a lemon and a peach market

No matter how bad the mood, the greatest joy I have found is in enjoying the company of your family. It was good that the last few months of my previous employment was a bit of a tough one. I used the time and the experience to grow smarter and tougher. I find it easier to deal with less catastrophic issues.

I have had some rough times in my career and many of them were earlier on in my life. These helped me prepare for a lot of shit that seemed to have followed. Of course it follows in different ways. Sometimes, there is boss trouble, sometimes there is peer trouble, sometimes, unrelated colleague trouble and sometimes employee trouble. Trouble doesn’t come with a standard tag or a name. You learn to deal with it and you learn about the vagaries of life while dealing with it. One of my reactions over a period of time is to simply buckle down and try and build a cocoon around yourself. Talking about it doesn’t really help. Hence sometimes I look at people talking about it to others and taking advice, making me wonder, if this was really helpful. Once in a while taking advice is good but more than that is to my view not healthy.

Over a period of time, I have realized that sitting, chatting and discussing with other people on various issues is a good thing. But consistently talking about your problems and looking for advice is practically useless. The old adage is that people say that you shouldn’t leave so much within yourself. It’s not good. Well – that’s a yes and a no. I think in life I have learnt to just simply contain a lot of the anguish and pain within myself. It served me well. Opening up did really do me good. I like the way men (archetype) are friends with each other (sounding sexist). We chat, we discuss and we move on. We simply don’t dwell too much on emotional issues. There are 100 different versions of this and counter versions, but I am discussing the archetype. Ok – forget the disclaimers. I am talking about the thing that when screwed, probably a response that allows you to just box it mentally and manage your other life well, possibly works best. In managing your other life, the time spent with your loved ones is something you cherish the most.

I love the way Jasmine fights with me these days. Or should I say – I love the way she responds when I fight with he these days. Whatever – it’s fun. I shout, she gets angry and in 30 seconds we are back, smiling at each other. It’s not personal. We fight and we just get back. No egos, no making up with each other – just the quiet confidence that we love each other more than what the fight is all about. That’s the only way we can manage to get through all the stuff that we are managing to do these days. Jispa’s swimming, the new house that we are planning about moving to, all the decor and the arrangements. It’s not possible to do all this and not fight. And it’s not possible to have good memories if we fight and sulk. Right now it’s going great and we are doing just fine on how we are doing up the house. Enough fights and enough fun times and a lot work trying to visualize all the work.

Coming back. I was in a horrendous mood since yesterday evening thanks to some crappy work I was seeing at work. But I liked the way I simply put my head down, slept through and when I woke up I decided to spend time with Jispa and jasmine at the dining table and take effort to smile and chat with them. There – I felt much better and I realized what real truth in life is.

Coming to which – Jispa is a real joker. She loves what she calls the ‘papa’ smell. Every time I wake up from sleep and I hug her she gets papa smell from my t shirt. So she makes it a point to sniff me when I wake her up. One day, out of the blue in the morning, I woke up removed my t shirt and threw it on her face and went for bath. After some time when she woke up she loved the fact that the t shirt was on her. Her words “I was dreaming that I was in a meadow and smelling flowers and the flowers were smelling of ‘papa smell’.” Hah! Jasmine didn’t know where to look. She rolled her eyes and was wondering to her self – these two are crazy.

With Jispa I have a pact going – she allows me to kiss her nose and I allow her to bite my arm. It’s an irrevocable pact. Now we have another pact that I engineered. I throw my t-shirt on her in the morning and allows me to give a kiss on her ear lobe twice a day. Her only condition is that I don’t do a slurp kiss. Hahaha. I engineered this one and in the morning I was explain to her – that thanks to this understanding a lot of benefits happened. First – she gets the t-shirt every day, second, I get to kiss her properly and not just sneak one on her ears while I am hugging her, third, I am forced to give a proper one – the one that she doesn’t really mind and fourth – it’s a sanity situation where I am constrained to two a day. All benefit when a trading pact happens. It benefits the whole ecosystem.

Today morning I was reading about The Market for Lemons. Here the economist Akerlof argues that in the market for used cars, there exist asymmetrical information. The buyer doesn’t know about the car quality but the seller does (which is the lemon and which the peach is). Over period of time, thanks to a trust deficit, the average price of the car being bought by the buyer will gravitate towards the middle, the average of the peach or the lemon. This will drive the peaches out of the market and then you are left with only lemons. This drives all the buyers out.

 An interesting quote from the paper: “The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost also must include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence”

The book I was reading spoke about how this paper is important in understanding that asymmetrical information is important in driving business out. With internet and apps and the platforms that it has mushroomed – people are able to rate each other and information can be democratized. This is the example of Uber allowing both the passenger and the driver to rate each other and similarly the case in AirBnB. It allows everyone to participate and the world becomes a more vibrant space. Trip advisor allowed the smaller hotels with exceptional service and no marketing budgets to beat the big hotels on ROI and occupancy rate. Information thus democratized forces people to improve their service or the lunch will move from the big stupid seller to the smart nimble seller on the basis of interactions that have been positive.

I have seen this thing in action. As Trip advisor and other review sites mushroomed the world became such a smaller place, such an accessible place, such a beautiful place. When I was in SFO I realized that to get anywhere to anywhere you just need Uber. This is a huge thing. Earlier you would wonder before takinga taxi in a new place – is cheating you, or taking you on the longer route or anything. Here all that friction is just taken care of. One other thing about uber – I have written about this in the past – is that in Mumbai it has caused a lot of congestion. I reaslie that it is in part thanks to the laws of the land. Here an average car owner cannot just switch on to become an Uber driver. He has to have a commercial registration and a yellow number plate. In US you can simply turn on the Uber app (some pre verification) and boom – you are an executive by day and an Uber driver on the way home. This is the ultimate Uber dream. Your car is idle and parked for 90% of the time. With Uber – you can simply sweat the asset through the day. Laws here stop that and hence the congestion. If you transform the laws, possibly you will have Uber and less congestion. That’s the great thing.

So it’s interesting, how Uber is relevant and the innovation has potential to really decongest the city. The ultimate Uber holy grail – Pooled, autonomous, electric vehicles. Now  that’s crazy. That’s serious transportation solutions. It uses existing infrastructure to provide a solution that promises to work and get the hassle off the commute. And without government spending.

That’s the power of innovation, freethinking and the ability to do business with minimal government regulation. That’s the case for regulation to reduce. And that’s the reason or trade. Trade allows rules to be formed that work well for all parties. Jispa gets my used t shirt and I get her ear lobe. Win win and everyone loses if the contract is broken. Speaking of which – distributed ledgers…. Some other day…

lies, dammed lies and even more dammed truth

The internet is dead. Long live the internet. Recently I have had this epiphany. Well it’s not that sudden as an epiphany might denote, but it’s come off late. In the last ten years of reading stuff, I have learnt that nothing is the truth. Nothing is the whole truth, the complete truth and nothing but the truth. Everything is questionable. Everything has a bias and everything is subjective. My guru Dharen, said something once. He said – there is science and then there is truth. He spoke about his experience with Parachute hair oil. He said there is science that hair oil doesn’t permeate the scalp more than a certain level and has possibly no effect on the brain function… but there is also the truth that during exam time, my mom puts oil in my hair and then I study and what all I study goes through in the brain. There is science and then there is truth. See – this is the truth – there is no real complete truth. We search for truth everywhere in our lives and place such a premium on it. But in effect there isn’t any! Everything becomes exciting when it offers to tell the truth but then slowly slowly it starts lying. But if there is no truth there can’t be lies as well. But surely there is obfuscation and theories that come from either side as either side use the new propaganda to convince the world of their side of the equation.

Basically I have become a skeptic of everything. Earlier newspapers were the upholders of truth. Today only a fool will believe whatever a newspaper will tell you. But as I see around me – there are tons of fools. A book I read many years ago – called ‘mindset’ by john nasbitt – in which he said –I turn to eth sports page as I know that is the only bit of truth in the newspapers. The score is the score. Today when I came to office I picked up the Bombay time – the tabloid edition of the daily newspaper. A young kid in the team asked me – is that the first thing I read. No – I replied. I read the paper today at home. The first thing I read is the sports page of the Times of India. Then I read some other pages, then I read the first article of the Mumbai Mirror. The Mumbai mirror on the first page will generally take up some expose of something that is ailing Mumbai – some civic or social issue. I like that article. And then to get insights into what the world is veering towards in terms of attitudes and expectations I look at the Bombay times. So first fact, then interpretation and then fiction… as a marketer – all three are important in different circumstances – I would even veer towards saying it’s in the wrong order. Fiction is extremely important for marketers… movies (read: popculture) tell us the most about ourselves…

So newspapers also lie. Then came the internet. The internet with its promise of democratizing information gave so much of it to all and sundry. Now people were not and will be not judged by what they know but how well they will search. This was told to me by a very intelligent man – one of my first mentors – Aditya Shastri. This was in 1997 when I first saw the internet in his office. It was pretty cool. His words have become prophetic. With internet now reaching mobile phones, information has exploded in terms of what is available in the palm of your hand and everywhere you are. So conversations in parties that talk about certain data used tobe done from memory and now if some contentious point comes out – the internet comes to the rescue and closes all conversation. I hope with this getting more and more omnipresent people will be more circumspect in what they talk. They will possibly learn to use words like ’from my memory’, ‘possibly’, ‘likely’, ‘mostly’, ‘I believe’ etc… cause anything said will and can be verified by a quick mobile search.

So I loved that google would be able to help us a lot on spreading knowledge and information. It truly allows us to do tons of research and helps us find the ‘truth’.  I used to joke that whats the internet to believe anything. Tomorrow I would write something and if it ranks on google then would that make it true? Today google has become the answer for what you want as the answer. Whatever you want you will get google to answer that for you. You want to know how microwave is bad for you – there will be billions of links – ditto for why this is all a sham. Just because its forwarded or on a link that looks nice, doesn’t make it true. So many people believe any shit that they see. In the middle there was a video of a lion roaming around in thane… people believed it to be true… er… one question – Which is the LAST refuge of the Asiatic lion? THE LAST REFUGE? You idiot. You don’t get lions outside Gir in India.

So the omnipresence of google is going to be used for both parties – the for and the against. Its up to you to analyse the data presented. The past possibly belonged to the believer – the future with so much data will belong to the skeptic. Everything is but a probability. You play probabilities. You read everything, listen everything, trust nothing and build your beliefs, values and judgment. That’s all.