Curiosity

Hyderabad, August 22, 2025

One of my favorite questions to ask people I find interesting is, “What are the 3 best pieces of content you’ve consumed in the last few months?” Usually there is a pause, and they start to think. I find it helpful to follow-up with, “It could be anything — a book, a show, music, a movie, a podcast, a research paper”. This takes the edge off and the other person can then respond with what they genuinely like, rather than what they think you might like amongst the content or format they normally consume.

This question is particularly great for so many reasons. You get to learn so much about them: what media they consume, what they find interesting, how they think about the world, what content they have access to, and even their connection to the Source, because this last one determines what imprints on them. In addition, you get to discover a new thing as deeply as the product of the depth of that person and the creator of the content they tell you about.

I would hate for this question to be a social hack or conversation starter at parties, so if you intend to use this, I’ll ask as tributeगुरुदक्षिणा that you employ it wisely and only for people whom you are genuinely curious about. Perhaps the only other drawback with this question is that it is too fertile. Often you get so drawn into the other person’s elaboration of their interests that you never get around to sharing yours. I’m not exactly saying that this has happened with me, but here's what I would have said if asked about my favorites.

Lincoln

I’ve tried watching Lincoln several times in the last few years, but always gave up because it was very slow. But a couple months ago, I sat down and finished it, and liked it so much that I watched it again a day later. There are two things in this film that particularly stood out to me.

First, Lincoln was an avid collector of stories from his own life and from the books he read, and he had a powerful way of telling them. This resulted in a profound ability to draw people into his life. I have often wondered why stories are so deeply ingrained in our culture, and do not yet have a convincing answer. Before you say “billions of years of evolution”, I challenge you to go deeper and explain precisely how or why that creates a strong human susceptibility to stories.

The second powerful idea in this film was that Power, even at the highest level, is so precarious. As a corollary, progress and impact is likely not about the person or institutions performing the progressive act, but about the act itself. Some endeavors are so important that you will never have a man powerful enough or resources substantial enough to achieve them with certainty. Yet they must be attempted with the terrible force of someone’s will, or history may not give them another chance. At the height of Abraham Lincoln’s power and presidency, he barely scraped together enough votes to secure the abolition of slavery before the civil war ended, after which collective incentives may never have aligned for decades or more.

Balaji vs Martin

This is a recent video of very high entertainment content. There are two people at the edge of two of the most important technologies — AI and crypto — discussing the state and future of technology and its impact on society.

It starts with a particularly crazy line [paraphrasing],

“Polytheistic AGI is a very useful macro frame. In the future, every society will have its own social network, its own cryptocurrency with its deterministic law, and its own AI oracle at the center of society providing probabilistic guidance”

If at first glance this topic feels particularly arid for comedy, I’ll point out that I personally find the meta-arc of this video really entertaining. After a 10-minute monologue from Balaji where he briefly sets up a context and deduces a future based on it, Martin proceeds to categorically deny Balaji’s entire frame. Balaji was speaking with the presumption that we are already living in a technological future where superintelligence has been achieved. Martin’s contention is that anthropomorphic or superintelligent AI is nowhere near the right approximation to what we’re seeing with the technology — they are mere infant systems. The rest of this video continues to be funnily awkward because their frames never really align, so they do not achieve common ground in discussion. At one point Balaji introduces a rocket analogy to explain prompting, and immediately follows up, “What do you think about the analogy? I think that’s a good analogy”. Yes, it was a great analogy, Balaji. Most of us are oblivious to it, but a large part of male social conflict and negotiation happens at the level of proposing and rejecting frames.

In terms of content, I actually think Martin is right, and that AI today is better treated as a ludic technology rather than a serious superintelligent God. I also think that Balaji is directionally correct: he’s just about 25-50 years too early for his visions of polytheistic AGI and crypto law in sovereign network states to meaningfully impact us.

Beyond this, I think this video is super interesting because it discusses topics across something like 20 different levels of frames from which you can think about the technology. Further, the very first frame negotiation between B & M spans the entire stack — the practical technology builder will see and agree that these are very flawed engineered systems, while the most uninformed user of ChatGPT sees in it the closest analog he has to a talking robot — an anthropomorphic sci-fi AI, which is in some sense the modern instantiation of God.

The Third One

I struggled to find a title for this third recommendation. Proceed with caution; it can be very polarizing. If you can look past the loud thumbnail, the way to watch this video is to look primarily at the relatively big man in yellow just behind the singer on the left. He is completely lost in the song and devotion and it is very wholesome and funny. Skip to 12:51 if you don’t have the patience to sit through all of it.

There is a little bit of backstory for the (re)discovery of this video. My grandmother sometimes watches these devotional videos at home in the living room TV. One evening I came down while this video was playing, and my mother who had been listening in asked me to stop and observe this guy. I burst out laughing. After that day, we lost this video for many months, and were collectively sad that we couldn’t find it. Then one day my househelp asked me to try typing “Laut Ke Aayenge Hanuman” in the search bar, and here it was again! Since then I’ve shown it to many people, and they have all enjoyed watching it and have tried in their own ways to rationalize the behavior of the man.