do things that remind me of my past then it just kind of pulls up past memories you know because i'm not obviously i'm not perfect i know my intentions and my awareness is way better than i used to be but you know i still make mistakes i still have old patterns where i don't do the right thing and then i'm like well i beat myself i'm like alright damn it like you did that in the past this time this time this time you suck you're shitty and um yeah but overall i don't beat myself up as much as i used to do you know what chakras are how familiar are you with chakras yes yeah i don't know a ton about them but with my therapist and through other reading and stuff and meditation i know that they're like different like there's like the crown chakra and like the throat chakra i don't know those aren't the traditional terms but i've learned a tiny bit about them so chakras are points on your cerebrospinal


so chakras are points on your cerebrospinal axis like along your spine the points in your body which also coincide with very important glands or organs okay so they have two functions like either they will help your hormonal system and your hormonal balance there'll be certain hormones that are released or not released through those points but they also have emotional significance for example your lowest chakras your sex organs like your penis or your vagina and also they have your sex glands there okay okay that's the biological side of things okay but the emotional importance is that they help you stay in one place they help you stay grounded okay so if your lowest chakras shaken one it might really result in problems related to your sex organs but it also means you're the kind of person who overthink too much who who'll lash out at them and they don't have to be linked to each other like you might um you might just have like the emotional side but you will you will actually they have


emotional side but you will you will actually they have to be linked so they actually they will be linked to each other a lot sometimes like you will have problems in your emotional side and your focus and your overthinking and it'll manifest itself as some physical problems in that region as well okay the next is your peace related chakra which is your intestines so have you heard of ibs irritable bowel syndrome yeah so they say that there's no reason for ibs but ibs tends to happen in people who aren't happy in life and the moment they fix that mental thing or the thing that's happening in their life the ibs gets fixed the next is yours yeah your solar plexus or your stomach which is about all your outward things if you have hate jealousy anger towards other people then you get problems in your stomach region and the the reason i was telling you all this was to bring you to your heart chakra because i feel with you you're someone who has a slightly shaken


with you you're someone who has a slightly shaken up heart chakra and you know the heart chakra is related to [Music] love yeah it's related to love like it's related to giving and receiving love and you know the kind of music you create your heart chakra is strong in terms of giving you give it you have so much love inside you that you even give it to the world like you give it on such a large stage but you're not able to receive it easily at all which is why you might you might even be getting things like indigestion like you might you know what a heart burn is like yeah definitely definitely you might feel that your throat is your communication which is good for you it's strong for you and this is your intuition like your penile gland which is also good for you but there are meditations to fix these areas you basically see meditation is a lot about visualization so the next time you're sitting what i will request you to do is that imagine your body


will request you to do is that imagine your body is completely filled up with light and especially this region imagine that all the light is going there specifically and healing you there a lot of meditations visualization you'll be surprised at how much visualization can help you heal and once you feel peace you ask the universe for that song you want to write from that piece and you immediately go and start composing right after your meditation wow i'll help you this is i can't thank you enough you know thank you so much i i honestly started tearing up when you were speaking about receiving love because i definitely feel that you know man the next time you're receiving love from fans or from the love of your life just take it and even if it means crying while receiving it cry and receive it openly because you deserve it dude you're you're a good guy you've put out a lot of goodness for the world so when people are like giving you love you know maybe this whole


are like giving you love you know maybe this whole podcast it even if it never goes up on the internet it could just be a moment that will help you and that'll be enough for me but you should know that dude like which is why you need to come to india and have many more moments like this in the himalayas i need to that is absolutely part of my journey you know bro i god bless you don't worry about it let's end the podcast but one thing i'd request of you is just if there's a message you'd like to put out for the world right now about whatever you're feeling whatever you've learned just in a few sentences or whatever however long you wish to make it go for it oh man this was such a heavy conversation honestly i just wish for everybody that they can get this opportunity these types of opportunities to explore the healing that i think is important for all of our souls on this planet you know i think there's especially in


on this planet you know i think there's especially in the world we live in today so much noise so much stuff so much you know just that distracts us from like their true spiritual experience and our happiness and our love and i just wish for everyone that they can get an opportunity an opportunity in their life to be able to go through this journey and to be aware of it and to help others you know through this and i'm really thankful that you've shared that with me and that i've had those opportunities in my life god bless you bro i hope that album that you're creating actually becomes what you wanted to become and uh you're doing great man again you just need external perspective sometime you're doing great the fact that you want to change is good enough right now and you're the kind of person who'll take the right action in the right moment yeah so just trust yourself bro there's nothing that stops you from going where you wish to really go in your heart and the fact that


to really go in your heart and the fact that you're using your fame for good [ __ ] for other people that's all that matters that in the present you're doing the right things so you're on the right path man i appreciate you thank you so much thank you this is an amazing podcast thank you god bless you bro


so parental investment theory basically argues that the two sexes don't have the same minimal obligatory parental investment so for example women have just if you look at the the gametes in a man's ejaculation there are 250 million spermatozoa women will have 400 ovulations so women a woman's ovum is is much more expensive than a man's spermatozoa right so that's already is tipping the the scale to a woman women have to bear the gestational cost women have to bear the likelihood of childhood mortality child bearing more time so for all sorts of reason the cost of minimal parental investment loom much larger for women than it does for men therefore we expect women to have evolved much more stringent mate choice strategies that's why women are much less interested in engaging in short-term mating not that they're not sometimes they are but much less so than men [Music] right that's uh that's an honor having you on the runway show i've learned so much from you off of the internet and


learned so much from you off of the internet and i think this is a dream come true that i get some time with you to pick your brain and take your knowledge to the rest of the world thank you so much for having me real pleasure your book's coming out a parasitic mind you are one of the world's experts on evolutionary psychology so firstly could you explain to my audiences and imagine that my audiences are just four or five years old what is evolutionary psychology so evolutionary psychology is basically the application of evolutionary theory to the study of the human mind so in the same way that we can use evolution to study why we have opposable thumbs why our pancreas are the way they are it's simply in this case the application of evolutionary thinking to know why it is that our minds are the way that we are why do we experience jealousy the way that we do why do we have certain fear responses how do we choose mates in the mating market so


how do we choose mates in the mating market so everything that we are doesn't come out of magic of course culture matters but the below culture exists some fundamental principles that makes the lebanese consumer and the indian consumer very similar to each other because we share a biological heritage and so that's what evolutionary theory is why did a teenage gadzad want to go down this path in life well i always knew that there were two things that interested me that i was good at i was a very competitive soccer player and so my goal was to become a professional soccer player and also i was always very interested in the pursuit of knowledge and so i always knew that eventually i would become a professor i didn't know which field i would be a professor in but i certainly knew that at the end of my soccer career i would transition to academia and then in my late teenage years i had become a very competitive soccer player i was you know hopefully heading to europe


player i was you know hopefully heading to europe to play professionally and in the in the eastern canadian championships i had a devastating uh injury and so my soccer career was over and so since that didn't pan out then i then quickly transitioned into academia how i became an evolutionary and consumer psychologist is during my doctoral training at cornell university my former doctoral supervisor jay russo who's a very famous cognitive psychologist had suggested that i take an advanced social psychology course with a gentleman by the name of professor dennis regan and about halfway through the course he assigned a book called homicide by two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology margot wilson and martin daly and in the book they explain patterns of criminality using an evolutionary lens and so that was my epiphany that was my aha moment i would take this incredible framework this evolutionary psychological framework and apply it to the study of consumer behavior beautiful uh there's a book behind you


consumer behavior beautiful uh there's a book behind you that you've released recently uh why why what's the intention behind writing that book in 2020 yeah so this so this is the the parasitic mind uh how infectious ideas are killing common sense um you know i faced two great wars in my life as i've discussed in chapter one of the book uh the first great war was the lebanese civil war an actual literal physical war where we are lebanese jews we were part of the last group of jewish people who were in lebanon and uh you know this was our homeland uh there was no reason for us to leave even though many jews had already left lebanon but when the civil war broke out in the mid 70s it became rather impossible to be jewish in lebanon so we had to escape the brutality of the lebanese war my parents eventually were kidnapped by fatah one of the terror groups and so the stuff that i saw as a child in the


the stuff that i saw as a child in the brutality of the civil war was truly horrible and it actually made me very cognizant of the ugliness of identity politics because it showed me what happens when a society is organized using tribal lines in this case the tribal identity is based on your religious belongingness even the lebanese constitution is based on you know the prime minister has to be of this religion and the president has to be of that religion and so that was my first exposure to the ugliness of tribal thinking then we moved to canada you know i got all my training i studied in the us came back to be a professor in canada and then i started seeing the second great war that i faced which was the war on university campuses on reason on logic on common sense on science uh because there were all sorts of disciplines that were teaching stuff that was completely anti-scientific and completely insane and so then i are i thought okay well


insane and so then i are i thought okay well how can we explain this kind of insanity and so there i and the reason why it's called the parasitic mind because there i use uh a uh a principle from neural parasitology parasitology is the study of how parasites can affect a host so for example a tapeworm can enter your intestine and parasitize your intestines a neuroparasite is one that actually goes to the brain of a host so for example if you take a parasite like toxoplasma gandhi it will infect the the brain of mice such that a mouse will lose its innate fear of cats it will actually become sexually attracted to the cat's urine which is not really a good thing for a mouse to have and so i take this principle and then i argue from my 26 plus years as a professor that humans can suffer from another class of brain parasites i call these idea pathogens they are they are ideas that in the


idea pathogens they are they are ideas that in the same way that an actual parasite can cause the host to behave in maladaptive irrational ways these dreadful ideas can kind of lead us to the abyss of infinite lunacy and so i trace where these bad ideas come from they come from the university it takes intellectuals to come up with really dumb ideas and and then i i trace their trajectory i explain these idea pathogens and then i offer a a vaccine if you like just like we're trying to identify a vaccine against coronavirus i try to identify a vaccine against this type of disordered thinking and so maybe if you'd like i can discuss examples of some of these dreadful ideas no of course please that's that was going to be my next question okay good uh so for example you take something like postmodernism this is the granddaddy of dreadful ideas because post-modernism actually argues that there are no objective truths we are completely shackled by subjectivity we are shackled by


shackled by subjectivity we are shackled by our personal biases so there is no point in seeking a absolute objective truth because there are no hold on hold on god like by saying uh no objective truth you mean nobody knows whether right wing is correct or left-wing is correct or this religion is correct or that religion oh no much more basic even so let me give you specific examples so in 2002 i had uh one of my doctoral students had just defended his doctoral dissertation and so we were going out uh for a celebratory dinner myself my wife him and his date for the evening and so prior to us going out he had given me a heads up to tell me that his date in question was a graduate student in post-modernism in cultural anthropology and in radical feminism sort of the holy trinity of and so and so i basically i hope we can say on your show if no no you can say whatever you want and so he was telling me this to sort


want and so he was telling me this to sort of kind of warn me you know let's let's be on our best behavior because you know we don't want to get into big arguments i said oh don't worry i'm going to be on my best behavior which of course was not true and so about halfway through the evening i turned to this uh lady in question and i asked her oh i hear you're a you stu you're a postmodernist yes do you mind if i ask if i propose to you some what i consider to be universal truths and then you could tell me you don't think that they are universal truths correct she said yeah no they are none say okay well let me propose what i think are some universal truths because i'm an evolutionary psychologist so i do know that there is a universal human nature for example excuse me she goes okay go for it i said well is it not a universal truth that within homo sapiens within humans only women bear children is that


sapiens within humans only women bear children is that not a truth she's she looks at me she scoffs she scowls she rolls her eyes she can't believe my stupidity and says absolutely not so it's not true that only women bear children she said no i said how's that she said well because there is some tribe off some exotic japanese island where within their mythological folklore it is the men who bear children so by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm that's how you keep us you know barefoot and pregnant okay so she didn't accept that only women bear children so i said okay well it seems like it's too controversial for you to concede that only women bear children let me give you maybe a a less controversial example is it true that from anywhere on earth sailors have always relied on the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and here she used something from deconstructionism a subfield of where she said what do you


a subfield of where she said what do you mean by east and west those are just arbitrary labels what do you mean by the sun that which you call the sun i might call dancing hyena to which i answered fine the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west and she said no i'm not going to play those label games so to answer your original question post-modernism is not saying there are no truths when it comes to whether the right wing or the left wing they don't accept gravity is a social construct uh sex differences are a social construct there is no such thing as east and west there is no such thing as the sun right as a matter of fact alan socal who's a famous physicist at new york university had written a paper a satirical paper a hoax paper in 1996 which he published in one of the top postmodernist journals academic journals where he was arguing that gravity is a social construct and the rest of it but he was being satirical it


the rest of it but he was being satirical it was a hoax paper and it was accepted in that journal so then he went and said oh i've got an admission to make it's all nonsense it's gibberish what i wrote they said oh but that proves nothing because meaning is subjective so imagine when you are training generations of students to instead of learning engineering and economics and neuroscience you're teaching them all this kind of nonsense that's a bad parasitic idea so that's one example i could give you others if you'd like what's gotten up about the world in the last 10 years well i think many things and i discuss all these in the book i think one for example is we've lost our will to defend freedom of speech freedom of inquiry there is now forbidden knowledge there are things that you shouldn't study as an academic because it might hurt someone's feelings there are things that you shouldn't discuss when you're discussing politics because it's offensive it's racist


discussing politics because it's offensive it's racist like like what like could you give some subject examples uh well for example in academia you certainly want to be careful when you're studying sex differences now it doesn't matter if you study sex differences if the findings come out according to the politically correct position if a finding comes out that women are superior to men on some task then you should publish that and you will be hailed as a great scientist if you publish research that shows that on a particular memory task men perform better oh well you're a nazi you're a sexist you're a misogynist you certainly shouldn't study any racial differences only nazi bigots would do that so that's in academia there's a class of things that you're allowed to say or not say in terms of the public discourse and i discussed this in one of the chapters of the parasitic mind there's a chapter where i talk about ostrich parasitic syndrome ops where you know you put your


syndrome ops where you know you put your head in the sand and you go la la la i don't want to hear it well i could show you a clip of a terrorist saying that i'm about to go and blow up this train station because of these 17 different reasons that is prescribed by my religion and i am doing this only because of my religion there is no other reason i'm doing this because of my religion and then when the terrorist commits the act all of the progressive nuanced thinkers will come out and say ah it's because of climate change it's because of the zionist occupation it's because of british imperialism it's because of beard bullying it's because of uh the drought in syria it's because of a lack of art exposure it's because of alienation it's because of lone wolfism so there are 70 different reasons that they'll come up with that reject what he told you in his own words which is i am doing this because my religion prescribes it


i am doing this because my religion prescribes it so that would be an example of how people decide to reject reality because they're trying to protect a particular you know narrative someone's feelings everyone's too worried about the world being too sensitive um that's basically what it is so uh gad you know i read this beautiful thing about historians as a concept it said that what's the point of being a historian the point of being a historian is you study history so that you can predict the future and therefore try to make it a slightly better future and i would apply that same logic to evolutionary psychology that you've studied human history in a way you've studied the history of the human mind and therefore you're able to predict what's going to happen going forward so do you think that by 2030 2040 2050 also keeping in mind technological advancements like neuralink and things like that what's going to happen to our minds like are we becoming smarter are we becoming stupider


are we becoming smarter are we becoming stupider are you becoming way more sensitive or is this just a phase are we just going through a phase of being over sensitive about everything so the the fact that you study the evolution of the human mind doesn't necessarily mean that you can if i may correct you predict the future because what evolution does is it operates within a particular environment to then create changes right so uh when it comes to the evolution of a gene that allows you to synthesize lactose right so some there are some cultures where they have a gene that allows them to synthesize lactose in other cultures they don't well that type of gene can actually evolve pretty quickly within a few you know generations you know a couple hundred years you have the selection pressures for that g but on the other hand when it comes to the fact that we now have ten fingers uh there's likely not going to be any selection pressures that i can think of that's going to alter the morphology


can think of that's going to alter the morphology of our hands to go from 10 fingers to 11. you follow what i mean so so for things to change so that they become fixated as a trait within the human species it's going to take a lot more than 20 30 or 20 50. do you follow what i mean so for example today we we have dna paternity testing kits if i want to know if little johnny is my child i could actually do a dna paternity test to know if he's mine or not correct but our human minds have evolved to a time when we didn't have dna paternity testing so for example the fact that men are very sexually territorial the fact that they don't accept that their women go with other men is not due to the patriarchy but it's because it is an evolutionary solution to the very real threat of paternity uncertainty right we are a biparental species meaning that both men and women invest heavily in their children and so your ancestors and mine


in their children and so your ancestors and mine come from a from men who didn't actually appreciate their women going and sleeping with other men because i don't want to be investing 20 years of my life in a child that's not mine now why am i saying all this so now let's put it together so even though today there are dna paternity tests that would allow me to absolutely know whether johnny is my kid or not my brain hasn't had a chance to catch up to that reality because my brain is an evolutionary solution to problems that existed in our evolutionary past but if for the next million years there are selection pressures that would remove my evolved sexual jealousy then it will happen but it won't be by 2030. do you follow yes when i mean could you put a rough number as to when it could be is it in the year 3000 that our behavior i wouldn't be able to uh because it really depends on the specific trait some traits as i said could


on the specific trait some traits as i said could really evolve very very rapidly and some traits take you know thousands hundreds of thousands of years to evolve so it's very very difficult i would be giving you a completely random number all i could say is depending on the trait the rate at which that trait becomes fixated within the species varies so basically for the last two million years or so human beings have been evolving and for a bulk of that two million years we didn't have writing we didn't have religion we didn't have organized society and our things that we did then in our daily life have gotten stuck in our genetics and our mind today so keeping that in mind i'd like to also ask you other relationship based human traits that surprised you as a student as a person who studies evolutionary psychology things that just jumped out at you you said oh okay that's how my relationships are affected that's why i think like this as a guy what were those nuggets yes


this as a guy what were those nuggets yes absolutely so i actually it's a great question because when you first are exposed to the power the explanatory power of evolutionary thinking it truly alters your understanding of human behavior you you're you now have kind of a unit not kind of you have a universal explanatory key to explain endless different behaviors right so one of the things that i tell my students whenever we start a course so i might be teaching an mba course on consumer behavior and i tell them well i'm going to explain to you the evolutionary and biological roots of our consumer behavior i tell them but just for you to know i'm not teaching you a recipe of how to be a better marketer i'm actually teaching you something much bigger i'm offering you a universal key to understand human behavior how you choose to then apply it you could apply it in a million different ways and what ends up happening is five years down the road i will get some former student


years down the road i will get some former student who writes to me and says i just had a fight with my wife about xyz and i remember your lecture on the evolution of romantic jealousy and it exactly explains why i became jealous at that party so so evolutionary theory truly allows you to understand under one framework all the things that happen in our daily lives now to answer your question more directly in terms of what surprises me i think one of the things that really surprises me is the extent to which humans have a huge repertoire of possible behaviors we could be unbelievably loving cooperative altruistic and we can also be the exact opposite we can be brutal abusive genocidal and so i think that's what makes uh the study of human nature so extraordinary so for example when you look at a dog in a sense a dog has all of the noble qualities that we should have without any of our faults it is loyal it is protective it is altruistic so


loyal it is protective it is altruistic so it has all the noble qualities without any of the faults i think humans are a lot more complex we're both loving and caring and brutal and genocidal so i think maybe that's one of the things that's both sad but also very exciting to study about the human condition is there any chance you have any predictions about the year 2030 like what's going to happen in this decade because of corona virus could you quantify happiness and keep that as the subject theme of this question that do you think we'll become happier people uh i think it really varies across people i don't think as a human race we will become happier or less happy i think that there are certain recipes and prescriptions that can try to optimize your happiness and actually i discussed this yesterday on the joe rogan show which will i think will be posted today so for example doing something that you're truly passionate about look most of your day is


truly passionate about look most of your day is spent at work right most of your waking hours is spent pursuing whatever job you're doing so if you look at the chunk of your life that you are spending at work it's a rather large part of your life now imagine if you're either spending that time doing something that you really hate but you have to do it just because it's a job or if you are lucky enough to find something that you could do as a job but that also brings you great happiness and passion now of course not everybody has the luxury of making that choice but if you do have the possibility to think carefully about how to choose the right career path i think that's a really important path to happiness one of the reasons why i wake up every morning incredibly happy like a child in a candy store is because i love what i do if i'm not working on a book i'm speaking to a podcaster that has a big show in india


a podcaster that has a big show in india if i'm not doing that i'm speaking to one of my graduate students and we discuss wonderful ideas if i'm not doing that i'm working on the next scientific project so there's always an endless number of sources of ways by which i am infinitely happy so that would be one way by which we could achieve happiness i think a second way is pick the right life partner uh another right and again it sounds like oh that's easy to say but hard to to implement but i truly think that if if if your life partner is also the person with whom you truly want to spend all your time with my wife is really my best friend it's not as though uh she's my wife but when i want to hang out and have fun i go out with my male friend no she i like to do things with her and so i think if you could find a partner who appreciates who you are and vice versa who respect i think you've already


and vice versa who respect i think you've already on your way to finding happiness because you're spending most of your day doing a job that you love you come home at night to a person that you love and who respects you and cherishes you there's only sleep left and so that's a pretty good path to to happiness so i can't tell you whether humanity will be happier but i can certainly tell you that there are specific rep recipes that we can pursue to maximize our happiness absolutely love how you encapsulated the two best aspects of your life and use that as a blueprint no but i completely agree and you know allow me to add a third factor to that for you i remember seeing a gre episode where you began it talking about your daughter and i'm not a father myself but i imagine that fatherhood is the third factor that really adds meaning and purpose as a matter of fact and thank you for pointing to that it was it was the start of a gre episode


it was it was the start of a gre episode where my daughter had given me a little note because my family had come with me to meet joe i mean they've met him many times before and she gave me this little note and so i showed it to joe i said you know i am the wealthiest man in the world because of this note and and i don't say this hyperbolically i'm being literal that you know when you have a family that you that you love and loves you back you know my you know in the middle eastern culture and i don't mean to stereotype but there's often this attitude of uh you know children shut up and be quiet the grown-ups are talking right uh this very hierarchical system you know i don't like that i mean children are little people that you want to nurture like a plant and so when i speak to my children one of the greatest joys i get for example my my children ask me daddy and they're very young they're still quite young


daddy and they're very young they're still quite young what's your book about so now i actually have to answer remember at the start of the show you said please speak to me as though my audience is made up of young children well how do i take these ideas and put them in such a way that my children can walk away say oh that's cool i want to read about that there are parasites and the brains of animals and humans can be parasites oh that's cool stuff daddy and so there's nothing more beautiful and magical than seeing your children grow up and so i would agree with you fatherhood as a or motherhood is certainly a third component i'm i'm wait i'm with you there you know that's that's the thing i gain from doing these podcasts you said that you love your life because you get to study your favorite subject you get to talk about your favorite subject you get to go deeper in it through the science experiments the reason i love my job is i get to talk


reason i love my job is i get to talk to older people like yourself who've seen more of the world who've seen more of life uh i also feel that you know you guys had it luckier than us in terms of people in the 20s today and teenagers of today have way more pressure because of what social media tells us that the version of life should be where you guys didn't have that much access to information and that actually was a blessing so uh keeping in mind evolutionary psychology again i i believe that your human brain is a limited sponge it can absorb a certain level of information and then beyond that your brain starts breaking down because it's just too heavy a load to hold so i mean keeping in mind the social media generation and all the mental health issues you're seeing all over the world um do you have hope are you a little afraid also keep in mind your young daughter who's gonna grow up in this world what do you think of her future yeah i you know


do you think of her future yeah i you know social media is both a blessing and a curse right as most things in life uh so it's a it's a blessing and that it allows connections to happen that otherwise would have never happened you and i would have never met you would have never reached out to me maybe you would have never been exposed to my ideas where they're not social media right i can appear on the joe rogan show and you know within a week 20 million people have downloaded this so so there is a velocity a speed of information transmission that is wonderful so from the perspective of a professor i mean i i have really two jobs as a professor i need to create new knowledge and then i need to disseminate this knowledge and so to the extent that now you're offering me tools by which i can put out a tweet that within an hour has been viewed by 300 000 people well that's a great thing so on the one hand so i don't want


thing so on the one hand so i don't want to castigate social media as this great evil so there are wonderful things about social media it allows connections to happen that otherwise would have never happened but of course as you correctly pointed out social media is also a huge trap it if you thought that bullying when you're growing up as a teenager was bad because there were four kids who you hated in high school who were tormenting you well now what happens when instead of four kids that are tormenting you we now do cyber bullying where 40 000 people can be bullying you when we put up a picture of you that is spread everywhere now imagine a young kid who's 14 15 years old whose personhood is not fully developed who doesn't yet have the full thickness of the skin to withstand an attack or scrutiny from 40 000 people that child is gonna be brittle they're gonna break even someone like me who can usually kind of go like this i don't you know no


kind of go like this i don't you know no problem i can let things roll off my back it's not easy because yes 99 of people will write things that are incredibly positive but the human mind doesn't read the 99 they look at the one percent of the people who wrote hateful things about you who make up things about you the bigger you become the more stuff they make up about you and there is no way to stop it it goes viral and and there it is so so it's a very very challenging thing to have the right discipline to take the best that you can from social media without succumbing to all of the traps and so one of the things that i struggle with as a parent is how do i modulate how much time my children spend uh on online and you know as you know all of these apps and so on they're designed to be addictive the people who design these understand marketing and understand psychology of persuasion and understand ergonomics and they design


of persuasion and understand ergonomics and they design these things so that it's impossible for me to disassociate from my damn iphone sometimes even my my family will say if if we see you daddy pulling out your iphones we're going to be very upset please don't we're having dinner and i do it usually not because i'm uh having fun it's usually work related but it becomes hard to create the limitation between your free time your family time and your social media time so i hear you i i i'm scared for the young generation because as you said i didn't grow up at 16 years old with some of the trappings of social media yeah god there's two uh things i want to highlight again from an evolutionary psychology perspective uh the first thing is the theory of negative biases that you spoke of that if there's 99 positive comments your human mind will go to that one negative comment because some ancestor of yours was always wary of the lions and tigers roaming around him at night so


lions and tigers roaming around him at night so he always thought okay you know there's mainly deer and elephants and friendly animals but for that one lion i'm gonna be like super and that's where that concept of negative biases i believe finds itself let me add to that if i forgive me for interrupting you but let me add to that there is actually something called the negativity the negativity bias in evolutionary theory which i actually used in a paper that i published i think in 2014 that speaks exactly at this point so maybe i can explain it a bit more sure please please so there's something called the framing effect which was uh developed by two two of the greatest psychologists uh you know of the certainly of the 20th century amos tversky and danielle kahneman kahneman ended up winning the nobel prize in economics for his work in studying decision making and so one of the many phenomena that they uncovered is something called the framing effect so if i


is something called the framing effect so if i tell you for example that uh this burger is 90 fat free or if i tell you that this burger contains 10 fat those two statements are isomorphic meaning they are logically exactly the same and yet people will judge the burger differently if i frame it as 90 fat free or if i frame it as 10 fat let me give you another example if i tell you that 3 out of 5 dentists recommend this uh toothpaste it's the same thing as telling you two out of five don't recommend this toothpaste but if i give you one frame or the other you have a completely different impression of the toothpaste so i took this principle with one of my former uh doctoral students and we studied the framing effect in the context of mate choice and so let me explain to you what i mean so if i tell you uh hey would you like to go out with this person on a date seven out of ten of her friends think she's intelligent that's the


ten of her friends think she's intelligent that's the positive frame i could also tell you the negative frame which is three out of ten of her friends don't think she's intelligent those two frames are identical seven out of ten think she is intelligent is the exact same thing as telling you three out of 10 things she's not yet people don't come up with the same final desire to go out with the person as a function but now i'm going to come to the negativity bias we predicted and found that when it comes to mate choice women would be much more likely to succumb to the framing effect because the negatively framed information looms much larger in their brain why because the costs of making a bad mate choice is much greater to a woman than it is to a man this is something called parental investment theory are you with me am i blowing your mind yet yes so wow so parental investment theory basically argues that the two sexes don't have the same minimal obligatory parental investment so for


have the same minimal obligatory parental investment so for example women have just if you look at the the gametes in a man's ejaculation there are 250 million spermatozoa women will have 400 ovulations so women a woman's ovum is is much more expensive than a man's spermatozoa right so that's already is tipping the the scale to a woman women have to bear the gestational cost women have to bear the likelihood of childhood mortality child bearing more time so for all sorts of reason the cost of minimal parental investment loom much larger for women than it does for men therefore we expect women to have evolved much more stringent mate choice strategies that's why women are much less interested in engaging in short-term mating not that they're not sometimes they are but much less so than men right precisely because of this parental investment difference and so we take this principle and argue that when it comes to framing within the mating market the negatively framed information will serve as a neon sign much


framed information will serve as a neon sign much more in a woman's psyche so this demonstrates to you the evolutionary roots of the negativity bias so let me get this straight guard uh basically because of our past as stone age people uh and our habits there our center of our life was a reproductive process and probably our eating process so everything was centered around these two things like you choose a mate and you should ensure where your next meal is coming from it was right go on i was going to say you you you exactly summarize it the game of life is made up of two steps survival but i could survive all you want if i can't propagate my genes my my genes end with me it's a darwinian dead end so so the game of life is made up of two steps first survive and then secondly procreate and so in some of my other work not in the parasitic mind but in some of my previous books i talk about there are four key darwinian modules


books i talk about there are four key darwinian modules that drive much of our purpose of behavior there is the reproductive module everything related to mating there is the survival module and when it comes to survival basically there are two key things that you could easily kind of remember don't become somebody's dinner and try to get dinner right so for example the evolution of camouflaging right the fact that some animals evolve so that they can perfectly be camouflaged this is the evolution of a trait that ensures that i don't become someone's dinner right on the other hand my gustatory preferences the fact that you and i probably prefer to eat something fatty and rich in calories more than something that is low in calories right so i might prefer juicy steak you might prefer a fatty chocolate mousse but we both prefer those things to raw celery because your ancestors and mine evolved in an environment of caloric uncertainty and caloric scarcity so the survival module is really make sure you


so the survival module is really make sure you eat dinner and make sure you don't become someone's dinner right and the other two modules are called the kin selection module right why do i jump into a river to save three of my brothers why would i risk my life for my three brothers well because my brothers share on average half half our genes with one another and so even if i were to die if i do that in the service of saving three of my brothers from an evolutionary calculus that makes perfect sense and then the fourth darwinian module is called reciprocal altruism why would i jump into the river to save you you and i are not biologically related well the reason i do that is because we've evolved something called reciprocity which is i scratch your back today and you will scratch mine tomorrow so the idea is that we engage in many forms of reciprocity because of this original uh problem that we're trying to solve evolutionarily speaking so this is why if you and i


speaking so this is why if you and i are best friends i will make sure to remember your birthday and invite you for dinner on your birthday but then when it's my birthday you better not forget and you better reciprocate from an economic perspective there's no reason for us to engage in this ritual i'm going to pay 50 for your dinner you're going to reciprocate and pay 50 for my dinner we're going to end up at the exact same point so why don't we just forget the whole thing and not do it the reason why we do it is because these reciprocal obligations is what oils it's the social lubricant that oils our friendship you follow i can't yeah i can't imagine what you went through after college and after studying these you know uh truths about life because according to me if you take the case of an entrepreneur going out on a date it captures all these four ideas the fourth module is in place in his professional life where he's doing some work to


in his professional life where he's doing some work to get something in return the third one is where he's doing it with his co-founders or something for his family the second one about reaper he sees the pretty girl on the date and then his horny stone age guy gets turned on and the first one is the food he eats at the date so if every everything you go through in your human experience is actually an outcome of what your ancestors went through in your stone age which is a very fascinating of course and and in a sense this this is why i'm both incredibly excited in my life because i've got this universal key to explain all these wonderful bizarre phenomena that we engage in but also it's what upsets me a lot in my both of my professional and my public life because as you may know if you follow my work there is a huge list of frankly imbeciles who despise evolutionary psychology and they despise evolutionary psychology for all of the wrong


despise evolutionary psychology for all of the wrong reasons right so radical feminists despise evolutionary psychology because they don't like the idea that there might be biological based sex differences well the average newborn pigeon knows that there are sex differences right but yet we're supposed to argue that men and women are indistinguishable it's only social construction that made us different right if only linda had been taught differently and uh uh rahul let's put an indian name rahul had been trained differently then we would have they would have come out different well of course socialization matters but underneath by the way socialization exists not outside of biology socialization exists in its form because of biology so there is no nature versus nurture everything is nature nurture exists in its form because of nature right but yet you've got all sorts of social scientists and humanities professors who hate the idea that humans are biological beings they they certainly are willing to accept that evolution explains the


are willing to accept that evolution explains the behavior of the dog of the cow of the zebra of the mosquito but don't you dare say dr sad that evolution explains the human mind what are you some kind of nazi well what do you mean what do you think the human mind comes from you think it's by magic it came to be so there's all sorts of people who put up many many roadblocks against the spread of biological thinking certainly in the social sciences for all sorts of idiotic reasons and so what my scientific career has been all about is to introduce evolutionary thinking in the behavioral sciences in general but in the business school in particular how could you study consumers without studying biology how could you study employees employers managers traders you don't think our hormones affect our behaviors you could ask me to make a decision before lunch and ask when my blood sugar is low and you could ask me to make the exact same decision after lunch when i'm now


the exact same decision after lunch when i'm now satiated and i might come to a different decision you don't think that affected my behavior but yet we have 100 years of theories and economics and sociology and marketing that are all outside of biology and so one of the things that i try to do in my work is to say no no of course we have to understand the biological roots of who we are yeah uh god i mean after evolutionary psychology is there another stage of psychology that focuses on different countries like people from different races uh you know like are there actually differentiators in race whether on a physical level or a psychological level yeah no that's a good question so this is how i'll answer it evolutionary psychology both explains human universals things that make the indian consumer the lebanese consumer and the bolivian consumer similar to one another but it also explains differences between consumers or people in general so let me re-explain there are some things that are universal irrespective of culture


are some things that are universal irrespective of culture there are some things that are culturally different because of biology and there are other things that are culturally different not due to biology so for example the fact that the color green might be considered to be a symbol of fertility in one culture and it's considered a symbol of disease in another might not be related to biology but let me give you an example of a cross-cultural difference that is due to biology okay take for example the use of spices and culinary traditions so on average indian food is spicier than swedish food yes now if i were a cultural anthropologist i would simply revel in having made that statement and it would end there swedish people eat less spicy foods indian people eat more spicy food good night everybody we're done an evolutionary psychologist says no no that's not enough i want to know is there a phenomenon that explains why indian people eat more spicy food than swedish people and so there is a field called


than swedish people and so there is a field called darwinian gastronomy that actually explains the distribution of spice use around the world and the explanation is magically beautiful it turns out that spices are used as a solution to something called it's called the antimicrobial hypothesis in hot climates there is a greater proliferation of pathogens food-borne pathogens therefore certain culinary traditions like the use of spices like pickling like salting like smoking are cultural solutions to biological problems so even in india you see differences in spice use in northern india where it's colder there won't be as much use of spices than in southern india where it is much hotter therefore there might be greater density of food-borne pathogens so in this case you're using evolutionary theory to explain differences between groups so it's not true that evolutionary psychology is only about studying human universals it also explains cross-cultural differences okay uh god like we're coming to the end of the podcast and i


coming to the end of the podcast and i have a couple of key questions for you uh the first is just if someone wants to go deeper into these subjects uh like psychology like evolutionary psychology like cultural psychology could you give like five book recommendations which have helped you a lot yeah so of course i would say anybody who wants to uh learn about evolutionary psychology read uh martin daly and margo wilson's book homicide that's the book that got me into evolutionary psychology another book that's a bit more technical is a classic sort of one of the bibles of evolutionary psychology it's called the adapted mind it was a book that was it's an edited book from 1992 that has some of the big original pioneers of evolutionary psychology all in one book if you want a book that's specific about the evolutionary roots of human mating david buss wrote a fantastic book many years ago called the evolution of desire so those are some of the uh


of desire so those are some of the uh evolutionary books if you're interested in psychology of decision making which was you know my original training in my in my doctorate uh read stuff by amos tversky and daniel kahneman daniel kahneman wrote a book uh about six seven years ago called thinking fast and slow about system one and system two thinking fantastic book so those are some of the books that if you're interested in psychology of decision making or evolutionary psychology you must read okay and one final question for you god like from all of your life's learnings if you were dying today and you had to give the current generation three pieces of learning to carry into the future from all your learnings of life what would it be uh always support freedom of speech everything flows from freedom of speech uh you don't have anything if you don't have freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry so defend that principle above all others uh live a purposeful and meaningful life uh life is very short we're


and meaningful life uh life is very short we're on this planet for a very short time period we'd love to think that we are immortal let your work and your legacy and your children be your path to immortality and thirdly so these are not necessarily things that i learned in book but things that i learned through the wisdom of life is uh be happy you know what i mean life is magical uh there's so much exciting things we all go through difficult periods my background is i come from the horrors of the lebanese civil war and yet i wake up every morning thankful that i'm alive so live life to the fullest don't regret anything and move forward god every single podcast teaches me something about the subject that we're speaking about but also from the person and from you have learned about the happiness that you can take away from keeping your curiosity and your willingness to learn a life thank you brother god bless you you're giving a lot to the world and i'm


you're giving a lot to the world and i'm glad i could take your story to my country and my audience thank you brother pleasure to be with you and keep doing what you're doing you're doing a great job cheers


they say passion is important of course passion is important but passion has to be combined with determination and perseverance so the word is great and i think grit is very important you know because if i have passion in doing something and if i don't have the perseverance if i don't do well and i mean every person goes through failures if i have that determination perseverance i'll try again but if i don't have i'll just give it up so grit is very important to succeed in life [Music] great having you on the ranvi show you're a massive business idol for a lot of young entrepreneurs in this country uh i have two very impactful and almost rude questions to ask you to begin the first question is uh they say that nine out of ten coconuts grown in india actually used to make parachute coconut oil i don't remember the exact numbers but we use a substantial number of coconuts in india i think 9 out of 10 may be an exaggeration but a


out of 10 may be an exaggeration but a substantial part of our requirement we are the biggest coconut buyers i would say in the world and we consume huge quantities in crores i would say in a year yeah i think every single indian at least that i know of or during my lifetime has used parachute coconut tail at some point yes i think one out of three indians use this parachute so that itself shows that you know there are and we sell something like uh between india and bangladesh and middle east we sell something like every month we sell five crore containers or bottles every month wow so it's a very wide usage when you were starting out in the 70s in the early 70s so you inherited a small business from your uh family and i mean i don't think it's small but you inherited a business it was very small at that time but it was mainly the edible oil business was mainly selling edible oils to in an unbranded form right to industries


to in an unbranded form right to industries in bulk uh barrels and big tins which was again so loose to the consumers yeah and i basically converted that business from unbranded to branded yeah you you took a call of using plastic bottles you took a call of making it more consumer-friendly focused on marketing branding i think that's kind of what a lot of young second generation entrepreneurs even today are trying to do where they're seeing whatever the parents give them and trying to grow it into yes basically what you've done yes so uh it's a straight question now and this is something a lot of young people want to know so yeah after you've become a billionaire or you know after you've reached what the world calls you like after you've reached that pedestal what does life become like then from now on you're saying or from the time i became a billionaire or so now how do you feel i feel very good i really feel on top of the world i am a


really feel on top of the world i am a fitness freak so i exercise every day and i keep myself very fit and this in this pandemic i'm spending more time on fitness so i i'm feeling very good money beyond a point does not uh impact me and i am not a kind of person who leads a flashy lifestyle so relatively simple lifestyle yeah so the so called wealth has not impacted me personally uh or in terms of lifestyle i i don't think i'll ever own a plane or a or a big bungalow or anything like that you know i am comfortable with what i have yeah that is that keeps me much more grounded humble right and also i would say that uh i'm far more happier because uh you know the artificial so-called stimulants you may call it or so so-called you know uh possessions don't add to happiness you know yeah you have to be happy internally yeah they say that the more possessions you have the likely the more suffering you're


you have the likely the more suffering you're prone to and then you are wanting next and export next so you know that in my case that next doesn't come only you know yeah but what is it like roaming in those circles like when you see people around you who may not think the way you do but have reached that same level in their careers does everyone think that way not necessarily not necessarily it's different i think each person is built differently okay for some people uh they want to enjoy spending more shall i say resources whether it's their own lifestyle or their spending i'm not saying i'm my lifestyle has not improved it has improved yes some amount of wealth is important to lead a comfortable lifestyle but it doesn't go beyond a certain point you know and it doesn't impact whether i'm x or x plus in terms of wealth you know yeah so so i mean when i talk to you even now i feel like you're a very busy person even though you have the


you're a very busy person even though you have the choice of not being busy so why do you choose to be busy even now i am the kind of person who like keeps likes to keep oneself occupied you know i have i need to be mentally occupied okay and is that the motivation it's not necessarily but i have to be mentally occupied i cannot just sit without doing anything sometimes i have to i think i have to learn to just relax you know which i can't and there is art of doing nothing they say so it's difficult for me to do that but i'm trying to this whole pandemic also has taught me to be far more patient i'm very impatient as a person so i need to create my own work so it's not necessarily that uh it is related to business whether it's fitness or whether it is whatever i play golf or i have to keep myself busy you know right like even your leisure activities have some amount of growth in them i feel i yeah i think ultimately


growth in them i feel i yeah i think ultimately life is learning you know and life is uh doing new things right and learning from mistakes and taking some risks and experimenting and so it's it's important to experiment to learn uh and to fail also yeah so i mean i'm gonna get to failure your story all that but i have one burning question in my head which is that while you have the blessing of career success material success wealth and i feel you also have a blessing of humility we are not really chasing all the artificial pleasures as you spoke but what is the curse of your life because no human has it perfect ever and from the outside people see successful people and think that okay everything's perfect i really don't i don't know i'm very difficult to pinpoint i am i have very good health i have good family i have two grandchildren which are my biggest source of joy and luckily they just stay one floor below me so i meet them every day i i enjoy playing


so i meet them every day i i enjoy playing golf i play golf now two to three times a week i have a good friend circle good social circle so all in all it's i'm lucky that i'm very fortunate that i am blessed with all these positives you know do you ever have like negative days even now i think i would say some frustrating days when things don't come out as planned or in a business there are failures there are some setbacks so sometimes i mean not big ones which is going to put you back but something which is supposed to happen for example the new product you may have launched may not do as well as you thought or a new service in kaya which may not do that well but uh and nothing worth checking so it's more i would say as i said frustration rather than uh big stress right stress points you know so like with your family uh and with your grandkids if you could pass on only like one piece of advice to them out of all


like one piece of advice to them out of all the piece of advice while i know it's just a hypothetical scenario what would that one piece be see i think two things i would say one piece is difficult one is to i think each person is born with certain inherent uh god given gifts and most of us don't know what are our god-given gifts and we try to emulate somebody else because that's the fashion like you know okay i have to emulate somebody else my say my grandfather for example i'm talking about they need not you know they have to figure out what is their god-given gifts and how can they leverage it you know and to find out first is to find out what is that god-given gift and many of us don't know and the process of finding out is actually talking to a lot of other people your family your friends and they will tell you you are like this and you are very good at this now if you pursue a career which is based


now if you pursue a career which is based on your gifts the chances of your enjoying that journey is much more rather than doing something which you don't enjoy and the chances of success also are higher so i would say that identify your strengths leverage your strengths and i have a 75-25 rule 75 of my strengths i will try and uh work on my strengths improving my strengths and 25 i will try and nullify my weaknesses normally it is the opposition every person tries to say okay where am i weak and i tonight to try to improve but if you work on your strengths and you know choose some vocation which is based on your strengths your chances of success will be much much more and if you have some fatal flaws in terms of your weaknesses then of course you need to rectify them as early as possible so that's one number two i think every person they say passion is important of course passion is important but passion has to be combined with determination


important but passion has to be combined with determination and perseverance so the word is great and i think grit is very important you know because if i have passion in doing something and if i don't have the perseverance if i don't do well and i mean every person goes through failures if i have that determination perseverance i'll try again but if i don't have i'll just give it up so grit is very important to succeed in life yeah so with what you're doing at maricopa technically you're competing with some very big international players and you have done that throughout your life so what is that indian mentality that you've brought in which has dominated the market like how is an indian company kind of beaten those international players so i would say twofold one is the certain inherent belief that indians can also the pride of being an indian an indian fmcg company in a in a sector where a lot of multinationals are active now in many indian companies have actually


are active now in many indian companies have actually are doing well but you have more multinationals and if you look at the overall market for fmcg a substantial part of it would be dominated by multinationals you know so that pride of creating something something indian was something always in my mind driving factor uh one one of the drying factors and then choosing certain categories and in which the multinationals are not that active so the portfolio choice of businesses where you can succeed played a very important role and in some categories of business we are in and where we are market leaders these multinationals are not present right so the fact that they were not leveraging those opportunities uh and we were able to do so i think that made us succeed in the marketplace right so i read about a lot of nuggets from your life and how you were a young brash person in the 70s you kind of evolved into something else in the 80s something else in the 90s so the question i have for


else in the 90s so the question i have for you is how have you changed through the decades if you could take me through each decade and how has the nature of business in india changed so i have changed a lot i have changed a lot from the time i started i started off as a very i would say very non-confident introvert person i was not sure though i think i had a good business mind but i've always been an introvert you know in the past i've changed now i'm not i don't think i'm introvert anymore but a lot of my energy came out of my looking within myself you know in the initial phases what do i need to do how do i make a mark uh you know just thinking thinking through reading uh talking to some people so i think you have to go on thinking you know so many of my initiatives which i undertook whether it is managing the family you know i was a part of a very large joint family you know my father three of


very large joint family you know my father three of my uncles my four five of my cousins all together in the business so how do you navigate to carve out your own identity was one big step then when we started marico how do you build a culture in an organization what's relevant and how culture can help in organizations succeed then the portfolio choice i talked about what kind of products what kind of category the products you should go into which will help you succeed and then the role on innovation you know i think whenever we've innovated we've seen a discontinuous impact if that innovation is succeeded so how can you create a culture of innovation was again another thing which one had to read a lot talk a lot because um i think many indian organizations at that time were not paying attention to to the culture part and then as we grew we said that what is the role of the organization you know it's not just for helping shareholders and creating wealth for shareholders the organization exists for all the


creating wealth for shareholders the organization exists for all the stakeholders and all the stakeholders and internet so whether it is your consumers your employees your shareholders your associates you're working with or the society and you need to walk that extra mile in ensuring that you are adding value to each stakeholder and if you're able to add value to each stakeholder then i mean they they're all of them as i said are interconnected it will help some other stakeholder so this whole purpose journey is something which we embarked about 10 15 years back and now it's being talked about in a lot of management circles that one has to look at all the stakeholders and not just shareholders i read somewhere that from getting to zero to one million dollars it's about hard work and an idea but from say one million and beyond it's entirely about humans and how you handle emotional equations how you handle psychology yeah would you agree so i think the role of entrepreneur changes you know as you grow when


role of entrepreneur changes you know as you grow when you are at a start-up stage you are also going through a learning curve and you are doing things on your own so everything because the scale is small you are not able to attract talent you are actually doing everything or most of the things you may have some clerical help some help but most of the decisions are taken by you so that the stage when you're doing things as you grow as you rightly put it above a certain stage then you can't handle everything on your own so you start recruiting people and then once you start recruiting people then that means you're getting things done from others and it's a very different role then most entrepreneurs don't realize that when you shift from doing things to getting things done your role changes substantially because then you are not doing things you are recruiting talent empowering them ensuring that they work in a team uh just alignment in terms of what is going to be your role and your colleagues role


going to be your role and your colleagues role and it's a very different way of managing business and i find that many entrepreneurs don't shift gears when they change from doing things to getting things done because if you don't create the right culture if you don't have the right talent if you don't delegate if you don't empower then you'll not be able to attack good talent if you're not able to attract good talent then you'll not be able to grow because there is a limit to which you can do things on your own and you have to ultimately delegate an empower if you have to grow so that's the second stage so doing things to getting things done and when you become much larger you're not even getting things done you're influencing others you're influencing large number of people by talking in big uh forums and writing about it and you know things like that because then your role is to influence not your own tea but inspire influence you know if there's an organization journey


influence you know if there's an organization journey reinforce some of the initiatives for example if i have to create innovation i have how can i influence people i can have innovation awards within the organization i can have whenever there's a review taking place i can talk about what are the innovative things you're doing i can write about innovation and you know share with my people so people in the organization know that innovation is very very important so that's my way of influencing to others that innovation is something i want you to take risk don't be afraid of failure experiment so that role as the business grows larger is shifts from getting things done to influencing others and again there's a big shift in terms of the role of entrepreneur and i think if you have to grow into a large organization a successful organization which sustain over a period of time your role has to shift and i think it's very important for organizations and entrepreneurs to ensure that and most of the time i've seen that


ensure that and most of the time i've seen that entrepreneurs may have very good idea very good business at a small scale but they are just not able to grow because of these issues and most of the problems are with the entrepreneurs themselves in terms of the shifts they have to make they are too controlled focused they don't trust others sometimes yes there is a risk in trusting others some sometimes things may go wrong but what is the option you can't go and go on doing things all your life you know if you want to do that then you'll always be small yeah so in terms of scaling up on a very personal level like other than this reinvention tip that you've given yeah would you give any other tip to entrepreneurs on a very personal human level like if you want to keep growing if you want to keep scaling up what you have to keep in mind so i would say that uh you know it's a very highly competitive environment you may succeed initially when you have started a business based


succeed initially when you have started a business based on whatever reason you succeeded but don't let that success go into your head because it's a matter of time competition will catch up with you so you need to improve upon what i call the right to win so how are you winning in the marketplace so depending on the kind of business you are in it may be something innovative it could be some pioneering move you've done or it could be some technology you have developed or it could be something service related thing which you have done which is making you succeed so you need to work on these things which will keep you two steps ahead of competition right and unless you are able to do that it's a matter of time others will copy you and you may not be able to retain that edge so a perpetual thrust on creating a right to win is very very important for any organization secondly i would say that talent plays a very important role and at every opportunity entrepreneur should take initiatives to


at every opportunity entrepreneur should take initiatives to improve the quality of talent which exists within them for example if there is a vacancy or if there is a resignation or a new position is created you try to recruit somebody who is better than earlier so you are continuously enhancing the talent pool within the organization and then how do you retain good talent is another challenge you know because if if you are known in the in the job market that you are very good talent then you will become a poaching ground for other other organizations and some people will leave so how do you ensure that it's just not money which will keep people with you you have to create the right culture you have to give the right challenge to people to grow so culture building challenge growth is something which will keep people with you and not just monetarily because you're paying them higher you know money has a limited role it of course it has low role but beyond that i think you have to keep your talent engaged in


think you have to keep your talent engaged in creating the right culture they should be enjoying working with you they should be looking forward to the next day what will i i want to go back to office rather than say oh my god i have to go to work you know right uh so have you seen bad boy billionaires on netflix uh bad boy the new one which is the mother yeah yeah that's right so so i mean what goes wrong at that level that like as a human being you know is it greed is it wanting more more like what happens i would say that uh some things one is in depending on you know in case of vijayamali it was i don't think it was as much greed but it was more stubbornness to go into a airline business headstrong yeah i had strong i have to be an airline and i will succeed and not willing to listen to others and i think he should have exited that business much earlier and he acquired that other decanaire


much earlier and he acquired that other decanaire also he should not have done so so i would say that headstrong in terms of wanting to get into a business which became like his passion and not exiting out of that business if he had exited you should have been because all other businesses like his liquor and all that still continue to do well but because he took so much and that wishful thinking you know that things will improve you can't run a business on visual thinking you have to run it on on actual uh data data your ability to judge future what's going to happen to the industry so i think on vijaya malaya that was the key thing and then i think his lifestyle also was done doing you know because he should have actually um if the company was not doing well and from what i saw in that episode was that he had a big party for his 50th birthday or something that creates a very wrong signal you know when you're not paid your employees of course he may not


you're not paid your employees of course he may not have he may not have funded his party from the airline money but people still associate the key promoter you know that if he can spend money on such a big for his party why can't he pay that money put in that money in the company and pay us you know so i would say these are the two things in some other cases it was more to do with governance and just being crook uh so some of the diamond guys and all that i think it was just cheating others so it's a combination of bad judgment uh not willing to accept your mistakes governance is very important and i think awareness is relevant for at every stage in the organization and not necessarily when you're big yeah because if you start taking shortcuts it will come come back to you you know if you start taking shortcuts if you don't follow the rule of law it will hit you and when it hits you it will just put puts you back you know so


it will just put puts you back you know so it's very important to to have the right governance to attract good talent uh and just to ensure that you know you sometimes it it could lead to some delays it could lead to some extra work but it's fully worth it yeah so i also feel like whoever the leader is that person's character trickles down through the organization yes so how much would you say like and i know you also have a sense of god and you know spirituality has that played any role in your business career so i would say that uh to some extent the culture of the organization is driven from my internal leadership style because i was the one who so very open very transparent very trusting willing to take risks is something which i've always again a self-starter i want people who are motivated from within so that burning desire to succeed has to be there so if a person comes in and you know he wants to be pampered or he wants to be guided at


be pampered or he wants to be guided at every stage that's not us yeah i have nobody has guided me in my journey i have taken all my decisions whatever learning are on my own so that's the culture which has i mean when i saw that people saying that you are not a nurturing organization it just i mean just realize that okay a lot of it may have come from me but is there any sense of spirituality within you like to keep going even now so i believe i mean i don't go to temples okay so i don't um but i have a strong belief that there is some super force and you have to do the things in the right manner does it play a role in business of course you have to play a role because in terms of governance in terms of fairness in terms of ethics it plays a very very important role so you have to be very ethical you have to be very fair and you have to do things in the right manner and luckily in


do things in the right manner and luckily in my sector the kind of business we are in i didn't have to go to the government for any license or anything you know and at that time i'm talking when i started the business there was a huge license raj and a lot of entrepreneurs benefited by just getting a license thank god i didn't have to do because i am not cut out for all these greasing palms and all that's not me so not i would like to go and you know sell something to somebody else if you're running a business then i i cannot uh pamper you and that's not me at all so luckily the kind of business i went into didn't require all this and i think that helped me also yeah and so for the 2020s and 2030s what business advice do you have for the youth of the nation in terms of industries we should look at or just how we should look about things so i think there are i mean one is in because of


think there are i mean one is in because of pandemic there are huge opportunities which have come up of course it's a big big area of stress anxiety for all of us and we are going through uh something which we have never imagined we would go through but having said that it's a matter of time things will improve i don't know when will that happen but i reckon within six months to one year things will come back to normal and we are seeing huge opportunities created by this pandemic so like like like for example some geopolitical realignments you know between china and other parts of the world like the whole trust on hygiene you know people are far more hygiene driven uh on health whether it's mental health spiritual health or the food you eat on immunity you know you want to be far more immune you want to take steps whether it's vitamins or ayurvedic products or honey or whatever or superfoods so and then the whole exposure to digital learning you know and digital exposure so


to digital learning you know and digital exposure so whether it's e-commerce or e-learning for the kids or e-prescriptions or reconsultation with the doctors these are habits we have formed in the last eight nine months i could never have imagined working from home i have not gone to office for seven eight months yeah and i'm perfectly i think i'm wondering do i need to go to office at all of course there is a benefit of meeting people and interacting with them that's i'm not undermining that but a lot of times i would now feel guilty that you know if i had to call people to my to my office from somewhere from far away and i would make them wait for half an hour meeting they would waste two and a half hours because in a city like bombay one hour commuting time each way in future i will just say let's do a zoom call because i got so used to it and they also got used to it um i don't need to call people for an interview if


don't need to call people for an interview if i have to interview from say delhi or wherever else i can do it through zumko so i think we have i think a lot of trends which uh which were existing have accelerated and i think they have thrown up a lot of newer opportunities you know and i think we look at we should look at those opportunities in addition to that i think for any entrepreneurs you have to as i said earlier you have to identify right to win you know so you do something which is unique you don't try and come do something which is others are doing it because it is it is growing uh you will not be able to succeed if you have me to product you have to have something unique so you try to find out your initial you should try and leverage your strengths if i'm not good at technology no point in me going into a highly technology intensive business i have to look at what i am good at and try and identify


at what i am good at and try and identify opportunities in areas which i'm good at so like what do you think about you know the concept of just human life coming to an end you know on a very personal level like do you think about things like that after having such an intense journey um i think as you grow your thoughts change they say first 25 years are for learning i'm talking earlier days 25 next 25 years are for earning and the next 25 years are forgiving you know so your desire to give back as you grow increases substantially depending on what you can give you can give time you can give energy you can give money in my case i would like to do all three together because i can afford to give money but it's just not giving a donation to a hospital or a school or anything i want to be a i believe in active giving so i have to be mentally involved i should spend time on something which i'm giving and not just donating money


something which i'm giving and not just donating money to an institute or something but each person has their own way so i am i'm increasingly spending more and more time on my giving initiatives what can i do to make a difference to this world i think that gives you some other type of joy you know and they say and i was just talking once to azim premji saying he gives he does a lot of giving saying giving is more difficult than than earning and running a business because you need to decide whom to give how whatever you're giving is it making an impact so it's it's a big challenge you know if you want to do active giving in terms of ensuring that you are making an impact right and uh do you have any regrets about not being born in the 90s or 2000s and being an entrepreneur now are you happy with like that no i don't think so one day i mean i'm i'm in a way i'm quite practical as a


i'm in a way i'm quite practical as a person so i i was born in a certain time i have enjoyed that part i have created a business so i don't even know you guys know but what do 90s born kids have that your generation didn't so i think they have far more freedom they're far more independent are far more conscious of environment and you know what is going to be the future they have this purpose within the organization so i think it's very important that i at one level i see that you know the good kids coming from good families i think they are i like the good qualities in them of course i mean the bad kids they would do drugs or something i mean that's but i'm talking on the positive side you know well brought our kids they have i think they understand much more the global issues which are going to impact all of us and it's going to impact them more because some of the environment issues sustainable issues will get accelerated over a period of time


issues will get accelerated over a period of time and it would be within their lifestyle we didn't think about it as much in our our days you know yeah but so in terms of business opportunity what do we have like in terms of this new india that's got the internet that's way more educated so i think you've seen so many unicorns coming up in the last uh few years you know so i think there are enough opportunities and i think big opportunities are in the area of technology you know how can technology impact all of us and india has huge opportunities whether it's agriculture or whether it's environment or education or healthcare can you try and leverage technology to improve the yields of agriculture or to what telecom did to through mobile to reach so many people to in healthcare or education there are you've seen the likes of baiju's and you know many other learning companies they have really grown so well in the last few years you know so there are enough opportunities and i


you know so there are enough opportunities and i think one should look at the positive side beautiful actually so before signing off you're coming out of the book soon which i am excited about because while researching this uh interview yeah i couldn't find the quantity of information i wanted on you and i feel there's too many stories and morals you've had yeah i think i have that's what uh i realized when i stepped down as managing director of the company and uh you know i speak a lot at various events on average at least twice a month and whenever i spoke about my own journey or any topic which i normally speak on innovation or board management or my own journey or how do you create a culture of innovation how do you convert a family managed company into a professionally managed company i used to uh get a lot of suggestions why don't you pen your thoughts and write a book so when i had that time i said that okay let me let me try and do that


that okay let me let me try and do that and as you as i had said earlier to you i cannot remain unoccupied i have to do something so that's how i started writing a book and it's almost like uh almost over and i it should go to the publishers within by latest by november end and it should be released by march i have a co-author who is also my mentor uh and i have gone to whenever i've had issues i've spoken to him his name is professor ramcharan he is a very famous coach internationally he has written some like 25 or 27 books many of them have sold millions and millions of copy so i'm very fortunate to have him but most of the writing i have done and he's given his insights into the book so it captures all my journey from the time i started to till today and all my failures what are the learnings out of these failures i think it's come out well i'm quite happy with the way it's turning out and uh


happy with the way it's turning out and uh the name of the book is harsh reality so now we're in the final stages of uh you know the some shoots on cover and all that but uh it's a matter of time i hope that by march april when we are ready to release things are much more back to normal and people start going to book shops and and see the book and then we can also hold panel discussions and you know more more coverage more podcasts also so i'm i'm looking forward to releasing this book and you know getting feedback about the book but i i'm quite sure that it will help entrepreneurs it is basically it is targeted towards entrepreneurs who want to scale up for entrepreneurs who who are in family businesses uh for professionals who want to improve the functioning so there is a lot on culture building how do you have an effective board of directors so i think there is for all professional as well as entrepreneurs there is there is a lot of


as entrepreneurs there is there is a lot of learning in this book i think it might be more valuable than modern mbas especially from yeah especially in considering that i'm just a commerce graduate i have not studied anything further yeah but i have worked with hundreds of mbas you know i've learned a lot from them right so i think it's practical knowledge and i think that makes any much larger impact than just theory beautiful harsh my valencia thank you thank you honor for me talking to you i asked you a lot of my personal questions so this is a half an hour mentoring session pretty much for me i really appreciate it if there's any one last message you'd like to give young motivated entrepreneurs watching it till this point so all i can say this two will pass never waste a crisis this is a crisis all of us are in in the crisis all of us are in different boats some of us are better off some of us are not better off but i all


some of us are not better off but i all i can say this too will pass and look at the positive side uh going forward thank you sir i really appreciate that thank you


this is a conversation about spirituality but also love and relationships which i believe go hand in hand this is a conversation with daji or kamlesh d patel a new a spiritual leader who's leading a movement where the central theme is the heart the central theme is love i'm not going to talk too much about this podcast in the intro because i feel like it's one of those conversations that you've just got to sink into this is daji on the ranvir show [Music] namaste it's a huge huge huge honor having you on the ranvir show i do not look at these kind of interactions as podcasts for my audience i look at them as blessings in my own personal life uh the life of the person behind the podcast so deeply honored thank you me too mr good to see you and you are what i have heard about as i already told you and be glad to meet you and i i can i can breathe my last seeing you young people interested in spirituality so it


last seeing you young people interested in spirituality so it gives me a lot of hopes i you know that that's that's my big hope and also my observation honestly i feel like there's a whole generation of kids coming out where you know there's this theory that all of them are special souls and we'll see the whole world gradually becoming more spiritual would you agree to something like that that you know kids born nowadays are not your average souls they are not average in fact their rebellion in a good sense okay the reason is the previous generations they have been living in the what we call state of obedience a parent say so they believe so nothing wrong with it also it's okay it maintains peace today's generation is quite challenging and they say you believe in god this i really don't know some people say i don't and i do admire that honesty because unless and until you do experience how can you believe so my moment my appeal to youth is come to a neutral point


appeal to youth is come to a neutral point don't say i don't believe and don't say i believe so see and run an experiment with your heart you become the scientist let your heart judge and through the experiments you carry out on a day-to-day basis let the results speak to itself and say yes i believe that he exists because i experienced so you can speak from your experience from your conviction not by borrowed knowledge whatever knowledge will not take us further right uh a little little personal question to you but what is your what is your image of god like i think every human being has an image of god some people say it doesn't exist some people say it's the universe for some people it's krishna bhagavan for some people it's jesus christ for some people it's just being a good person so what is your image of god in your head image of god has been changing in my life it's it has been evolving over a period of time when i was younger i had


a period of time when i was younger i had certain image of god in the form of brahma krishna allah you know all i believed in everything then i came across ramakrishna paramansa literature and we work on that and many saints and then you start watching etc etc and then if you try to meditate on lord krishna you know who comes to your mind the actor all of the photograph of radha and krishna so we get trapped into imaginary images of you know from movies from photographs etc then comes a stage where you believe god is all-pervading because you start experiencing presence but what is he or is he you know and this has been a challenge to me i have until now i have come to this conclusion that god is a principle he can be understood when you yourself become godly that's all there is as you become more godly the other entity becomes more revealing to you it appeals to your heart so becoming will tell us that yes i


your heart so becoming will tell us that yes i have become godly and that's how the god is earlier you know based on the needs of a person people created god in their own image four fundamental needs of a human being right artha means some basic fundamental physical need that will be satisfied with finance support that is artha karma emotional fulfillment dharma what is right what is wrong and uphold what is right right without any indoctrination with what comes from your conscience and you stand by it and that's what today's youth is protesting that this is the dharma because this is what i feel in my heart and moksha is the ultimate what they call in sastras as a state of liberation you have arrived a total state of freedom which is freeing you also from the concept of freedom see now we pray based on these four individual requirements and individually you may not be fulfilled at the artha level right or you may be fulfilled at arthur level financial level but what other things


at arthur level financial level but what other things are remaining or you may have all three but moksha is awaiting you or you have may have moksha you may have you may have full of you may be full of spirituality but what if your basic needs bread and butter is missing out that is also a topsy-turvy world you see so to me it's a fine balance of four fundamental requirement nothing excessive nothing excessive so they call my generation the mental health issues generation you know where um everyone's mental health is taking a toll because of social media because of all the numbers around us because of the need for validation so you said that a lack of balance is what causes issues now is the lack of balance happening due to a wrong kind of lifestyle a wrong kind of environment what's happening with this generation according to you so we begin with parents parents are to be blamed can we i mean little terrible thing to say such a thing but it's a fact next stage comes where you


thing but it's a fact next stage comes where you lack grandparents support you know you heard about this amazonian segments know so much they are old people they have the knowledge of all the her all kinds of herbs all kinds of trees what to eat what not to read under certain circumstances what are the medicines you need to take to prevent certain diseases okay the youth of amazonian jungle is now migrating to the cities old folks are left behind in the forest now what happens when the traditional knowledge is not passed on to the next generation or generation after that as in vacuum it is not transferred i i don't know if you had the opportunity of spending time with your grandparents if you did then you'll appreciate wow the way they eat the way they talk the way they interact with other people in a soft manner that gets absorbed by a child imagine just living with parents and parents both are working running around and child is left to a mate or a