Ep 128: The Final Episode

**Amit Varma** (0:00)
Welcome, you are 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.
Welcome to Everything is Everything. For the last time, I'm Amit, and this is Ajay. And we are not Amit and Ajay for the last time. I will continue to be Amit, he will continue to be Ajay. But this is our last episode of Everything is Everything for the moment. And we thought we'll do like a pleasant goodbye, look back a little bit, talk about our reasons why we are bringing this to an end, and kind of talk about the things that we've learnt from doing the show. So, Ajay, both of us actually have reasons for not doing this anymore, and it so happened that we had a chat and they coincided, so we said, okay, all good things come to an end, better things lie ahead of both of us. So, you want to share your reasons with our gentle listeners?

**Ajay Shah** (1:10)
My biggest reason, so I have one big reason and I have a less big reason. My big reason is that I think I've said what I wanted to say. Okay, so I have one lifetime of knowledge, I have only one lifetime of knowledge. And, you know, I've always been saying to you that there aren't that many nice complete episodes that one can make. So I have a lifetime in hiking and that gives an episode. You have a lifetime in cycling and that gives an episode. You have a lifetime in poker and that gives an episode. And one can't live more lives and create these bodies of knowledge. So that is the main reason that I feel I had certain things to say and I am at the end of that. And the other reason is that it is very, very difficult. It is very costly and perhaps there is a connection that as one steps away from the very familiar lifetime knowledge material, the difficulty levels of doing this were going up.
And on this show, I have promised a book project, a book of taxes by Vijay K. Alkar, Arbin Modi and me, and I have many other research papers. And I just got into a whole tangle. In early December, we are running three conferences and it is just a grueling pace. So I thought it's optimal to stop here. I think we have built a great body of work. We'll talk about it a bit more, but it is time to stop.

**Amit Varma** (2:42)
Yeah, and you know, you said you're writing that book in so many research papers. When you said so many, I was hoping you're going to say so many books, because gentle readers, I've been convincing him to do various books that are in this man, Invisible Infrastructure and various others. So hopefully they will happen. Let me share my reasons for it. You know, I've always been really bloody minded about, you know, once you start something, you just take it through where it's got to go. The scene in The Unseen was weekly for seven years and is now fortnightly. I never missed a scheduled release. Various incidents happened in my life, but I never missed a Monday where it had to come out. Similarly with Everything is Everything, we have never missed a release. You know, it's always Friday, 12 o'clock, the episode comes out. Once it had to go to Saturday very early on. But otherwise, always Friday, 12 o'clock, it came out. Even when I was in hospital getting a procedure done, or Ajay broke his leg and etc, etc. All kinds of things have happened to us. We've done it. But what was also happening was that, like what Ajay just said, it was getting difficult in the sense, it was taking up a lot of my bandwidth. It wasn't difficult in terms of the actual logistics. Like the way we would do it is, once in six weeks, we would gather at a friend's farmhouse and we would, over three days, we would shoot six episodes, two episodes on each day. So it was just three days every six weeks. It wasn't a big deal. But I also produced the show. So therefore, I would create, after Namsita would send the rough cut to me, I would create the list of inserts that you see on the screen right now, with all of these, you know, pinch-taking details. And then Namsita and I would be chatting over the edit every day. We'd be in touch. And then the thing would release on Friday. And it was rinse and repeat every week. And it was taking up mind space. And as you know, there are other things I want to do. You've been on my case that, here, I write that book, write this book, etc., etc. But I just found that even though I can bank episodes of the seen and the unseen, and that's fortnightly now, so let's stress, this will just run my mind all the time. And I just didn't want to stop this because I love the show. Ajay and I both love the show. We didn't want to stop it. On our own, we would not have stopped the show. But then when we chatted, I found he's got reasons, I've got reasons. We said, you know what? Fine. We don't have to hold on to this. Good things come to an end, but more good things are born out of that. No man steps in the same river twice. And it's been a beautiful show. We've really enjoyed hanging out. We've really enjoyed doing this.