Episode 437: Gautam John is Figuring it Out — The Seen and the Unseen

A conversation with Amit Varma on The Seen and the Unseen.

He studied law, found success as an entrepreneur, and has since spent almost two decades in the social sector trying to make the world a better place. Gautam John joins Amit Varma in episode 437 of The Seen and the Unseen to share his reflections on society, technology, gender, friendships, fatherhood…

Transcript

This transcript was generated with AI-assisted transcription and may contain occasional transcription or speaker-attribution errors.

Amit Varma: Outside the temple of Delphi in ancient Greece were a bunch of maxims, the most famous of which translates to the words, know thyself. Now, originally know thyself was interpreted as meaning know your limits, an apt caution outside a temple. But over time, perhaps due to Plato’s writing, it was reinterpreted as meaning know your soul, know who you are, know the man in the mirror.

Other cultural traditions also have versions of this. And it seems kind of banal and obvious, of course, we should know ourselves. But if you think about it, we don’t spend enough time trying to do this, we don’t do enough self reflection.

It is not that we don’t focus on ourselves. But that focus is often either self aggrandizement or self pity, in service of a narrative we are building about ourselves. It is more self delusion than self reflection.

Indeed, if there’s one regret I have in my life, it is that I did not do enough self reflection. If I had made a habit of only this, I believe I would have led a more fulfilled life and basically had no regrets at all. And when I look around me, I’m shocked at how few people do any self reflection.

We wander through this world preening or anxious about how others see us and view ourselves only through that lens. We read books and listen to podcasts to understand the world. But most of the time, we’re looking outwards, not inwards.

The world is seen by us, but we remain unseen to ourselves.

Gautam John: Welcome to the scene and the unseen.

Amit Varma: My guest today is Gautam John, an old friend I have known and admired for over 20 years now, for his kind and thoughtful nature, setting an example for both the kind of thinker we should all aspire to be, and the kind of human being we should all want to be. Gautam studied law, gained early success as an entrepreneur, and spent most of his working life in the nonprofit sector. He played a pivotal role at Pratham Books a decade and a half ago, and he’s been the CEO of Rohini Nilikani Philanthropies for a few years now.

We became friends in the early years of blogging, when Gautam would send me these long beautiful emails, sharing his thoughts on many things, often disagreeing gently. I was young and full of certainties and passion. Gautam was young and curious and humble and burning with a quiet fire of wanting to understand the world, and indeed understand himself.

I spoke about self-reflection a minute earlier. I can’t think of someone who embodies that quality more than Gautam does. Every time I meet him, he provokes me to think deeper and question what I think I know.

I’ve been asking him for many years to come on the show, but in his typical self-effacing way, he’s been putting me off. Well, I was in Bangalore in December to record a bunch of episodes, and when I wrote to him and insisted that abhi toh aao, he finally showed signs of agreeing. But let’s do it later, he said.

He’ll just finish writing a book on his learnings from the social sector, especially on the subject of leadership. And he said that maybe we should wait till he finds a publisher and the book is out. Nonsense, I said.

Why wait? Come on the show. Let’s talk about your life and your learnings and your book and we can do another episode later.

This my friends is what we call chance pay dance. Gautam agreed. He sent me his book.

I loved the book and learned a lot from it. And I love the conversation you will hear now. We discuss society, technology, how to reclaim agency in our lives, India’s crisis of masculinity, gender equality, his experience as a stay at home dad, and his journey towards figuring out how to live his life, which I promise you will make you think about how to live your life as well.

There’s tremendous food for thought here. But before we get to it, let’s take a quick commercial break. One of the most satisfying experiences of the last few years came in putting together my course life lessons.

Now here’s the idea behind life lessons. School and college don’t teach us most of what we need to learn to live fulfilled lives to be the best versions of ourselves. Everything important that I learned, I learned when life happened to me, and I paid attention.

I had to work hard to educate myself and it took years and it lacked structure. Well, over a decade ago, I started thinking wouldn’t it be great if there was a course that put all these essential life lessons together in one package? What would such a course contain?

Could I put it together? So over time, I roped in my friend Ajay Shah and we put together life lessons, and I’ve already conducted three cohorts of it. Cohort four starts from February 28.

And I invite you to register. While Ajay is moving on to other projects, there are books to write. I’ll be joined in conducting life lessons by Mohit Satyanand.

Mohit has straddled many fields over nearly seven decades. And both Ajay and I consider him to be one of the wisest people we know. So no one better to step into those shoes.

Mohit has been a personal mentor to me and to many others. He shared his insights on quite a few episodes of this podcast. And honestly, even I can’t wait for cohort four to begin.

In life lessons, Mohit and I will share frameworks to understand the world. We’ll discuss learning how to learn, learning how to think, communication, writing, personal finance, personal health, probabilistic thinking, the use of math and economics in everyday life, the history of ideas, how to think about purpose and agency, and how to build a roadmap for personal growth. For full details, head on over to lifelessons.co.in. That’s lifelessons.co.in, also linked from the show notes. The course consists of 16 webinars over four weekends, starting February 28. It costs $2,000. Around 130 people have signed up for the three cohorts so far.

And we even had an offline meetup in Goa last year, where 50 people turned up. This will be an annual tradition. And I am so thrilled with this community that is forming of high agency people who want to learn from each other and are brimming with ideas and curiosity.

You can be a part of this. So do sign up at lifelessons.co.in. It’s worth it. Gautam, welcome to the scene in the unseen.

I mean, it’s such a pleasure.

Gautam John: I don’t know how long we’ve known each other. 20 years, probably.

Amit Varma: I think it’s probably 21 years because I remember you as one of my earliest blog friends when I started blogging and, you know, we’d correspond a lot. And that’s how I kind of know you as a reticent deep reader, but someone who doesn’t blog much himself. That’s how.

Did you have a blog yourself?

Gautam John: It was a very local blog. I’ve never had a blog about thoughts. But on India Uncut, you used to have that those interesting links on the side.

I think for a while I helped out with that. But yeah, reading widely has always been something that’s interesting.

Amit Varma: And I really and I’ve been, of course, asking you to come on my podcast for a long time. To write for a long time. And I’ve read the manuscript of this book that you’ve just written, which I absolutely loved.

It’s such a great book. I think you’re unnecessarily modest about it, even at the start of the book itself. But it provided me with very useful frameworks to think not just about philanthropy or leadership, but about life itself.

And in your book, you’ve quoted Kierkegaard and that famous quote about how life must be understood backwards, but it’s lived forwards. Right. And I want to ask you, I want to ask you to double click on that with regard to your own life, because ever since I’ve known you, I’ve found you to be someone who is very reflective, you know, the level of self-reflection I’ve seen in you is something that I kind of aspire to every time we have a conversation, like whenever I record in Bangalore for the last few years, we meet up for a coffee or a breakfast. And I always find that you’ve provoked me to think in very interesting ways. Our conversation starts off as just casual and we’re having fun and we’re hanging out.

But it leaves me with a lot of food for thought, which not all conversations do. And I wanted to translate some of that in the show. So thanks for coming.

But I want to kind of double click on that quality of self-reflection, like another frame that you shared in your book in the context of leadership was Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky’s metaphor of moving from the dance floor to the balcony, that in the dance floor, you’re stuck in day to day operations. And then you move to the balcony where you see the bigger picture. I’m reading this excellent book by Arthur Brooks called From Strength to Strength, How to Make the Most of the Second Part of Your Life, where he talks about the two kinds of intelligence of fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.

And, you know, the dance floor is fluid intelligence. You’re doing things, you do them really well, you dance beautifully, you’re a virtuoso. But that skill declines.

A time comes when you can’t dance so well, you don’t have that much energy. But the crystallized intelligence is a balcony view, the sky high view. So I want you to kind of look back on your life in a sense in an episode that I just recorded with Shruti Rajgopalan and Pranay Kotesan, I asked them this interesting question about if the younger self, the 19 year old self was to look at them now, what would that self be surprised by horrified by?

What would they admire, etc, etc. So I’m going to ask you to take the balcony view that you have lived forwards, but now, you know, look backwards. And tell me about how you’ve changed?

What are the significant ways in which you’ve changed? What has the journey taught you? What would then what do you feel when you look at the 19 year old Gautam and what would the 19 year old Gautam feel looking at you?

Gautam John: Such a great question. And it’s usually one of my questions when I meet someone new. So thank you for turning the lens back on me.

The 19 year old Gautam would not understand the 46 year old Gautam. The 46 year old Gautam, of course, with the benefit of hindsight understands the 19 year old Gautam much better. I think for me, the biggest inflection points have been, I don’t know how much you get this on the show, but have been around personal work, not professional development.

For a variety of reasons. Thanks, you know, my wife, who I met, friends who decided to look inwards first, whether it’s therapeutic work, whether it’s counselling work, essentially said that they began to see themselves from a third person perspective rather than from the inside. And that helped them kind of see patterns, understand what underlying drivers were to name things that were unnameable to see the unseen.

And I was fascinated by it. And I still remember the first time I went to a counsellor and I went and sat down and I spoke to the counsellor and they’re like, OK, so what brings you here? I was like, I don’t know.

Everyone said you’ve got to do therapy. And here I am. And they’re like, you’re not ready for this.

I was like, why? I told you everything. They’re like, you told the version of the story that you wanted me to hear.

What is the other version? I was like, there is no other version. And this was perhaps in my early 30s.

At some point, life gets difficult. And then you recognise that, at least for me, you recognise that the tools and coping mechanisms you have, the hangover that lasts for a couple of days, not knowing how you woke up in a particular city, get a little bit complicated. And then you’re like, there has to be a different way of doing this.

And I will also say that in my family, I’ve had the experience of supporting people, supporting a person through their recovery from alcoholism. And it’s a pattern then I began to see that you can externalise your helplessness and channel it into ways that help in the moment, but are not really therapeutic or recovering. And so that’s when I started doing work for myself with a counsellor, a therapist, etc.

And that journey essentially forced me to reflect. I mean, most of that is, what is that phrase? There is the reaction and then there is the pause and the response and life is held in that pause.

I forget, it’s a very famous book. And for me, intentionally building this pause into my life, I was like, wow, A, you don’t have to be reactive. B, in this pause, something new emerges.

And C, in a collection of pauses over a lifetime or over decades, you allow for new things to show up because you’re allowing yourself to go a little bit deeper. And that kind of made reflection a more intentional process for me. I think the part of reflection that really became intense was when I started writing.

I realised that in speaking to yourself, bullshit is really easy. But writing has a way of clarifying that bullshit in ways that you look and be like, no one’s going to buy this, myself included. And so I started writing the manuscript a few years ago, saying that I want to put down everything I’ve learned in a way that honours the people I learnt it from, the journeys I learnt it from.

And I realised in that learning, that learning wasn’t only in the past decade, that learning started a long time ago. And which is why I opened with that quote about the universe having billions of people and trillions of connections, and that you can’t be on top of all of them. And if you can’t be on top of all of them, then what do we do?

Just give up. And part of that journey was then recognising that because it has billions of people and trillions of connections, sometimes you dance with them, sometimes you step up onto the balcony and view them. And knowing that one has to do both, and seeing other leaders and leadership styles that do both has been incredibly illuminating and empowering, because the energy you need on the dance floor is very different from what you need on the balcony.

And I think this reflection, this moment of pause, and this of consciously changing vectors, close up and removed, has been just one of the most powerful changes in my life. To recognise that a response is possible only when we pause and that the world, social media and everything else incentivises a reactive moment, which is also why I am no longer on social media. I have intentionally declined.

I mean, I’m on LinkedIn now. I can’t tell the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook from a decade ago. Not on WhatsApp.

And I don’t think that came from saying I don’t want to be connected to people. I meet people, right? And there’s a great sense of joy that comes from learning something new, as opposed to the lies I used to tell myself when I was on Instagram and Facebook.

It’s great to be ambiently aware of what’s going on in people’s lives. It’s like if you care about a person, why would you want to be ambiently aware? You want to meet the person, you want to have a deep, meaningful conversation.

And in that sense, severing this light and shallow connection that technology has amplified has allowed me to be more conscious about time and where I pay my attention, has allowed me reflection. And the reflection has then allowed me to take on other perspectives that I’ve never considered otherwise.

Amit Varma: So yeah, long answer to your short question. No, no, it’s a lot of food for thought, different things I want to double click on. The anecdote at the start of your book you referred to, of course, was you mentioned that you used to lie as a child.

And one day your father told you that it’s not sustainable. There are billions of people, trillions of connections, and lies can’t sustain them. And you have to be authentic self.

And that resonates with me deeply, like recently, when we ended our YouTube show, everything is everything, like I gave a list of lessons that I’ve learned from the show. And one of them was that it is both easy and rewarding to be authentic, that, you know, if you’re trying to project a self of yourself to the outside world, one, it doesn’t pay off in the long run, because everyone sees through it and be it’s just hard, you know, to how many people can you be different things and to how much can you pretend and eventually the easiest thing is just to sink into your own skin.

And I want to ask you a little bit more about that. And also the kind of pauses that you mentioned taking that sometimes I wonder what is even the authentic self that what I can persuade myself as my authentic self could just be a projection of something that you know that I want to be seen as or that I want to think of myself as and what is even authentic, because if we embrace humility to the extent that we should, then we would probably recognize that we are nothing at the core of it, that there’s a bunch of hardwiring, there’s a bunch of environmental influences, nature and nurture come together. And after that is circumstantial.

And, you know, without getting into the naughty question of whether there is free will or not, it’s still, you know, what is authentic, and then I guess that self reflection becomes not just an act of reflecting on yourself per se, but also an act of consciously crafting yourself and shaping yourself and all of that. So I’ll ask you to sort of what are your thoughts on that. And also, I was wondering when you say take a pause, and you said so eloquently that, you know, you externalize your helplessness when say you do something like have some alcohol.

And I’m wondering that in a lot of cases, how do you even know that there is a problem and that you were trying to solve in this way? Like, I guess a lot of people who are driven towards having a drink every evening are driven towards it by a sense of self, a lack of self worth or a frustration at life, which they may not even articulate to themselves. So how is it that you know when to take a pause?

How is it that you know what to reflect upon? Like in your life, are there concrete moments where it’s really helped for you to take a pause and think about something where in the past, you might have reacted differently?

Gautam John: So two things there. One is the practice of pausing. The second one is when you do it for the first time.

I wouldn’t say that everyone who has a drink every evening is doing it for reasons of self worth. There’s a particular moment in time when you recognize that the reason you drink is because you’re at rock bottom or the reason you use drugs or whatever. I mean, there can be a variety.

Exercise can be a way of expressing this. But I think it’s to recognize the helplessness one has over the situation, the lack of agency. Like there’s this idea of rock bottom, right?

That you need to hit rock bottom and to recognize you’re at rock bottom to start again. Because also rock bottom is the only place you can build a new foundation from. You can’t build it from anywhere else.

If you’re lucky, you will realize it. And you are, at least in my universe, you are the only one who can recognize it. There is nothing anyone can tell you, right?

It goes to a larger question that I hold of how does change happen. And to me, change happens when you see things differently. Because if you don’t see things differently, you’ll never do things differently.

So is it coincidence? Is it situations? I don’t have a full coherent reply as to how it happens.

If you should be so lucky as to find yourself in a moment where there’s a crack in your universe and you recognize, gosh, this is rock bottom. And you can see the crack and say, I don’t want to go there. But if you’re in that place and you have a support system, whether it’s people or processes or structures or money to say, okay, let me just explore this a little bit more.

What is the way out? That is only it, right? And just to recognize that it’s very difficult because you then have to account for everything you’ve done in your past and deal with it.

But I don’t know if you can manufacture those situations. I think people can manufacture the opportunity, but you are going to have to step into it. And that is such an individual choice.

I mean, to me, it’s also like leadership, right? Everyone says that ultimately leadership is something that you can build and grow. And I’m not saying no to any of those things.

But ultimately, when the moment arrives, you have to choose to step into it. And very often that moment does not look like leadership. It might look like service.

It might look like humility. It might look like many things, as opposed to this idea of, I am the hero. I’m going to save this boat.

The moment you are called, whether out of rock bottom or to lead, doesn’t look like the versions that we’re told. And in that moment, should you be so lucky as to have a clarity of thought, a support system, a moment of hope, a moment of rejuvenation, you can step into it. And then you recognize that’s the first step.

You’re getting in on the ground floor. And there’s a lot of work from there. And a lot of work, whether you’re in recovering alcoholic or a leader starting, a lot of work that involves yourself.

And that’s the most uncomfortable work. Which is why when you said, when you asked that question, I was like, I often use this metaphor as a fractal. Because the thing that I’ve seen so often is this dissonance between the person I portray who I am, or the leader I portray who I am, who I really am, and how I want to be in this organization or in this ecosystem.

And narrowing that gap, I think, is ultimately what adult development theory is, right? I mean, if you look at any adult development theory, it’s to go from saying, someone else writes my story to say, I can write my own story, and then to say, I can transform my story and the lives around. So maybe that’s the arc, right?

To reclaim agency for ourselves. And then to say, I am not the subject of someone else’s story, I’m the object of my own story. And then to say, in being an object of my own story, I can transform many stories.

So the fractal metaphor is the one that I hold on to the most, to say that it has to be representative and accurate at every level of self, team, organization, anything else. Because otherwise, the lack of coherence makes it very, very, very hard. And ultimately, at least the way I look at it is the only thing in our control is ourselves, right?

I mean, the rest of the world, what control do we have? It’s like me, 10 year old me trying to lie to keep those connections honest. My realization over the years is keeping myself honest, lines up everything else better than trying to keep that on the external world honest, or aligned.

Amit Varma: There’s a quote by Tim Ferriss, you use in your book where he said people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty. And when I think of, you know, self reflection, it is such a difficult task for many people, I think partly because it is a path into the uncertain do they really want to confront themselves in particular ways, most people are just sort of stuck in the groove, and they’re happy to be stuck in that groove, you know, the inertia is fine. Why go into a difficult place where you have to ask difficult questions.

So I wonder if in a sense that, to understand that you are going down that you’re low, do you have to hit rock bottom, that unless you get to rock bottom, that self reflection doesn’t come like, do you need a major event in your life? Like, I guess, every midlife crisis in a sense is a little bit like this, right? That you get to a place close to rock bottom, and then you reflect, but the danger is that you may never reach that crisis point, you know, the balance of payments crisis for India in 91, you may never reached a crisis point, and therefore never actually reflect upon yourself and so on.

So in your own life, how was it? Were you always given to self reflection? And therefore it wasn’t very hard?

Or did you have to get to a difficult place both in terms of your own self and reaching rock bottom and perhaps even, you know, in the context of leadership, as you point out, so much of the book is also about your journey as well as your learnings, which I absolutely loved. So what is that process like for you? And then when you look at others, what do you think?

Gautam John: I’m sure we know people who don’t who haven’t had to hit rock bottom to be able to do this. I mean, there’s a common friend of us Mohit Satyanand, who I think is the most evolved person in the world. I’m sure his journey was very different.

Should you be so lucky? I don’t know if my journey was representative of everyone’s, right? And then maybe there’s that possibility.

But never having experienced that because with the benefit of hindsight, one says, but there were so many inflection points before that, why didn’t it happen? Like, maybe it didn’t pain enough, maybe it didn’t hurt enough, maybe I wasn’t able to see enough. So maybe there’s this confluence of circumstances that has to come together for that crack to happen and for the light to shine through.

In my experience, it happens at rock bottom. I truly hope and I’d love to hear that it doesn’t need to be that way. But part of it is for us to take, you know, what will it take for us to do an honest accounting of ourselves?

And I don’t have an answer to that. I mean, nobody, very rarely do we wake up in the morning and today I’m going to account for it. There has to be some external crisis, there has to be something that causes a crack in the charade, in the facade, in the vineyard.

And we’re like, okay, you know, what’s going on here? Why is the person I am not the person I want to be not the person I was? I don’t know what offers that.

Serendipity could be. And I talk about serendipity, I will say that, you know, for me, the thing that I have made the biggest journey on is from an engineering mindset to an emergence mindset. It’s been deeply uncomfortable for someone trained in the law, in the sciences, like, you can’t engineer these things to recognize that sometimes, because there are billions of people and trillions of connections that what we can do is create the conditions for something to emerge, but there’s no guarantee it’s going to happen.

Perhaps recovery and restoration is similar. If the conditions align, it happens. If the conditions don’t align, and you have a lucky friend who’s willing to kick that piece into place, it might happen.

But my experience is that it has to be a pretty severe fracture to at least kickstart the process. And kickstarting the process is no guarantee you’re going to stick with it, right? Because kickstarting the process is one is acknowledging the discomfort and uncertainty, then to say I’m going to sit with it.

Amit Varma: Just before we started the recording, we were chatting about geography and friendships and how we relate to other people and all that. And just now you said that, hey, I’m not on social media, but I make connections, I meet people, which is such a great thing. I meet people, you know, and how many of us really do enough of that.

Now, I have sort of two ways of thinking about this. And one way of thinking about this is that I just feel that to live in the times that we live in has been such an enormous blessing for me, because I have been able to move from communities of circumstance to communities of choice. Earlier, you’re restrained by geography, you know, the people in your school, your surface area of serendipity is really low, you’ve used that phrase a lot in your book, and I have an episode on my YouTube show with that title.

And the surface area of serendipity is very low. And therefore, for someone like me with different kinds of interests, introvert, loner, I think I would have been pretty miserable had I not been able to make and pretty much most of my friends, barring one or two are communities of choice like you, for example, you know, we met when blogging connected us 20 years ago. So that is the good side of it.

But the flip side of it also is that it’s common to enter a cafe now and look at five friends sitting together at a table and they’re all looking into the black mirrors. You know, people often talk about the journey in India from joint families to nuclear families. And I will go one step further and say that if your image of a nuclear family is parents and their two kids sitting at a dining table, but they’re all staring into their phones.

And these are now atomized families, you know, it’s a further step in. And it can enrich your interior world and you can help make all kinds of shallow connections, but perhaps in a sense, fewer deeper connections, if not no deep connections. Right.

And I remember this phrase, which I first learned in the 1980s. So this predate social media, but it’s a great Japanese word called Hikikomori. And Hikikomori are it was a word for Japanese teenagers who are all the time in their bedrooms and never interact with the world.

If anything, they’ll do a grocery run in the middle of the night. But they’re all the time in their bedrooms and they never meet anyone. And they just play video games all day.

I think this was pre internet. So how do you think of the flip side? What did you see it doing to you?

That made you get intentional about moving away from social media and towards keeping real friendships going? Because I remember at one point, you had told me that I just look at my smartphone for things other than phone calls, I think between 5pm and 6pm, something like that. And I was like, wow, that’s great.

I got to build a, you know, a commitment device like that into my own life. So tell me how you’re thinking on this as evolved and how you look at relationships and friendships differently? And what are the principles you’ve adopted for yourself regarding those two?

Gautam John: Great question. Let me start with the first one, right? I think what technology has done has made connections easier, quote unquote easier.

If you use the blogging example, it required us to have some proof of work that we cared about each other, write an email, write a post we remember we’d comment on posts. I don’t know if you remember Delicious and all these tools that would ping when people’s posts were updated in LiveJournal. Essentially, it was a communication that required effort.

Most social media apps today require a tap, right? Maybe you can even nod at it now and that’s gone. In service of building larger and larger, quote unquote, communities, networks, scale, global ambitions, etc., we have taken away what proof of work of that connection should be. It’s become narrower and narrower and narrower and narrower. Now we can just talk to it and that’s all. In doing so, we have reduced the carbon elements of our relationship into purely silicon.

And yes, there have been upsides to it. But I think the fundamental breakdown is how do human beings relate? If you take away all friction between building a relationship, then what are you left with, right?

So for me, the intentionality was to say, A, I want to break that chain. B, at some level, perhaps it’s some amount of privilege that I have to do that, but that’s the thing that I chose to exercise. And in breaking that, then to say that, but I still want to be connected to people, right?

So what do I have to do? I love hosting. I love gathering people.

I do it professionally. I do it personally. Because it’s incredibly enriching for me and incredibly valuable for other people as well.

So it’s not that I eschew interacting with people. I eschew shallow interactions. There used to be a time when people wrote long emails to each other as well, right?

At this point, I don’t know what email is written by what tool anymore, because it feels coherent and cogent, but there’s no human being in it. I’m sure you see this in a variety of, I mean, writing work, right? I mean, eloquent writing is proof of work doesn’t exist anymore.

And if a relationship is built on effort, what is that anymore? Yeah, so to that extent, my thing was that I want to A, consciously sever light technology relationships and try and build more deep, meaningful ones. And I’m happy to be on a group iMessage with people I’m in deep relationships with.

But I have zero interest in using it for a school chat, college chat, because it does not add value to my life. I’m sure it does to other people. But for me, I recognize that the shallow connection that abstraction via technology gave me was a sense of what I said, just brought light contextual awareness without any deep knowing of what anybody in my life was up to.

So that’s one. I mean, the flip side to this is everyone messages my wife on WhatsApp to say, please, can Gautam reply to Emil and her point is, I didn’t sign up for this. And Shobita, I’m sorry.

But for me, the flip side is it just frees up so much time, right? And because I’m in a role where I meet people, I can truly meet you. I can meet you and have a conversation.

And you know, there’s no, I will WhatsApp you something later, we will finish the conversation the next time I meet you six months from now or six years from now, we can pick up on the entire thread. I will say that as I age, I’m realizing there are only so many deep relationships one can hold. But that’s okay.

A deep relationship is meaningful because it’s deep, not with the number of people you hold it with. So that’s something I’ve also narrowed. But for me, you know, in a way, Amit, I mean, a question I’ve always asked myself, and I think it’s been, it’s come out of your work is, every person has a story.

Can I sit and listen to it? And I can’t. But it feels, you know, listening to the way you speak to people, you’re saying, you have a story, let’s hear all of it.

And I want to bring that attention, because ultimately, you know, what we pay attention to is what we consecrate. And I want to consecrate connection, it’s valuable, it’s, it’s precious, it’s almost religious for me, because I’m seeing that as what makes us human. And so which is why I push back against this idea of, you know, light abstraction, shallow connection, scale a lot.

Are there things that need to be done at scale? Of course. Do we need to scale human belonging and connection?

Yes. But do it, as my colleague says, carbon to carbon, not silicon to silicon.

Amit Varma: That’s such a great phrase. You know, one of the things I’ve kind of realized is that occasionally it has so happened that I’ve done an episode, a long episode like this with someone I’ve also known for like 20 years. And each time I have been amazed by how little I knew about them.

And I’m like, I’ve known this guy for 20 years, we’ve been hanging out for so long. And I’ve been amazed by how little I knew about them. And part of it I have come to realize part of it is the fundamental quality in male to male friendships, that a lot of it is either instrumental, a lot of conversations, or it centers around small talk, where you’re almost autocomplete, you’re talking about the same damn things as the same conversations are happening again.

A friend of mine who runs a bank says that when he meets other people in the CXO suite, there’s nothing to talk about but cricket, Bollywood and gossip of their world. They don’t read books, they don’t watch movies, no conversations to be had. And women have different kinds of conversation, perhaps because they’re hardwired to look at conversation as connection, and not merely as you know, information exchange.

So what is your sense of the different kinds of friendships that one can have male to male friendships, male to female friendships, like I’m imagining the quality of the conversations you have with women is at a different order. And like in my case, and obviously, in your case as well, I have got intentional about it enough that the male to male friendships that I do have, don’t have those kinds of conversations are far richer now. And you know, it’s a different level, but what’s that experience been like for you?

Such a beautiful question, Amit.

Gautam John: What is male friendship in the middle ages of our life anyway, right? Between work, between life, between holding some space for self, what really is male conversation, and male friendship? So I have two slightly different paths to go down, right?

The first is, I mean, I grew up in Bangalore. So I did all my schooling here, my college here. So I have people I have known since I was born.

And we continue to be connected. Geography was destiny. And I realised that this is not an ordinary thing.

Like my wife, her father was in the army, and they travelled widely. And she’s like, I had a new circle of friends every couple of years. So there is no friendship I’ve had for 20, 30, 40 years.

College is perhaps we graduated in 2002. So college was perhaps the first five-year period where I had meaningful friendships that then continued because then I was an adult. But for me, I have friendships from like 1981.

I have friendships from 1979, where our parents were friends in the generation before that. I didn’t realise how rare that was, right? So the first is just to recognise that there are some kinds of friendships that I took for granted that are rare.

Not everyone has friends from 40 years ago. The second one was the pandemic. So there were a few of us in the pandemic who were active online, perhaps we knew each other from various contexts, who, I still can’t remember how it happened.

It’s four of us all in the broad same age, we all do very different things professionally. There’s founder, designer, journalist. But for whatever moment, the pandemic causes intense fracture.

And we’re like, my God, what does tomorrow look like? And I remember us getting on a Zoom call sometime in March or April 2020, saying that, you know, we don’t know. Because we came together through this giant rupture in the universe, we were able to connect not as our identities, but as just people genuinely confused.

And it’s been one of the most joyous and, how to say, enlivening friendships we’ve had. We’ve seen each other through good and bad. Do we talk about work?

Yes. But we spent so much of our time talking about who we are as people. And I think it was because this pandemic is a rupture brought us together, we were looking for a sense of belonging, a sense of what is certainty, what is uncertainty, what is discomfort.

And I didn’t think I could make such deep friendships in my 40s. Yet here we are. And I think there’s a template for male friendship, at least for me, that doesn’t predate on having known someone 40 years, but around coming together with enough vulnerability to say, hey, we’re in this shit together, what are we going to do?

Again, I don’t know what creates those conditions. I’m just really glad and grateful I was in that mix. So I have these two groups of male friends, one that I met five years ago that I’m incredibly deep with.

We know our fears, our worries, our hopes, our aspirations. We talk about work, but more than that, we talk about ourselves as human beings, right? As men, and what navigating that is.

And then I have this other bunch that I’ve known since I was in diapers. And now we have children, some of whom are going off to college. And that’s another incredible thing, because over there, we can lean back on, you know, when we were 10, when we were 15.

But when you do that in your 40s, you have, there’s nothing to lean back on, you’re creating it from scratch. And so one is geography, the other one feels like vulnerability. And maybe those are two ways to think about male friendship.

You can create deep, meaningful friends with people who you were in physical proximity with in school. Some will last, some may not. You can do the same by creating a container for vulnerability, where everyone is invited into it.

In this case, the pandemic created the container. And I’m very curious about how many people that happened for, that the pandemic was, I mean, nobody had seen this before, there was no playbook, there was no one to go to for advice. There’s like, what the hell do we do A as a human being, B as a parent, and C as an entrepreneur or someone in the working life.

And often we were able to answer these questions as entrepreneurs far faster than you were able to answer it as a parent, or an individual navigating complete uncertainty. So yeah, these are not templates, but these are two parts I’ve seen. I’m sure that I’m many, many more.

But I’m just really glad that in the last few years, something that I’ve seen emerge is that the idea of the male identity is being complex and multifaceted as well. And, you know, while we’ve often talked about the emotional man, the emotional man has been reduced to someone who can cry and who is in touch with their feelings. I think there’s a wider canvas for us to now work from.

There are newer retreats that were otherwise women-only spaces, women around menopause, working women, which are great. But we’ve seen the emergence of these newer spaces for men as well. Men in a midlife crisis, what does it mean?

What does it mean to be navigating career shifts as a man? These were not conversations men had in public or in close groups. These were things that you navigated yourself.

If you’re lucky, you had a mentor. But there was no group or container to hold us because we also had stereotypes of what that would be. So for me, the emergence of these multiple pathways to male friendships and also these multiple pathways to male connection, they may not be popular or visible just yet, but that they even exist and they exist in a diversity of spaces, a diversity of age categories, is really, really helpful to me because I don’t want us to think that the only idea of the masculine models we have are what we see on social media. There are ones that are blossoming and growing.

And I just find it so fascinating. For example, at work, one of the portfolios that emerged over the last 10 years was this portfolio that’s now titled Layak, working with young men and boys. And a colleague of mine who leads this was in a conversation a few weeks ago in Delhi around what does it mean to be a young man?

And there was a founder there who said that, I have a makeup brand for men. And I was like, it’s amazing, right? Because it means something to me.

It means something that there are people who are willing to claim it and you don’t have to hide it. And I was like, that’s fabulous because the conversation is changing. And unless the conversation changes, the connections never will.

And unless the connection changes, this fractures that we are navigating in so many ways of thin, shallow connection, lack of feeling like you belong, what does friendship look like will never begin to narrow. So yeah, new conversations.

Amit Varma: Just before we started recording, we were chatting about the crisis in masculinity, the great male crisis that’s kind of hit the world. And as we were speaking about friendship, it also struck me that for women, when there is crisis, friendships and conversations and female solidarity is often a way out of that. And for men, it is much less so.

It is lonelier, they are more isolated, because they can’t often connect with other people at that level, and they have to bottle up whatever they feel inside them. And obviously, women are starting from a worse base, especially in India, because women tend to, you know, like one of the great revelations I’ve had during all my time doing the scene in the unseen was Chinmay Tumbe’s revolution of the largest cause of internal migration in India is women getting married, because women are leaving their childhood homes and they’re traveling to their husband’s home.

So they are utterly uprooted, they have no more friends and their life revolves around their man and everything is conditional upon that and life is really hard. So it’s a worse base to start from. But they, women are naturally simply better at connecting and having deep friendships and having those kinds of bonds and men quite aren’t.

But that’s an aside. But in general, I’ll ask you to double click on this crisis in masculinity and you know what you’ve seen of it. I know that you guys, you know, funded Nikhil Taneja’s project for Yuva.

Yeah, and Nikhil had of course done that very popular episode of my show called The Loneliness of the Indian Man. He’s just become a father as well. And he’s just become a father.

And yeah, in fact, for a documentary I was shooting, I’d recorded with him talking about parenthood just before his child was born. And his child has been born now. So we have to catch up.

But also not only has he just become a father, but very sadly, he also lost his father. Oh dear. Recently.

So these two have kind of come together. Let’s double click on this crisis in Indian masculinity. What have you been seeing?

What have you been thinking about?

Gautam John: The first one was a lot of self-loathing. Maybe I can use this as a way to talk about my own journey in this, right? I lead a family philanthropy in Bangalore.

One of the areas of work that they’ve traditionally supported has been work supporting women’s rights, focusing on gender-based violence and all of these things. And it’s a tremendous body of work over the last 20 or 30 years. But 10 years ago, the principal asked a question about what about the plight of the young Indian man.

And this was 10 years ago. So maybe 2015, 2016. And my instinctive question was what plight?

It was invisible to me, right? And in that, I mean, she was talking a little bit about what she was seeing and feeling the texture of something that was invisible, but under the surface around young men having a crisis of confidence, crisis of purpose, crisis of identity. And to me, I was like, what are you talking about?

I mean, being a man in particularly in India, and if you’re an upper class, upper caste man, wealthy man, life is made. So I didn’t really see it. And, you know, she did this talk in 2015, 2016, that got severe blowback.

And some of it was also around the analogies that I had used. So for example, has the pendulum swung too far? In hindsight was perhaps not a great analogy.

But there was definitely something there, right? And so what the philanthropy was then tasked with doing was to see if there’s anybody working, doing work with young men. And most of the work that was being done with young men, or boys, was for women’s empowerment, be a good husband, be a good brother, protect your women, etc, etc.

Which I didn’t think of as particularly problematic, because like that is the role. But there was a second thing that slowly started emerging, which I found quite fascinating, right? For example, in South India, I’m sure the research has moved on now.

But back then, as women made more money, they faced more backlash. And I think it’s a fairly, I mean, hindsight, of course, they do face more backlash, but it was news to me. I was like, so women’s empowerment isn’t a way out of this.

Because the logic is, you empower women financially, and everything will be this thing. Their paths change dramatically, which is again, one of these moments of crack when you’re like, so women’s economic empowerment is a good step, but it’s not everything. Then what do we do, right?

And I didn’t know. Back then, I looked around, there was this one organization in Pune, who was doing this work. And so I went to Pune, and I sat with them.

And I was like, you know, what are you doing? They said, you know, we started running film clubs in slums around Pune, and only boys would show up in the evenings. Only boys would show up because the girls can’t allow.

And as the boys showed up, they said the film was nice, but we want a place to talk. And they started understanding the psyche of the boys, right? This is 2014, 2013.

So social media wasn’t as widely prevalent, but it was. And so this pressure of what is our proximate universe like versus what is aspirational universe like? I’m sure you’ve read Sringnapoonam’s Dreamers.

She’s been on the show as well. Yeah, I mean, it’s just that my proximate life is like this, whereas my aspirations are like that. This was a felt need.

And unfortunately, there was no structure for them to assimilate into, unless it was either political or caste or one of those kinds of structures. There was no social structure. Women, we built that for women, right?

India built that. Self-help groups became a way to structure women for economic empowerment, but it also offered other ways of holding women as a group together, but didn’t exist for men. So most of those safe social spaces for men existed in very fractured power hierarchies.

And so this organization then said, OK, these men are showing up and they say they want to talk, then let’s figure out what we want to do. And a lot of it was that, you know, we are told to be protective provider. If I can’t be, how do I get respect?

Often I get respect by violence, by proving something. What is my proof of work anymore? And part of the realization through that was, at least early then for me, was that I, for example, have taken it for granted that I could be anything I want.

But for a young boy in Pune, he could not be anything he wanted. He could not because the universe he lived in wouldn’t offer him that choice. So that was one dissonance.

The second one was also, why should women care? The chairperson of our trust is a woman. My colleague who leads this work is a woman.

It’s like, why do you give a shit? And for the longest time, I was like, how is this your responsibility as well? Women have had to bear, quote unquote, the burden of patriarchy.

Now is it your burden to fix it as well? It took me such a long time to understand this thing. You know, we’re not trying to fix it.

We’re trying to create the opportunity and space for men to step into the work. I don’t think I’ve still fully internalized it. I mean, I appreciate where they’re coming from.

They’re saying that we can create the conditions. We can create an opportunity. We can create a moment of reflection.

But ultimately, we’re not saying it is our work to do, to quote unquote, fix, save men. It’s men’s work to do. And we can only create the opportunity in the pathway, whether it’s art or sport or culture or in school, we can create the opportunities.

But ultimately, men have got to want to step into it and feel safe stepping into it. And that’s our responsibility. And that’s our responsibility to the framing of gender equity, because ultimately, that’s the goal.

I’ve had a lot of conversations about this. It still makes me deeply uncomfortable that in a way that are women stewarding this role. But I’ve come to understand that it’s not women doing the work.

It’s women creating the space for the work to happen and that men have to step into it. And I will say that in the past decade, we’ve just seen so many organizations, people step into this work, so much so that this portfolio, one of our organizations has now set up the Center for Young Men and Boys to focus on these things, whether you’re gig workers, because they have concerns and fears and worries and identities and hopes and aspirations as well. In the US, there’s Richard Reeves, who’s, you know, who was at a think tank and then wrote a book on the crisis of young American men, and now has a center for, again, young men and boys in they’re talking about this.

And I get that the challenges, we’re talking about the challenges of men mean that the challenges of women aren’t important. And part of, for me, the journey has been that dealing with the challenges of men is also dealing with the challenges of all of us together. Because if men have a limited set of hopes and aspirations that the universe doesn’t offer them anymore, then what is the path forward?

So widening that, making more acceptable, more male role models, more pathways of acceptability. What does gathering in community even mean for a young man, right? I mean, where do you go, whether it’s your local, I was reading this fabulous piece, just the other day on research saying that Wednesday community football in the UK has done more for community gathering and connection than any other program.

You just show up, right? And you feel connected. So to me, the larger question, again, is what helps us connect?

And at this point, the question in this frame is what helps young men connect with each other, with ideas, with hopes and aspirations? And how do you do so in a way that makes them feel both safe and valued? Because that’s not what the universe offers at this point.

And the recognition that we’ve done some, we did some of this to recognize that these don’t exist for women, right? And we’ve done that. And not to devalue that, but to say, can we do it for others in crisis as well?

And the hope is that there’s a conversation over here that emerges around, what are our hopes and aspirations as a society? And how do we all collectively get there that is co-powered by people of all genders, rather than saying it is the man’s burden to provide and the woman’s burden to care? Because those tropes are old and bored and tired now.

Amit Varma: How has the crisis become worse in the last 20 years or so? And the reason I ask is, you know, just before we were chatting, I was telling you about sort of the two disturbing factoids that I found recently. And one is that throughout history, 80% of women have had offspring, but only 40% of men have, right?

So it is already harder for men to, you know, fulfill the revolutionary imperative as it were, and I’m saying it glibly, than it is for women. And that’s been exacerbated by social media, because earlier in the past, a middling man would still have enough women in his geography who don’t have enough options, that he has a chance of getting a mate. But in this new age, you know, the data we get from dating apps is that about half of all women will have someone, you know, swipe right on them in the course of a month, but only about 10% of men or even less, you know, it’s like 90% of women tend to go for 5% of men, etc, etc.

So it’s almost like that tendency has been exacerbated. And therefore, you have the manosphere coming up, you have anger from incels, and so on and so forth. And that sense of self worth, which anyway, was an issue for men has kind of become worse.

And then that goes off into very toxic directions and very toxic thinking. Like, so what’s been, you know, when you think about this crisis, do you think it’s something that’s become worse in the last 20 years? And what are the ways in which people have managed to alleviate this?

Like, of course, Wednesday football and all of that is great. That is one way you allow them space to gather, meet each other in a healthy environment. But you know, what are the ways in like, what is the problem?

What are the ways in which it’s become worse? And what are the kinds of ways in which it can be mitigated?

Gautam John: I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that I know what the problem is. And but I can talk a little bit about what we’ve seen from our work and what I’ve observed from my own perspective, right? If a relationship is fundamentally two people connecting, what has the commodification of it as an experience or an app done?

It’s severed the idea of connection. I’m sure this will come up multiple times in our conversation. It’s severed the idea of connection from two human people being in conversation with each other to two human people texting each other, to two human people swiping on each other, to now, like, I’m sure there’s a version of it where the AI matches you or something of the sort.

In that, what is it? What has it done? I suppose it’s created a false sense of those who can project what being a good partner looks like onto an app, as opposed to actually being a good partner.

And if you’re sitting with someone at a community center, at a bar, playing football with them, you have a far better sense of a human being than on an app. And so then you have this, probably have some sort of weird Pareto rule where 20% of men are dating 80% of women or the sort. And those 20% of men are not particularly a good example of our species.

The thing that I find interesting is I remember, I hope this is true. I remember once reading that societies that have polygamy have higher rates of suicide, being like suicide bombers and because 1% of men can have 10, 15, 20, or even three or four wives. So that 80-40 gets even more narrow.

And to me, the answer is really to re-knit connection. So if you look at the youngest generations these years, I find it fascinating that there’s this huge nostalgia for retro, because in a sense, that’s a life they never knew. What is friendship meant?

It meant picking up a landline, you hung out with people. Nobody does these things anymore. And so even if you read about a lot of the dating that’s now happening, it’s to say, let’s meet.

We can meet in groups, but it’s to go back to anchor in that because dating is not something that we should optimize for efficiency, but optimize for some other things. And in this optimization for efficiency, we’ve realized that some people can play the game much better than other people and everyone’s disappointed. So to that extent, my sense is that the real luxury good in the future will be connection and that everyone will ultimately all luxury goods become mass goods.

So to that extent, I think that in many ways, generations are now, there’s this huge thing about retro brick phones that are not smartphones. All of it is saying that enough, there’s this, you know, what is it, Gen Alpha, Gen Z, sorry, I’m not very up to date with that lingo, eschewing this hyperconnected model to say that, no, we want to go back to a simpler form. And I don’t think it’s surprising.

One of the things that we switch to work mode, one of the things that we do as a philanthropy is that we convene a lot, right? We get partners together. So each of our portfolios, we have 30, 40, 50 partners.

And in this hyperconnected age, you would assume they all know each other, collaborating with each other. But when you bring them into a room and kind of lower the expectations, just to say that you’re all people doing this work, we care about the same things. What are conversations we can have?

Nine times out of 10, they’re saying, I didn’t know you did this. Let’s collaborate over here. So how is it possible that in a world where all of this work is available online on their website, they are, each organization is broadcasting it on social media, that this doesn’t happen?

That to re-knit this fabric, you need to actually create some temporal space, invite people into it and say, hey, we’re here as people who care about X, what can happen over here? And I think that’s the same thing that human beings will ultimately end up with as well. That men, women, and the relationships between all genders will ultimately go back to, is the fact that there’s a temporal and space-based relationship with this aspect as well that we’ve lost.

And we lost it in service of scale, and scale is profitable, but it’s going to need some outliers to check out. And then a community of outliers to say that, hey, this is the new future that wants to emerge here. We didn’t get here overnight, right?

The process of unwinding will also be slow. But I think for men, part of it is also the refusal to play the performative game. And we have, what is the opposite of the manosphere?

What exists? After the US elections, everyone was like, the left needs a Joe Rogan. I’m like, it doesn’t work that way, right?

It’s not the left needs a Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan exists because of Joe Rogan. So to say we need an anti and rotate is not the answer.

Perhaps we need something softer to invite people into to say that it is okay. It’s perhaps easier a few years ago, it’s a little bit more challenging now. But which is why I’m seeing the emergence of these offline spaces that are holding this, because it doesn’t need to be loud and visible.

And you can show up there, you know, it’s people self-selecting in who want to hold this space. And it’s not necessarily this, you’re not broadcasting on social media for more followers, etc. This is for more connection, not more following.

Which is why I’m very hopeful about people building containers for connection, relationality, etc. It will be small, it will be local, but it will be powerful. And ultimately, I think in this work, if you can transform a person’s life, they then can go out and do the same for other people, as opposed to saying, here’s my message, come to my church, which is…

Amit Varma: Have you heard of this essay is called Henry Carlson? No. So he’s a brilliant substracker.

And there’s a particular essay which I keep forwarding to people because I think it has a potential to change lives. And it gave me a great frame to think about the world. And his essay is about he talks about the design of his life.

And you’ll appreciate it because it’s again a shift from engineering to emergent in a sense, where he says that a mistake people often make is that they build a conception for themselves of the kind of life they want to live. And they go out and they try to find that and fit into that. Or they build a conception of the kind of partner they would like to have, they think they’ll be happy with.

And they go out and they try to date people like that. And he says, what you really need to do is get out of that mindset. And instead of trying to fit the world, figure out what in the world fits you.

And, you know, live life, everything that is in your comfort zone, you keep it, everything that is not in your comfort zone, you push it away. And eventually, he says that he ended up with a life that fits him perfectly and is nothing like the kind of life he thought he would like to live. And equally, he is with a partner quite different from what he imagined he would be with, but she fits him perfectly well.

Right. And this is such a charming story and a beautiful lesson across many domains, not just life and finding partners. And as you were speaking, I was thinking that what happens with the dating apps is they make this impossible, this last part, that you allow life to happen to you.

And then whatever fits you fits you. Because necessarily, when you go on to a dating app or to any social media platform, you are projecting yourself, you are interacting with other people’s projected selves. And without actually knowing anyone or seeing how they fit you, you are trying to build a relationship out of that and is necessarily shallow and likely to fail.

And that whole sense of serendipity that you meet someone and you chat with them for a while and things work and that’s simply not happening. And I did this episode with Malini Goel, I’m sure you know her, who wrote this excellent book called Unboxing Bangalore. And she has a great chapter in that on dating apps.

And she pointed out that in Bangalore especially has a sort of a crisis where she says that A, she did both quantitative and qualitative work. The quantitative work finds that people hook up much easier in Bangalore than anywhere else. But also that in the qualitative stuff she found out is that everybody’s more promiscuous, but everybody’s more unhappy.

That back in the day, you’re building a relationship, you’ll have friction, you’ll have a fight, you’ll get over it, you’ll sulk for two days, you’ll come back, etc, etc. There is that process of getting to know each other and all that. Whereas here, if you add the slightest show of friction, the woman will be like, I have 10 other options.

And it’s a very shallow interaction. And if it scales, it will necessarily be shallow. And if it’s deep in the ways that you point out, it will necessarily not scale and but it is important to kind of build that.

So yeah, I mean, I’m just sharing this because it fits into what you were saying.

Gautam John: Two things on that. First is how many Substacks do you subscribe to? I’ve realized that for me, Substack has become, can I find a trusted curator and then listen to the world through them?

The second one is this question that you’re asking about dating apps and things of the sort, right? At some point, I’m trying to figure out how to say this. Let me ask it this way.

We’ve known each other a long time. You’ve been a very strong proponent of the individual and liberty. And to say that our actions create our universe, etc.

In this idea of emergence, there’s some of that, but there’s also what happens to us and to recognize that there are millions of connections more. I think it’s in severing those millions of connections in favor of a thin one through a time portal or whatever we call a phone these days, that essentially we lose the magic of what it is to live as a human being. At some level, it’s also so seductive.

It’s quick, it’s fast. But I have a question, does abundance create its own kind of scarcity? If, for example, your dating pool was a neighborhood and you had three people to date, but now you can date someone if you pay the app $10 more, someone from a thousand miles away.

What does that do? So the other question I’ve been sitting with is does abundance create its own challenges? And the reason I ask this is because yesterday, I read this incredible piece about how in the early 60s, Japanese car makers were terribly inefficient.

American car makers were doing fabulously well. But ultimately, American car makers were doing fabulously well because they had this amazing, abundant, endless resource base, whereas the Japanese didn’t. And so then the Japanese optimized in many ways, whether it’s process, etc., etc., etc. And then ended up making cars a third of the price of the Americans. And we know how that story ends. And the analogy was to China and AI chips that they’ve had to be invented, etc., etc. And now they’ve found their own ways to be independent of that. And they’ll soon have surplus chips that they’ll be shipping. So part of it is just me wondering, we’ve often talked about this, we often talk about abundance as a good thing, but I’m just wondering what the dark side of abundance is as well.

And particularly manufactured abundance, right? In this case, it’s a manufactured abundance because the person is not anywhere close to you, or sits behind a $50 upgrade for Super Like or whatever it’s called. So to that extent, weaponizing connection has just caused this incredible thing where we believe everything is abundant, but nothing truly is.

And the thing that is truly scarce is the person next to you. And it just feels so bonkers that we’ve landed up here. But I suppose, I mean, we were all people of that generation, we thought the internet would unlock everything for everyone.

Amit Varma: I don’t know how many of us ever thought that it would end up looking like this as well. I’ll think aloud and say that, you know, abundance creates trade-offs. We don’t need to elaborate on the good side of it.

Like on the one hand, it’s miraculous that, you know, I remember myself as a teenager scrambling to find the books I wanted to read, scrambling to put together these little mixtapes of music I wanted. And it was just such an enormous privilege to get access to a new album by someone you really admired, who may not have been mainstream at the time. Yeah, so, etc, etc.

And I think that there is a classic trade-off there. And the trade-off there is, and I’m thinking aloud, and I could be wrong, and I’m sure there are exceptions to this. But I think that the greater the abundance, the shallower your interactions become, right?

So if I just have three friends in my neighborhood, I’m engaging more deeply with them, even if I don’t totally like them, and etc, etc. Whereas if I have 100 friends to choose from who are all online, the interactions are shallower. In the same way, you know, many people of my generation who used to be avid readers said they read everything they could get their hands on.

They got a huge Chandamama, they would read it cover to cover. If you served them Vada Pav on a newspaper, I bet they’d read that too. And that was because of scarcity.

So, you know, because there is scarcity, you are engaging much more deeply with whatever you get of the written word. Equally, when it comes to music, you know, I remember all my teenage passions, whether it’s collecting Van Morrison or discovering grunge when that happened and getting mixtapes and going back into history and etc, etc. My engagement was so incredibly deep that I remember the lyrics of so many songs back then, which I don’t now.

Though I think that typically anyway happens with songs you grow up with. So it’s true for every generation. But today, you can just skim the surface of everything.

And there are so many more things to do, that you are not, by the scarcity that this is all there is, forced to go deep into something, you know, I could have 50 books in my room. And therefore, because there are 50 books to choose from, it’s harder for me to pick up any one. But if there is just one book, and that’s the only book I have, and only after I finish it, can I return it to the library and take another book, you know, the whole engagement with that goes down.

So I think that’s possibly one factor. And, you know, individuals like you and me can come to that recognition and therefore fight it by, you know, you’ve reduced the abundance of interactions in your life by going off social media completely. But how many people can even do that?

Gautam John: Is can the right question? Because part of it is like everybody can.

Amit Varma: But at a level of biochemistry can is I think the right question, because you need the dopamine hits. Your brain wants to be distracted, your brain wants to save calories by not focusing deeply on something but just skimming, right? The Instagram reel is…

Yes. So in a way, you know, all of that, we’ve been hacked in that sense.

Gautam John: But I did want to pick up on the point that you mentioned on trade offs. A, because most people say choices. And I think trade offs is actually the far better framing.

And it’s one of those things that comes up in work so often, right? Organization A wants, organization wants to do A, then B will happen. And because many of these happen, C will happen.

That this world is beautifully linear, that input, output, outcome is that. But we know that doesn’t really work that way, right? I mean, maybe unless you’re actually building a school or something of the sort.

And so this idea of trade offs and unintended consequences and things of the sort is a frame that I have come to value a lot. Not because one can predict the future, but one can at least start to think about… It’s very much in the pause, right?

So something that we ask partners are, what are some potential unintended consequences of this? And just to say, just to take that pause and be like, doesn’t all have to go well. Unintended consequences can be positive as well.

But they are unintended. What was that line? Known unknowns.

Known unknowns. Yeah. Unknown unknowns.

So I don’t want you to talk about unknown unknowns because none of us know, but at least known unknowns. And I will say I made fun of that phrase when it was first made. It took me a long time to recognize there’s some wisdom in it.

Amit Varma: It’s a great epistemic framework.

Gautam John: I use it all the time. It is. But it took me a long time to recognize the wisdom in that.

But you can sit with it individually, collectively to try and think about what these trade offs are. And then to say, not that some are worth it, some are not, but also to say that we can start to recognize the emergence of some of these trade offs and then course correct. But if they’re never on our radar, there’s no course correction, which ties with something else that, you know, this new idea of futures thinking that has become very popular, which I really like.

To say that there is no singular future. There are multiple futures and we can envision those and that we can, you know, we can shape our pathways to that because the earlier thing was the prediction market. And now there’s a lot of talk about the futures market to recognize there’s no singular future.

There are multiple pathways and that different things will lead in different ways, which ties into my, I suppose, ties into my larger realization over the last decade or so that as much as we’d like to do things, more often than not things emerge.

Amit Varma: Yeah. And, you know, this actually ties into that Kierkegaard quote that when you’re living forwards, everything is probabilistic. There are multiple futures.

But if you’re understanding things backwards, everything has already happened. It’s 0% or 100%. There are no probabilities.

And then there’s a danger in understanding backwards is that you ascribe a narrative to it and you imagine things are teleological and that gives you a sense of certainty. And certainty is what actually leads to the engineering mindset. Then you’ve built perfect narratives of why the world is the way it is.

And therefore you tell yourself that I can control the way that is going to be. But if you’re always looking at the probabilistic framework and assuming that the way we are is just sheer luck at the end of the day, and that, you know, it’s like that Milan Kundera metaphor from Testaments Betrayed of the man in the fog, you’ve heard of that, where he says that, you know, if there is a man in the fog and he can’t see where to go, but he starts walking anyway. And eventually he makes a road for himself and he goes back.

And at the end of the journey, if you were to look back and you were to look at the man, you’ll be able to see the road and you’ll be able to see the man, but you won’t be able to see the fog. And that’s exactly to me the mistake that so many of us make. You know, that’s so powerful for two reasons.

Gautam John: One is, one is it ties into this idea that we were talking about earlier, that you can take the end result and say that this path will always get the same result. There’s no guarantee of that. And the second one is, what does it mean to meet the present and future with a sense of curiosity and humility to say that I don’t know, but I yet want to.

And that’s for me become something that I really enjoy, right? Like I don’t know what this interaction is going to lead to. But I better understand myself and I understand myself wanting to lean into this and see what happens, as opposed to going to that to say that I will do A, they will do B and C will happen.

Because the magic I’ve really realized is in when people find ways to connect in the non-obvious, right? I’m strong at A, you are strong at B, but actually, you know, I have this orthogonal D and you have this orthogonal E that together is far more powerful. And that just comes from connection.

And it’s also a kind of leadership that I’ve been deeply, I can’t say I practice it, but I’ve seen it happen where, you know, we often talk about the sum of the parts being greater. Very rarely have I seen it happen, but there’s this kind of relationship, leadership and relationship that allows people to come together to see each other more deeply as individuals first, and then as organizations, institutions that allow something to be co-created or collaborated is a bad word, that wasn’t possible otherwise, if we only worked from our organizational selves, it would never be possible. But when we work as whole human beings to say that we care about the same things, something happens that isn’t possible otherwise. And, you know, that is something that I found really, really interesting.

Whereas, if we only looked at the parts that got us to this point, we have a very narrow surface area for connection, right? I did A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and I got here, you did this, and we will only intersect across, it’s much narrow as opposed to I’m a whole human being. So this increasing the surface area of serendipity also means that one has to be willing to meet the future in an open stance rather than to say, this is how I arrived here, and this is how we go forward, which is also at some point level a criticism I’ve had of consulting companies, they say, this worked here, therefore, it will work here.

It didn’t work here, hire me, I will make it work here. Like, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if the solution is yet another template, as opposed to yet another way of seeing what might emerge here, that’s unique and special here.

It’s a lot more work. Maybe it won’t work for a company with 100,000 people, maybe it will. But not all of us run companies that are 100,000 people.

A lot of us exist in small bounded companies, with people who care deeply and there’s another way to lead.

Amit Varma: My controversial view about consulting companies is that they’re largely a fraud. And now thinking aloud, I’m thinking that we misunderstand what they’re for, like in the same way that schools are not really for education, they’re daycare. Right?

So in a similar sense, I think consulting companies are not really for showing you a new direction, but helping whoever’s hired them do the things he would have done anyway, just because you know, the consultant’s brand is imprinted upon it or whatever, but I’m just being glib and I have very shallow understanding of that. But what you’re talking about, that just because two people into, you know, do A or do B or intersect along a narrow frontier, but you want to find out other unexpected ways in which they can interact and co create things at a philosophical level that that’s obviously deeply desirable, but at a tactical level, how do you enable that? Like, I mean, both at the personal and the professional level, that at a personal level, when you meet people, how are you trying to get to know them beyond the superficial facts of what they do, and etc, etc?

How are you trying to get to know them? What are the kind of connections that happen, you’ve pointed out about the new friends, you the three friends, you got together with a zoom call on during COVID. And obviously, that is a moment where there’s an inflection point in the universe.

And therefore, all of you are more vulnerable, and that becomes a way to connect. But, you know, is there some intentionality that you adopt while meeting new people, trying to get to know them, etc, etc? What was your thinking?

Gautam John: I don’t think it’ll be very different from how you meet people, right? In a sense that there is an individual, there is the individual in the web of connections they have. And there is the individual the web of connections and the structures and systems that hold them.

Often, if we meet through the structures and systems, we stay at that level. Or if we meet through the individual, you know, personal connection, we stay at that level. For me, a lot of it has to be is to recognise that there is the individual and how they see themselves and their place in the service.

That is how they relate with other people and how other people relate with them. And then that there is this systems and processes and structures they use to make sense of the world and meaning. And to recognise all three has is what I find truly fascinating.

I mean, when I’m in deep conversation with someone, I want to know the person’s story, right? I want to know the person’s story as an individual, as a member of an organisation or society, and then what tools and things shape their work and world view and how they operate. And the reason I’ve come to that is not because I had some great revelation is because during the pandemic, one of the things I decided to do since you’re all stuck at home and on Zoom was I said, let me try and do some course.

And one of the courses I came across, which was being offered virtually, was a course on becoming an integral coach, which sounded interesting. And I was like, what is this? And, you know, it was this idea that you can be a coach to a person without being prescriptive.

You can be a coach to a person to help them better understand their individual being, their collective being, and then their structural being. And that often challenges that they had was because of some misalignment there. And the goal is not to fix it for them.

The goal is not to be a performance coach or an executive coach to make them a better salesperson, but to fix the fundamental fractures that often exist, or rather to help them recognise it and work on it themselves. You can’t really fix it externally. That framework of the I, the we and the it has been really powerful to me, right?

Because it’s a frame I now use consciously when meeting a person, when meeting an organisation to get to know you in various contexts, and then to see where we might intersect rather than only in the presented self. Then the funny thing that I read was, so this integral philosophy is by a gentleman named Ken Wilber. He has a large body of work, which I’m not entirely familiar with.

But someone told me that the matrix was influenced by Ken Wilber’s philosophy. And so I went back and watched it. And if you looked at the evolution of Neo, it’s who am I?

The next one he becomes like, what am I now? Then the where am I? And then his recognition is also that I can’t fight this alone, we can fight it together.

And the last one is I need to give myself into the system for Zion. And I was like, you know, it makes so much sense, because the way I’ve seen this amazing set of leaders I’ve been fortunate to walk alongside, is that none of them are saying I alone is enough. None of them are saying we alone is enough.

None of them are saying systems and structures are enough. They’re saying we have to exist at all three levels simultaneously. Sometimes I have to show up as a friend to someone, someone has to show up as a partner, sometimes someone needs a new system or structure.

And I need to do work outside of an individual institutional framework, where I have no authority. And where, yeah, where I have no authority, nobody needs to listen to me. But I care deeply enough about a problem where I can show up in a way that, you know, people listen to me, because I’m authentic, because I can see all of them.

And because we can see all of each other. And that’s something that I’ve just found, you know, just so amazing, because and it’s definitely because of my vantage point, I’ve only ever seen it in civil society. Maybe it exists in markets in state, I’m sure it exists in state, because the complexities are as challenging.

But this ability to lead by seeing an individual and an organization at every level, rather than only one transactional level, just unlocks something that can emerge that would never have happened in a transaction. You can collaborate in a transaction, you bring A, I bring B, and we’ll do C. But if you truly want to move the needle on a massive structural problem, that’s, those are starting stakes.

Amit Varma: Double click on this for me, like when you talk about the I, the we and the it, like, how would you think about yourself using this framework? And was there ever a time where you were misaligned completely? And you had to bring that together.

So if you can double click on that in concrete terms, so I get a sense of what you mean. And also, if there’s an example, you can give me of how you make this work where a collaboration is not just about skills as an I’ll do A, you do B, but at a deeper level, you understand each other’s place in all of this.

Gautam John: So the first one, yes, I think my whole journey has my whole the last decade, at least, has been a journey of discovery about who I thought I was, how I related to other people and the systems and structures I use to make sense of the world, and to recognize fractures in each of them. I mean, it goes back to where we started, right? How I want other people to see me how I see myself, and then to recognize the dissonance, then to recognize the dissonance is what’s creating the tension.

And then to recognize part of this is because of flawed systems and structures. And then to say, where do we want to start? In that you’ll start with the self and then everything flows from there.

At least for me, I think this is more honest than I was expecting. But I think for me, the biggest one was that I thought being a good person meant to be humble and servile, or not even servile, humble and like servant leadership, right? And that we had to dissolve the self.

And in a way, you know, like you said, like you said earlier, the biggest realization for me has been that in showing up differently, you can walk into the life, not that you want, but that you needed when more of these things align. And so A, to be more honest to myself to say that I’m playing this role, but do I honestly want, is this what I’m feeling satisfied by? So to start pivot how I showed up.

When I started to pivot how I showed up, it also meant how I showed up for other people changed. And when that changed, then, you know, it changes in how an organization is structured and works and things of the sort. And while we might still end up in a similar space, it’s not the same space.

While we still might end up in a similar space, the thing I find fascinating is that the feedback loop is now a positive feedback loop, right? As opposed to, oh my God, the tension between what I want to be and what I have to show up as keeps widening. When you can move those to become positive and reinforcing loops, it just becomes so powerful.

Or I’m living in a gigantic bubble. Entirely possible. But it’s not a bad one.

So to that extent, it’s not like I did this as some magical thing. I did it because I so happened to go through this course and recognize the value in that and was doing work alongside it. But then, you know, I’m sure there’s some sort of bias for this, but then you start to see it show up in other places, right?

You start to see it, at least for me, in individuals who said, justice is a problem I care about. But justice is a complex, sticky problem. I can’t do it alone.

Many people. Rather than saying, I will, quote unquote, collaborate, a lot of it has been, what do we do if we get all of the actors in a problem? Say you’re working in a high court, from the judges to the bar to citizens, etc.

And you only choose people who care. You’re not trying to convince the world and bring them into a container and say, we all care about this problem. What is our point of view?

And to see the point of view, not just as I’m a judge, but what is my frustration? What is my annoyance? Not just what is my problem?

As a lawyer or a member of the bar, what threatens me here? What fulfills me here? As a citizen to say, what are my pain points?

What do I want from the justice system? Because these conversations don’t happen. I mean, these are not designed to happen in any meaningful fashion.

So you have to create, A, you need a leader who can invite people in without feeling threatened. B, you need people to hold that conversation so it’s not accusatory. And C, you then need to be able to go one, two levels down to say, what are our shared ambitions and goals?

And what do we build from there? And you see magic happen. There’s this amazing organization called Pukar who, for the longest time, convened judges and advocates and litigants and things of the sort.

And what emerged from that was a brand new court system, which just blows my mind that existed in Kerala. It’s called the On Courts, the always-on courts, that shifted the fundamental premise of the Indian court system. The Indian court system is structured as both parties have to show up.

They said if we move it virtual, both parties no longer have to show up at the same time. You can move the process through. And again, in hindsight, you’re like, man, this is so obvious.

Why didn’t anyone think of it? Perhaps no one thought of it because no one wanted to see everyone’s pain points and see what would move it forward. Because you have the structured vision of the, no, I mean, two advocates have to show up, two litigants and defendants have to show up.

You’ll argue your case. If one is not there, there’ll be an adjournment. As opposed to say that for some, and they’re doing it for a specific set of cases from this high volume, low value checkbounds, etc., that there’s no great need to show up in person. And if you fundamentally rethink that, you can move everything dramatically. And so this new model in working in Kerala, it’s been written about quite recently, but this re-imagination cannot happen as an individual project, right? It’s re-imagination of what a functioning, well-functioning dispute resolution mechanism will only happen if multiple people can be in the room, multiple people not just wearing their institutional hats.

And for me, it’s one of the, again, we’ve seen this in multiple other spaces, whether it’s in civic engagement, etc., but this ability to build that container, hold that space, the difficult conversations, and then to say, here is something that can only emerge from here, as opposed to saying, here is what worked in Northern California, why don’t you try it? Because it won’t work over here, which has been the traditional method. Let’s do e-filing, let’s digitize some process, as opposed to let’s re-imagine this.

And if you want re-imagination, you have to show up as human beings. You can’t show up as representatives of an organization only. And if you want people to show up as their full selves, you need a particular kind of leadership that’s able to hold that space for people.

Because leadership has otherwise been about, here’s the big audacious goal, and let’s all get behind it. But in this case, the audacious goal only emerges from the group, there is no single vision for it. So that kind of leadership that holds space for the self, for the individual, for the collective, and for systems and structures that want to emerge from it, just transformative.

And the good news and the bad news is that there’s no playbook for this. Find those leaders and support them. We’ve tried getting consultants to go in and say, how do you replicate this playbook?

And the answer is, you need to find a person who’s willing to sit in so much uncertainty and hold that space for people, which I think is a new kind of leadership that has deeply imprinted on me. And the other reason that it’s deeply imprinted on me is that, you know, at least since COVID, and the last few years with this increasing intensity and frequency of climate disasters, climate risks, we’re asking every single human being to step into greater and greater uncertainty. Actually, they’re not choosing it, we’re stepping into greater and greater uncertainty.

And how are we going to respond, right? I mean, our traditional models of response are built on systems, protocols, this thing, but that world is long gone. What is the acronym shift we’ve done from volatility, uncertainty, something, something to brittle, anxious, and the other one’s called bunny, I should note better.

But the old leadership frameworks don’t work. And to that extent, what I’m seeing emerge on the front lines of reality, which I think civil society is because they’re meeting these conditions head on, is this amazing way to say that we cannot meet these conditions head on, we cannot meet them as individuals, we need to meet them as collectives, which leads me to another point that I don’t know how you’d feel about titling this era to be the end of individualism.

But perhaps we’ve reached the limits of what we can achieve as individuals alone. Not to say there isn’t a role for our individual identities, our individual rights and all of those things. But perhaps a planetary scale problem cannot be addressed through that landscape.

Or perhaps problems that have increased in both frequency and intensity cannot be addressed through the individual framework alone. And if community and connection was always resilience, what does it mean to start to read it that because that’s what’s most afraid.

Amit Varma: So bunny stands for brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible. It is a term that I didn’t know before I learned it from your magnificent book. And I’m looking in my room research now I’ve taken my notes, that’s how I got it.

The other thing that my search for bunny throws up is a note from some earlier episode, which says that Gharana is a modern incarnation of bunny bunny and gayaki. So maybe there’s a deeper metaphor there. And I guess a playbook for any kind of emergent order is not in terms of things to do which you cannot possibly know they are known unknowns and often unknown unknowns.

But in terms of mindset in terms of a compass of values, which you hold and we’ll come back to that term later because you’ve used it in your book. But to talk about that, you know, the last point that you made that the end of the age of individualism and I think, you know, you’re saying that possibly comes from the conception that there is a binary there between the individual and the collective. And I don’t really buy that.

I think people often misunderstand individualism to be atomization. Right. And that’s a strawman version of what individualists would believe.

We don’t believe individuals should be atomized. Man is a social animal. Humans are social animals is a better way of phrasing that.

And we are, of course, social animals. So, you know, when you speak of collective action, I’m all for collective action, because collective action comes from the voluntary interactions of individuals, voluntary cooperation of individuals. And, you know, as long as it is voluntary, and of course, every collective is a collection of individuals.

I’m all for that, you earlier referred to human action playing such a key part. I mean, there’s this great phrase by Adam Ferguson, where he talks about society being the result of human action, but not human design. And that’s, of course, a great revelation of emergent order.

Speaking about human action, let’s kind of go back to not the human action, which brought you here, we shall not talk about that. But let’s go back to your childhood. You know, tell me about, you know, where were you born?

Where did you grow up? What were your early years like? What were your parents like?

What was the mahal like? I know your grand uncle was Vagis Korean, you know, how did that make a difference in the ethos around where you grew up? So just give me a sense of your childhood and how you spent it.

Gautam John: So I was born in Delhi. This point, I should say, maybe I was grateful that I never had to live there. But I was born in Delhi.

My mother’s parents lived in Delhi, father’s parents lived in Madras. I spent a lot of time in Madras as well. But Bangalore is definitely home.

It’s where I went to school. It’s where I went to college. Bangalore is like, what is that Baz Luhrmann song?

Live in California once but leave before it makes you soft. Bangalore is that to me. My maternal and my paternal grandfather was also someone who was incredibly visible and successful.

He was the first Indian chairperson of a previously British company. What was it called? The Parian Company, which is a big deal in South India.

You know, they built towns, so very much larger than life. But I don’t think I quite understood it then. All I understood then was that they had a lovely old big house in Chennai that was great to go to.

Madras, sorry. So I don’t think there was anything unique about my childhood in that sense. We lived in Bangalore, we went to Chennai, Madras for summers.

My father had three siblings, so there were a bunch of kids. I will say that it wasn’t a wealthy childhood. And I think that was definitely something that I didn’t realize how deeply it imprinted on me over the years.

It was a comfortable childhood, but it wasn’t wealthy. And at least for me, there was one part of it, which I didn’t realize how much living with a scarcity mindset did as you grow older and not recognizing it. So that was one.

The other one was also that my father was an entrepreneur in varying degrees of success. Towards the end of his life, he was very successful, but as with the life of an entrepreneur, it wasn’t always successful. And that plays out in many ways.

And there were many times I remember there are things that I might have desired or wanted. In particular, I remember a school trip that we couldn’t afford. Those are things I’ve only realized much later, how deeply they imprinted on me and what it meant to work from a scarcity mindset.

What it meant to work with a scarcity mindset when you lived in relative abundance as well in a variety of ways, from relationship with food to relationship with money to relationship with shopping. The thing that I also hold from my childhood is I had great friends. We lived in a fairly middle class, but great friends, and I’ve stayed friends with them.

My mom was very insistent on raising two good boys. So, you know, my brother and me, we cook. In a pre-dating app world, we were ideal catch.

And I’m just so grateful for that, that, you know, my mother saw it fit to raise two boys in a way that might have been slightly different from the norm. Couldn’t have been easy to do, but I’m very grateful for that. I went to, funnily enough, I first went to a girl’s school, then to a boy’s school, which was fun because I was the popular kid in the boy’s school because I knew all the girls.

But school was great. I mean, there were no fancy schools and we only had simple schools. And it was the first, all three schools I went to were church schools.

So there was a sense of, how to say, forced middle classness. I mean, they took people from a wide variety of backgrounds. So you had friends from everywhere.

So that was great. And I think it’ll be true, broadly true of anyone in an urban city who grew up in a fairly middle to upper middle class life. And then I went to law school.

Was it the most obvious thing to do? No. But one of my teachers said that you can either go to St. Stephen’s and study literature or go to law school. And the idea of St. Stephen’s and literature was a bit much. I didn’t know what I’d do with it. I went to law school.

And I will say that law school was transformative in many ways. Firstly, because the way the National Law School was structured was as this five year integrated undergraduate and graduate course. So you were exposed to people five years older than you in the same intellectual environment.

And because it was set up as a new law school, it had a free thinking culture that was very rare. I mean, I certainly didn’t have access to it in school, in my own social circle. That was something else, right?

To engage with everything from Marxist history to the ideas of economics, to what does crime and punishment mean. And to do so with a cohort of 18 year olds is a particularly interesting moment, because no 18 year old has any conception of what life outside the home boundary is. And here you’re talking about big things, right?

I mean, in most countries, law is something you do after your undergrad, but here you’re thrown in like contracts and like, I haven’t bought anything myself. So the gap between what we were being taught versus our lived experience was massive. But it was this incredible environment because it was residential, it was very free thinking space, you had people from a variety of political and social backgrounds.

I mean, it just opened me up to a variety of cultures. But what it also did was completely destabilize any sense of self I had. There were people smarter than me, wealthier than me, so it completely destabilized that.

And my whole thing I would throw law school was like, who am I? I don’t know. I want to be this, I want to be that.

And then at some point, I said, actually, maybe this law is not for me. And maybe in hindsight, the law was not for me, because I genuinely didn’t know where I fit in this hierarchy of things. I will say that law school was great, because I think the study of law is a fascinating tool for me.

It has been a fascinating journey for me to understand human behavior, governance, regulation, the things we do, the things we claim to do. And all been apparent later, not at that moment in time. But pretty much by the time I got to the final year of law school, I decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer.

And then you’re like, then what? So I did some work in the US with a law firm, didn’t enjoy it. My father was on a second round of entrepreneurship then.

And so I came back and said, hey, let’s try this. And I really enjoyed that, because I think, for me, I used to focus on intellectual property rights. And while the creator side is always expansive, the legal side of that is like, how then do I protect this so nobody else can use it?

And going into work with my father for a little while was fascinating, because you have to be generative, right? You’re trying to solve problems, not trying to encompass. And I found that really liberating and freeing.

And I mean, I will also say that because he was an entrepreneur in the manufacturing space, I have this incredible respect for people who do work with their hands. I think my biggest challenge in the last decade for me has been engaging only with ideas and words and code, because they’re just so malleable that sometimes they can mean everything and nothing at the same time. So the part that I really find myself missing is, you know, a factory where something is made, where you can’t bullshit your way out of a problem, because it’s real and tactile.

That was one. The second one was also just starting to work with hundreds of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, people who looked up to you for answers, people who looked up to you for a variety of things. And it’s not something that I’ve ever experienced before.

So that was a pretty interesting seven, eight years for me. Then, you know, the company did really well. We sold it.

And I was like, what next? And like any good person, what next is if you don’t know what to do, you go and do an MBA. So I applied for that.

And then everyone was like, you know, before you apply, you should really do some, get some experience on your resume, do an internship or volunteer. I was like, all right, I need to do that. And I turned up at one of our factories.

I used to see this organization that had a board outside that said the Akshara Foundation, Pratham Books. And I was like, okay, it’s closed, but let me go see. And I went there and they were like, hey, we’re a children’s book publisher.

What do you know about book publishing? I was like, I know zero about book publishing. They’re like, then why do you want to do this?

I was like, I don’t know. I thought I could be useful to you. And then one of the co-founders of the organization, Ashok, who has been someone I’ve learned a lot from, Ashok said, so what do you know how to do?

I can do, I know scale, I know operations, I know management. He’s like, as a book publisher, we want to grow. Can you help us with that?

I was like, yeah, sure. I can help you with that. So I said, I’ll come in part-time and see what happens.

And we started building out a process to streamline operations, scale, et cetera, et cetera. And there was this amazing, in that time, there was this amazing thing that the government of Bihar did that said they’re going to run a in all of the districts and that publishers can show up and teachers would come and buy books. And this was in 2008.

It was an interesting time for someone who doesn’t speak Hindi. So I was running this massive project, printing millions of books in Mangalore, getting them shipped to Bihar. And it was fabulous.

I really enjoyed all of the scaling. And then once this was done, I was like, you know, this is great, but this model is not sustainable because you publish in four languages. We have 21 languages just in our constitution.

There are 300 million children. You, if you’re in a good year, publish a million books. Good luck.

But this is not the way forward. So like, okay, thanks. But what is the way forward then?

And I had slowly, in that time, I’d become very influenced by quote-unquote community models. So Wikipedia was one. But there was also this amazing organization that existed in Bangalore then called the Center for Internet and Society, founded by Sunil Abraham, that became this place for people who had slightly heretical views in technology, right?

That communities can create, communities can build, open source is the way forward. And I love those ideas. I don’t know why I love those ideas, but I really love those ideas.

And so I spent a lot of time with them. And so a lot of that thinking, I brought back to Pratham Books and said, you know, you guys keep thinking of yourself as publishers that we have to heroically publish a book for every child. The mission was a book in every child’s hand.

There is no way you’re going to be able to do this. So I said, you know, rather than seeing yourself as gatekeepers of content, what would it look like for you all to quote-unquote enable? The benefit of telling the story in retrospect is it sounds a lot very linear and very clear it wasn’t.

And they’re like, what is that? So I said, you know, there’s Wikipedia, why can’t many people contribute writing your books? And it all sounds a bit bonkers, but can you run a small pilot?

And so one of the things we did was, you know, we put out some of our books and said, does anybody want to rewrite them? And it came back French and German. And this was in 2008, right?

So it’s not even like we had these amazing social networks back then. So someone would actually type it up on some Word document, send it to you, then you send it to an illustrator. And there was this natural urge for people to want to contribute to something larger than themselves.

And I found that fascinating. And, you know, I went back to the board and it’s like, hey, here’s something. And they’re like, do you want to run this?

I was like, right, I hadn’t counted on that. I ended up staying there six years and building, you know, what is now the world’s largest open publishing platform for children. It publishes in 300 languages, has tens of millions of reads and tens of thousands of stories.

And it was a little bit of a recognition of what happens when you create the space for people to step into, whether it’s digital or physical. That invitation, that container that invites people in more than a transactional way to say that I will pay you for this, as opposed to here, you can come and express yourself. It was really powerful and very pivotal for me as well to recognize that the invitation and the container creates the opportunities and that sometimes our goal is to enable, not necessarily to do.

And the enabling can be technical, it can be community, it can be many things, but the invitation is important rather than saying, let’s heroically solve a problem together by being transactional. So, yeah, that whole arc was fun. The thing I’ve struggled to say is why some things happen.

Like, how did I find CS? I don’t know. Maybe there’s likely some lawyer, but I found a kindred set of people there.

People who were thinking about what does community mean? What does ownership mean? And I was very attracted to those.

Then I happened to end up in a children’s book publisher, and I happened to have experience in intellectual property rights or copyright. How do you look at copyright? Is it from a tool of control to a tool of creation?

So, yeah, I mean, some of this is just a random, but I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to be a method to the madness. None of the things I did were structured and they happened, but I wouldn’t change one piece of it.

Amit Varma: On that note, let’s take a quick commercial break. And on the other side of it, talk a lot more about your journey and about your learnings about leadership and life. Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.

In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time. I love the freedom the form gave me, and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways. I exercised my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things because I wrote about many different things.

Well, that phase in my life for various reasons, and now it is time to revive it. Only now I’m doing it through a newsletter. I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy. I’ll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else. So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe. It is free.

Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox. You don’t need to go anywhere. So subscribe now for free.

The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com. Thank you. Um, you know, there was a sense that something is taking shape there.

And I want to ask you about that shaping of the self as it were, like what I want to go back to first is that you spoke about how that scarcity mindset was kind of imprinted on you what it meant to not be wealthy. And I had a sense that there was a slight emotional moment there when you spoke about your dad and the fact that he wasn’t always a successful entrepreneur that in the past, he might have been a failed one and the impact that it had. And I wonder if you thought about it differently once upon a time, perhaps you feel some regret or guilt for that, etc, etc.

But can you elaborate in concrete terms on what you meant by that scarcity mindset being imprinted in you and affecting the way you behaved even when there was no reason to behave in that way?

Gautam John: Yeah, I can. I mean, I appreciate you picking picking up on that. But for me, it was, again, this is the benefit of hindsight.

It was I mean, my biggest, the biggest place it showed out in was was in with food.

Amit Varma: I mean, you’ve known me 20 years, you’ve seen me go through a variety of shapes and sizes. You in fact recommended the best restaurant I have eaten at in Asia, I will quickly tell the story. I was doing a food trip with our mutual friend Madhu Menon.

And we went to Bangkok and Singapore not for the reasons most Indian men go but Madhu had an excel sheet where every meal time was fixed up. Madhu Menon was a great chef, by the way. And when we hit Singapore, you told us you have to eat at this place called Bistecca.

And I have eaten the best steak of my life there. It was a brilliant rib eye steak. So thank you for that.

But I’m sorry.

Gautam John: Yeah, I remember Bistecca. I remember that trip. So my relationship with food, right?

I mean, I think I always enjoyed good food, but I didn’t always have access to it. And as I started working, made my own money, had access to more money, there was access to more good food. There were no guardrails.

I would eat a cake like it was going to disappear. And I can still see myself, right? Like there’s a whole cake, you could eat a slice, but I’m like, I’ll eat the whole cake now because I don’t know if it’ll be there tomorrow.

Not that I had that explicit conversation, but I would.

Amit Varma: That’s ultimate causation, not proximate. That’s why we like cakes.

Gautam John: So many things like, you know, an unlimited buffet was a dream for me because I could eat and eat and eat till I was sick. Not because I was hungry, but because I didn’t know when the chance would come again. When I had money, I would buy the most random things because I didn’t know if I’d ever have the money again.

So in a sense, not knowing whether tomorrow would look the same as yesterday essentially meant that it’ll live out my full arc of fulfillment in 24 hours, or in some cases 12 hours, or in some cases one tea cake. And I didn’t recognize how much of that was the fact that I wasn’t actually sure if this was ever going to be possible again. And I mean, rational self, of course, it was going to be possible.

Tomorrow I had a cake and the day after tomorrow I had a cake and I could buy something even more expensive. But it really took me a lot of quote unquote reflection and pause to be able to figure out that pattern. And also then what it meant for decision making, right?

Are you optimizing for tomorrow? Are you optimizing for the long run as an individual, as a partner, as a person, as an employee, as working in an organization and then leading? What are you optimizing for?

And the answer, at least to me, was that I was not necessarily optimizing but being shaped by things that were so distant and deep that until I had the chance to explore and unpack them, even to recognize that they were existing. And then once you recognize them, recognizing something is power because then you can call it and once you can name it, you can do differently. So a lot around that, Amit.

And, you know, for me just to recognize that none of these are intentional, right? I mean, all of these are ways of protecting yourself, ways of coping and things of the sort. And they exist long after that moment in time has passed or that moment in your life has passed, but they stay on and they linger.

And to do the intentional work then of recognizing it and seeing what one can choose to do differently. Choosing to do differently starts with seeing differently. And seeing differently for me starts with creating a sense of a pause and creating some time for reflection, which also ties into, you know, how does change happen?

How does change happen for an individual? How does change happen at any level of scale? Happens with seeing differently first time.

To see differently, one does need to slow down. Maybe there are people who can do it without an intentional pause. I’d love to learn how, but for me, my method has been to intentionally slow down.

And in particular, I think what I really have come to see as valuable is as the intensity and frequency and velocity of the work or problem or whatever one is engaged with, increases the value of slowing down, increases as well, because we tend to be reactive and responsive, never to look for the pattern, never to step onto the balcony, always be in the dance. And that switch between reactive and reflective is so important. I wish there were a manuscript or a handbook or a framework as to when to do it.

But that really comes from being open and in the moment that you recognize when crystallized knowledge, like you said, is important and when embodied knowledge is important.

Amit Varma: Tell me a bit about your dad. I’ll ask about your mom also after this, but tell me a bit about your dad because, you know, A, you worked with him in the enterprise, which you eventually sold. What was he like?

What was your relationship with him like? When did you stop seeing him as a father and more as a full human being? And also, you know, there is that old cliched remark about how all men eventually turn into their fathers.

So, you know, when you look at him from a distance and when you look at yourself from a distance, what do you see?

Gautam John: You know, I’m definitely living through that phase now where I recognize so many of the patterns and habits that I have of my father’s. And now to recognize it with a sense of gratitude as well. But just to say that all these cliches have some truths in them.

The other one, of course, is also the journey from seeing your father as being the embodiment of safety and structure and all of that, and then to see them as a full human being. I think that’s been incredibly moving for me. And in a sense, it hasn’t been resolution.

It’s not like my father and I have had many conversations. But the nature of our relationship has changed from being one of father, son, to being people who work together and then now to being people on different stages of their life journey. So definitely that has moved.

But also to recognize how much that generation was shaped by its context, what it meant to be a man, what it meant to be certain, what it meant to hold on to emotions. My father is probably far more emotional now than he was when I was his age. And that’s a journey as well.

But the biggest one has really been to see your parents, your father, as a complete human being with their own hopes, fears, worries, as opposed to just the North Star in your life. And I’m sure you get this from many guests, but that unpacking has been both wholesome to recognize that we’re all imperfect human beings, but also then to recognize that we’re now at this point where the relationship is inverted, where I have to show up for my father in very different ways to support, to help. And yeah, I think it just makes me think about this period in our lives.

I don’t know if you felt it, but where most of our relationships with our older people have changed from one of awe to one of care. And then there’s a certain tenderness in knowing that time is limited also. Like, for example, this year, my wife and I were chatting that we lost two friends, my parents lost two friends.

And so it’s just at that moment, I mean, you recognize, okay, there’s only so much time. And then what? And then you have a child, and you realize that every year that goes by, you actually spend less and less time with them.

So it’s a tough one.

Amit Varma: It’s a full circle. Tell me about your mom. Like one thing that interests me about women of that generation is that they lived such almost unimaginably constrained lives to what women today can lead.

And I’m always fascinated by what would their interior life have been like, like when I’ve like some of the guests on the show, like Shanta Gokhale and Mukulika Banerjee, when they’ve spoken about their moms, I get the sense that their moms were incredible women, whose lives if you just look at the mere biographical details, in many case, would appear to be that of a conventional Indian woman of that time, nothing extraordinary at all. But there were all kinds of little acts, little rebellions in their lives, which I would classify as a kind of lived feminism, though a feminist today would not be able to look back on that and consider that feminist in any way.

But within the context of what their lives were like, and what the constraints were like, they were finding ways to express their agency and do interesting things. And it strikes me that your mom bringing you brothers up differently from what other boys were brought up as was an act of profound feminism, even if she would not have used that term, or even if you would not have used that term then. And in a sense, what you are today would have been shaped so much by that, that you guys are a result of that lived feminism of your mom.

So tell me more about your mom, what you have, you know, learned about her interior life and what it was like and you know, when you began to relate to her as a person and perhaps even a friend?

Gautam John: A fascinating question. One is I completely agree with you that I think these what might have been what we might see as small acts of rebellion were perhaps not small at all in that period of time. Secondly, very grateful for those because I think where I certainly am and my brother would acknowledge that we’re certainly both more complete human beings for that.

Third, definitely more independent. I mean, my brother can, he lives very far away, but my brother can cook a full Indian meal at any point in time. And that’s just because of the upbringing we had.

We’re still people who will, when we’re at dinner, we’ll clear up the table. So there’s small things, big things that I absolutely adore about what my mother has given me. But the flip side to seeing my, the flip side to getting older and a little bit more zoomed out view is also recognizing what could have been, right?

The opportunities and chances. My mother was a very devoted mother. She learned Kannada, teaching me Kannada.

She went out of her way for most things, but to recognize that there was so much potential, right? In innovation, for my mother in writing and reading that ultimately had nowhere to go and to express itself. And at some level you feel like we’ve lost so many generations of this, but in my case, it’s my mother.

And I see that much more clearly. And the fourth one is, you know, I think about what mothers of boys in particular have to go through, because sometimes I feel like it’s a double whammy, right? You don’t want to be your boys.

You don’t want your boys to grow up to be the kind of boys that you didn’t want around you. So you ultimately have to become this break the chain generation. And I don’t know if it’s something, it’s definitely not something we’ve spoken about, but it’s one of those things that I think that women of sons have this particular societal obligation that they’re both responsible for breaking, but also have been subjected to in their lives.

And to choose to do it differently, you know, is remarkable because what’s that line about hurt people, hurt people, the easiest ways to be shaped by experience is to choose not to do that and to choose separately and to choose differently is a remarkable act of both courage and bravery. And yeah, I mean, very, very grateful for that. I think for my mother to see her in her life as being shaped so much.

And I also think this is a particularly Syrian Christian kind of view, being shaped by community norms, community practices, being shaped by a joke with my mother that, you know, for all the time I’ve known you, you never sit down on a chair and eat. You always sit at the edge of the chair because you never know when you have to get up. And like, sometimes it maddens me.

I’m like, just sit down. It’s okay. I’ll get up.

But it’s like, it’s the most defining feature I have of my mother sitting at a dining table, at any dining table, where she’d be on the edge of the seat, always wanting to get up, always wanting to be in service of. And yeah, I think there’s a definite part of me that annoys me. Like, you don’t have to be this person, but also to recognize that, I mean, life shapes you in so many ways.

So that’s one. The other thing, of course, is, you know, I’m just really glad that my mother shaped our food preferences. We have such a wide variety of tastes.

She is and was an excellent cook, but also just someone who is very global in outlook. So we tried different kinds of food. We tried different kinds.

I mean, our reading, she used to be a voracious reader. So I think, you know, her love of reading is something that we inherited. And a wide variety of things, everything from novels to magazines to newspapers.

So we used to do that. So when you said you used to read the Vada Pav paper, I recognize that. I mean, there are times when I have read the print on the back of a shampoo bottle, because there was nothing else to read.

But yeah, definitely stepped in and built that new bridge for us. And at some level, you know, I think in many ways, her greatest act of love was to kind of protect and shield us from many of the realities that I’ve only seen in retrospect, right? Sometimes how little we had, sometimes what was not possible, to make the impossible possible, things that we wanted but could not always have.

So to bridge that, to build a bridge from our lived reality to what she wanted us to experience, and that just came from a place of love.

Amit Varma: There’s such a heartbreaking image of her on the edge of the chair. You know, before we continue with, you know, your LinkedIn biography, as it were, it’s a good time to talk about your parenthood, that, you know, you’ve been a parent, I know that you’re very intentional about it, you’ve thought about it a lot, and which is pretty much what I’d expect from you, knowing you that this guy is going to think deeply, go through all the frameworks, read all the books, etc, etc.

And what has that experience been like, because there also, it is a clashing of two mindsets, which you speak about in your book, and we’ll talk about a lot more in a different context, which is the engineering mindset that I will control the outcomes. And, you know, I, this is the input, that’s the output, that’s the outcome, etc, etc. And many parents have the hubris of thinking that they can shape their child and they can shape their child’s lives, and so on and so forth.

But at the same time, knowing that, while of course, the world is complex, and society is complex, even a single small human being is deeply complex, and you can’t control for everything. And, you know, there’s an emergent order there as well. So what have you, you know, what have you learned in all these years, as a parent about parenting and be about yourself?

And what ways have you changed?

Gautam John: I love that. So when our daughter Anushka was born, I was fortunate to be in a place where I could take a year and a half off, when my wife went back to work and be a stay at home dad for that period of time. I will say it showed me more about gender inequity than pretty much anything else in my life.

But what it changed for me was, I always thought that, you know, it would be a year and a half of doing things right of changing a diaper and giving taking Anushka out for a walk and a series of tasks. And the thing that I realized was that the magic of a relationship is that the act of doing changes the person who does it as well. Similarly, there’s a parallel ledger on philanthropy as well, that your act of giving must change not just the recipient, but the giver as well, because if it doesn’t, just it’s pointless, it’s some transaction.

And that, to me, has been the key, right? To be present, that the doing is not the point, the doing leads to a changing of the person. I mean, which is also why I’ve been thinking about my daughter in her current phase, where she’s been really invested in swimming, and what would it mean to accompany her?

Not because I can help her swim faster or better, but just to be changed by that sort of process. So for me, the big one was thinking of parenting as a series of tasks to realizing, it’s the building of a relationship that ultimately changes both people. So that was one.

So the second one was to realize how tiny and small the universe of first day at home dads is. Our good friend Mohit Satyanand was one. I think we spoke a few times at that point.

And then to recognize because I was kind of popular, visible on social media, then, good God, the level of elevation I received. I mean, I was on NDTV panels, people would write articles. The NDTV panel was a fun one, I was accused of destroying Indian social hierarchy.

But that aside, I was just like so amazed by the fact that choosing to be a stay-at-home dad was this thing that needed to be called out and adulated. And people wanted me on panels and to speak to audiences. And at some point, I was like, but billions of women do this every year, it can’t be that much of a thing.

But yeah, that was one. The second one was how amazing the burden of low expectations is. I remember this one time that I was carrying Anushka, she was a few months old.

I was in a coffee shop or something somewhere. And someone said, you know, are you a single parent? And I was like, what?

Like, no, I mean, where’s the mother? Shouldn’t the child be with the mother? I’m like, but I’m the father.

It’s like, oh, okay. And you’ve kept the child healthy and safe. This is ridiculous, right?

Being a single, not single, but being a primary parent as a father, apparently, the burden of expectation is that the child is alive, as opposed to if you were a mother. So then I changed my story once. And I told people that actually, you know, her mother is out in the forest doing the tiger safari.

Sorry, doing the tiger census. I thought, you know, that would be a worthwhile calling and people wouldn’t judge. And the only answer I got back was, I left the child here.

So I will say that it was one of those moments where I didn’t fully realize what it meant to be a woman in India until I realized that for a man doing the same task, the standard was completely different. So that was one. The second one was also just, I mean, we have only one daughter, right?

And I will say that in hindsight, if everybody, anybody can make that choice, you should just because like, it changed me as a person, right? It made me, I mean, the cliche is it made me more patient and all of those things. But it fundamentally changed me to say that, you know, what is it like for a piece of your heart to walk around outside you?

What is it for a piece of your heart to walk around outside you and realize will grow to be an individual, independent human being and that there’s not much you can do about it? What does it mean to let go with a certain amount of equanimity? I don’t think any of these are new for most parents, but it was new to me.

But also, it kind of helped me think about what does it mean to accompany another human being and help them live their fullest potential? And that’s something that, you know, a value I hold on to as a parent, as a partner, as a leader, to see that, you know, maybe what we’re called to do is help the people around them discover their truest and fullest potentials. And if so, then what do we show up as in their lives to accompany or to lead?

And I think we often think of leadership and parenting as something from the front. But I actually think it sometimes is from the front, sometimes it’s from the back, sometimes it’s from the side, sometimes it’s invisible, sometimes it’s visible. And to recognize the, you know, many contradictions in all of this and to say that it’s okay, because ultimately, our goal is to see what, you know, what is the best that can happen here.

And to recognize that to that end, there’s only so much engineering one can do and more one can create enabling conditions for.

Amit Varma: I’ll bring up the 19-year-old Gautam again and ask the question that, what do you take more seriously than he did? And what do you take less seriously than he did?

Gautam John: What do I take more seriously? That’s a fascinating question. I take soft cues more importantly.

I take coincidence more importantly. I take serendipity more importantly. I take the idea of coherence more importantly.

The things that I take less importantly is definitely this idea of self-worth. The 19-year-old me was all about that and self-worth linked to measurable traits, perhaps because I didn’t have many of them. But the biggest journey has been to surrender not to the life I thought I wanted, but to the life that makes me feel most alive.

And like you said, in living the life that makes you feel most alive, the life you wanted is irrelevant. So it’s not a loss. In a sense, it’s a gain of something you never knew that was even possible.

Amit Varma: Yeah.

Gautam John: And less scarcity mindset, that as well. To know that, for the most part, tomorrow will look like today. Elaborate on what you mean by soft cues.

Yeah, this is going to be an interesting one, right? I will say that, you know, in this journey, as you start to focus on the self, on how one shows up, a question that I have sat with is, then what do you use as feedback cues, right? I mean, how do you know this is the right way, wrong way?

Earlier, at least you’re saying this is the only way because somebody else said it, we’ll follow it. But in this, what do you use as evidence, as feedback loops, all of those things? And in the last few years, particularly in the last few years, I think one of the things I’ve started noticing more, and now it’s either it’s happening more, I’m noticing it more, I don’t know which one it is, is that coincidences point to that paths of coherence.

It’ll happen on a very regular basis, right? I’m thinking about a particular piece of work, I will read something, someone will speak to me, and they’ll all be linked. In particular, if you look at my LinkedIn over the last few years has been this, here are three pieces I didn’t hear how they connect.

And I just, it’s not something that used to happen earlier, right? But the sense that the more inner coherence you have, the more that it’s reflected outside is something that I have come to see as valuable. I can’t articulate it, you know, in…

Amit Varma: Like, is there an example you can cite of when things fell into place in this manner?

Gautam John: It’s not even things falling into place as much as saying that this is the path. It’s incredible, right? It’s, for example, a piece of work that we’re doing to see that, you know, do we double down on this?

And then someone will have a conversation with you, you’ll read some evidence that you had not read before. And then someone in the portfolio will say, hey, have you thought about this? And you’re like, hey, but you’re all saying the same thing.

And then to say, okay, maybe this is it. As opposed to saying, I know the right path. I know this will work because, you know, it fits this framework.

So for me, a lot more now is like, which is the direction that brings most coherence? And I’m finding that either I’ll be institutionalized in 10 years, saying that he lives in a make-believe world, or what I’m hoping is that I’ll find that coherence really perhaps is our greatest calling to find resonance in who we are, what we do, how we do it, where we do it, who we do it alongside as being true and authentic. Because I certainly don’t have a framework for this, right?

I don’t have a framework for this. This feels like something that emerges out of the process of reflection, out of the process of being more open and vulnerable, and, you know, willing to listen, to acknowledge, to show up rather than to lead. And that just creates this greater surface area for input.

Maybe it’s just that we’re dealing with more kinds of input rather than just intellectual, somatic, all of those things. I struggle to articulate it, but broadly doing work for inner coherence and widening your surface area for serendipity has been the only two things that I live by. Because if you do the inner work and you widen the surface area for serendipity, you just find greater ability to sense who else out there will work alongside you, can work alongside you, can work together.

One of the things that I’ve started doing more intentionally in the last decade is write. And I earlier used to write because I wanted to convince people. Now I write because when people are looking, they’ll find it and then they’ll discover me, or they’ll discover us.

And to take that pressure off to saying that, my God, if this hasn’t convinced anyone, why am I writing it? I’m writing it because I want to write this as a true narrative of what happened. And to realize that the life of anything you write is not one day, one week, not how many retweets, it’s how many people connect with it over time.

And people will find pieces from seven, eight years ago, and be like, hey, this, you know, I’m now doing it. I’m like, I’m glad. So this writing to express rather than writing to convince has also been a large shift for me.

And a lot of that has come from the fact that the universe has its own time. And maybe I should give in to that.

Amit Varma: Are curiosity and openness a superpower that you arrived at through circumstance or are they innate to you? Like in the sense, when I look back on the arc of my own life, I think and I’m not trying to be overly modest here. But in a sense, I’m glad that in most of the things I tried to do, I actually failed.

I think had I been too successful, you know, power corrupt success would have corrupted me, I would have been a different kind of person. But I’ve been forced into a certain kind of direction. Because I failed at so many things that I had to keep trying, I had to be open, I had to self reflect a lot more than I otherwise would have.

So in your case, you mentioned that in college, you weren’t particularly outstanding at anything, they were kids smarter than you, wealthier than you, etc, etc. And did all this, you know, for example, lead to a better work ethic, push you in those directions? No, it didn’t.

Gautam John: Isomorphic mimicry, I pretended to be wealthier, I pretended to be smarter. It definitely wasn’t that. Yeah.

So when you say the 19 year old me, the 19 year old me was like, fake it till you make it. And now I’m like, make what? So that’s a huge part of my own learning right for myself.

In every which way I tried to pretend like I could belong in that in the group I was. And to recognize over time, it’s not like the group didn’t want to accept me in any other way. So I didn’t want to accept myself in any other way.

So this sense of curiosity really came from again, at the risk of overstating it, the ability to kind of slow down and reflect, right? Because otherwise, you’re not asking the why, the what, the how, the where, the which, the why. And creating that space, really, then reflecting, understanding, unpacking has been unnerving in many times.

But incredibly, what’s the word I’m looking for? Satisfying. To be able to recognize that you don’t have to be a hostage or a prisoner to your patterns, that your patterns existed in response to certain things.

And that one can, I mean, I don’t know if you want to do the free will argument, but one can at least make other choices.

Amit Varma: So I, you know, the 19 year old you actually seems a lot like the 19 year old me in the sense that we are slaves to those twin anxieties of one, you want to fit in with the world around you and get the validation and two, you’re trying to figure out who the hell you are and you can’t figure it out. And when did you start getting past those anxieties? When did you start getting comfortable in your skin?

My late 30s, Amit. Really? Yeah.

Gautam John: I mean, yeah, probably in my late 30s. I think post-daughter, post a lot of those things. Even the days, I used to think that, oh, if you work in a non-profit, you’re a virtuousness, unless you don’t have to be.

You can work in a non-profit and sit on a very high horse, but not actually be virtuous. It took me a lot. Yeah.

So it’s very, very much recent. It’s perhaps in the last maybe eight, maybe 10 years. A lot of it has to do with the fact that, you know, when Shobita and I started dating and then when we got married, she was doing her own work to explore her sense of what shaped her.

And I was like, why would you do this? And she was like, because, you know, I want to see who I am. And that’s when I went the first time to a therapist or a counselor.

And I was like, I don’t have any problems. And they’re like, come back when you’re ready. And then, you know, it’s been, and I joked to my wife, right?

The first time I went to a therapist, I came back and told her, I was like, what do you see? I just went and told them my life and they said, life’s peachy. And she’s like, that’s so annoying.

But it took me a little while, I think, to A, have some break in the mirror that says that everything’s not there and to willing to be honest with yourself first. And then once you’re willing to be honest with yourself, and once you find someone who can reflect it back, I’ve had the fortune of working with a great set of people. My friends joke that I have a coach for everything I do.

Part of the process was in saying that I don’t have to have all the answers myself. And if Roger Federer could have a coach, I can have a coach. So right now, I have a strength and conditioning coach, I have a running coach, I have a somatic coach, I have integral coach, I have a craniosacral therapy coach, I have like six or seven people.

But for me, it is so liberating, right? To say that it’s okay to ask for help. And asking for help doesn’t mean you’re failing, it means you want to be better.

And that was the key insight, because otherwise it was always this, oh my God, if you have to do this, it means what does it mean? What do people think? Like, I don’t give a shit what people think anymore, because I’m just feeling like a better human being every day in every single facet of my life.

And it’s a running argument I have with some friends who are like always about no, no, why do you need external help? You must do it yourself. And those are two worldviews.

And I fully appreciate the you must do it yourself worldview as well. So you understand yourself better. But I’m like, man, if the best people in the world can say I want to get better and work with someone outside, I can be humble enough to say I can do the same too.

So a lot of it, a lot of it was that first crack and then being fortunate to work with good people who didn’t try to fix me, who offered me reflection, helped me in some amount of discomfort with my wife who was able to support that. Then having a child, you’re like, man, everything’s changing. What do I do?

Uncertainty. But yeah, just having the right support systems, the right people at the right time, in hindsight, they offered me a lot of this ability to kind of see myself differently and then make different choices and quote unquote evolve, if that’s the word I want to use. But the thing is, it’s a one way door, right?

Once you see it, I don’t think you can unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, then you sit with the discomfort of saying, I know this is not working, but I don’t want to go there. Or do you say, hey, let’s see what emerges.

So to go back to that line of discomfort versus uncertainty, it’s, yeah, once you see it, what do you do with it? And it’s also a question of resourcing. I mean, I had access to resources.

I recognize that it may not be the same for everyone. But I had the access to resources previously as well. It’s not like I chose to do this.

But discovering the gaps between the person I was, the person I am, the person I wanted to be, and discovering what shaped those gaps, and discovering what I could do to narrow those gaps, and discovering in narrowing those gaps, I had more coherence between the external and the internal, and discovering I had more coherence between that. I showed up differently and discovering that when I show up differently with coherence, things around me happen differently. And that when things around me happen differently, I no longer have to look for validation, but I can look for softer cues and senses like coincidences and serendipity.

Or I’m batshit crazy, I don’t know.

Amit Varma: No, that’s such a great frame to think about this. And, you know, in the break, we were talking about technology. And I was pointing out how I always advise my writing students that, you know, use tools like AI as, you know, use them as tools, not as crutches.

And I guess that’s the same thing you could say about coaches, that if they are tools to help you get to the best version of yourself, great, as long as they don’t become crutches for you to avoid the responsibility of doing the, you know, the self work that you have to. Tell me also about your partnership with Shobita and your marriage, because I imagine that it would be true in your case, as in the case of absolutely anyone else, right? If you were with someone else for so long, you would be a different person.

And therefore, to a large extent, what you are is also a constant, you know, she’s probably been a mirror into who you’re becoming. And, you know, you would have been shaped a lot through the relationship and knowing you, I know that this is something that you would have explicitly put a lot of thought to how does one nurture a relationship, how does one, you know, grow through it, etc, etc. So, you know, what’s that journey been like for you?

Gautam John: I’d say the person I am today has entirely emerged in relationship to Shobita, in being in relationship with Shobita, right? To hold yourself, to hold a person to account, to see the best in them, to support when faith is low, to check when ego is too wide, to want a person to become the best version of themselves that you see and love in them. That’s been Shobita to me.

I don’t, like I said, the 19 year old me wouldn’t recognize this version. But this version exists because I have been in relationship with and in partnership with Shobita. And yeah, I mean, I think going back to the idea of being in relationship means not just giving, but receiving as well.

And it took me a while to be able to receive as well. I mean, I was very comfortable giving, but then to receive and to be changed by another person is an incredibly powerful thing. And I have been just so lucky and blessed to be in relationship with and changed by a person who is so thoughtful, kind, deep, generous.

And yeah, I don’t know if she’d agree with the fact that she’s been transformative, but she has. And I think that for me is the part that, yeah, she changed me. And changed me in so many ways that I’ll forever be grateful for, but never did it in wanting to change me, just in wanting to be held differently, in wanting to be in conversation differently.

So yeah, it was not an engineering problem to fix, but a relationship to nurture. And I’m just so grateful for that because, like I said, the person I am today is entirely because of her.

Amit Varma: I hope she’d say the same about me. Can you double click on what you just said about it being hard for you to receive and it was easy for you to give? Because I think that’s again goes back to that notion of masculinity that we spoke about, that we are the providers, we do the giving, we’ll help you, we’ll solve your problem.

But to actually make yourself vulnerable and accept the other person as an actual equal partner to get past the main character syndrome is really hard. So just double click on what it was like for you to make that shift.

Gautam John: You know, there’s a phrase that she once used that still sticks in my mind and I share it with people. She said, Gautam, I don’t want you to solve my problems. I just want you to sit here with me.

And I was like, and then what use am I if I’m just sitting here with you? But that very act of sitting is what it means to be in a relationship with someone, right? That I can’t fix it, I can’t change it, but I can sit here with you and you can both be changed by that experience.

So that act of surrender to say that a relationship is not only about giving, but it is also about being open enough to want to be changed by another person. It took me a long time to understand. It wasn’t intuitive, it wasn’t easy.

A, because, I mean, for a variety of reasons and scarcity, etc., it’s not like I felt like people were offering. B, if people were offering, it was always, what is the quid pro quo here? But C, to say that when you’re truly in alignment with someone, sometimes you can just sit here and watch the world go by and that’s all that’s necessary to change both people.

I didn’t know what that felt like. I will also say that I think it’s also maybe a me and a man problem, that sometimes we don’t know what it is to receive and to hold and to acknowledge someone giving you something. A, maybe it’s so rare.

I mean, you know, they say men don’t compliment each other, like women compliment each other, men don’t really do that. And maybe it’s just one of those things, right? That we’re just so used to being seen, felt and saying, I don’t want one part of you, I just want you here sitting.

And that’s all. You don’t want my strength, you don’t want my intellect, you don’t want my money, like, what do you want? You.

And I don’t think I’ve ever been seen in that way before. And that was tremendously shattering, right? To recognize that, hey, there are people out there who want all of you and not any one instrumental part of you.

And you don’t have to perform that version of it. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, what it felt to be truly seen, what it felt to be truly in relationship with came from those moments.

Again, I mean, if you ask me in the moment, I wouldn’t know it. I think I know it. I know now how transformative those were.

And also how difficult it might have been for her to be the one to ask that question, to be the one to say it, to say it out loud. Because half the time we have this internal monologue saying you can’t say it out loud, don’t say it out loud. You know, okay, just do it.

But to be honest, and I think that’s, that was remarkably powerful.

Amit Varma: Marques makes a distinction between the public self, the private self and the secret self. And one’s private self is known to one’s spouse, but the secret self is known only to oneself. So is there a secret self there?

Like how many secrets does your secret self have?

Gautam John: You know, my mother used to joke that there were three Gautams, that there was I, me and myself. And I think it was a fair indication of how central I was in my own story. And each of those versions, I can still see so clearly, and was always a glorified version of where I was.

I think what changed is that A, there was less dissonance between those three. My secret self at this point, I’ll actually have to sit with it, because I don’t know if I felt that way in a while. But I just feel like the distance between three has narrowed.

And the private and public feel more aligned now than they used to be. On the secret one, a question I love asking people I meet is, you know, if you could, if you could do anything, what would you do? And I find it interesting that a lot of people say, you’d cure cancer.

But why would you do it? Because you knew you’d succeed, right? I mean, is the struggle not at all meaningful?

Because my answer is always, I just wouldn’t get out of bed. Like, what would I get out for? And maybe my secret self is one that can perhaps acknowledge that a little bit more, and say that all life doesn’t always have to be this high friction striving.

Sometimes it’s okay to just be. And yeah, I recognize that those are the last vestiges of this part of me that said striving and effort and things of that sort.

Amit Varma: This is a terrible tragedy, because now that you’ve revealed your secret self, it is no longer your secret self. Yeah, which is why I chose to do it. So here’s a question that comes to mind.

I did a recent episode with Gurcharan Das on his life in times, and he brought up the myth of Sisyphus. And while we were chatting, the thought struck me that if Sisyphus was rolling the rock up the hill to get the rock to the top of the hill, he would forever be unhappy because of course, it’s going to come rolling down. But Sisyphus was rolling the rock up the hill to roll the rock up the hill, then he would forever be happy because that’s what he was doing.

For you, what is rolling the rock up the hill?

Gautam John: Oh, I love this question. I think I’ve only recently been able to articulate that for myself. It is to create conditions for people to show up differently, to choose to do differently.

Let me try and articulate a little bit better. I think my greatest joy is in being able to work with individuals and groups of people, to be able to offer them conditions that they can live up to their highest self and live up their highest self, not just in a professional context, but in the context of being an individual, being an employee, to unlock people. I don’t know what the exact phrase is, but again, to go back to the metaphor of coaching, the reason this particular thing of coaching called to me is that it wasn’t so much a way to fix people or help them be more productive.

It was to help them regain authorship of their lives. It is to help and enable them, again, you talked about coaches, to have a set of tools to draw their own maps of reality and update them as opposed to say, I will draw it for you, which is perhaps one of my frustrations with the whole advisor-mentor kind of framework because almost always advisors and mentors tell you about the lay of their land, not your land. Like even worse is if you have an old man mentor, then it almost becomes, don’t make the mistakes I made, please make the choices I never made.

So this idea of giving people ways to make sense of their own reality and draw their maps and update their maps, to be cartographers of their own lives, to give them a compass and not the direction, to give them the map making tools, but not the map is the thing that I find most fascinating. And the reason I find it fascinating is because many of the people I work with are often people working at the edges of the possible. So there is no map, right?

I mean, there are many other people for whom like if you want to be a pilot, there’s a well-worn part, but if you’re trying to solve a social challenge, I mean, nobody comes, there’s no handbook to this. So in a way, you’re sitting at the bleeding edge and the bleeding edge hurts. And you’re trying to ask, is this the right way?

Is that the right way? Which is the right way? And for me, the joy has come in being able to give people the abilities and help them find both the courage and conviction in themselves to say that I am the map maker and I can update my map as I go along.

And then for me to be the crutch that falls away. So when you said that about coaches, I was thinking so much about that because it really is what I think a coach is, right? A coach is a season in your life and then you’ll have a different coach at a later point in your life.

To help people become their own map makers, to help people to tell their own stories a little bit more, to reclaim a sense of authorship of their own lives, but never to do it for them, which as I’m saying, feels a lot like how my colleagues think about the work with young men and boys. To make the space and the ability for them to do the work, but never to do the work for them. Maybe that’s the through line that really calls to me.

To create conditions, to create opportunities, to create relationships where people can explore into the unknown that otherwise would not have been possible, to lead for themselves, for their organizations, and then to equip them with the tools and habits and, how to say, muscles and skills for them to do this on their own.

Amit Varma: So, you know, sometimes I think about charity or when I have an impulse to help someone, I cynically question myself and wonder if this generosity, if this charity is really a kind of self-aggrandizement and I’m doing it to feel good about myself and that’s what it is. And it’s very hard to disentangle that sometimes I will help people because I genuinely, it’s just what I want to do and I feel really good. I feel the warm glow that, oh, I managed to help someone or set them on a path or someone started a podcast because of me or etc.

And that feels great. But then there is that cynical voice in my head saying that, oh, it feels great because it helps you feel good about yourself and so on. And earlier you had mentioned that in the act of giving, the giver must also change, right?

And I just wonder how in every act of giving, if one gives often, can the giver change? Like one way of thinking about it is a utilitarian way that, hey, if I have made somebody better off, that better off is all that matters. The intent doesn’t matter and is impossible to disentangle anyway.

And plus there’s proximate and ultimate causation. So why even go there? You do a good thing, it’s a good thing for its own sake.

But I was very interested in double clicking on what you said about the giver must also change. How does one look at oneself? How does one look at one’s own motivations?

Gautam John: You know, where it comes from is the fact that giving, philanthropy, etc. is often anchored in a sense of what is philanthropy, love of humanity or something of the sort. And it comes from that place, right?

A human connection. But perhaps to be in relationship with someone essentially means not just giving, but learning and receiving as well. And to that extent, I’m not drawing a distinction between what it is to be in relationship with a human being versus what it is to give.

And to say that to give is to transform their lives, but then their transformation can transform you as well. It might be hard to do if you give to 10,000 individual people. But I think there are ways of it to say that, you know, their story then becomes my story, I’m involved in it.

And this is not for everyone. Like there’s the entire effective altruist movement, which is a whole other thing. Just say what is the highest ROI you get and do it.

I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m just saying that it’s a different way. But for me, because I’m saying not so much what is the highest ROI, but what is the highest unlock possible here?

Or what is the thing that can only happen over here? Because otherwise, you’d go down the framework of saying, if you want to reform the codes, we need to make them more efficient. That’s not a bad thing.

Go down that path. But it’s linear. It has its own challenges, as opposed to what is the thing we can build if we reimagine this.

Now, the reimagination part, it’s not just for them, right? We have to reimagine together. And so you have to be open to being changed.

You have to be open to listening, to be vulnerable, to be humble. And when I say vulnerability, I don’t mean it as, oh my God, you need to be emotional. I mean, you need to keep yourself porous to ideas.

I mean, ideas challenge us and very few of us like our own sense of self and ideas challenge. So to that extent, the idea of being changed is to say that we hold an open posture to the world. We hold a posture where we’re willing to listen and in that being open to changing as well.

And I think that takes both courage and curiosity.

Amit Varma: Tell me about how it was when you got together with your dad and you read Aventure. What was that like? Because you’ve come straight out of law school and I guess law school would have put you, you know, would have shaped your thinking in particular ways and all of that.

So why did you decide the law wasn’t for you? And then what made you go into entrepreneurship with your dad? And what were your learnings from that?

Gautam John: I think it was also my dad’s way of throwing me a lifeline. He’s like, I mean, you got to do something. Why don’t you show up every day?

And then it went from there. It wasn’t some intentional choice. That was my dad’s definitely act of rescue.

The thing is, it wasn’t too alien, right? I mean, if you, you’ll hear this from lots of people who’ve lived in households where are entrepreneurs, that it’s a part of your daily life, the language, the work, all of those things. So it wasn’t alien in that sense.

I knew the actors, I knew the things. So in that sense, it was definitely comfortable. I am very grateful for that.

He didn’t make anything easy for me and that there was never any of this idea that, you know, this was an inheritance as opposed to a job. Managing people, these are not things that 21 year old had done. And I don’t think any of the people who graduated from law school and went into the legal profession at that point in time had to work on a factory floor with 100 people.

So in a sense, A, it gave me some amount of humility, again, in hindsight, to recognize that I don’t know a lot of things about, I don’t know most things about most things. B, to recognize that you have to build your own credibility. And then how do you do that?

To recognize, the other one that I really appreciate is to recognize the limitations of the physical world. So which is why I say that, you know, for me, because we were in manufacturing, it was this great, it was a boundary condition, you couldn’t wish it away. And in the later years, I’ve worked at more and more abstractions, publishing, then platforms, now we’re in ideas and something of the sort.

And as you get more and more removed from the tangible, everything becomes more and more possible and doable, because there are only words and fantasies and code and things of the sort. Whereas if you’re working in a factory, I recognize the tangibility of it and the boundary conditions, which I really, really appreciate. Because you cannot invent a better doohickey just because you think of it, you have to be able to produce it as well, as opposed to better code these days, which apparently everyone can.

So those hard boundary conditions were great for me. Because I recognize that in my current, I mean, the challenge with living in a world of ideas and thinking is that they’re ever expanding, right? And you don’t know right from wrong, but in the physical world, it gives you very, very hard boundaries.

It also, for the first time, made me understand what it was to sell. I mean, I didn’t have to sell anything before that, what do I know, right? To show up with someone and say, hey, mine is better, will you buy this?

And then to recognize that better doesn’t necessarily mean anyone’s going to buy it. So yeah, I’m just so grateful for the entrepreneurship journey alongside my father because it gave me so many reality checks that bounced. I mean, being a little bit removed from it, you thought you’d do something and some money magically happens and you recognize there’s a lot of effort in between.

The other one was just to recognize that organizations are large, complex things and you cannot force them to bend to your will, particularly when sometimes you don’t even have authority or control. So sometimes it’s a little bit of negotiation. So a lot of these things that people in business families would take for granted, but if you worked only in professional firms or you worked in a professional firm structure, you may not because it’s a very different this thing.

The big one really also I learned is the value of dignity of labor, right? I don’t think I would have seen it otherwise. To show up at nine o’clock, I mean, nowadays there’s work from home, remote work, all of these things, but to show up at 8 a.m. in the morning, I mean, sometimes 3 a.m. depending on when the shift started and to show up because there are other people showing up and you could not show up just because you were the boss’s son, that instilled definitely some amount of humility in me to recognize that there’s value in labor that I hadn’t otherwise at all seen. And maybe I would have never seen otherwise, which is also why even now for me, I think the thing that I find of highest value is people who can create things with their hands.

Like I can’t, I don’t do very many things with my hands, but someone who can create something, I’m like, I just have a tremendous amount of respect for it.

Amit Varma: You’ve got three great sentences in your book or a great three-sentence para where you talk about what you learned from law, entrepreneurship, and the social sector. And I’ll ask you to double click on each of those one at a time. So first law, you write, law taught me the importance of precision and principle, but also the limits of structure in solving human problems.

Gautam John: I mean, the law is a very blunt instrument of change, right? If anything, India should be a beautiful country because we have so many laws, but it’s not. And I think it took me a while to recognize that the law, it’s very much this isomorphic mimicry, right?

That if we import a good law from a different context, magically we’ll get that context. And the answer is no, you don’t. So you have to work on the more fundamentals.

So to recognize at least law was lots of good intention, but directed in terrible ways. So the belief that a better law would solve a problem isn’t always true. And also to believe that a better law, not better law making, I mean, and for me to draw that distinction, right?

The process of how you arrive at has to improve, not just that the better law. And particularly with social problems. I mean, you can’t legislate your way out of hunger.

You can’t legislate your way out of most challenges. I mean, we have a fundamental right to everything, but actually realistically access to very little. A fundamental right to education, but education is not great.

Food, but it’s not great. So one is that the law should be something that emerges from context, not is imported into context. The second one is also that for many parts, and because I worked in intellectual property rights law, that was what I really enjoyed, that the law was a tool of precision control.

That if I do this, if I do this first, then nobody else gets to do it for 20 years, and it will be solely mine. And then to kind of forget that this monopoly is created as an incentive for people to produce, for people to invent. But then at some point, we’ve kind of lost track of that.

Copyrights are now 70 years, 90 years. So, I mean, the entire system has been inverted in that sense to go from being a limited monopoly provided by the state to spur innovation and creation to being an end in itself. So that was a little bit also of a struggle.

So which is why, you know, the next part of Pratham books, I was like, oh, hey, you can use the law as a tool of subversion as well.

Amit Varma: And that was a fascinating shift for me. Your next line is about entrepreneurship, are you right? Entrepreneurship drilled into me the value of agility, but also revealed the pitfalls of chasing growth without purpose.

Now, of course, the free marketeer in me would quibble that when you’re chasing profit in a free market, you are making people better off, that is purpose by itself. But leaving that aside, I want to sort of double click here on what you mean by a sense of purpose in terms of your personal sense of purpose and how it evolved over time.

Gautam John: So in a sense, it goes back to my question about friction, right? And I think you can keep making more money. But if friction is reducing, I think for myself, I realized that I’m a zero to one person.

I really enjoy the hard part of the first part of the journey is high friction. The one to 100 isn’t of interest to me. And so what I’ve now looked for consistently is the zero to one friction.

When you get to one and then going from one to 100, it’s a very different challenge. I’m not saying it’s not challenging. It’s not the challenge that satisfies me, which is also the question I ask about what would you do if you knew you could not fail?

And for me, that was a realization that there came a point in the journey where, you know, there was less and less daily friction in terms of systems processes. What are you producing? What are you selling?

And to recognize I was missing that. And that was also kind of dovetailed with when the business was successful enough. And we were so fortunate to have a successful business that, you know, you didn’t have as much friction on a daily basis.

So yeah, that that was my recognition that I am not a scale person.

Amit Varma: And your third sentence is really what your book is about. And we can start talking about that now, which is where you write and the social sector. It taught me that leadership at its heart isn’t anchored in control or clarity.

It grows through trust, adapts to uncertainty and moves with courage into the unknown. A key part of your book is the phrase unheroic leadership. So tell me about that.

What is unheroic leadership? You know, I’ve gotten so much pushback on this title, right?

Gautam John: Because people have said it sounds so unglamorous. It sounds like some sort of drudgery and things of the sort. But for me, it kind of spoke to the value that I see these people doing, right?

What does it mean to be in service of a problem, not in service of a personal kind of say, what’s the word I’m looking for? Or, and I see unheroic, not because it isn’t difficult. It’s incredibly difficult.

I see unheroic because the focus is not on the individual, but on the larger problem that they’re trying to solve. Again, I will say that, you know, all of these are my own observations, not to say that there isn’t other kinds of leadership, not to say that there isn’t other kinds of leadership that are equally valuable. Just for me to call out what I’ve seen as something that’s unique and special, and to acknowledge how much I have learned from it.

In moments of crisis, perhaps you need to be another leader. That’s completely fine. But for the most part, you know, unheroic leadership for me has been individuals who exist in service of a larger idea, recognizing that they cannot get to that idea by themselves.

And then saying what we need to be is shepherds towards gardeners of spaces and ecosystems or groups, or convenings or containers or whatever you want to use, where we can bring diverse people together, that we can see each other as human beings, and then create something that did not exist before. And to do so exists and to do so means to exist entirely in the realm of relationships, entirely in the realm of uncertainty, because there is no path, and entirely in the space of some kind of self-doubt, which is why I’m drawn to these people, right? Because I’m drawn to these people so much so because this living at the edge of the possible is heroic in a way, it’s the idea of the explorer, it’s the idea of the frontier and things of the sort.

And yet these people are doing that saying that I alone am not enough. And there’s this duality, right? There’s this duality between the frontiers person and the fearless expedition leader, and saying that I am here in service of a larger whole.

I feel like perhaps it mirrors the, you know, there’s this conceptual arc around the idea of the alpha and the wolfpack, right? That’s changed over time, that the alpha and the wolfpack used to be the strongest, biggest one. Now it’s actually, it’s also the most nurturing and caring one.

And in a sense, I wonder if, you know, we’ve kind of over-indexed on a particular kind of leadership, A, because it was more legible and visible, but also B, because it was more legible and visible, right? I mean, ultimately, I’m sure you’ve read Seeing Like a State by Scott Cooke. And his thing is how the goal of a state is to make things legible and visible.

So it’s not like with bad intention, we compress diversity. It’s just to make things more manageable. Similarly, in leadership, this, for me, this kind of leadership is unheroic and invisible.

And I said, you know, I’ve been fortunate to walk alongside it. So what I want to try and do is make it legible and visible in a way the others have, so that more people feel like they can step into this, that this is not a failure. This is not an illegitimate kind of a place to be, that you’re not the visible face.

In fact, it’s a strength. And then to draw from these experiences that I have of walking alongside, usually, behind most of these leaders, and to say that, in doing so, there are these little traits that I have seen. Not all of them exhibit all of them.

And while the book is structured in chapters, not to think that this is some linear path you have to follow. And saying that if you follow this, then that will happen. But to say these are more observable characteristics, and that some combination of this might be authentic to you and to see if you might want to do that.

Because, again, if we don’t have good role models of different kinds of, whether it’s masculinity or leaders, people are not going to help you, you can only be what you see. And so for me, it’s to bring some sort of visibility to this kind of leadership, this kind of work. And because of my vantage point, they almost all come from civil society.

Amit Varma: And we are actually not hardwired to see people like the kind you mentioned as leaders or to even want to be like them. Like when I think of the ways we are hardwired, some of the ways in which we are hardwired don’t reflect the reality of the complex world we live in. For example, we are hardwired to think in a top down way, which made sense back then where everything was manageable, there wasn’t too much scale.

And therefore, your tribal chieftain who you would be attracted to would be the strong guy giving orders and, you know, the best at hunting the lion and the best at, you know, subduing his own rivals for position of the alpha male in the pack And equally, we are hardwired towards looking at the world in zero sum ways, whereas the world is, of course, positive sum and etc, etc. And I guess these hardwirings, where they fall apart is when you achieve some kind of scale in the real world, like at the level of a family or at the level of a small firm, you can possibly run it in a top down way. And that’s the most efficient way to do so.

But at the level of a society and the level of an economy, everything can only happen bottom up, there’s no other way to think about And that’s deeply counterintuitive. It’s emergent order, spontaneous order, etc, etc. And I often used to wonder that, you know, where is that line?

Where do you draw a line that a firm gets so large or an enterprise gets so large, that top down no longer works. And you have to think of ways of letting emergent order emerge, as it were. And reading your book, sort of made me wonder if I wasn’t asking the wrong question, if the question was not so much of scale, but of different kinds of complexity, because complexity is not only about scale, that in the social sector, like if I’m in a manufacturing firm, I can do things top down, because I can precisely measure my inputs and outputs and everything is legible.

But in the social sector, where I’m working with people and where I am explicitly trying to affect change in society, even for a small firm, the level of complexity is already sky high. And therefore, you do need to think of other ways of, you know, running the show.

Gautam John: Complexity is sky high, it’s nonlinear, feedback loops are delayed. And the thing, my case and my point is that every sector will now face this, right? Simply because of the growing frequency of whether it’s fiscal, financial events, or whether it’s climate events, or whether it’s health events, we’re definitely in a point of greater volatility.

And if we’re in a point of greater volatility, then all of the quote unquote, order and structure in which we work with are collapsing at the edges. And if they are collapsing at the edges, then does a top down control model even work? Because that exists on the basis of some things being stable.

But at this point, it’s hard to tell what stable ground looks like to build on or build from anymore. So, which is why I was, you know, who are the set of people who are dealing with ever changing sand to build on a regular basis? And this is where I saw this.

And COVID was a particular, you know, moment in time, but I saw it more clearly. I mean, in the development sector, we have this idea of log frames, right? Which is, you have inputs, you have outputs, and then you have outcomes.

And that you lock yourself into five years for this. And then at the end of five years, magically, the problem be solved. Everyone acknowledges that no problem has been magically solved by following a log frame.

A, because when you do A, firstly, when you do A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H also happen, I mean, unintended consequences, invisible outcomes, second order effects, but we’re ignoring all of those. And at five years, the compounded effect of all of these invisible second order effects will overwhelm the system itself. Then the question is, you know, how do you work with systems that are in real time?

And I think the best articulation I’ve come across is that you don’t work with them, you dance with them, which is why the balcony and dance floor metaphor, which isn’t mine. But I just think that it’s again to be in relationship with, right? I think for me, that big shift has been you don’t have control over.

I mean, control over is perhaps the frame that fails us, as opposed to being in relationship with. And being in relationship with ultimately means that, you know, sometimes you’re on the dance floor, sometimes you’re off, you change who you’re dancing with. And to that extent, with uncertainty, you can only dance with uncertainty.

I mean, we can try and model and plan it, but I think we’ve all discovered the limits of that. So what I was trying to do was to take this insight from these set of leaders who work in ways that are open and vulnerable and many things that we associate with the development sector, and say it’s deeply strategic. Because the way they’re doing this is to say that we’re sensing the system rather than, quote unquote, only measuring it.

And as we’re sensing the system, we’re generating ways, we’re being generative in ways to work with the system. That isn’t common. I mean, you will see that a lot of work in this space involves biology and those sorts of things, because that’s where emergence, you know, a lot of the work is more emergent there.

You’ll talk about mycelial frameworks, and some of it is now entering the mainstream, which I find fascinating. Because if you look at mycelium, for example, they aren’t heroic, they’re invisible, but vital. They transport nutrients, but invisible.

We often think about the redwoods as being the banyan tree. So there’s a lot more biology that’s informing what this looks like. And ultimately, human society, human beings are also biological as much as we can want to wish that away.

And hopefully, it’s not isomorphic mimicry, but a more deeper understanding of how change happens through an emergent process rather than through an organized linear hypothesis.

Amit Varma: Since you mentioned biology, I’ll take a digression, which nevertheless stays on the theme, but a digression before we come back to the narrative we were on. In one part of your book, you pointed out about how one of the things that you learned from your colleagues, and you speak about a lot of things you learned from Natasha and Shahana. And one of the things you point out that you learned from Shahana is that you say at one point, you realized that you were trying to solve while she was trying to sense, right?

And exactly what you said about leaders sensing. And I wonder also, and obviously, every generalization is false, because there are exceptions. But I also wonder if part of this is biology that men are wired to try and solve while women are wired to try and sense.

I mean, that’s what my wife said, you know, just sit here with me, don’t solve my problems.

Gautam John: Yeah. And to recognize that, that in itself is valuable in problem solving, just staying with it. Yeah, I fully agree.

Because then you can be intentional about sensing. And to sense, you have to be open, right? I mean, I hadn’t thought of it from that frame.

It also might explain why I work almost exclusively with women. Interesting. Perhaps it might.

Amit Varma: There’s a great metaphor that you’ve kind of used here, which writers use in a very different sense. But you’ve used it in this particular sense. I’ll just quote from your book.

Think of it like an iceberg. Traditional leadership models focus on what’s visible above the water, the metrics, the scalable solutions or quick wins. But civil society leaders have learned to work simultaneously at multiple levels.

They respond to immediate crisis while also addressing the deeper patterns, structures and mindsets that lie beneath the surface. They’ve had to because they operate in what we now call the bunny world, brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible, which, you know, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, developed and you go on to elaborate on that. And I want to ask you about this because the temptation would always be to focus on what is legible.

The temptation would be that if I am giving my money, I want it to be measurable and attributable, right? I want to see the difference that I have made. And I want people to say, oh, this is because that generous man did all of this.

And yet, the deepest change that you can affect really comes about from things that are not measurable and not attributable. At some level, they’re almost an act of faith. So, you know, as someone who heads a philanthropy, who is always funding other philanthropies and other nonprofits and etc, etc.

How do you think about this? How do you fight the temptation within yourself? And when you feel, say, answerable to Rohini, what are the metrics by which she is evaluating someone like you?

I mean, I should probably ask her this in my episode with her and I did, obviously. But what would her metrics be? And I’m sure you know them.

And what would your metrics be? And how comfortable is it to function without those metrics, but with a sense of conviction?

Gautam John: Two parts to it, right? One is, what metrics are relevant? And two is, rather than saying, are the metrics relevant or is progress relevant?

And I think there are two schools of thought. One is that metrics are an end in themselves. Our point is that metrics are an abstraction at a point in time that tell one story, but one can widen the frame and see what change over time looks like.

And that’s perhaps more valuable insight and information. The second one is, how are we answerable? On the first one, a colleague of mine, Natasha, has done this admirable job of saying that there is impact beyond metrics.

You can count things and some things are uncountable. They don’t mean they don’t matter. I think it was Lord Deming who said, what is that phrase?

Something about what is measurable is trackable or something. But the most important things can’t be measured. It’s a fairly well-known corruption that we only focus on the first part of it.

So for us, we’re also asking, what is the immeasurable things that cannot be measured at a point in time but can be measured over time? So for example, if you’re measuring how many clicks, that’s at a point in time. If you want to measure how many people have come back over a year and clicked, that’s over time.

So really think about impact as a spectrum and not a single point thing. The dashboardization of the universe has become a little bit of a limitation because a dashboard in a factory will show how many doohickeys were produced, but that’s not very comparable to how change has been affected in a large complex social ecosystem. You could use it to measure the number of cases disposed.

But then we have the other challenge, which very often the measure will become the goal, and then we’ve lost the sense of the purpose. So the first one was to say really that measurement isn’t a single thing, it’s a range of things over time, and to make some of this visible and to call it out and to say how you can measure it, etc. The second thing was to say that then our goal is not to be measurer and evaluator, but to be co-traveller.

Because when you’re a co-traveller, then you’re saying, okay, this changed, you should change, right? I mean, you should do something differently, as opposed to lock you into a log frame from five years ago, which was the dominant model. So our point is that change happens through connection and connection happens through accompanying our and accompanying our partners and recognizing the diversity of ways in which things can be measured, not a single one.

And then to say when something changes for them to be open enough to say that, hey, this changes for us, this changes for us too. So to that end, we don’t do impact measurement in the traditional sense. But what we do across all of our partners, and we’ll have like 175 structured into five or six main thematics, is that we ask them to tell us at the end of every year, what did you set out to do?

What did you do? What happened? What are you going to do differently?

Because we’re saying that the only thing that matters is the delta. So our fundamental assumption is that nothing is fixed, everything’s going to change. What matters is how you’re reacting, how you’re responding to that change.

And for us, it becomes a great sense-making tool at the level of each individual organization, and then for the organization to be reflective. So again, we’re forcing the idea of the pause over there to say, don’t tell us what you did, tell us what the journey of the year was, don’t tell us numbers. And then secondly, at the level of each portfolio to say, hey, we can sense-make more widely now.

And to say that then this can inform priorities of a portfolio. And then at the level of philanthropy to say, hey, we’re seeing this pattern across five or six places, what do we need to do differently? And then for us to use our voice to platform that to other philanthropy, capital, etc.

So in a sense, our role is then to be translators, is to speak these multiple languages, the language of accompaniment and learning with our partners, the language of sense-making with the larger field. And that’s a role we play really, really well, I’d like to say, because we show up with a sense of curiosity and humility to say that, hey, we have something to learn from you as opposed to something that we can measure your efficacy against. So when we look at impact measured in a year, perhaps it’s very low.

When we look at impact measured over 10 years, it’s massive. It’s because it’s not linear, but it’s not guaranteed. Now, the thing is, if you go in saying that change must be guaranteed, then you’ll only do the kinds of things that can be guaranteed.

And I’m not saying those are not good. More access to sanitation, all great things. For some people, maybe if you have a higher risk appetite, a higher sense of curiosity, you can also ask them, what are the conditions causing this to happen rather than solving the problem?

There’s that philanthropy must not just work on the problems, but also the deeper conditions that led to them. What’s his name? It’s a very famous American civil rights activist, Martin Luther King.

So Martin Luther King said something about philanthropy, charity of philanthropy is a noble thing, but it should not forget about the underlying conditions that give rise to that inequity. And not to say that everyone has to solve everything. But if that calling or that curiosity or that risk of trying something a little bit different is yours, then by all means.

The other thing for us is that philanthropy capital is the ultimate kind of risk capital, in a sense that you can try things that nobody else can because it’s responsible to change and not to some sort of profit.

Amit Varma: So yeah. There’s another great sentence I’ll ask you to elaborate on, and this comes early on in your book, but actually it encompasses many of the lessons that come later in the book, where you speak about how the hero’s journey, as it were, is looked upon as a lonely one. It’s lonely at the top, and there’s no one you can talk to, and et cetera, et cetera.

And at one point you muse, but what if that loneliness isn’t an unavoidable part of the journey? What if it’s a flaw in the model itself? And I found this deeply profound.

And of course, the rest of your book, in a sense, is an elaboration on this. So can I ask you to elaborate now?

Gautam John: Yeah. I mean, you know, the traditional hero’s arc, right? In the wilderness, all of that.

I mean, every story follows that. But I’m like, it posits that leadership is a lonely, heroic thing, as opposed to leadership is a beautiful relational thing that you can carry along with you. That you don’t have to have all the answers.

You have to have the better questions. That you don’t have to be the hero of your own story. That many people can be the hero of the story.

And in a way, for me, it transformed, right? Like with these amazing colleagues that I get to work with, it went from saying that this is our problem, not my problem. You don’t have to answer.

If you don’t have the answer, then all of us do. And in a sense, it went from being leadership as responsibility and accountability and leadership as some sort of facilitative thing, right? That you can facilitate outcomes, impacts, structures that you could not do as an individual.

And that is the strength of it. Rather than seeing this hero’s journey as being an inevitable part of it and the loneliness and the frustration and all of that. To think that if you can lead alongside and with, if you can co-lead with, if you can lead sometimes from the back, from the front, then it becomes a shared experience and it’s not lonely.

And so many of these leaders have like, but I get to show up with all of these amazing people. And that’s such an inversion of the traditional idea of the boy stood on the burning bridge kind of thing. And then it makes it joyful because it doesn’t make it this incredibly difficult, lonely, dark place.

I’m not saying it isn’t at times, but to recognize that sometimes if you’re in a lonely and dark place, perhaps you’ve forgotten the universe and the container that you’re trying to facilitate and to go back and do that. So that the loneliness and darkness and solitariness is a flaw of you haven’t gotten too far ahead rather than a de facto part of the journey. Again, I will say that other heroic journeys, I’m sure that they make for great stories.

I’m sure there are heroic journeys that have been very well rewritten. But to me, part of this version of leading or the unheroic journey is to say that it doesn’t have to be alone. It doesn’t have to be this lonely and dark thing.

It can be for you, but if you’re willing to incept a new community, a new container, a new way of doing and being, it doesn’t have to be this place where there’s a triumphant return at the end.

Amit Varma: I mean, loneliness is part of the human condition, but it need not be part of leadership is a profound point that you’re making. There are a number of awesome chapters in your book, in the manuscript that I’ve read. I don’t think you’ve numbered them, but I was doing that in my notes.

But nevertheless, I want to double click on different aspects of them. My purpose here is not really to go through your book in great detail. So every bit of it is known to the listener.

The listeners will just have to wait for the book to come out because we can’t actually encapsulate it into a three or four or even five hours. It’s just got filled with insight that I will be processing for many days, but I’ll double click on certain aspects of them. And one of your chapters is about defining core values.

And there are a couple of interesting things that you say in them that I wanted to double click on. And one of them is in your colleagues pointing to the way that you ask questions and the way that you invited others into the conversation. They said that you quote, model values not through declarations, but through rhythm, stop quote.

And in another place, you talk about, you know, one of the people you work with, and you support Kuldeep Dantewadia, who told you that some of the strongest communities, ideological, religious, political, etc. They don’t begin with declared values. They began with shared doing.

Elaborate on these.

Gautam John: It’s such a powerful phrase. Let me start with the first one. I mean, if part of our role as leaders is to be facilitative, then part of our role is to be curious and to make space for others rather than to send our own voices.

It’s something that I try and do. And it’s something that I’ve learned from all of these amazing leaders to acknowledge that there’s wisdom and knowledge in the room, and that one doesn’t have to be the sole carrier of this and to make space and to surface that. So very often, I mean, a lot of my team will say, sometimes we just want an answer, but you’ll always come back with another question.

And I recognize the frustration of that. And perhaps sometimes I should give an answer rather than a question. But my instinct is to say that we know this together.

I don’t have to provide an answer. I can’t even provide the right answer because I’m not as proximate to the challenge or the work as you are, which is also a kind of pause, right? To say that, hey, we got this.

But then to be able to do that essentially requires decentering of self. So which is why I’m saying this curiosity, humility and being in service of the whole is something that’s more important. Kuldeep’s point is one that took me a while to understand.

He’s like, essentially his thing is ultimately people will follow what you do, not what you say. And so you can say ask questions, but if you don’t, no one’s going to do it. And Kuldeep’s biggest insight that he’s brought, one of his biggest insights that he’s brought to me is that teams that do together, stay together and grow together.

And that there’s a level of trust that doing together, working together brings that all of the words and verbiage can’t. And so, which is why for us as a philanthropy, I mean, one of the things we take for grant, we take as very important is that we’re a philanthropy that makes grants. Everyone in the team has to make grants because that’s a muscle we have to exercise together to know what it’s like to be in service of a different ecosystem.

Kuldeep’s point is the same, right? That you cannot build for belonging and all of these things without doing something together. Belonging is a verb.

Hope is a verb that we have to do something together. So a lot of Kuldeep’s work starts with small micro actions that people, often students, et cetera, do to reclaim agency in the reclaim of agency, to rebuild solidarity and hope, and then say, we got this. The other thing that Kuldeep has pointed to me, he’s my bridge to young people, is that there’s this great yearning out there among young people to feel a sense of purpose, to feel a sense of direction.

And so people are coming in to do things together, to feel connected with each other, but also say that we’re doing something together, that we’re heading in some direction, we’re reclaiming some sense of agency. It’s not just a problem, we’re solving a problem together. So that has been powerful.

And I think it translates not just to communities, but to organizations as well. Sure, you can’t do it in a 10,000 person organization, but that’s not the kind of organization we are. So my big one was that many of these things that we use as values, hope, belonging, et cetera, et cetera, are also verbs.

Amit Varma: I think in that same chapter, you talk about how someone pointed out that your values are like a compass, not a checklist, which I won’t ask you to elaborate on. But what I will ask you to elaborate on is that when you talk of defining core values for an organization, how does it happen? Because one way of thinking about it is a heroic model that there is a leader and the leader will say, these are my core values, and therefore these are the core values of the organization.

And another way is that you try to come at it through a consultative bottom-up process where the values kind of emerge and so on and so forth. So how was it in the case of your organization? Like you had your own moral compass and your own sense of values, but you didn’t impose them, you know?

So how was it? How did it all work out? How did it play out?

And what are the lines you draw?

Gautam John: So I can use the example at Pratham Books, right? I mean, I think the values kind of emerged from what drew greatest resonance from the community of being open, of being facilitative, etc. And then as we did more of that, more of the work we want to do happen.

So while in hindsight, it’s very easy to say to be open, etc., were great values, they weren’t necessarily the ones we started with. They were the ones that found the most resonance and pushed the work forward the most. So again, some of this is sensemaking, some of this is fundamental, like for example, at the philanthropy, something that we inherited from Rohini is humility and trust.

And so those are non-negotiables. But the other ones are ones that emerge from the work, from listening, etc., to say that this is the greatest value we can add here, and this is how we can hold that value. So at the philanthropy, if you go to our website, we have a bunch of values.

But those are not the ones we started with. The ones we started with are trust, trust our partners. But we have some excellent ones that have come from our partners saying this is what we see as being your North Star, hold it for us, hold it for the ecosystem.

So while we have one around humility, but it’s tempered by humble, not modest. Because our partners say, you know, the thing is, you guys are very humble in your approach, but you’re not asking us to be modest and ambitious. And that’s a rare thing.

They’re like, just because you are saying, you know, you don’t want to send yourself, you’re saying go out and change the world. And to do so from a place of curiosity, not certainty. So each of these builds on the other and each of these came from one founding value of trust.

So when we say curiosity, not certainty, we’re saying we hold that value, because it’s important when we’re saying humble, not modest. Because if we want people to have immodest ambitions, then we can’t be certain about how it’s going to happen. I mean, we’ve landed with five or six values through the end of the process, through listening and being reflective about what’s working and what has alignment for our partners, rather than starting out by saying these are our values.

So yes, you can have a core group of non-negotiable values, but the rest really come from resonance, facilitation, some amount of listening, some amount of people telling you and they can only tell you if they feel trust. This is your highest value. So one of the questions we ask ourselves is, are we doing something here that only we can do?

Because it’s very easy to do something that others can do here as well, but that’s not the highest value. So in a way, because of the work we do, to say that we don’t have to do the work, but perhaps we need to do pieces of it that nobody else can do. And finding those as values and compasses to saying that, you know, these are the directionality we’ll take has been very helpful because it creates a nice list of things you don’t have to do.

And I think in many, many times, part of it is also creating the list of things you want to do, because then it’s easier to decide. Otherwise, your list of things you will do just keeps growing ever and ever longer.

Amit Varma: I want to double click on the trust. You have a chapter on cultivating trust in the book. And there you point out about how Rohini’s motto is, you always have to trust first, and then you go on to write.

For her, trust isn’t just a moral choice, but a strategic one. You do your diligence and then you let go. If you insist on controlling everything, you’ll get a vendor.

But if you lead with trust, you might get a partner. And I want to double click on this as well, because what it points out is that you don’t trust because it’s the right thing to do, you trust because it’s the right thing to do. So just elaborate on this for me as a strategic choice.

And it does this translate to human relationships as well as I guess it does.

Gautam John: I mean, we are a low trust society for a number of reasons, but very high trust person to person relationships, right? I might not trust a transaction, but I will trust a person and so many of our business structures, etc, are based on that. But to Rohini, I mean, her, and again, it’s taken me a little bit of a while to understand this is that most people want to do good work.

Sometimes it doesn’t work out, sometimes it does. And that’s not a moral failure. It’s a failure of an approach.

Now, in the development sector, we have conflated the failure of an approach with the failure of a human being. And what we need to do is to be able to separate those two out. And to separate those two out, it’s essential to say, we trust in your ability to be authentic and honest to the problem and to go out and solve it, rather than to say you have to solve your problem my way, which is invariably what happens.

You solve your problem in the way that is legible and visible to me. And so in that sense, you know, one of the counterfactuals to this that I love saying is that have we had work that we’ve supported that’s failed many times? Have we had work that’s ended in moral failure, or some sorts of fraud?

Never. And this is 30 years of work, right? And we’ve funded all sorts of organizations and individuals.

So to that end, you know, at some level, can’t be an outlier. This feels like fairly evident that most people, nobody wants to do this work because it’s sexy. I mean, they do this work because they have some deep calling to it.

And in doing so, then you’re saying at least that all you’re saying is at least let me be authentic to the problem in my way of solving it, rather than saying that we will ask you to contract us to our ideas, which is unfortunately what a lot of development sector capital looks like. My idea, you contract as opposed to your idea, your change, we will support and learn from it. So that’s rare and very valuable and something we’ve tried to hold on to.

But it’s also what allows us, you know, it’s also what allows Rohini to see things that are emerging that others don’t. So for example, our portfolio on young men and boys started 10 years ago before it was a conversation. And a lot of that is because, you know, we’re in relationship with people who are willing to listen and Rohini is willing to listen and we listen.

So we get a sense of texture and emergence that others don’t because you’re locked in your own frame. This second one, for example, is our work on climate. I mean, eight years ago, Rohini’s point is, why weren’t we doing climate?

And it was not a problem for us, but she was like, it’s going to be. And now, you know, the India Climate Collaborative is something that she helped facilitate, and it was years ahead of its time. And this is true of many of our areas of work.

Rohini has this incredible ability to feel the texture of what’s under the surface, and then to transfer that to us, and then for us to incept work on top of that, that takes six to eight years to mature. That comes from leading with trust, because ultimately, if you’re going to impose your thoughts and your ideas, you’ll never be willing to be changed by what you listen, right? Because you’ll say, no, you just do it, but I don’t want to hear your way.

And that’s, you know, listening is a superpower. Listening and then willing to be changed by it is truly something that I have found so, so, so important, particularly in volatile contexts, because there’s no other sense making tool but the work and the engagement and the relationship. So yeah, I will say that starting with trust is important because it allows a relationship of equals, a relationship of equals is important, because it allows us both to be changed, it allows us to be changed, and then to change our way of doing to be more responsive to potential futures, rather than responding to everything in the past.

Amit Varma: You know, with reference to this podcast, I sometimes joke that I’m the only man in India who knows how to listen. And now you’ve just indicated that there is one more. So welcome to the club.

Gautam John: No, no, I’m by the way, saying that’s Rohini’s superpower. This thing is to take what she listens and sees and to incept it as a long walk.

Amit Varma: Fair enough, he said with great modesty, which he’s proud of. So let’s talk about another quality you talk about in the book, which is again, not something one associates with leaders, which is vulnerability, you have a chapter in practicing vulnerability, you begin by talking about the change Satya Nadella brought when he took over Microsoft, where he gave this talk where he spoke about his struggles with his son. And in your words, he changed the culture there from know it all to learn it all.

You know, and you quote Brenner Brown as saying that vulnerability is a leadership superpower elaborate on this one.

Gautam John: To reference something that we said earlier, right, we use the word vulnerability often as a short form or shorthand for someone who’s in touch with the emotions or someone who’s emotional and things of the sort. I think it’s far deeper than that. I’m saying vulnerable means, and in a lot of this articulation, means to be willing to listen, right, to be willing to be changed.

And that’s not a comfortable position to take, right? I mean, we’ve known our earlier days when we used to have flaming email exchanges and things of the sort, because you wanted to be right. But to be vulnerable says I’m willing to listen to yours.

I’m open to that. And sometimes in this case, vulnerability is not so much about being right as about being effective. And sometimes the goal of good leaders, no one gives you brownie points for being right.

You get brownie points for moving the agenda forward. And that often requires saying that I don’t need to be right, but I need to be effective. To be effective, I need to be willing to listen.

To be willing to listen, I need to say I am open to that. And one way of saying that is that I am vulnerable. Not to say that, you know, not the tropes around it.

So to me, vulnerability is really that willingness to be changed. And that willingness to say that I am in relationship with you and you can change me. That’s rare.

It’s rare, A, because it’s hard. But B also, it’s not the trait that we associate with leadership the most. But I think it’s the trait that we need to associate more with leadership.

Again, it goes back to, you didn’t need to be listening, curious, etc. if every day looked the same as before. But if every day is changing, how are you making sense of the universe?

If you have 100,000 people in this thing, can you be vulnerable? Does it exist at scale? No, it doesn’t.

But if you’re willing to model that culture, it becomes an incredible sense-making tool, right? Because otherwise, what you’ll hear from the front lines is the truth that everyone believes you want to hear. And that’s not very helpful.

I mean, I think Taleb says that at some point that the king is always surrounded by yes-men, right? And it’s just the way of power. And then the only way you realize you’re not listening to the truth is when this gigantic fracture happens.

And in a fast-changing environment, you need to be able to model a culture of listening and curiosity so that it percolates every which way. Because you don’t know where the best answers are going to come from. You don’t know where the next opportunity is going to come from.

And so it’s definitely a superpower that’s easier to talk about than practice. Like even for me, I struggle. Sometimes my first reaction is, but I know better.

And then to recognize that because you know better means nothing in the context of this, the goal is to move a strategy forward or to move a collective forward.

Amit Varma: You wrote about the trade-off involved here between, quote unquote, authentic connection and inappropriate oversharing, right? And there’s a balancing act here also, because you want to be vulnerable when it comes to the qualities of being curious and being open and putting aside your ego and simply listening. But at the same time, how you come across as a people can sometimes matter.

Sometimes they want you to be a decisive leader. Sometimes they want to see you exude certainty. In difficult times, that is what they expect you to project, even if you don’t feel that way inside.

So what have your experiences been with this balance? I mean, how have you dealt with it? Do you feel you sometimes overstepped in one direction or the other?

Oh, 100%. I probably do so on a daily basis. Most of the people I have talked to do so on a regular basis.

Gautam John: The superpower over here is to be vulnerable to feedback, no? Because otherwise, I mean, how are you going to correct? So, I mean, part of the reason I structured the book the way it is, is because each of these might be a feedback loop for a previous one, but not all are necessary.

So in that sense, this whole book is perhaps one way of saying there is no way. The only way is to be in relationship and in relationship to be willing to give and take on a constant basis, whether it’s balcony and dance floor, whether it’s push or pull, whether it’s up or down. To say that the old models of saying there is one way to do it are failing, particularly at the edges.

And that what it calls for us as leaders is to be less certain, not more certain, or to be more certain about needing to be less certain, about more certain to being more vulnerable. And all of those are not necessarily mainstream leadership thinking. It’s slowly emerging.

It’s slowly emerging from many places. But I just wanted to call it out as something that exists deeply in a space that I have walked alongside and been familiar with. And to say that what we thought as weaknesses are actually now strengths in particular kinds of contexts, which are now being more, what’s that line, the future is already here, just not evenly distributed.

Amit Varma: Yeah, this volatility is here, just not evenly distributed yet. Let’s talk about serendipity now, which you’ve spoken about earlier here, but you also have a chapter called embracing serendipity. And I love the phrase, the surface area of serendipity, which was actually the title of this old YouTube episode I did and something I think about for myself because being introverted, the Sartre’s phrase, hell is other people fully applies to me.

So I try to make an intentional effort to increase my surface area, whether it’s meeting people or reading books or going to conferences. And in fact, one of the interesting full circles in this chapter is between two conferences you held, which are Enlightened 2018 and Enlightened 2024 and the completely different approaches you took to both of them and the learnings in between. So tell me a little bit about that.

Gautam John: When was the last time you went to a conference and sat through three panels and one keynote and then left saying, this was a great use of my time. It’s one of those things. But then also you realize that, at least for me, I realized, but this is the only kind of event I’ve gone to where you’re being spoken at and where the most interesting conversations, as my colleague Natasha says, happens outside the main auditorium.

We’ve kind of gotten the order of this wrong. So this embracing serendipity, the idea is much wider, but I think for us, the biggest articulation has been in how we convene and how we write. I used to originally write to convince.

Now I’m saying I’m writing so that people who are looking will find it and that’s okay. That’s all we write for. The second one is how we convene.

The first few times I convened, it was, here is a set of people who must be given Gyan. So we’ll do masterclasses and panels and things of the sort. At the end of the day, everyone was like, and what did we get out of this?

We were spoken at, we were infantilized for two and a half days.

Amit Varma: And this is a 2018 version of the conference.

Gautam John: I can still feel it in my bones. My God, we were so tired by the end of it. But I like when everybody got a chance to speak.

And sometimes I was like, that was not the goal. The goal was to make it valuable. And again, if the goal of gathering people is to make it valuable, is it to make it valuable for the person doing the gathering or to make it valuable for the people there?

So this was also something, being in relationship with our partners, they’re like, can you gather differently? The thing about you guys is you’re willing to bring us together. We don’t get to meet each other.

Then you put us together and all we have to do is listen to some people. Why can’t we speak to each other? So ultimately, our way of gathering changed.

And a lot of this has to do with Natasha when she came in, is how do we gather in a way that we can see each other better? And then in seeing each other better, do things differently with each other. So our gatherings became this, a way to create greater surface area for serendipity is each individual saying that we have gifts and we have requests and to make that more visible.

And it’s been transformative. The one thing we do after every gathering now is go back six months later and say, what’s changed? And it always blows our minds that dozens of collaborations, dozens of things that if we had only spoken to them, there would have never been time.

And the more valuable thing is for this sort of emergent thing to happen. So our question is, how do we create conditions for more of this to happen? And my frame is, my colleagues have far more nuanced dreams.

My frame is that we’re trying to broaden the surface area of serendipity between these people, because then things will emerge that we could not have otherwise designed when people find and see each other. So yeah, we now design our events around the idea that we’re gathering them to each other so that they know each other’s stories a little better. They know each other’s fears, hopes and aspirations.

And then you can work together on those things, not in a deterministic way, but in an emergent way. Collaboration usually means you and you will do this as opposed to saying, hey, we care about the same thing. Why don’t we do that?

So we’ve kind of flipped collaboration saying it’s led by the work, not led by the intent.

Amit Varma: Beautiful. And something that emerges out of this, or perhaps as a consequence of this is what you call relational practice. And you refer to sort of a spur in your thinking as being this event you went to in 2011 as a TED fellow.

Gautam John: Collaboration.

Amit Varma: Collaboratorium. Yeah, it’s collaboration plus like auditorium. Auditorium.

Yeah. Yeah. So collaboratorium.

But tell me about this experience, because I found it fascinating in the way it panned out for you. I can still feel it. I was then at the Akshara Foundation.

Gautam John: I was working with a team building something called the Karnataka Learning Partnership. And the central insight was that nobody cares about public schools, but there’s such a large community around it. Whether it’s parents, communities, why can’t we make the school visible to them?

They can all incorporate. Multiple NGOs work in the same school. We don’t know each other.

We should do it together. And my answer was, we’ll build this amazing platform that allows all of this to happen. And then I went around trying to sell it to everyone saying, you know, you should put your data here.

We can work together. And it wasn’t really progressing. And I went to this collaboration, and it was a beautiful three-day journey.

Multiple coaches focused on an individual.

Amit Varma: Hey, we were both TED fellows. We were TED fellows in 2009. But I never went anywhere because of that.

Gautam John: Well, I had a lot of self-doubt after that. And this process came out of that. And, you know, at the end of it, I call it my oh-shit moment, my oh-shift moment.

You know, what emerged over the process was this realization that you were asking people to buy into pages of your story. And why would anyone want to do that as opposed to, can we write the story together? And I still remember standing on that stage being like, oh, shit, I didn’t see it at all, right?

And so, in a way, then changed that the technical architecture and whatever we build must emerge from our human relational work, not the other way around. Nine times out of 10, I realized that I have built the thing and then say, come take it. And people are like, but it’s yours, you take it, as opposed to we do this together, which is what I see leaders doing now, right?

To say that I can’t build this, I can’t imagine this, but together we can, and we will own it because we have done it together. So then there’s this other question that comes up in the development sector a lot is what does sustainability look like? Because I built this beautiful thing, I want people to use it, but how is it sustainable?

And the answer is, you go out and keep raising more and more money, as opposed to something that emerges, is built relational first technology or platform or whatever later, that’s owned by everyone. So no single, there is no single point of failure. And that was a remarkable moment.

I will say that big moment for me was, I call it my O-shift moment. I’m like, oh damn, I never even saw this. I was asking people to buy the thing that I was building and selling because it was the best thing, not because it was what they wanted, what they needed.

I didn’t recognize that. And now I’m seeing all of these amazing pieces of work emerge from people saying we’ll work together. And then we will build the thing that’s appropriate for us working together.

Amit Varma: What wants to emerge and be built here rather than say, here’s something great, everyone, please use it. And I love the great phrase from this chapter, prismatic leader, which Brian Stout came up with. So define this for me.

And you also spoke about the Virat Kohli style of leadership versus the M. S. Honey style of leadership.

And I guess the M. S. Honey style is more the prismatic leader kind of style.

So just elaborate on these for me. Well, I will say that some of these came up in conversation.

Gautam John: Brian Stout is against just one of those amazing human beings who I’ve learned so much from about around leadership. He uses this phrase as a way to kind of metaphorize this. And for me, I think there’s the leaders who sharpen the work of others and the leaders who then reflect and bask in the glow of others.

And I’ve just found that so fascinating because it helps. I mean, I’ve overused a lot of metaphors because I’ve struggled to articulate how to express this otherwise. But this felt like appropriate one.

And Brian Substack is someone I can recommend everyone subscribe to because he really talks about the new. While Brian’s work talks a lot about connection and belonging and things from a societal perspective, a lot of his questions also like what is the sort of leadership necessary to make this happen? And in that, he’s been able to articulate with a great deal of clarity work that honors and reflects and shines light on everyone else rather than focuses light on a central figure.

Yeah.

Amit Varma: Like I said, while he writes a little bit more about society, I found his work to be tremendously meaningful. And Virat Kohli, M.S. Sohri, for many of my listeners who are perked up and who are fans of one or the other… I feel like this is a trick question.

Gautam John: I’m going to get it wrong either which way. Well, no, I think there’s the work that says that a leader can be charismatic, yet not be the hero figure. And there’s the work that says a leader can be charismatic and the hero figure.

And for me, there’s the kind of leadership that is charismatic and then inspires others and leads with others as opposed to saying, I will do this alone. And so I may have abused a cricket metaphor to do that.

Amit Varma: You’re already kind of pushing back. I hope it doesn’t get cut out of your book. Let’s also talk about the aspect of empowering communities.

You have a chapter on that as well. And I was fascinated where you spoke about how you look at communities as, you know, where you look at platforms as not just a gathering space, but also a catalyst, a way to ignite shared energy, purpose and belonging within a community, stop quote. And you obviously quote Linus’s law, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

So give me a sense of what you learned about communities, because one way that you could have thought about what you do typically is that, oh, you’ve got a vision, you know what, how the world needs to be changed to go out there and do it. But to actually not just pay lip service to the idea of things emerging bottom up, but to actually do the hard grind of engaging with the, you know, different stakeholders, different people, and that process is far slower and etc, etc. So take me through the nitty gritties of what learning the importance of community was like for you, and how it would actually play out and when you eventually got convinced.

Gautam John: So, community is a word that’s often used, but very rarely understood, right? I mean, Facebook is a community. RWA is a community.

It’s a word that has a lot of overuse, but I don’t agree with lots of those cases. I think for me, community is where you show up in solidarity with each other for some sort of common thing. And community was the default problem solving unit for a large part of our life, right?

Before we had platforms and all. I mean, if you had a problem, it was you, your neighbor and someone else who solved it. Again, solving those sort of problems meant that you had to show up alongside with another human being.

Then we said, to make it more efficient, we can build some sort of way of abstracting this for scale. And with every level of abstraction for scale, whether it was local to global to maybe interplanetary, the actual problems that was being solved have gotten less and less because there’s no real connection anymore. My thing is to understand is that very often we kind of forget that building the platform should be in service of what that community wants to do, as opposed to build something and then go out and try and get people to do it.

A lot of this was driven by Wikipedia, right? Wikipedia now seems like a, what’s it called? No brainer.

But when they started the idea that some community edited thing would, non-expert community edited thing would be that accurate and that complete was not obvious. While the open source software movement had seen that in, you know, open source software, it had not been done in content and things of the sort. But I think the important one was to figure out what values are important, then to figure out who the community around these values are, and then what wants to emerge from this community and then go out and build it, right?

So very often it is not platform first or rather not build the technology platform first. It’s to build the group first and then see what wants to emerge from the group. StoryWeaver, the platform was built much, much later after we realized that the manual methods were failing as opposed to building StoryWeaver and then telling people to use it, which did not happen.

So in a way, when technology or when mostly technology emerges from a shared understanding of a group as opposed to here is a better tool, we just find that it catalyzes a very different way of being because it’s amplifying latent intent as opposed to trying to reshape or, you know, force latent intent. And the second one we’ve also seen is that when technology emerges, when this emerges from being built, you no longer have to convince people to use it, right? Because the distribution and the usage has already been pre-baked.

The social sector is great at this. We’ve got amazing tools that nobody wants to use. They’re like, oh my God, the tool is great.

And the point is, like my realization, your great tool means nothing to anyone. We’re not in this universe to build better tools. We’re in this universe to effect change.

And sometimes change means not starting from the tool-led model, but starting from the connection and community-led model. Which also ties in then to my thing about what does sustainability look like? Great organization has a great idea, builds a great tool that nobody wants to use.

And then we spend the rest of our lives trying to get people to use it and then pay for it as well. So, and then when people start using it, oh my God, scale has gone up. You have to pay even more for it.

This single point of failure as opposed to something that’s distributed scales very differently. Each piece does its own thing. So, to that extent, my own thing is that you cannot abstract something and then go looking for connection.

You can do the connecting part and then abstract from that and that connection will own it. Like this case, this thing I was talking about in Kerala around these on-courts, they didn’t build the technology first and then say, you have to use it. They said, what is the problem which we all care about?

And then let’s build something in service of that. And then everyone’s using it because they’re like, it solves a real problem for me. I mean, sometimes with the technology approach, we can say, build it and they will come.

It might work in the case of for-profits, etc, etc, because the incentive structures are different. But over here, if it’s not going to solve my problem, and if I don’t feel like it’s relevant to me, I’m never going to use it. And if I’m never going to use it, then I have a problem of someone building this and then saying, who’s going to use it?

So, sometimes you put the cart first. And I really hope that more organizations say, let’s build the tool that helps us scale what works here, as opposed to let’s build the tool that we think will work and then go out and try and find people to use it. So, that again is one of my lessons that the technology first work in some of these community cases isn’t always the best approach.

The connection and then the abstraction as a layer of technology that amplifies that intent is more important. In a sense, how do you honor the, what’s that French word? Terroir of what exists here, right?

It’s unique over here.

Amit Varma: You can’t just say everyone use one thing. I’ll be slightly mischievous here and take a quick digression. Tools that no one uses.

We are far more likely to see this in the nonprofit sector, because simply because of the way the incentives are aligned, that in the for profit center, your survival depends on making tools that people use. And if you do make tools that people don’t use, you quickly pivot away or you shut down and the incentives are just right. But in the nonprofit sector, the incentives don’t really work that way.

Like, and I understand this all for different kinds of problems and all of that is fine. But in the for profit center, in a good free market, the incentives are awesome. They work just perfectly.

You have skin in the game. You’re trying to create double thank you moments. The only way you make a profit is by making somebody better off, whereas incentives are very different in the nonprofit sector.

So how do you deal with this? Like, how do you deal with this when it comes to the kind of people you fund? And how do you deal with this when it even comes to introspecting the kind of work that you do and the kind of incentives you work under?

Gautam John: You know, it’s one of the greatest challenges in the development sector is to say we failed. Because this confusion of if we failed, does that mean we’ve let people down as opposed to it didn’t work? Then there’s the second challenge of an organization saying what we built failed.

And then the funder saying, but we can’t afford to fail, right? It makes us look bad. So we will continue funding you at some low level that will be some zombie organization that does not grow, that does not close, because failure essentially reflects badly on everyone.

Something that Rohini started doing a few years ago was showing up at these development failure conferences to say that it’s OK. Like in the for-profit sector, people talk fail fast, fail this, fail that. I mean, it’s almost gone to the point of if you fail three times, then you’ll succeed, which is a whole other problem.

But in the development sector, nobody can say we failed because if you say you failed, then we’re like, who’s going to give you money, right? It’s a zero-sum game. As opposed to saying we made some choices, they didn’t work out.

Maybe the next organization can make different choices and we’ll move on. But it requires funders also to be OK with it, right? Or philanthropic capital to be OK with it, which it traditionally hasn’t.

So something that Rohini has been trying for a while, and I think we talk about it as well, is that we all make bets and some bets don’t work out, and that’s OK. And we need to acknowledge that the goal of philanthropic capital is risk capital and not all risks will pay off. But it needs a normative shift, right?

And in the sense that to say that work failing, organization or a mission or a project failing is limited to one attempt as opposed to making some larger model, personal, institutional case. And the other one that we also say is that, you know, just because your work, whether it’s a project or a mission or an institution or organization failed, doesn’t mean everything is lost, which is why underpinning a lot of our work is this idea that everything that’s created by philanthropic capital should be available as public good, so that even if that mission fails, the assets are available for people to work on at future points in time. So there is no overall, I mean, it’s not like these things evaporate, like in the for-profit space, if a company fails, those assets evaporate. Here we’re saying, you know, you can make your code, you can make your text, you can make everything public under some sort of open source license.

So the work will live on. And to make that acceptable, it’s going to take a while, because so much of funding is often seen as a zero-sum game, right? So if you say you failed in the for-profit world, if a VC knows you failed a couple of times, they’re like, okay, at least they tried, there’s still skin in the game.

Here they’re like, you failed, sorry, can’t fund you. So there needs to be a little bit of a normative shift as well, particularly if you want to move from solving problems to changing systems. Solving a bunch of problems is not going to change the system.

And so long as we sit in the solving a bunch of problems, then we’re always going to be in the same thing, because if we stop solving, then what is our value, as opposed to make a bigger bet and recognize that those bets aren’t guaranteed.

Amit Varma: You’ve got a bunch of other chapters in your book, like relinquishing control, nurturing the ecosystem, learning through fractals, which I found really fascinating, but I won’t double click on right now. I’ll leave it to people to actually read the book. It’s a great book.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Literally a single sitting book for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

And I think there’s one particular balance in the book that I think you got just right, which is the balance between presenting a coherent framework for thinking about leadership on the one hand, and your personal journey, where a lot of these learnings came to you on the other hand. And I think you could not have managed the balance better, because I was really, you know, I love the story, your personal story and your journey. And at the same time, it doesn’t overpower the material.

Someone just in it for the insights will also get all of that and is so coherent and cogent.

Gautam John: Thank you. I mean, I was fortunate to work with a great researcher and a great writer as well, co-writer as well on this. Sometimes you have thoughts that sound cogent, and then other people do a lot of effort to make it sound coherent.

Amit Varma: So I’m just really grateful to Nadia and Kavya for the work they helped support in this book. You’re exactly the kind of person who’s always giving credit to others, perhaps because you work in that way and they deserve it. So a bunch of other questions.

There’s a fantastic point you bring up in one of the last chapters, the shadows of unheroic leadership, where you speak about the dilemma that women and non-binary leaders face where you write quote, Globally, women and non-binary leaders often face a double bind. If they adopt traditionally masculine or heroic leadership traits, there is being seen as aggressive, abrasive or not a team player. If they embrace more, quote unquote, feminine or unheroic traits like vulnerability and collaboration, there is being perceived as too soft, indecisive or lacking in executive presence.

For non-binary leaders, a challenge can be even more acute as they navigate spaces that may lack established archetypes for the leadership expression leading to heightened scrutiny regardless of their approach, stop quote. And you point out how you’ve been lucky to work with these great women, both from Rohini and Natasha and Shahana and so on and so forth. Obviously, many of the partners and founders you’ve had.

But this is a serious problem that would be actually be invisible to men, that we think about the kind of leadership style we want to evolve as something that I will choose. I will choose whether to be a Virat Kohli or whether to be an MS Soni. But for women, it’s not so simple because every choice has another layer of scrutiny hidden behind that, you know.

So what is your sense of this particular world? Like everyone talks of toxic corporate workspaces, which are really all around us. How is it in this particular sector where you would expect people to be more empathetic and more open?

How have you seen these spaces evolve? How do you negotiate this? How do you, you know, empower the women who work with you and, you know, get past all of the various baggage that the world forces upon them?

Two things, right?

Gautam John: First is, you’re right, it’s invisible. But it’s where the vulnerability and humility kind of help make it visible. I can give you an example.

This was in the day, early days of the foundation. We were all traveling a lot and it’s like, you know, I love taking late night flights because I get into a cab and sleep on the way home. And a colleague of mine said, yeah, you can because you’re a man.

I was like, what, women can’t sleep? It really took me a few seconds. It’s like, no, we don’t feel safe sleeping in a cabin.

So it’s just one of those things that is, at least for me, was so completely invisible. And then you start to see it, right? A lot of these things are one way doors that once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

And then you see it in multiple contexts, et cetera, et cetera. For me, you know, cars, technology, all of these are things that once you see, you’re like, man, I can’t unsee this. And then you start to pick up on it.

So in a way, part of the call is also for men to show up differently, right? For men to say that, for men to even lean into ways of leadership that they might feel are inauthentic to them, and so don’t even give themselves permission to say, if I did this, then I’d be considered some other kind of leader. And I think it ties back to the earlier conversation we’re having with the work that we support with young men and boys, to say that it’s not to do the work for men, but to give them permission to show up differently, to say that I can make a different choice.

Similarly, in this, ultimately, as much as sponsorship matters, what also matters is that in modelling different kinds of leadership as well, right? Because otherwise, you’re going to default to a particular kind. A colleague of mine in the early days had a really interesting point.

She was like, Gautam, you know, you seat me at the table and then you disappear. She’s like, nobody listens to me. So I need you to hang around at the table for a little while and slowly fade out.

So it’s some of this, right? Like for me, I’m forever grateful for people who trusted me enough to say that. Would I have known that?

No, I was like, here, you’re at the table. Bye, good luck. This is yours.

You own the space. And she’s like, you might think I own the space, but I don’t because nobody even thinks I’m legitimate enough over here. Then to say that, you know, your presence, your sponsorship, you’re deferring to them in the presence of others, establish them, then you leave.

So, you know, I mean, I suppose the biggest part of this entire journey in any of these things is that there is no black and white. There’s all greys and everything has to be responsive and in some degree emerging. I wish there were, actually, I don’t wish.

I think I don’t wish there were a playbook for this. I think ultimately the playbook is to become a better human being or a more, not a better, maybe a more responsive, a more open and a more vulnerable human being. And everything moves from there.

So I think for me, the biggest shift for me is that I used to think of change as something outside in. I now think of it as inside out.

Amit Varma: Another of the sort of shadows of unheroic leadership that you talk about.

Gautam John: Can I just say that the Shadows chapter actually came after everything was written because a couple of friends I sent to, they said, this sounds like there are no downsides. What are the downsides? I was like, good point.

Amit Varma: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gautam John: It’s like, yeah, it can go in many ways. So yeah, that’s where the chapter came from. It was written after the book was complete.

Amit Varma: No, it’s a great chapter. And there’s very good feedback that they gave you and you listened to them. So thereby, you know, improving your book by following exactly what you were preaching in the book.

And the next shadow that you speak about, not the next shadow you speak about, but the next shadow I want to talk about is the tyranny of structurelessness, right? So you and I can go on forever talking about spontaneous order and how everything good emerges bottom up and so on and so forth. But the danger there also is that without structure, that can also go in terrible directions like you outlined.

Power can also be captured by different interest groups. And even within a community where everyone seems to be openly speaking with everyone else, there will be existing dynamics that can subvert the whole process. So tell me about your learnings about this.

Gautam John: I will. I just realized I didn’t speak to the question you asked previously about oversharing. You know, we’ve seen people overshare in a sense of helplessness.

And I think that often becomes a defense mechanism. Oh, I tried. As opposed to sharing with a goal to kind of foster a more collaborative spirit.

Oversharing as a way of excuse, as a way of, you know, like some sort of emotional approach to what should otherwise be not one. And I did want to call it out. The reason I want to call it out is I’ve seen it being used as, oh, but we tried to be open or, you know, oh, my God, it’s so difficult.

And that’s the thing about leadership, right? Everyone is so many people say they want to be leaders. And I’m like, just remember, it’s a leadership is a call to serve.

And that’s not an easy thing. You can convert it into this heroic thing of leading from the front. But my sense is it’ll be brittle and fragile.

But to me, leadership is a call to serve. And to recognize that stepping into leadership essentially means you’re willing to serve another set of human beings, another set of an organization, something larger than yourself, rather than yourself. And maybe that’s the unheroic part in it.

And perhaps one of the shadows that I and one of the shadows I refer to. To the question you talked about, which I have now forgotten. The tyranny of structurelessness.

Amit Varma: Yes.

Gautam John: So, you know, again, we can leave everything fluid and emergent. It’s going to struggle. I feel like this book, the other title of this book could have been It Depends.

In the sense that human beings also need some sort of structure, right? I mean, I as an individual might be completely okay. But someone coming to work in this organization needs some center boundaries.

What are directions? What does progress look like? What does meaning making look like?

Am I valued? Am I being valuable? Is this my job?

Is this my responsibility? What am I being measured against? So to believe that we can dissolve all boundary conditions.

And this is the part that I think I still have a lot to learn on. To balance curiosity and enterprise and autonomy with some amount of structure and support as well. Because again, not every person wants to say that I want to go out and explore this.

I want complete autonomy, but there’s no support or there’s no structure. People need that sense of it, right? Because otherwise you can get confusing as the organization grows.

Roles can clash, things can overlap. And ultimately, maintaining coherence is also an important thing. And some amount of structure, some amount of clarity, some amount of systems, some amount of support is necessary to maintain coherence at every level of scale.

What it looks like if you’re a five person organization, what a 500 person organization will be different. But this ability to retain coherence is a big one. Some people might say coherence is overrated.

In this kind of work, I found that coherence is necessary because it’s one of the few things that can create a sense of shape and direction. I can see how in certain other kinds, maybe it’s not. Maybe if you’re in a sales role, et cetera, I mean, I don’t need to be coherent with the other people.

My goal is to sell as much as possible. So I recognize that it might not be universally seen as a good thing. I’m saying in particular kinds of fields and for particular kinds of roles and for particular kinds of organizations that work in a more fluid, non-hierarchical way, coherence is an important factor.

And coherence helps create some amount of structure because otherwise people can feel lost.

Amit Varma: So when you’re running a community or when you’re tapping into a community to do things better or to learn about things, I guess the tensions that come up there is that ultimately a community is a collection of people. People are deeply complicated. They have their own baggage.

They have their own views of themselves and where they stand in relation to the others. They have their own egos. For example, one of the shadows you point out is a tension around expertise, that you have a group of people and a decision has to be made.

And there is one guy somewhere who’s saying, hey, wait a minute, I am an expert in this particular subject. And why are other people getting a say? Right.

And I had a sense of this where, you know, I was in a group once and I shared an opinion on something I’ve been writing about for 30 years and somebody else who had thought about it for perhaps 30 seconds came up with an opinion. And in an unwise moment of anger that I have otherwise completely suppressed in myself as the years have gone by, I snapped back that look, please express an opinion only if you can write a 2000 word essay about it, which is a very glib and stupid thing to say. But there was something to that, that in this age of social media, everybody is expressing shallow opinions and deep expertise therefore may get lost if you give it an equal voice.

And I guess this is one tension about expertise. But the other countervailing factor against this is that experts, quote unquote, experts are the ones who tend to have more certainty and certainty is the biggest trap there is. It is a part to folly.

It is a part to all disaster. So and this is just one of the margins, expertise along which you have to balance a community. There’s just so much else that comes into it, male versus female, caste, social standing, etc, etc.

So in your experience, how hard is it to balance it? And does one do it, for example, by first figuring out the incentive structures when you’re actually putting a community together, like in a different chapter, you write about how Kuldeep pointed out, you know, the three common elements, the three kinds of communities that they are, that a community can be centered around a learning mindset, it can be centered around emotions or shared sentiment, like, hey, we all suffer from Bangalore traffic, or it can be centered around reward and recognition. Right? So give me a sense of what you’re thinking about community has been and how best do you harness it?

How do you avoid all the dangers that can arise? First, I will say that it is that community is often shorthand for a type of container, right?

Gautam John: So you can be leading an organization and see the people within the organization as part of a community, not necessarily only something outside. And to that end, where the question of expertise comes in, or opinion, I’ll go back to the it depends, but part of it is getting the room to see differently, right? Very often, I think one of the challenges we all have is that expertise comes to saying, listen to me because I’m the expert.

And perhaps what our role as leaders, and this is why I keep saying that leadership is a call to serve, is to get everyone in the room to see the expert differently. And for the expert to see those opinions differently. So will it take longer?

Yes. But the first time you have to do it to get everyone to see these perspectives differently, it unlocks something, right? The expert is not in this case, not right only because they’re expert because of a variety of things.

The other people have to be willing to see and acknowledge that the expert has to be willing to see and acknowledge that you can be wrong. And at the end of the day, your job as a leadership is to facilitate that. But ultimately, that call will still be yours.

But the goal is really to get everyone to see these things differently. So a lot of this work is facilitation, right? A lot of this work is getting to see people see things differently.

Like, I actually think that in these kinds of work, I think friction is a great thing, right? Friction harnessed the right way. You can have collaborative debate, you can have constructive debate where you surface things that otherwise won’t.

But to do that, you have to be able to hold those spaces, facilitate those conversations. Others have to be, I mean, if you can do it, then others in the organization have to be willing to do it. So in a sense, you get more ideas, you get more perspectives.

But it takes longer. The thing is, it takes longer the first time, then the second time it takes less time, the third time it takes less time. But again, if you are being operated on and the surgeon has an opinion, I wouldn’t want the internist to say that, no, why not this?

Amit Varma: But I wouldn’t be surprised if there are times when internists have been right. Another of the shadows you speak about in this chapter is what you call the pace problem. You know, where you write, quote, building meaningful collaborative processes takes time.

But when there’s a crisis or sudden opportunity, there’s pressure to act with urgency. It’s in those moments we might fall back on top-down decisions just to keep things moving. So how do we balance a slow work of deep inclusion with the urgency required in high-stakes environments?

We’ve seen this a lot. I mean, again, going back to the COVID experiences or the floods or anything that happens.

Gautam John: Ultimately, community response is almost a collective response is almost the first, necessarily the first one. And for us, A, to recognize that. B, to recognize that there’s a kind of social value, social capital in relationships that we don’t fully acknowledge.

An example is that, you know, India has these district action plans for many things, for heat, for mental health, et cetera, et cetera. And almost all of them start with the idea that the district will have these things and you’ll use those when this thing strikes. And those things don’t exist.

As opposed to saying, what exists in this place, right? What is this place rich in? What are communities of trust?

What are networks and mutuality that exist? And so you can respond via that framework. So very often in the idea of responding to a crisis, we take this idea that it must be a singular response or it is one person’s responsibility to guide and respond, as opposed to say the best response would be local and decentralized along existing networks of trust, existing networks of relationships, et cetera.

It’s a great new piece, a great new piece on relational state capital as a new form of capital to account for by Dan Honig, that I think you’d love, because they’re saying that financial capital, political capital are all important, but we never talk about relational capital, A, because it’s invisible, B, because we don’t explicitly grow it, but C, it is vital in certain kinds of conditions. And it’s a really nice paper that talks a little bit about it and is a little bit of the orthogonal to Scott’s seeing like a state, and this is the other perspective. So to that extent, I think the temptation is to say in a moment of crisis, what I need to do is re-centralize, as opposed to in a moment of crisis, what I need to do is hold coherence across the whole.

And to say that responses are best from most proximate nodes, right? Not from the most distant nodes. And if you look at it, I mean, where did some of these ideas come from?

I mean, General Stanley McChrystal wrote this book called Team of Teams, and he led the US operations in Iraq and in Afghanistan. And ultimately, he was saying, for the US military, which is the ultimate command and control structure, it is not working because the changes are too rapid. And what we need to be able to do is decentralize command and control to frontline commanders to be able to be more responsive.

Like if the US military can do it, then most organizations can acknowledge the fact that responses are best done from the edges, not from the center.

Amit Varma: I mean, the military cliche there is that strategy can happen at the top, but tactics happens at the most local level possible. But one of the arguments you made in your book in a very subtle way is that even strategy can emerge in a bottom up way depending on the needs of the community.

Gautam John: It must emerge, because at the end of the day, while the military might have a strategy of conquest, organization working in a community is to improve something or to change some underlying social structure. But that is done alongside a community, not from a remote place. So I think, I mean, there’s a great new book, which is called Emergent Strategy, to say that the best strategy will emerge from the frontline rather than to be centrally determined.

I mean, it’s no different from the old, well, not so old, but from the Soviet-controlled centralized economy to the market-led economy. And in a sense, what businesses at all etc. respond to is things that are emergent, right?

I mean, very rarely is it saying, we’ve built a better thing.

Amit Varma: It’s a thing to say that, you know, you all find this more valuable, let’s build from there. Similar. Moving on from the book, which everyone must read, if you’re listening to this right now, you can’t go out and buy the book right now, because it’s not out yet.

But if you’re a publisher, please get in touch with Gautam, no doubt there will be a bidding war for this book. And I can’t wait for everyone to read it. But moving on from this, my penultimate question to you is, you know, you’ve thought really deeply about how such an organization can be run.

You’ve thought really deeply about how the social sector should function. You know, you’ve thought really deeply about the nature of leadership. I now want to turn attention to you, to the personal, that when you think of, you know, the way you want to live your life, how you define purpose for yourself, how you build each day for how we live our days, of course, is how we live our lives.

Where are you right now? How do you think about these? Do you have as much clarity?

What’s going on there?

Gautam John: One, I wouldn’t say it’s as much thinking as much as it has been learning and then seeing what of these I could reflect in how I show up and how I lead. I’m definitely not some complete package of everything I’ve written about, just more a reflection of everything I’m learning. On the other one, definitely.

I have a daily reflective practice. I have a monthly reflective practice. What is this practice?

So it’s essentially just, you know, at the end of the day to do a tally about, you know, the things that work, the things that didn’t, what I could do differently. I write this down and then I reflect on that monthly. And a collection of those then becomes a book.

But, you know, if there’s one thing I could ask people to take away from what I’ve learned from walking alongside these leaders is the value of the pause, is the value of the reflection, is the value of the collective and to recognize that it is not a cost to pay, but a catalyst to unlock, because then you can act from a place of not reacting, but from a place of responding. And it’s slower at first, but it is far more durable. And it is nonlinear, because once it catches, the outcomes are nonlinear, because otherwise you’re stuck in this linear path of 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1.

So for myself, I think my question is, you know, the question I keep asking myself is, how can I show up tomorrow more differently, differently from how I showed up today in service of the more authentic human being I want to be? I know it sounds vague, but I have a very good sense of what that feels like, because I now have a great sense of what it feels to be in more authentic alignment with myself, with my work, with the universe, and to get a sense of, you know, what a sign of that alignment is, coherence, coincidence, whatever you want to call it. So, yeah, it’s a great feedback loop I’ve got now.

But again, I mean, maybe I’ll be institutionalized in a decade and be like, he was nuts.

Amit Varma: So final question for you, for me and my listeners recommend books, films, music that mean a lot to you, and you’d love to share with the world. Any kind of art at all.

Gautam John: So I will say that, not just in writing this book, but in particular, because in writing this book, I realized that every time I read a nonfiction book, I got stuck in a rut. Every time I read a fiction book helped me connect ideas that were otherwise unconnectable in my head. And I don’t know what it is, right?

I think part of our goal as human beings should be to expand our imaginations. And I found that for myself, fiction has been the best. And I’ve just really leaned into that.

I don’t watch a lot of movies. I recently did my Spotify rap and said my average age of my listening was 21. Minus 70.

What the fuck? Yeah. So 21, I’m guessing it’s because my music I listen to is when I’m exercising.

That’s how. But the place that I’ve been very intentional in is reading fiction. I’ve been reading a lot of Indian fiction.

I just finished Arundhati’s new book. I just finished another great one called Stain, which is a translation from Malayalam of the parable of Sodom and Gomorrah. But I’ve been reading a lot of fiction, and I found that it changes me in a way that I then see things differently.

So I found that fascinating. Nonfiction doesn’t seem to do that to me. It just seems to make me want to do something more effectively, more efficiently, like, you know, marginal tooling as opposed to reimagining and retooling.

Amit Varma: Give me some names, fiction.

Gautam John: So I loved Arundhati Roy’s new book. I will say I never read God of Small Things when it first came out because I was like, it’s set in my community and I didn’t want to read it. But I read Mother Mary Calls to Men.

I absolutely loved it. This new book called Stain. I can pull out my Goodreads.

Amit Varma: So that’s the other thing. I can’t actually. I’ll link your Goodreads page also, if I may.

Is it public?

Gautam John: I don’t think it’s public. But the other thing is I don’t read on a Kindle. I only read in print.

I have this strange affliction. I can only read in print. I can’t read in.

Then I read Heartlamp by Bhanu Mushtaq, which I absolutely loved. It was translated stories from Muslim women. And then, of course, there’s no Internet, so nothing else is loading.

Some great, some lovely new, what’s it called, science fiction, Babel by R. F. Kuang.

I don’t know if you read Quarter Life by Devika Regge. Yeah, so Brotherless Knight, which is great fiction set in Sri Lanka. So a lot of that.

And I started reading books on food again, which I haven’t done in a while. Exhalation by Ted Chiang, Glass Hotel, some really nice science fiction as well. And in particular, a lot of translated science fiction from Chinese, which I found quite fascinating because it has a very different conception.

So yes, read more fiction.

Amit Varma: Movies, music?

Gautam John: I mean, yeah, I’ve seen some random movies I’ve seen. I saw that new F1 movie, which was nice, but nothing that really moved me. The Philanthropy did a documentary this year, which was wonderful.

It was on the Nilgiris, and it’s done really, really well. It was telling a story of coexistence. I was fortunate to be working alongside on that.

Just seeing the making of a documentary and everything that goes into it gives you new appreciation for the effort that goes into all of these things. The other thing I’ve started to do, which I find a bit strange, is I no longer read long articles. I convert them to audio and listen to them.

It’s some very odd new behavior that I found, because it then sounds like a scripted podcast. And apparently AI does this very well now. You can get it to be read out in the voice of like Marlon Brando, if you fancy that.

Amit Varma: Not bad. I must try that. So Gautam, I’ve been asking you on the show for three or four years, but even though the podcast is only eight years old, it feels like I’ve been asking you for 20 years, which is how long we’ve known each other.

So thank you so much for this. You gave me a lot to think about and process, and I really enjoyed myself. Thank you so much, Amit.

Gautam John: I am glad that I came. I’m sorry it took so long, but I had to recognize that I had something worthwhile sharing first.

Amit Varma: Thank you. Amit, thank you so much for being a part of this.

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Originally published at The Seen and the Unseen on 9 February 2026. View on YouTube →