Ep 126: Understanding Human Sexuality

**Amit Varma** (0:00)
Welcome, you're listening to the audio version of Everything is Everything. This show is a video show, there are sometimes visuals that help you appreciate the content better, but mostly the audio should be enough. Please, please, please do subscribe to us on YouTube also.

**Ajay Shah** (0:28)
Welcome, gentle reader, to this episode of Everything is Everything by my good friend Amit Varma and myself.
Amit, what fun things have we been up to? Okay, let me tell you what fun things I've been up to. Gentle reader, as you know, Amit and I have been building this concept called life lessons. And after three cohorts of life lessons in Calendar 2025, we had an in-person meetup in Goa.
So, a bunch of us got together. We did some scholarly discourse. We did some incredibly fun things. And most interestingly, it was a bunch of people getting to be physically together in the same place for two and a half days. So, I just really enjoyed it. It was better than anything that I had anticipated. And what did you feel, Amit?

**Amit Varma** (1:24)
I absolutely loved it.
It's a highlight of my year, one of the highlights of my life, and a manner of speaking. You know, I often speak about how I am extremely lucky to be on that cusp generation, which managed to move from communities of circumstance to communities of choice. So, you grow up and you are where you are. Geography is a restraint. You go to school in a particular place, that's the friends you have. You go to work in a particular place, that's the friends you have. And what the internet allowed us to do was form communities of choice. That's how you and I know each other. That's how we know Namsita, Vaishnava and Punya. And that's a beautiful thing and that's been a blessing for me because pretty much all my old friends, except one or two, are communities of choice people, that people are discovered in the new age. And to me, life lessons is such an amplification of that, because what happened here was we launched this course, assuming it will attract a particular kind of person who's sinking is a little hutke, who are looking at life in different ways, who are full of curiosity. And by putting the price point that we did, by saying this is not a trivial thing, we put in a ton of effort behind it, the kind of content we do in the course is not content we do otherwise and everything is everything on the seen and the unseen. So we put in that effort, we charged a premium and that led to a selection effect. And I'm saying this kind of in hindsight, though at the time I assumed it would. And that left to a selection effect where over the first three cohorts, 130 people who signed up were people of a certain kind of person, in the sense that they were not following the beaten path. They wanted to learn more about the world, they wanted to engage, and they had agency. And these are people who took the decision to actually do the course and then to actually come to Goa. So we planned this annual meet up in Goa, and we thought maybe 20, 30 people if we get that will be good enough. More than 50 people came, something between 50 and 60 people actually trekked down to Goa, to this place we'd organized, and all of them are paying for the hotel themselves, mind you. So they come all the way, they booked their own flights, they come. We had three days there, and it was brilliant because I remember.

**Ajay Shah** (3:28)
We had these last minute sign ups, at the very last minute, one person came in from Thailand, one person came in from New York.

**Amit Varma** (3:35)
One person came, like on the morning of the first day, there was so much FOMO in the WhatsApp group for life lessons. One guy came in from Thailand, one guy came in from New York, beautiful man called Devakar with his ukulele.
We had singing, we had dancing, it was just incredible. And what I loved about it was that number one, they were all a particular kind of person because of the selection effect. So I remember sitting down for lunch on the very first day as people were coming in, and the first seven people to join me were all on a sabbatical. It just tells you something about the kind of person. They were all on a sabbatical, they were all looking to re-examine life and etc. And that was great. The other thing was, this may not appear this way on television, but I'm a socially awkward introvert, large crowds make me uncomfortable. But this was the only gathering in my life, and forgive me if I tear up, but this was the only gathering in my life where I just felt immediately at ease and comfortable with each and every person. It was like everybody, and obviously the advantage was they knew us already. We may not have known most of them, but they knew us. But the advantage was that it was just, you know, the comfort level was off the charts, it was great, we had a great time. And what Ajay and I had planned is, we said we'll do a couple of sessions each, but we'll kind of keep it freewheeling, we'll have some fun, there's a beach there. So tons of singing and dancing, but also we did a couple of sessions. Ajay did a beautiful session on happiness, which I thought was for me in the audience, and I hadn't seen the session, one of the highlights of Life Lessons. And I did a couple of sessions, and one of them is on the subject of what we're going to talk about today, which was Understanding Human Sexuality. In our last episode, we spoke about natural selection, and I've been reading up a lot on human sexuality, and obviously, I was at pains to give the caveat to everyone present. And this is not a practical class, but theory, theory. But it was really something about the what and the why of human sexuality. Went on very well. We had really great discussions after it was done as well, going on deep into the evening. And that's what we're going to present to you today. It's a rare example of something that we presented for the Life Lessons crowd, but are also bringing here. But the sessions that we did at the event were really bonus sessions for them. So it was a little hut cave from the usual Life Lessons stuff. It's like this is different stuff you won't get either on the course or anywhere. And we had been planning this episode for Everything is Everything. So I said, okay, I'll just create a PowerPoint and do a session. And essentially, in a sense, I'll just replicate the session here. So that's the plan for today.