Ep 127: 10 Frameworks That Shaped Us

**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.
General readers, welcome to Everything is Everything. This is Ajay Shah, this is Amit Varma. You come here for enlightenment, but today we will give you intimacy. What you will find is an intimate act, because here's what happened. We were at this great Life Lessons conference in Goa, meet up in Goa, gathering in Goa of like-minded souls, which we spoke about in the last episode. And one of the things we decided we will do out there is a first ever Everything is Everything shoot with a live audience of specially selected Life Lessons people. And we said, let's make it a special episode. Let's not just make this a regular EIE episode, but let's also make it personal. An episode in which we offer to the world and to our friends, a part of ourselves. Now, alas, something terrible happened. It rained. It rained in Goa in October. Who would have thunk? But it did. And therefore, we couldn't shoot that episode because for a variety of reasons. So we're shooting that episode today. All ye Life Lessons people who were there and really wanted to attend this, you have missed the live recording. But we shall still offer Ajay Shah a part of ourselves. Will we not? Let's go for it. So what we are going to do today is we are going to share ten frameworks, five each, which shape the way that we look at the world and the way that we think. Within Life Lessons, we actually have a webinar on frameworks with which you can look at the world. But that's more normative stuff. We are suggesting, hey, this framework is good for this. This is good for that, et cetera, et cetera. This is a much more personal episode. It's about what sort of shaped us on our journey through life. And then looking back with hindsight, we can say, yeah, this was big for me. That was big for me, et cetera, et cetera. Ajay, how did you figure life out? What was your journey like?

**Ajay Shah** (2:11)
I think the words that matter most here for this conversation is first principles thinking. That I somehow got onto this track that you have to be able to argue it from first principles. And then that inevitably takes you to this kind of toolkit. If you're willing to accept an edifice as a given, saying all these assumptions are there, and then I'm going to design integrated circuits, great, more power to you. But if you are going to try to do first principles thinking, which really is our greatest defense against all the bullshit of the world, the only way to protect yourself from all the nonsense of the world is first principles thinking. Then we need this kind of tool chain as a raw material about how we will think.

**Amit Varma** (2:53)
I gotta tell you, gentle readers, that he mentioned the word bullshit. So every once in a while, for the last few years, I will hear Ajay saying something like, I just wrote a BS article or I'm working on a BS article. And I was always thinking that man, this is such modesty. But why is he saying this? I mean, isn't it going too far? But BS, my friends, is business standard. He's written a column for the business standard for the last 30 years. That's what he meant.

**Ajay Shah** (3:23)
Okay, Amit, let's get going. Tell me your first.

**Amit Varma** (3:25)
So my first framework was really understanding natural selection. Right? And this is super important because it's not a subject that should only be taught in biology classes. I discovered it through popular science writing, reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, then all the great books by Richard Dawkins, Selfish Gene, Blind Watchmaker, reading Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Evolves, and our last couple of episodes have been on this, and we are going to have one more great episode on this, where we talk about evolution in a larger context. Why is this important? You know, I cited that great quote from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in the last episode, Know thyself. It is important to know ourselves and understand ourselves, to be able to make the most of ourselves, to come to peace with who we are, and to be able to construct and craft the best possible version of ourselves. And so, I think that this is deeply sort of important to me. It's given me a frame of looking at myself and it's given me a frame of looking at the world. And though I was an atheist long before I discovered natural selection, and we have a great episode on atheism where we spoken about how atheism is not a system of belief as much as a non-belief. You just don't believe in things as proof of. So, I was always an atheist in that sense, but natural selection solidified it. And I can do no better than quote Douglas Adams on this, where Douglas Adams has this beautiful quote where he writes about natural selection. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem frankly silly beside it. I take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. And honestly, I have been a person much more than you, drawn to fiction, drawn to the arts, drawn to literature, because to me the greatest mystery is not perhaps the mysteries of science or economics or whatever, they are the mysteries of human nature. You know, why do we love? Why do we cry? Why do we flounder? Why do we struggle? Why do we feel lonely and seek companionship? Why are things so hard sometimes? And I just feel that understanding ourselves, understanding human nature really helps figure out and come to terms with, if not always figure out some of these puzzles. And natural selection gets you there.