn't even know that we could experiment with.
[36:55] Sundar: Like a really dumb example of that is, I'm from Southern India and it was drilled into me that you couldn't eat certain things at different times of the day. There's no rational reason for this. I mean, maybe there was a rational reason at one point, but you go, no, you cannot eat an Indian with, I don't know, marmalade. You go, why can't you eat an Indian with marmalade? Why can't you have a nutella dosa? Of course people are doing that now in Dubai because Dubai's crazy and whatever. But these sorts of things, once you start buying into a paradigm, that's all you do. And then that pattern gets set in, and when you go in a different direction, you meet somebody from wherever, like you can make ramen dosa or, ramen indie or whatever, and the fun in that is that humans can change these things in completely new ways and we need to do it. This is an existential question now. If we don't start being silly and have more fun, we could very much be in this rut that basically takes us all out, it's like a bad virus. So yeah, I would say like the stuff that you did and where you got to, is a testament to this.
[38:02] Briar: Do you think that when it comes to children that we need to be thinking about how we're teaching them? Like, do we need to reconstruct our schools? Like do you think there's enough technology being taught in the schools?
[38:13] Sundar: I feel like we need to get the hell out of the way. I think one of the problems that exists out there is that adults have come up with ways to make it easy for adults to control children. If you have a bunch of children in a room that are in a classroom that are being rowdy, what do we tell them? We tell them to sit down. Why do we tell them to sit down? Because we are tired. It's like, Hey, the old people are tired can you all just shut up? Because I need some time to think, I need time to think. Not they need time to think. They can run around all they want. Like, why am I trying to control this? I think we need to come up with a mechanism of how we can facilitate the energy that they have and actually utilize it.
[38:55] Sundar: I'm not an educator. I don't have kids in my house all the time, so I don't know what some of those mechanics look like, but I know that I get tired, like after a certain amount of time being around children. But the problem is not the children, the problem is me. So we need to come up with ways of how we facilitate that. In a way that's what being outside, like, getting them to go out and like figure stuff out was about, and like providing a little bit of bounding conditions. But maybe that's the way that we have to like, change education so that we allow classrooms to be entirely unstructured and inject structure at like, very key points. Like, almost like mile markers, something like this.
[39:37] Briar: And what piece of technology would you say you are most excited about when it comes to the future?
[39:43] Sundar: I think you and I talked about this a little bit on the last podcast. My favorite piece of technology is a pencil and a piece of paper. And it has evolved like, kind of remarkably in the generations that we've been using them. I think those tools, like something that you can take with you, that is not a phone, that really gives you the ability to create in the space around you. It's like, I mean, a wand or something like this is the kind of direction that we're heading in. It's not about something that is technological that binds back to us, but it's something that allows us to extend where we are. Maybe it's a bionic arm or something like this, that allows us to evolve ourself to the space that's next to us. Not try and fill it with more like, bad ideas or something. Something like this. Not sure exactly where that's going.
[40:47] Briar: I feel like I can't even use a pencil these days because I'm so used to typing on my phone that when I pick up a pen or a pencil, like my writing is just literally like a chicken wrote it.
[40:57] Sundar: You cook?
[40:58] Briar: Yeah, I cook.
[40:58] Sundar: Okay. You like to cook? Do you cook with your phone?
[41:02] Briar: I cook with my feet.
[41:03] Sundar: You cook with your feet? What does that mean? I love this idea. Are you cooking with your feet?
[41:09] Briar: Oh God, it's hard. But I make it work, with obviously clean feet, I clean them too, but no, I cook with my hands and do I look at recipes? Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes I have a little look, I get inspired, but I've cooked so much now I kind of know like what kind of spices and flavors need to go together in order for it to taste good. Like, sometimes I do what you do. I open up my cupboard and I'm like, crap, there's not really anything in here. But then suddenly I'm like, oh, I've got wraps there. Oh yeah, there's some leftover chicken. Like, oh yeah, I can do this, like, sort of thing. And you get creative and that's when you can really make some of your best dishes.
[41:49] Sundar: The reason I'm asking that is because the process of cooking is not the process of getting nutrition to consume, it's like to feel how spices feel and to actually open a package and do something, put, I don't know pasta into a pot and drain it out. Like all of those steps, the muscle memory around that is important because it also congeals other ideas in your head. It's not just the one act that you're performing or maybe I'll throw that to you as a question. Like, do you find inspiration in cooking for like whatever else you're going to do?
[42:26] Briar: When I say I cook, I like to cook, like, for not too long. I just want to be clear, like I'm not the kind of person that spends like three hours in the kitchen.
[42:37] Sundar: I mean like 20 minutes.
[42:38] Briar: Yeah. 20 minutes is perfect. Like in and out sort of thing.
[42:42] Sundar: But are you just making sandwiches or are you like, actually like?
[42:45] Briar: No, I get involved.
[42:49] Sundar: Why do you get involved? It sounds like a lot of work.
[42:52] Briar: Well, for 20 minutes, again, not like this whole three hour sort of cooking thing. I don't like that. I like to not measure things, just kind of be a bit creative. But yeah, I think it is a creative thing. And I think afterwards you've got that reward and it's real dopamine that you get out of cooking as well. I think that's what people need to remember about this technological society that we live in, is that yes, it can be so easy to be scrolling on our phones and get those cheap dopamine hits and you kind of trick your brain into thinking that you're doing something to get some kind of reward, but you're not. So I think that's a lot of the reasons why we have like a lot of depression and anxiety in today's society. Whereas if I'm getting in the kitchen and I'm cooking, I'm off my phone and I get that sweet dopamine hits at the end of it, and it's a real dopamine hit. I've earned it. And I think that's what I like about it.
[43:43] Sundar: I think there are a couple of things in that, that are slightly frustrating, like in the cooking process that you have to clean afterwards and all that, which actually I don't mind. I can totally see how having a mess is the problem that people are trying to avoid. I think there is something that happens to people when they do these kinds of actions. It's sort of like gardening, you go out and put your hand in the ground and there's something good in that, the first time you're just like, oh my god, my hands are just dirty. But after you do it a few times, you're like, this is good. I feel like that's a technology that has evolved over a really, really long time that we somehow often don't give credit to.
[44:22] Sundar: Again, like everything that we think about is technology is maybe 200 years old, maybe 250 years old, like the industrial revolution technology is not really tech. It's one aspect of technology, of us having destroyed a bunch of things to create one very let's say marginalized version of what that thing is. And of course, in the process we've also discovered truly phenomenal things, but I think we also have to give credit to how seeds work, how trees work, how things like graphite works. And that solve very clear problems that we have and adapt them for other use cases.
[45:03] Briar: You love seeds and spices.
[45:05] Sundar: I mean, I'm just fascinated by the idea of spices.
[45:09] Briar: By the way, Sundar's Instagram is a lot of pictures of spices and seeds.
[45:13] Sundar: Just random food.
[45:15] Briar: Yeah, because you go to markets and things, I believe.
[45:19] Sundar: It's my favorite thing.
[45:19] Briar: Try and find little interesting.
[45:22] Sundar: I mean, you think about this idea of like, you take one mustard seed. Mustard seed is a tiny little thing, and from one mustard seed you can create thousands of mustard seeds. It's a crazy idea that you can actually compress the information into such a minuscule like container and from there regenerate over and over again. And this is the thing that we often forget about, like, we think in terms of scarcity as we think in terms of like bounding conditions and things like that. And I think this kind of collaboration is really infinite and endless. And the paradigm for it, or like the template for it already exists in a bunch of places in nature, or at least, I mean, it seems that way to me.
[46:12] Sundar: And also how you compress this information and put it into like this little container and then like, you're able to open it up, like spread this information around. You think about how spices work. A leaf, basil, you dry it, put it into a container, take it out, put it into oil, and it releases a whole slew of flavors. You're like, how is it possible that we can like figure out all of this stuff? And for me, that very much is the kind of technology, because there's a memory, there's imprints in these things that we haven't figured out how to do yet. For example, there's no mechanism that we have for transferring smell from one place to another, digitally today. We haven't figured this out. It's very complex to like trigger your olfactory system. But that would be a fun thing because we have lots of encoded messaging around smell memory. So if we could figure that out, that would be kind of super fun. We'll have to come up with new weird technologies for these things.
[47:15] Briar: Yeah. How would we even do that?
[47:17] Sundar: So this will be our next five hour conversation.
[47:21] Briar: This will be, maybe a little bit more trying to come up with a solution for that. But it has been so good to have you on the show again today. As always, I think we could have kept on going, but we'll have to, until the next time.
[47:33] Sundar: Yeah. It's always fun. And I will say like, I mean, just bringing back a couple of these ideas. The idea of loneliness, the idea of feeling despair, like completely without purpose and without a way to see the future as something positive. It is very easy to descend into that right now for a variety of reasons. But I think what I would love to see is more places that people can have these random serendipitous encounters, that we actually start creating. So maybe that's the thing that I would love to like have you do,
[48:14] Briar: Do you know what I found when I was getting my microchip with Sophia, the robot? I found that was one of those moments for me. I literally have this vivid memory of the robot's just gotten a microchip piercing and a matching tattoo with me in Philadelphia. And my producer Georgia is getting her matching tattoo and she turns to Sophia the robot, she's like, sing me a song. And you would think that the robot's like going to turn on, I don't know, the radio and sing, I don't know, Beyonce or whatever. The robot literally just started singing opera. So it was like, oh wow. Sort of the craziest song. And it was just one of those moments where I just sat there and I was like, you can't make this up. Like, this is just so weird. But I felt so much excitement inside me because it was such a novel, strange situation.
[49:04] Sundar: That's great, let's have more novel situations. Thank you so much, it's always fun to do this.
[49:12] Briar: It's always fun.
About Sundar Raman
Sundar Raman is a Creative Engineer. He is the co-founder and CTO of the innovative Experience Design firm PRESENT, nowpresent.co.
Sundar was the Director of Technology at the Museum of the Future in Dubai, from Oct 2019 to Dec 2024. From 2010 to 2019 he was the Director of Technology at Local Projects, New York.
Sundar’s passion is in seamlessly weaving engineering with art. He believes that technology should be a facilitator for creative output, and that the process of making technology is itself a creative endeavor.
Sundar’s background spans telecommunications, data communications, alternative energy systems, community media, social gaming and interactive experience design. He strives to leverage his broad background to bring conceptual visions to life using a variety of cultural, technological and engineering approaches.
Sundar has contributed to award-winning projects including the National September 11th Memorial and Museum, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, NC; The Tech Interactive in San Jose; Museum of the City of New York; London Mithraeum; Aros Kunst Museum in Denmark; Harvard University Smith Campus Pavilion, Cambridge; Eisenhower Memorial in Washington D.C.; and the Museum of the Future in Dubai.
Sundar has lectured at institutions including Princeton University, Parsons Design School, NYU, and FIT. He is a sought after speaker at industry events globally such as Avixa’s Center Stage, DLD, Gitex, Creative Tech Week, and has been featured on many podcasts and keynotes.
Sundar is currently working on “bi-directional interactive environments”, which allow visitors to engage in active dialog with immersive spaces.
Sundar’s work as a creative engineer pushes him to explore new modes of engagement, including those inspired by cultural and traditional practices.
