How to Take a Year Off and Balance Your Life with Vikram Seth (Episode 018)

By day, Vikram Seth is a Senior Economist working on renewable energy at Shell.

By night, he is the co-founder of Bounce Bhangra, an award winning combination of high energy cardio and Indian dance.

And at heart, Vikram is a philosopher. Someone who spends much of his time thinking deeply about life and the meaning of it all.

In this episode we talk about how Vikram has cultivated balance between a demanding career (working for one of the largest corporations in the world), his personal passions, and his spiritual side.

In this episode we discuss:

• “The Great Resignation” happening now. Why are workers quitting jobs?
• What is a sabbatical?
• What forced Vikram to re-evaluate his life and confront his own mortality
• How do you arrange a sabbatical with your boss?
• The two things you need to do before you can ask for extended time off
• “Hunting like a lion” at work
• Managing your schedule and your energy to do your best creative work
• How to play to your strengths and gain leverage in negotiations at work
• So you’ve arranged a year off… now what? How should you use that time?
• A fateful first stop in Dubai, leaning in to serendipity and where it leads
• What a 10 day Vipassana silent meditation retreat teaches you
• How to get out of your head and back into your body
• Eastern vs Western views of time. “Transcend and include”
• Zooming out to see the “upward Spiral Graph”
• What is Hindu philosophy, once you strip away all the mythology?
• Mysticism and the power of direct experience
• Consensus mechanisms and why crypto gives Vikram hope for humanity

Links to Resources and Other Books Mentioned:

• Vikram on Twitter
• Bounce Bhangra Website
• Bounce Bhangra on Instagram
  
• Confessions of an Economic Hitman
• Vipassana
• Ido Portal
• Wim Hof
• Mammalian Dive Reflex

Transcript

Neville Mehra
My guest for this episode is Vikram Seth. By day Vikram is a senior economist focused on renewable energy at Shell. By night, he is the co founder of Bounce Bhangra, an award winning combination of high energy cardio and Indian dance. They hold, live sessions that you can join in central London and online. I should also mention that Vikram is my cousin, but he’s been more like a brother to me ever since we were little kids. In this episode, we talk about how Vikram has tried to cultivate a sense of balance between his work, his personal passions and his spiritual side.

Vikram Seth, Welcome to Never Normal.

Vikram Seth
Thank you for having me here.

Neville Mehra
My pleasure. I suspect given our usual conversations that we may well pull up Tim Ferriss x Balaji and run four and a half hours long.

In an effort to to prevent that, I’ll try to keep the conversation a little bit more structured. And I suspect we may need to do a part two or Part Three, or maybe even make this a weekly thing. But to start out with anyway, I would love to talk about your journey starting back few years ago. Well, let me preface that by saying I’ve been reading in the news all about the great resignation. And this idea that I think surveys say something like 41% of people plan to quit their jobs in the next 12 months, as we’re recording this in in December 2021. Christmas Eve 2021. That’s been going on for a few months now. And like there were like, in the US anyway, they’re like waves of people quitting their jobs. But actually, the number is still is still that high of people who are planning in the next 12 months in 2022 to quit their jobs. 41% sounds like a lot. But it’s crazy, because that that actually is misleading. It’s it because most like boomers are not planning to quit their jobs. So it’s 77% of Gen Z and 63% of millennials plan to switch jobs in the next 12 months or just quit altogether. I’ve written a bunch about that and spoken about it and other podcasts and all different ideas of like how you can quit your job, how you can become a freelancer starting a business on the side or just go like quitting and taking a year off and going and traveling the world. You took a different approach. And I would love to like rewind back to around 2016. And first of all, what the heck is a sabbatical? And why did you decide to take one?

Vikram Seth
Yeah. So just one more thing to add to your two steps there. So a Gallup poll, I think I can’t remember when But like every time I check up on this, it’s always almost always this similar kind of numbers. 70 to 80% of people are perennially disillusioned with their job. And every time they update these polls, it’s always 70 to 80% and I those that’s definitely covering like Europe and the North America. I don’t know if it’s a global survey, but 70 to 80% of people are perennially disillusioned with their job. It’s a bloody huge number. And like, that’s the systemic problem. That’s not like one off issue. So So what’s Yeah, for sure, like I was disillusioned with my job at some point, as well. So I’ve been in Shell now I’ve been in shell for like 10 and a half years about, I guess when it was it was probably around six years through. I was in Scotland away from family like making new friends and been in shell for six years constantly like looking at new opportunities and entrepreneurial ideas and all of those kinds of things. But not doing anything about it feeling frustrated and missing out on all of these trends that I’ve seen developing and then didn’t act on, etc. So I guess I had the option or had the urge to quit and just leave and one go back to London and be with family for a bit but also just like Chuck it all in and start something new. And I did consider that. But I found that being like a large multinational show had this other option on the table, which was take a sabbatical, which is essentially take a break for an unpaid break long term. On paper, it’s not like a month, or there could be a month, but more likely. So like three months plus, they turned out that that time shell had this policy, which they’ve now got rid of, which was that you could take a sabbatical of up to two years, which is huge, because it’s, it’s like a no risk solution. You can leave the company for two years, you’re still you’re, you’re on payroll, but not getting paid. And at the end of the two year period, you sort of just drop a line to HR and say, hey, I want to come back is like, that was like a blessing, a massive blessing. in disguise for me or not in disguise, it was just a massive blessing to be able to do something like that. And the whole concept of a sabbatical. So comes from this concept that every seven years, you take a break from your career to replenish yourself. That’s and so the word sabbatical literally means something like a cycle of seven years. And I also read up a lot like on sort of design thinking and design thinking approaches, which specifically recommended that and I don’t remember whether it was the founders of IDEO, or some other kind of design agency, where they religiously did this every seven years, obviously, they would have been around for a while to have many, multiple cycles of seven years, but every seven years, they would take the year off. So they would shut down their design agency for the full year to let everybody just do whatever like. And the point of that was, because it’s a design agency, it’s highly creative. And it gave chance to everyone, not just top management, but the whole company to sort of go off do their own thing, whatever that was, it didn’t have to be anything related to work, it could have been do your own side project, it could have been just go travel, whatever, like anything to get your creative juices flowing again. And the whole point of that was a recognition that at some point, you’ll just get stuck in a rut if you’re just doing the same thing over and over again. And even if you’re not, even if you’re jumping from project to project, at some point, you just need space to not fill with a routine and do something else. So that was an amazing realization. And for me, that urge was always there like I am. I am very creative. But I’m also highly I desire security a lot at the same time. So this was like you were saying before, like a perfect hedge for me.

Neville Mehra
You mentioned you use the word religiously, which I think is kind of interesting, because just trying to think before you took a sabbatical, it was just it was like this foreign word to me. Like it might have been a Jewish holiday. No, I mean, I mean, the root has to be the same. You mentioned seven. And I’m thinking like in terms of like, etymology, but also like the Sabbath, right. And it’s, it’s the same concept on a weekly basis, like a day of rest, where you’re literally prohibited from doing things that resemble work. And depending on your religious beliefs that might even include something like pressing a button in an elevator interacting with a with a machine. In that case, the idea of taking time off to rest makes a lot of sense. And I can understand why that feels safer than just sort of quitting your job. But I’m just sort of curious. In the case of Shell, you mentioned the policy change. But when you took your sabbatical, did you did you tell like your manager or somebody in HR, like, Hey, I’m feeling really burned out and I want to quit? And then they suggested this as a counter offer? Or did you propose it? Or how did it actually come about?

Vikram Seth
So I actually had a whole other thing going on my decision to take a sabbatical was a combination of stuff. One was uneasiness and this urge inside that I’m missing out, I need to do something, I need to try out some of these ideas that I have in my head, etc. So that was probably not enough of a catalyst for me, the bigger catalyst was that what happened was around that time, same sort of time, my friend passed away. So at the age of, I think, was 28. He had like chronic illness from birth, he had cystic fibrosis. But the point was that when he passed away, that was almost like my reflection on my own mortality and finiteness, like, this always happens, right? Like you, you need something external to kind of trigger stuff you already know that you need to do and make a change on but you don’t do it until something external pushes you in that direction. So I already had that inside. But then this was a major trigger for me that I needed to sort of resolve my own desires. And also the other part of that was that part of my uneasiness was also just being away from friends and family and this was a close friend who was in London, passing away So there’s also just like the direct thing that Oh, shit, I should be closer to friends and family, because God knows what can happen. So it was kind of like multiple things. One of the first things I did on my sabbatical was to go in do vipassana retreat. We can get into that. But your question or how, how practically, how did I arrange it? So firstly, my manager was fully aware of the personal situation, because I got to took a week off to go to the funeral I then to my friend’s funeral, I then said, Actually, I want to stay in London, like, I don’t feel like coming back right now. So we sort of did the short term thing where for a month, I worked remotely, and then I came back and I said, Hey, look, yeah, I need to do this, I just need to do this for myself. And I need to move back to London. So initially, what I was, I actually had a few things going, because I typically tend to do this, if, if I want to do something, I will have multiple avenues to achieve that. And then one of them may materialize. So I had three things going. One was I said to my manager, Alright, I’m gonna, I want to, I want to go and work, I’ll stay in this role. But I want to work from London. So we did that for a month, then the second thing was actually long term, I want to move back to London. So if you can permanently move this role to London, then great. Otherwise, I’ll get another role in London, within Shell in somewhere else. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll leave shell and find something else. So I have very candid conversations with my manager, again, like I tried to make it a point to like, cultivate a good relationship with my manager, because otherwise, I mean, if you don’t have that, then firstly, like, what’s the point of even staying somewhere where you don’t have a good relationship with people you’re constantly working with. And then secondly, also, if you understand each other better than you can manage all of these things. And if it doesn’t, then feel like you’re pushing against this immovable process and system, you’re just dealing with one individual human being, who can actually influence a lot for you. So I have a very open conversations. And we basically tried each of these almost, so I spent a bit of time in London, then I came back, I said, Okay, look, I want to do something else we tried to make working from the same role work, but that like it logistically didn’t make sense. So then I just started applying for roles in London as well, that didn’t really work out until I just thought, Screw this, I’m gonna take a sabbatical. Because that was, I think, something else I just researched. I brought it up with my manager. And we saw that, okay, this could work. And he’s fully supportive of it. And it’s kind of like, there was definitely like a thought in my head. Two years, are they really going to honor this? Set me back. After two years of being away, prodigal

Neville Mehra
son returns that everybody’s like, you, as I’m listening to this, like, I kind of rail against, you know, corporate culture and climbing the corporate ladder and spending your life in a cubicle and all of the stuff that’s kind of become cliche, these days, gaped the nine to five. But one thing that is coming across is that I suppose it’s the thing sort of like Daisey, parents have been telling their kids forever. And that’s like, you know, go work for one of these big companies, right? Go work for Microsoft, or shell or Google, or one of the big consulting companies or Goldman Sachs, which I think have a lot of challenges, especially burnout and things. But at least one nice thing is sort of what you’re describing where you could stay within the company and do things like move to another city, although it didn’t work out yet for you at that point, but also the policies of taking a sabbatical. And I think it’s a weird sort of a balance for them in the sense that like, your work is valuable enough that they’re willing to leave a door open for you. And yet at the same time, you know, if it’s like a three person company, there’s no way they could just have one of the people gone for a year or two and not hire somebody else. In the meantime, there’s sort of a sweet spot there, where it’s like, okay, we really value you and we accept that you need time off. And we’ll keep a role open for you whenever you’re ready to come back, and we’ll be able to survive in the meantime,

Vikram Seth
this only works if you do two things consistently, way beforehand. One you have to perform. And two, you have to build up trust. If you don’t do those two things, then there you’re not going to get the trust back family and my close friends always joking around, especially my mom and my brother, like constantly joking that they just seem to always give me stuff on a silver platter. And the reason he says that is because for example, I will I will always shape my working schedule to how I want to work. I do. And it sounds a bit ridiculous, but like, I do not work nine to five. Like I said, That’s not how I can work like sometimes I will I will work quite regularly like I will sleep in very late and then I’ll work like extremely well. Yeah, it’ll work extremely well. Like mid night for him. And, and the thing is that that’s not all the time but like, sometimes I, I just I do that, and I need to do that. And I’d much rather. So I also questioned sometimes myself like internally I’m like shit Am I just really disabusing the system, but what always gets reflected back to me is that nobody cares as long as you it’s output focused. So and that’s what I, that’s something that I really value a lot. And is one reason, one reason that I’d probably stayed in Shell this long. And another reason and also why I, like ran away from investment banking, where I worked for a while because it was, at least at that time, and where I was in, it was the opposite. It was FaceTime, it was input, and of course, outputs important, but you were literally valued on how long you sat in your desk. And for me, that’s bullshit, because I work far more effectively going out for a walk, and synthesizing ideas before hours, and coming back and executing those ideas in half an hour. Then, sitting there for four hours at my desk and doing jack shit because I won’t be able to, I won’t be able to synthesize anything.

Neville Mehra
I’m the exact same way. It’s just funny for me to hear that from you as an economist, even like, I mean, I suppose it’s the whole thing of like, knowledge work is knowledge work. And obviously, what you do has major elements of creativity. But it’s just, it’s, it’s interesting, because it kind of breaks the mold of what we typically think of as creative careers. But everything you’re describing is exactly the process of, you know, artists and writers and, and other kind of like, what I would call maybe more traditionally creative professions where it’s like, yeah, you can’t strap that to a nine to five, like, if you’re creative at the middle of the night, you know, I mean, like, like, no one assumes that, like Ernest Hemingway, you know, sat at a desk in an office from a certain time to a certain time and did all of his best creative work during that time, you just sort of accept this idea that as a writer, or as a painter, or any any type of creative that like it comes in spurts. And what’s the Naval Ravikant, like, Hunt like a lion, you know, like, go after a big kill, and then rest for a while, it makes total sense. I guess one thing that I’m hearing, and I just want to kind of like Echo for everyone listening is the amount of like thought and energy you’ve put into designing the way that you work and creating a situation where that’s possible. So sort of like pushing back against those kinds of constraints, changing industries, when you needed to having a relationship with your manager that allows you to do this, just kind of bringing it back to what we were talking about, at the beginning, the idea of all these people, both disaffected in their jobs, but many now actively planning to quit, you know, I mean, obviously, the pandemic has changed. Some of this people are more burned out than ever, they’re stressed, etc. But I think a lot of what’s going on right now is that workers feel empowered, in the sense that, you know, the labor market is tight. Any company you talk to, whether it’s a McDonald’s franchise, all the way up to, you know, Google or somebody with the most prestigious jobs, they all say that it’s hard to hire right now. They’re all looking for people. I mean, in the case of something like McDonald’s, they’re literally paying people to show up to an interview, just do the interview, if you’ll just come, they’ll pay you. And the reason I bring that up is because I think employees now have more leverage than ever to be able to dictate the terms of how they work. And you’ve effectively done that, and you’ve done it at a time when remote work wasn’t yet, you know, kind of mainstream accepted. And certainly the labor market was different, especially if we’re talking, you know, five to 10 years ago. So yeah, I don’t want to take us too far off track. But I just think there’s something there for, again, for listeners, whether you work in one of these big companies that has a defined policy, like the one you took advantage of at Shell or not, like if you’re just you know, working in a smaller company, just the idea that like, Hey, boss, this is how I can do my best work for you. And first of all, having the self awareness to know how you work best as you do, but But secondly, just almost like going on offense a little bit and saying, like, yeah, I can, I can do great work, but it’s on these terms. And maybe that’s just setting your hours, but maybe it’s also like leaving work for a year or so. And going away from that. Yeah,

Vikram Seth
I think I think agency is a fundamental part of all of this. And if you what typically happens is that you will take on a job because you need the money. And then because of that, you are now beholden to this job, because you need the money, and then your lifestyle is a standard thing, right? Then you have lifestyle creep, and now you’re shit scared to let go of the job and because you’re scared to let go of it. You also throw your agency out the window as well and you just follow what you need to follow because you’re too scared to go off the path that’s been set for you. And as a result, you’re probably not even going to do your best work anyway because you’re you’re You’re acting out of a place of fear. So I think that for me, it’s a lot of this wasn’t really that conscious consciously designed initially, it was simply, I cannot work like that. I literally can’t do it. So because I can’t do it, I had to shape it. Hell, I needed it. And then I started to see that, and I would I would have this conflict internally, like, oh, I, I should really show up at 9am every day. And it’s like, yeah, but the days, I would actually show up at 9am, I’d still be there at 9pm. Because that’s when I because I would only really do any work from 4pm to 9pm. So I’m like, Well, why the hell am I doing? Like nobody else cares? Nobody, nobody else is sitting there going, you know, he showed up at 9am. Today, very good. Okay, now he should leave like nobody, nobody’s doing so all they’re doing is they’re going, what’s the output he’s got here. And, and again, I think like having that mindset of agency, and then also understanding that you’re not necessarily going to be able to shape things from day one, because you, you haven’t yet built up any trust, you haven’t shown what you can do. So there’s a there’s kind of a balance there of once you yourself have that sense of integrity that Yeah, I know, I can do what I know, I have done my best and shown it. And now I can kind of make use of that and cash in on the goodwill. It doesn’t mean you have to spend three years doing that you could it could just be a month, or it could be the first project you do you absolutely smashed through that project. And then that’s your, that’s your data point to say, hey, look, I can work well, I can do what you hired me to do. I can give you creative ideas, I can give you input, and I can shape things. So now let me work how I work best. Again, for example, like one of another one of my managers, ironically, would work very similarly to me in sort of similar patterns, but would constantly question directly Why am I coming in late like tonight? For the first couple of times? I’ve responded saying, yeah, no, I’ll try and come in earlier, etc. I mean, this is just, I’m just using a really simple example of like, okay, time of coming into work. But that’s just a proxy for everything else, right? Because so many people just put so much emphasis on that. But then after a few times of having this conversation, I was like, Look, this is how I work best. If you want me to come in early, that’s fine. I will. But then don’t expect me to be able to be creative and be able to give you all these ideas I’ve been giving you because I simply can’t work like that. And then then, I mean, I was just like

Neville Mehra
blackmail them into your schedule. Because it’s just like, This is

Vikram Seth
literally how I work. And if you like my output, then you’re only going to, you’re literally only going to get my output this way. What is the point of me, I mean, this is Gary Vee, Gary Vaynerchuck, one of his whole thing was around play to your strengths, not your weaknesses, and double down on your strength. Now, if you’ve got a weakness, which is pulling everything else down, that’s a different story, you do need to pull that up to a good enough level. But if it’s just something like this, which is not even a real issue, it’s just a perceived issue. Because you perceive that your manager perceives that as an issue and they perceive it as an issue because that’s just a it’s just this imaginary construct, which is leftover from industrial age is bullshit. It doesn’t mean anything. So it again, it depends, it depends on the industry, it depends on what you’re doing, etc, etc.

Neville Mehra
Well, I think there’s also just companies that are, you know, so one version of sort of, like, oh, it’s it’s all in your head, like you think you should perform a certain way, not not about the output, but just like, you know, maintain a certain appearance in order to look like your, whatever, a good professional person at your company. And then it’s just this internal thing. It’s sort of like, if you’re wearing mismatching socks, you’re like, super aware of it, but the rest of the world doesn’t notice. That sounds a little bit like your case. I think, in fairness to there are certainly companies and people and like you experienced in investment banking, where they do put a lot of weight on that. And and in some cases, it sounds like, you know, maybe you can, as we’ve been talking about sort of go on the offensive and just kind of be like, Look, this is how I work best. Don’t you want this output? Don’t you want me at my best? And in some cases, maybe it’s just, you know, find, find the job or the industry or whatever, where you can do your best work. I think

Vikram Seth
it’s both like I couldn’t do that in in my investment banking role, because it logistically, again, didn’t work. Like you say, that was like a table state, because that’s simply how I work. So that didn’t fit for me. And I loved the work I was doing. But I couldn’t deal with that culture because I couldn’t maintain my creativity. I couldn’t maintain like I was getting frustrated because it was too constrained.

Neville Mehra
It’s a masochistic industry. It’s like it’s like let’s all put in 100 hour weeks just for the sake of outdoing each other and competing on who’s a better paperweight in their chair. But But

Vikram Seth
if that works great for someone. You mentioned self awareness like that. That’s another critical point. Like, if you want to do a certain type of thing, but actually you don’t fit into that area, then you need to decide what you want. Like, do you want to give up the thing you want to do to fit in? Or how do you want to play it. And for me, it was too much of I was giving up too much to do that it was too constraining was a

Neville Mehra
perfect segue, actually, because this goes to the broader point of this entire podcast of Never Normal as a whole and a lot of my work, but also in your story. And I think this is deep. And I’ll try to do it briefly. But like, I think underneath a lot of what we’re talking about is this idea of to what extent should you be trading today for tomorrow? So if you work in one of those investment bank careers, you mentioned that like, Oh, is that works for you? Look, maybe I’m just sort of biased and or I only meet, you know, the people who burned out from that career and who left it early, and whatever. And I know there are people who are very successful and who thrive in those companies. But I get the impression that almost no one enjoys at least that the level of working from 6am to 2am. And the constant pressure and deadlines, and there are literally suicides and heart attacks, among Junior staffers in these companies from the pressure directly attributed to the amount of pressure that there is. And so then the question becomes, Why does anybody do it? And the reason that they do it, as I’m told is, is not because Oh, yeah, it’s so fun to put in these 100 hour weeks, it’s because there’s this sort of like crucible that you go through. And then you make partner in a law firm, or, you know, you reach some status in one of these firms. And now, ostensibly, anyway, like, you’re higher up, and you get paid more, and you get some sort of profit sharing. And so you’re basically just grinding through this difficult period, for some sort of reward that comes later on. And it’s extreme in the case of those industries. But I think we all do this in life, I mean, school is pitched to us, as that basically knuckle down, you know, get through this thing, get the degree, and then you can go and do whatever, right. And, and even within school, I had plenty of this where it’s like, you know, all that, you know, you’re in middle school. Now, it’s really important that you, you know, get through this and do well, because when you’re in high school, then you’re gonna It’s always like this, there’s always this next level that’s in front of you that you’re preparing for, you had a friend passed away. And all of us have had, you know, some sort of awakening or wake up call, or whatever you want to call it with the pandemic. And now we’ve got this, again, the topic from the beginning, this idea of great resignation, and all these people who want to quit, and all these workers were just affected, and I can’t help but think part of it is people waking up to the idea of like, Sure, this path that I’m on right now, might be societally accepted, and it might lead to rewards down the road, and I’ve got this 401k That, you know, in 20 years, you know, I should be able to retire, hopefully, but in the meantime, they’re sacrificing day to day enjoyment. You mentioned that as a factor in in wanting to leave in addition to all the other stuff that was going on. So let’s go back to it. 2016, I think October 2016, you had worked out the sabbatical with your manager at Shell. And so what did you do? Like what’s what’s day one or week one, after they approve it, and you’re like, you’re on breaks, Hey, see you in a year or two?

Vikram Seth
Well, I think at some point around that time, I had a conversation with you. And you, you know, and the tip you gave me was just schedule something. Because if you don’t just schedule something, then you could just be sitting around for a while. Without any kind of endpoint of what you want to do. So just schedule something. So what I did pretty damn quickly, I think I spent a couple of weeks at home, again, wanting to spend time with family, etc. And then I thought I need a break I need to get out and one of my again, a close friend who I made in who actually made I met this friend in Aberdeen in Scotland where I was during the those few years, and we became very close and I thought you know what, I’m just gonna go and spend time with him. He moved to Dubai, I went to Dubai. And it was just it was just like going with the flow kind of thing. Like I I had this I had set in my mind like okay, where do I want to go? I want to travel around Asia. So let me go to Dubai first and then I’ll figure out where I want to go after that. So I had this kind of thing in my mind that I’m gonna do some backpacking type thing always like massively into spirituality and yoga, meditation etc. So I had in my mind that okay, I’ll go do some yoga retreat or some kind of like well being retreat, you know, go to like yoga barn in Bali, or whatever the standard stuff everybody does. But when I was in Dubai, my friend’s brother picked me up from the airport and in the car, so I’ve literally just landed and I’m in the car going to his house. So it’s literally the first thing that’s even happened. And I started chatting with him. And he said, Yeah, you know what, when I finished when he when he finished school or university, he was like, I need a break. And so he ended up doing Vipassana. And I was like, what’s that? I’ve never heard of the pastor, he told me about it. And it’s a 10 day silent meditation, meditation retreat, based on set the Vipassana practice in, in Buddhism, and the one that he went on was part of the global network of voluntary Vipassana retreats. And it was like, now I know it was the most hardcore one out of all of them, because it’s 10 days, no iContact, no reading, no writing, no speaking, no external stimulation whatsoever, etc. So, no, he’s telling me about this. He’s like, You should go on that. And unlike, and I actually, I was like, Yeah, I definitely need to go on that. So by the time I, you know, like a couple of I don’t know why, like, it was just like, it resonated so much. So by the, by the time I got to itself, bear in mind, I have just landed, it is landed from London to the boy. So I literally did not go out for breakfast until I had already booked my place on a vipassana retreat. So we get to his house. And that was the first thing I did. I just started, I read started reading up blogs and whatever. And some of them were horrifying, like people literally like running out of a bit past jumping out to them because they needed to escape. And they were so embarrassed that they couldn’t say anything to the, to the caretakers that they wanted to, they literally just like jumped the fence and ran away. And I was like, I have to do this, they literally have to do that. So I booked myself on the first of the partner that I could find in Asia and it was in Japan. And that was for like, it was going to be like a month later or something. So that suddenly like created my it created something for me to look forward to. And it gave me that tangible sense of this is my sabbatical. This is what I’m, this is the thing that’s going to rejuvenate me and give me that creativity back again. And it was just like, I need to explore this. And one of the reasons that resonated with me so much is because I’d been spending so many months before that, reading up on Wim Hof and trying out Wim Hof techniques, the Iceman, and all of these kinds of things, and Ido portal, movement, culture, and all of these things. And one of the things which kind of resonated with me and all of that was, which always has is putting my physical body under some sort of pressure, physical body or my mind to train myself up in a certain way. And Wim Hof is about cold exposure and breathing. Ido portal is about movement. And Vipassana is about probably for me, what was the more important starting point? Your mental state and just like, shutter everything, everything possible?

Neville Mehra
Alright, not talking, I think certainly, yeah.

Vikram Seth
The funny thing was that and obviously me too. Yeah, definitely. So my, my, when I told my mum this, her biggest concern was was not me going to some random village in rural Japan for 10 days and doing meditation. It was how the hell are you going to keep quiet for 10 days and not speak?

Neville Mehra
I have to ask you mentioned it was that he went to I think it was like the most difficult or something voluntary vipassana retreat involuntary Vipassana retreats, because that sounds terrifying.

Vikram Seth
No, what I meant is that this specific network of report, there’s multiple schools of the partner and centers, there’s there’s one which is under Goinka, who is the man that founded it, and this is, as far as I am aware, is one of the largest networks of the partner retreat centers around the world. It’s like almost any any country you can think of, they have a partner center. But the point is, the entire organization is completely voluntary. It’s run by volunteers. You also go there you go there voluntarily, but you also, it’s also entirely free. It’s based upon donation. So at the end of it, you you can donate or not donate and you can donate $1 Or a million dollars, whatever the hell you want. So it’s entirely run on goodwill and centers are built on a voluntary basis based on donations from the community. So it really is like the complete opposite of where you know the corporate world and where I what I needed to get out of and needed to take a break from I

Neville Mehra
love the serendipity also, I mean, it’s this is also one of those travel cliches, but it’s it’s damn well worth repeating and That is, first of all, just by like making space for new stuff to show up. I mean, I, I think I forgot about this part of your story, or maybe I didn’t even know it. But like you literally had just landed in like the first stop the first new country the first place on the trip after starting your sabbatical. And like not even as you said, gotten out of like the car yet, you’re just on the way home from the airport. And immediately, you have this suggestion of what you should do, which it sounds like you paired with my suggestion of like, put something on your calendar. So all the time doesn’t just disappear. And so you took those two together and ran with it and immediately scheduled, like the most intense possible mindfulness experience prior to that, were you I mean, you mentioned Wim Hof, you mentioned Ido portal, those are certainly practices that you could sort of contain within a normal lifestyle, right, you could do the breathing before work or something like that. So were you were you already thinking about the sabbatical as an opportunity to do something like this to like, find some sort of experimental quest? Or, I mean, I could imagine a lot of people take a sabbatical and just like, you know, do it to build a startup and hope that, you know, in the year that they’re off, they’ll build their business from zero to one. And then when the One Year comes up, you know, then they’ll just call their their bosses. I mean, presumably, it’s not a contractual obligation on the employee side. And you can just be like, you know, what, I took a sabbatical. And sorry, I had a change of heart, and I’m not going to come back was that like, was something like that, in your mind? Were you thinking like, I’m going to take this year off, and then try to replace my employer with some other thing? Or were you just basically like, I need one hell of a vacation?

Vikram Seth
Yeah, I actually forgot about this so interesting. It’s, you reminded me of a huge aspect of all of this. So So one thing is, I definitely, I definitely left with the intention that I’m not going to come back. But I’ve hedged my bet in case I decide I want to come back. So I…

Neville Mehra
Very on brand.

Vikram Seth
So I definitely left with that intention. It was almost like it was a free insurance policy, like why the hell wouldn’t I take it? So that was that? So that’s that bit. But did I think I’m gonna do a startup or something? No, absolutely not. I had zero, I needed space. And I, and again, like, I had, by this point, I had like six years of like, creativity, creative juices built up. And like all this, like, I’ve seen, like, I’m not necessarily an entrepreneur, but I have entrepreneurial tendencies. And those entrepreneurial tendencies were going nowhere, they’re just turning in my head for that entire time I’ve been in shell. And they’d come out in like, small doses of whatever creativity I could inject into a project I happen to be working on or like, you know, shaped my career a bit by deliberately moving somewhere, etc. But the real juice was not coming out, because it didn’t have that space to come out. I never knew if I had like a one month break, if I ever took a one month break, which I don’t think I did, from showing at any point, up until then, you know, I would, I would use that to go on a holiday with family or like friends or whatever, like, most of the time go to somebody’s wedding and some exotic location. But but the point was from again, for me, the way I work is this, like, I try and stay true to my energy cycle, not my, like, I schedule my energy code myself, according to my energy level, not my time. I absolutely I’m rubbish at scheduling according to time, I completely follow what my energy is doing. And the problem was up until this point, that energy was just keeping on building up. So what you see what I’ve remembered now is I had this intense desire to go and live with a tribe, in specifically in South America, like in the Amazon, or Peru or something like that. And one of the reasons for that is from reading John Perkins books to the guy who wrote Confessions of an economic hitman. He actually before that he actually wrote a whole bunch of books on shamanism and living with tribes in in Amazon. And one of the reason he was living with one of them is because he was actually there to go and build a dam in like the Amazon rainforest, for example, or not him build a dam, but he was there to get intelligence and, and kind of CO opt the tribal leaders said that he could get the World Bank to come in and build something. And that’s what the Confessions of an economic hitman is about, but what he wrote about before that, so I read up so much on this and once again, I mean, there’s so many tangents in here, but like one major interest for me is development economics. And even if you skip the development, part like development, personal development, spiritual development, global development, and a major thing for me was kind of similar to the partner like, what if I just shut out the whole of the modern world, and go back to some of the most wise people in our society who don’t have the technological and scientific tools to them, and yet reach many of the same conclusions as we do with the same scientific and technological tools, etc, etc. So like that was like massively interest. But the specific thing that I wanted to go on, which again, was like John, it was a, it was this tribal tribal quest kind of thing. Like you go in and spend like a month living with the tribe. Again, I wasn’t comfortable doing this as a lone backpacker, going by myself, because I needed some sense of security. So instead, I was looking at like, pay two grand for this company, which had been was actually a charity set up by John Perkins going and living with one of these tribes. So that gave me this like, hedge, again, sense of security. But unfortunately, like the whatever, there wasn’t enough people going at that time, and so it didn’t work out. And so the next time I thought about that was, again, this person or thing, and I was like, Okay, well, I’m not getting my like connection with wisdom with the tribe, but I can get it directly from myself by doing the past.

Neville Mehra
I suppose I maybe thought about this before, but I don’t know that I ever fully connected the dots. Again, going back to the kind of things that you keep mentioning, so Ido Portal, if you don’t know him, anyone listening. He’s the movement guy, watch his videos in YouTube, he uses his body and like a super playful way like a child. But he’s all about sort of getting into your body and reconnecting with it. Wim Hof, same idea, but but about breathing and all the way down to the level of like your immune system and being able to sort of control it in some ways. And then again, cold exposure. And the thing about cold exposure. So I’ll come together in a moment is that we have such a primal reaction to exposure to extreme cold, especially cold water, like you can look into the what is it the mammalian dive reflex that it’s like involuntary to come back to our favorite word, and this snaps you back into your body? Right? And then Vipassana is this control over your mind? And maybe that’s too strong of a phrasing but something approaching that right. It’s yeah, I mean, getting your thinking under control. Well, one of them being mindful.

Vikram Seth
Yeah, one of the core philosophy or the core task of the partner is accepting that everything changes. So you’re literally meditating upon change, you’re observing, for example, pain in your body. And instead of reacting to the pain, you simply observe that until, and remind yourself that everything changes, everything is transient, and therefore you’re able to endure all of this mental anguish, of thoughts coming through your mind, but also physical anguish. Because you’re constantly reminding yourself do not react, this is transitory this is going to change and so it’s, that’s that’s the but it is yeah, it’s a it’s a way of training yourself through direct experience of the trends and three nature of existing

Neville Mehra
Wim Hof Ido portal, Vipassana and then connecting the fourth now the tribe, which is I mean, you specifically mentioned the I mean, it’s one thing to just go in and like, you know, with some sort of anthropological curiosity be like, oh, I want to see how these people live. But you you specifically wanted like the wisdom of people who lack our modern technology, and I can’t help but now put all that together in the same context as like the antidote for all the thinking and brain time. To put it one way and yes, so

Vikram Seth
we’re so heavily in our dreams and our frontal lobe frontal lobe exactly is great. Yeah, West west, so in our frontal lobe, but that we’re not in our body. Yeah. And, I mean, I was gonna say we’re not in when we’re not in our reptilian mind, but, but we don’t even have we, we don’t even have awareness and control over our reptilian mind as some of the you know, let’s just say tribal people, but but really what I mean is, you know, traditionally you probably had, we had more awareness and control of our reptilian mind, ie the part that involves, again, the involuntary part of our brain that just reacts and responds, fight or flight, but we’re so in our frontal lobe that we’re so mostly so far removed from our bodies, hence why it’s so interesting to see that like some of the large like, you know, in the health and well being space, you know, gyms fitness, like peloton or like all of these things, then like yoga, yoga, meditation, mindfulness, headspace, all of these things like they are huge industries, but again, they’re industries now. We found a way of fitting them into our paradigm of business models, as opposed to which is again why I was like Republic. Snow was important for me because it was not a business model. And that was critical because it’s not designed in that manner. But again, I get a lot of these things are like we’re bringing, and we’re bringing those antidotes back in to try and resolve some of the pain that we have and the like disconnection that we have.

Neville Mehra
That’s what I’m noticing is that you were sort of like self medicating with this kind of like anything that wasn’t cerebral, I guess is what I’m trying to say. First, you’re doing it in these kind of like, you know, little doses around work, and then it then it just boiled over to a point where you’re like, Okay, I need to just get away from this altogether. And like, perhaps this is obvious, but maybe I need to tell you anyway, if most people were to, like get out of an airplane in Dubai and have somebody tell them, Hey, there’s this thing where you go, and they like, basically lock you in a place for 10 days, you’re not allowed to talk to anybody, and the food is intentionally bland, and you’re not allowed to make eye contact, you just have to sit there, most people would describe that as prison and run the other direction. And you’re like, awesome, I’m signing up for this. Pretty much, which says, I mean, it’s it’s one thing it says about your personality, which I think is fantastic. But it also kind of goes back to that same point of just burnout. And you know, I mean, hey, the show’s called never normal. And I think there’s a lot of things that we accept we society in general accept as normal, because they are sort of mainstream right now. But this idea that like you spend, effectively 24 hours a day less sleeping in, in this kind of cerebral state, right, where you’re either like reading the news, or working or doing something else on a screen, all of which involves, like thinking and analysis and stuff that you and I are both sort of predisposed to enjoying and doing anyway. It’s not bad. I’m not I’m not in any way against that stuff. I love that stuff. We’re doing it right now. I’m analyzing, talking about you doing all this non cerebral stuff. But the idea that a human being and body and mind can spend, again, like 24 hours a day doing that this is not normal, like this has never been normal at any point in human history. Until very recently, it’s never

Vikram Seth
normal to use a very apt phrase. But again, balance balance is critical. And where we are imbalanced, were so imbalanced towards our frontal lobes and cerebral work, etc. Like, I mean, there’s so many things I can bring. First of all, just another funny coincidence, this is one of the major reasons we found it, bounce Bhangra, which I’m sure we’ll we’ll get to but sounds like it’s dance, cardio fitness for no other reason. And whether it’s a business or not, whether we make money from it or not, is irrelevant, because the point of it is that we need it ourself, myself and my brother, we need to do this which dance fitness get into our body. And one of the ways that we close the sessions is through meditation, and feeling your body and breathing, etc. So that one of the reasons for that is to provide I mean, I’m maybe going into it too deep at the moment. But just to close that point, one of the reasons we do that, specifically in central London, is to provide an antidote to city professionals, people stuck and surrounded by this cerebral paradigm, like you need a way out of it. And and balance is critical. So again, like what what is imbalanced working nine to five every single day is imbalanced? Like how can you do that all the time? How can you we have a structure of a corporate structure and a kind of company ownership structure and via stock markets, which essentially follow a quarterly cycle of reviewing your performance, like how was your your what’s your, what are you? What were your quarterly profits now, so you’re basically forcing this regularity on something which is not necessarily regular, you’re forcing linearity on complex dynamic systems, which are by definition, nonlinear. And this is, this is what this is what our entire society is, where we’re taking nonlinearities and making them linear and, and that causes a lot of pain and strife, like, and it will come out and it does come out. It comes out individually and it comes out society. I might be over generalizing

Neville Mehra
here. But I feel like there’s almost an Eastern twist to what you’re saying in the sense of like, I mean, seasons and nature and things exist, you know, universally and yet, I think in the West, in at least most of Europe, and certainly in the United States. And I imagine Canada Yeah, we think in exactly the way that you’re describing, we tend to think like the graph goes up into the right everything is sort of like linear constant progress. And at least from my own exposure to sort of more Eastern philosophy and religion and even views of history. It’s much more cyclical in nature, right? Things go up and then they come back down. There’s a day and then there’s a night there’s a winter and there’s a summer and there’s a spring and a fall and it’s just it’s it’s constantly cycling, and we talked about that a little bit in terms of like your rhythm of the day and the way you’re sort of more tuned into that, I think then certainly the average person, but also just then maybe jobs than a typical job would would respect. But then even this coming back to this concept of a sabbatical, right, and you mentioned the idea of like an every seven years things

Vikram Seth
every seven years. So So actually, you’re right, like Eastern philosophy and Eastern traditions pay a lot more heed to circularity versus Western. However, a lot of the thought a lot of my thinking in this space has developed even further through systems thinking and especially ecological system. So which is primarily a Western study or Western discipline, I say that I mean, in the sense that the people I’ve read are Western, or in the sense that this is this is very core to environmentalism and systems thinking and complex system dynamics, etc. Because actually, those two models get merged the linear and the circular get merged in, in it. So if you look at how ecological systems actually function is spiral dynamics. So essentially, you’ve got a circular process. But that circular process is still in increasing to the up in the right as it’s spiraling. So you’ve got this, think of like a boom bust cycle, but the trend is still going up, you do have the circularity. And you do have this rhythm of up and down and up and down, and up and down. But it’s still rising. And so again, there’s also this concept of well, actually, what’s happening is, we’re not just constantly going up into the right, or we’re not just constantly going up and down and fluctuating between A and B, we’re transcending and including, so we’re constantly transcending where we were before, by going up, and including that in there. So that’s how things are actually evolving. Like when you’re new. When we evolved from eight primates to human order, Homo sapiens. We haven’t then, like, the prior species hasn’t been completely and utterly destroyed, they still exist, bacteria doesn’t suddenly no longer exist, because you’ve got more complex forms of life, we’ve transcended bacteria, and yet we still include bacteria in the world, and so on, and so forth. And so I think this is something that, for me is really important, because in the most forward thinking parts of society, this thinking does come in, for example, if you look at something like Google, how Google design their offices, and Facebook, and how how the, you know, big tech, how they design their offices, they have done this kind of transcending include concept, and maybe they haven’t really, maybe they’ve definitely done it towards their own for their own benefit. But it’s this acknowledgment that we need the traditional corporate way of working, but we also need to give something back to people, we need to give them that sense of risk, and play, etc. Because having too much of an imbalance on the corporate side isn’t giving these people who are all knowledge workers, because every single person working for Google is a knowledge worker, we don’t have any industrial workers, our entire business model business is entirely like creative knowledge thinking in and software, etc. So they’re far enough removed from the industrial model that they can play around with it. And what have they come up with, they’ve come up with exactly this, this kind of go back a bit, pick up something from the past, you could see that as a regression, but it’s not a regression because they’ve they’ve combined combined that regulatory nine to five structure, etc, with something new and bringing in the kind of like, we need some playfulness, we need some time back just to make

Neville Mehra
this a little bit less abstract. I can picture the exact graph, you’re thinking of that kind of like upward spiral, I think Balaji actually tweeted, tweeted one recently, we can link to it. But if you think of even like a tree, so like there’s times of year when it grows a lot, because there’s a lot of like abundant sunshine in the spring and summer and rainfall. And then there’s times of year when like all the leaves fall off, and when it goes sort of dormant in the winter. But it doesn’t first of all, doesn’t die in the winter, necessarily, at least not a healthy tree. But it also doesn’t just like stay the same size forever. So if you were to look at it through a lens of just cyclicality it would seem like it’s just staying the same forever. And if you would look at it through the lens of just like upward growth, it would seem that the tree is constantly growing bigger and constantly having more leaves. But in fact, it’s going through like a spring, summer, winter, whatever cycle of losing and regaining leaves, but it’s also growing bigger and taller and more branches and all that over time. Even weightlifting, for example, or almost any type of physical training has a similar thing. Like you have days when you’re lifting and the days when you’re resting and then days when you’re lifting again, but ideally, you’re lifting more over time, maybe not from day to day, but certainly from like month to month.

Vikram Seth
Yeah. So just just to circle back to the like stock markets quarterly, quarterly performance, etc. So what you’ve just said You see that circularity and the and the linearity point, the more you zoom out so that when you look at that tree on 100 year time horizon, you see that it’s not just losing its leaves and it never grows the leaves back. It’s going through the cycle, and it is growing over time. But what we do, for example, with quarterly performance is we’re so far zoomed in that we are looking only at like summer, winter, Autumn spring, we’re not looking at, we’re not looking at what’s happening over time. It’s only when you kind of are now I’m thinking of like a, you know, like, the graph of Tesla shares are something like, the exact same example. Yes. So now, if you zoom in, if you zoom out and you zoom out, or Amazon or whatever, you zoom out far enough, you will see the trend over time. And you know, you can link this into like instant gratification, etc. Why are we so zoomed in? Why, and this is, this is the point, this was the point of this is the point of the sabbatical, it’s to zoom out, this is the point of Vipassana, to zoom out, this is a point of, why am I interested in going and sitting with some tribal people who will hold this wisdom, because a lot of that wisdom is zooming out and being and stepping back. And that’s so important, because you don’t see the upward trend of the graph, when all you see is, you know, this week, I worked 70 hours. And in my case, you know, my friend passed away, and then I’m stuck in this city without any friends and family. And my job’s not going anywhere. Yeah. But if you zoom out, you see what’s really going on. And you don’t and because otherwise you’re stuck in this reacting to your immediate mindset and your immediate condition.

Neville Mehra
I mean, you could apply this to say like cryptocurrencies where, you know, the people who are long term bullish, we act the same way every time there’s a dip in the price, like you guys are too zoomed in by the day. Yeah. Because over time, okay, yeah, but you see it going up, we’re bullish in the long term. So you’re paying way too much attention to the fact that the price went up 5000 or down 5000. Yesterday, and you’re missing the fact that it was, you know, whatever, 10 cents, 10 years ago, and $5, a few years after that, and $1,000 At some point, I’m talking about Bitcoin

Vikram Seth
Yeah. And you’re missing the fact that this is going to replace like some aspect of this is going to replace how you currently do it. So if you look 50 years, hence, you’ve just built a whole new Amazon from scratch, which you could have been part of on day one, for example. But the

Neville Mehra
reason I bring that up is because these are all examples where the graph is is going up into the right, and you just have to have the right perspective to see that and to sort of ignore you know, what’s to see the forest for the trees or whatever. But I think part of the thing with your sabbatical, and certainly your friend passing away is that like the graph is not always going up into the right. And you can also lose focus of that, you know, when you’re just so sort of squashed with all the day to day, you don’t have to be at work at this time. I have to do this thing. This project is due, oh, I’m too busy. Oh, it’s the holidays. And you’re just you’re constantly reacting to some short term stimulus. You miss the fact that actually no, you’re not like, you used to have all these hopes and dreams or you used to be excited about life, or you used to have more friends or have more time for friends or have better health or something else. And instead, you’re just caught up in this day to day grind. And yes, your sabbatical does seem like the perfect antidote to that. And Vipassana specifically within it. Like I mean, I know that was 10 days out of what ended up being, I think, a year or more. So you did the vipassana retreat, you had that experience. I

Vikram Seth
was in Japan for the vipassana retreat, so I wasn’t so obviously, I then I stayed in Japan, so. So after that, I mean, I sort of just continued on that theme. I spent a bit of time in Tokyo, but actually was like him at that point. It was like a bombardment of too much modernity, after spending 10 days in my partner. So I get I was staying with a Serbian friend who lives there. And again, like I didn’t come up with a suggestion, he suggested to me, he’s like, look, what you you’re in this mode right now, you should really go and check out this place. Koyasan. Koyasan is a monastery town in the mountains, which is supposedly the you know, the birthplace of Buddhism in Japan. So it’s where a Japanese official went to China specifically to find out about Buddhism and bring it back and came back and was so affected by it, that he set up this monastery town in the mountains, because it was so peaceful. And so I then went there and I spent 10 days in that monastery. Then I spent a bit of time traveling around Japan after that and did finally spend a good amount of time in Tokyo. And in sort of the heart of like the crazy technologically powered place and then then after that, I went to India, and again continued on the theme Went to Kerala in the south of India and didn’t 10 Day Yoga Retreat. So yeah, I continued on that theme. And then then it pretty much ended after that, because I spent it too. I went to two close friends weddings in India, where I just go completely and utterly drunk. So, but balance balance was needed. That was the real like, stepping back phase of that sabbatical. I spent it only in India, and Japan. And then after that, I finally decided, okay, I actually started getting itchy feet that I want to create something now like I’ve I’ve done enough stepping back and going in inward, I was actually getting very uneasy that like, what am I doing to contribute to society, I want to create something I want to do something and build something

Neville Mehra
was that I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you do these retreats especially like Vipassana, but even like attend a yoga retreat? Did you walk away from those with any sort of like new? I mean, there’s an experiential learning, but was there some sort of like, Aha, epiphany kind of thing that you did that retreat? And then you were like, got it? Or did you feel some sort of like, sea change? Or was it just like, you know, a bit more relaxed, a bit less, kind of with your head and work a bit less stressed, maybe a bit more at peace? Or like, what was the what was the emotion when you finished those? But also, yeah, like, was there some epiphany,

Vikram Seth
there’s a couple of things. So one was more a reminder, I’m like a experiential internal reminder that I need to do this, I need to do these things much more often. Because, again, it’s that balance. And I need that. I can’t wait seven years to do another sabbatical. So one was a reminder that like, almost like, well, well done, you’re back home again, or welcome back home, like this is who you truly are. And you have to do this regularly. That was one which is more kind of subtle, but the other one was specifically from the past, which was this whole concept of furniture, which is the change transient, everything is transient, everything is changing that I mean, I’ve since I’ve been a kid, I’ve been reading philosophy and and doing yoga, etc. But that concept has been largely theoretical, and Vipassana it was so profoundly in my face, for example, what are you actually doing? Because not right, you can’t talk you can’t do any of this stuff, what do you actually do it you you have 10 hours of scheduled meditation every day. So in that time, the schedule is like one hour meditation, a break and then a two hour session and then a lunch break and then like another two hour so it’s all you’re doing is you’re just like meditating, take a break in one of those breaks you will eat and then the rest of it like you there’s nothing else you can do. You’re not allowed to exercise you know not to run you’re not allowed to do stretching or anything like you literally are there for meditation sleep and a little bit of sustenance to keep you going and maybe a shower now and then when you have a two hour meditation slot twice a day and and obviously you haven’t tapped you’re doing this 10 hours but the two hour meditation slot lets you go very, very deep. And you’re doing this constantly but what happens is very very quickly, your body hurts because you’re sitting in a cross legged position for 20

Neville Mehra
minutes in my ass is now and my back hurts and like I’m already making like the grocery list precisely in my brain

Vikram Seth
precisely so so what happens is on day one, you’re just fidgeting all over the place and you’re spending the whole time you’re you’re absolutely not meditating like your mind is all over like what the hell am I doing here? You’re listening at whatever you’re doing anything but actually doing the meditation day two, I went up to the My back was hurting now because after like another couple of hours so I went up to one person you’re allowed to speak to is the teacher and you can only speak in a given slot. So in my given slot, which is like you know, 30 seconds to just like ask a question about whatever. So I basically used up my 32nd slot saying to the teacher, my back is hurting Is it okay? If I have backrest because you can’t just take a backrest, you need to ask for one and and my the response I got was you can take them backwards, but you’re here for a reason. And you need to think about whether that backrest is going to support the reason you’re here for or not. And I’m like, oh god sakes, like Screw that.

Neville Mehra
That’s the most like

Zen possible answer ever. That’s fantastic. But

Vikram Seth
the reason I say this is because by day three, my back is absolutely killing me. I’m sitting there doing two hours meditation. And then what suddenly happened on like, day four or something I’m observing was all pain disappeared. And then every I kept sitting down for like the next one hour meditation slot, the next two hour meditation slot, there was no pain and then when the pain arose, it was no longer theoretical knowledge. It was experience or knowledge that oh, this pain is actually going to go away. It will go away. I I know it’s going to go away. So that was, that was a profound thing. And again, it was, it’s a subtle understanding, because you kind of already know that theoretically, but it’s a very different thing. Having a real example in your memory imprinted in your memory that remember, remember, when this happened, the pain actually goes away. And I mean, you can sort of relate that to like a breakup or whatever, like, you can use that. But I think for me, that was like a critical thing. There’s,

Neville Mehra
there’s a book, that’s something that I hadn’t even read it I’ve just seen it on the shelf in stores, like years ago, something like all I need to know I learned in kindergarten, and it says, the title just sort of caught my eye. And I often think about that, that like, sure there’s some history dates, and there’s some you know, physics or something that I didn’t learn that that young, but basically all of the like tacit knowledge, you need to just sort of go about low the book knowledge, you need to just go about life, you learn pretty early on, and it’s just, it’s all those sorts of experiences that convert that into something different. It’s, there’s such a huge difference between me saying to you, oh, yeah, the pain will eventually go away, don’t worry about it, which basically provides you zero relief, and you haven’t had that, right. Yeah. When I think of meditation, I think of meditation as basically firsthand experience of the such a simple truth like that of just sort of like you are not your thoughts, right. I mean, that’s, that’s kind of the standard example for mindfulness. But any of that kind of stuff, the idea that like by sitting still for a moment, and actively want to see controlling your thoughts, because that’s still not quite the right phrasing, but observing, but but distancing yourself, I guess, is the right way like this, the discovering that witness perspective and realizing that like, there’s you and then there’s all this stuff that’s floating around. And normally, we don’t have enough distance to be able to see that, right. It’s that same principle we’ve been talking about right back to the quarterly quarterly earnings reports. So being able to sort of step back from that and see that I can tell you that or you can tell me that or anybody else. But unless you’ve actually done it, it’s very diverse. Like, you can’t read a book about how to shoot a basketball. Well, you could, but ultimately, you just need to throw that orange circle through a hoop a bunch of times, and you’ll figure it out. Like, no amount of just like book knowledge about it will do the trick.

Vikram Seth
Yeah. And so this is, we’re going to end up in Hinduism now.

Neville Mehra
It’s inevitable, I suppose.

Vikram Seth
But yeah. So this is two points on Firstly, this is a core fundamental goal and concept and point in Hinduism. So core Hindu philosophy, like it’s clouded by a massive layer of mythology on top, but that layer of mythology is just to basically pull you in because nobody, nobody connects with abstract philosophy ever. So you need that company. Which is, which is why every every religion or school of thought has to have stories, to connect at stories and morals and fables and blah, blah, blah, because otherwise you just like, nobody’s going to bother with it. But anyway, the core philosophy of Hinduism is direct experience is that is the only thing that leads you to the ultimate truth, you can only you should only believe in that which you have direct experience of and therefore, and so, this is one of the is for any lay any anybody who is like unfamiliar with Hinduism, Hindu philosophy, or even people who are familiar, very familiar with Hinduism, but observe it at that mythological like 1000s of Gods level, this may seem like am I talking about the same religion or school of thought because it doesn’t come across like this at all, but it is the core core of Hinduism is that purpose of all is actually you should not rely on your teacher you should not rely on anything else other than your direct experience. However, your senses your five senses are not your only direct experience, real direct experience of the core reality of who you are, comes from meditation and comes from a meditation doesn’t in this context does not just mean sitting cross legged, with your eyes closed, it means following that which is most true for you. So for example, if you are inherently in love with basketball, if you take that to its conclusion that is meditation because what you will do is you will become one with that thing. And this is what happens when you you like this is easy to relate to there you can see you know, when a musician for example, with you, when you start learning music, you’re all clunky, and then at some point, then you have to follow you have to follow the structure you have to follow like the notes in front of you because you have to play every single note each and it sounds robotic, and then slowly, you get used to it and you memorize it and you don’t need the notes anymore. And then You’re still playing tunes which have been composed by other people. And then suddenly, a point comes where you become like Mozart or Beethoven or whoever, and you are creating. And when you’ve got to that point, it’s coming from your innate creativity. And that actually is considered in Hinduism, that is direct experience that is you connecting with your truth and the truth coming through you. I mean, there’s different aspects of this. And you know that that’s a personal truth. That’s not necessarily an ultimate truth. That’s not that’s not necessarily you did this that’s like you coming face to face with God expressing itself through you? Which what, what else is that, like, what else?

What else is there to achieve in life, other than expressing the ultimate truth of who you are through yourself. And this is the point, this comes back to agency, again, an empowered be feeling empowered to do what is flow states of getting into a flow state. So like, again, all of these things are fundamentally new. So that now that’s that this, the other point here is that I’ve been going for Hinduism classes, like a Sunday school kind of thing of Hinduism, since I was about, I don’t know what it was, like seven, eight years old, or something like that. But prior to that, I was already interested through our own like family connection, and practices, and etc, the thing that I constantly was being taught was this as a concept. It’s all about direct experience. Like, that’s what the core part of Hinduism is, meditation is so important. But what pissed me off over and over again, was that nobody was teaching me how to meditate. Nobody was like, what I was doing was the Cerebro side of it, I was learning, and I’m reading and I’m listening to talks, and I’m listening to, I’m going to Sunday school, and we’re sitting there and we’re writing, and we’re learning and I’m like, good, but you’re constantly telling me that the whole core of all of this is physical practice of meditation, and yet, I’m not doing it, I’m not doing the meditation. Whereas at home, what we were doing is we’re doing the prayers, and we’re doing the rituals. And And the irony of that was that I felt the connection far more from the rituals and the prayers, because that’s designed to make you feel a connection. It’s not just, and so it’s just so interesting that you’ve got these two things going, the one which we have largely abandoned in most of the world, which is the ritualistic prayers, going to the temple, or the church or the mosque, or etc, that place of worship the congregation, or even doing your own prayers at home and following the rituals, lighting, the inset tinkling the bell, etc. We’ve disregarded all that we’ve chucked out. And when I say we, I don’t mean me a new I mean, as a society that is not seen as the approach, the approach has been replaced by the cerebral side of it. Like, let’s study neuroscience, let’s understand consciousness. Let’s delve into the hard problem of consciousness and see where God exists inside the brain. And like, let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s do away with, let’s do away with

Neville Mehra
the, yeah, we’re dissecting pituitary glands, instead of instead of lighting fires, and just staring at them

Vikram Seth
precisely, and let’s, let’s, let’s do away with like, the concept of God, and but let’s keep the philosophy of it. And let’s delve into. And that’s, that’s why that’s, again, why people are so or why I feel like the modern world is far more originates far more with Buddhism, than with other religions, because Buddhism has kind of already done that. But there’s stripped away the concept. It’s agnostic towards God. It’s not agnostic towards suffering, it says suffering is, like real. And let’s take this practice. And it’s funny that actually, it’s far easier to connect with all of this through all of the rituals and the prayers, and the lighting of the incense. But you don’t understand why you’re doing it without the philosophy etc. You don’t understand the why, from the practice, but the the theory and the why, and the philosophy means nothing if you don’t do any practice. And this thing pissed me off to no end until I was like, I need to actually do the meditation, and only to actually do this. And again, I feel like that’s another reason Vipassana was so crucial for me. And again, I was exploring this through yoga, etc. as well.

Neville Mehra
There’s a word that I hear often that for the longest time, I mean, it just sounds kind of cool, but I could never really understand what it really refers to and its mysticism, and it’s exactly now now that I do understand that it’s exactly what you’re describing. It’s the difference between sort of reading the holy texts at a very kind of surface level of like, yep, on this page, it said that this thing happened and so so was born in this you know, Valley and whatever, versus this kind of direct experience that you’re describing. And every religion that I know of, at least of the kind of major traditional religions has some major component of what you’re talking about. And just going back to our earlier point, we live in a time that is not normal by historical standards. Like the the sort of absence of religion as a part of everyday life is a very recent phenomenon for most of the world, like maybe a couple of 100 years at the absolute most in certain societies. But that’s really stretching, like we’re really talking about a few decades, if you’re talking like sort of like the median person walking around on the street, not having a regular religious practice. And they don’t say that to try to convert people or something, but rather, just going back to your earlier point about imbalance. And there are all of these sort of what I think you could almost describe as like secular substitutes, exactly back to what you were doing before, before leaving your job and then being confronted with death and being confronted with this sort of sense of burnout and feeling too zoomed in. You’re sort of rediscovering all of these various, you could even call them tactics, but I think they’re rooted in something much deeper than that.

Vikram Seth
Well, isn’t. Isn’t it ironic that part of Wim Hof ‘s part of Wim Hof structure that he teaches one of the three parts is essentially meditation and yoga Ido portal is about movement, but there’s meditation in the result like it’s, again, exactly what you say, like secular substitute. And that’s also why we’re saying that this is what sort of philosophy is doing as well, let’s remove the concept of God that make a secular but we’re essentially describing the same thing when we’re doing the same thing. And I mean, this, this, this will bring me to my sort of my thesis as well of the the key sort of trends that I’ve seen developing, we, again, we can go into this deeper, but the first two of those are essentially bringing back that which we’ve discarded, and only recently discarded. The first one is community. And the second one is regeneration. And regeneration is quite vast. Regeneration is almost sort of, for me, it’s regeneration of our spirit, our self, society and planet. And these are all linked for me is not a coincidence. And it’s not a separate aspect of this that we are facing, for example, global climate change, and global pollution problems, that’s one in the same thing as being disconnected from spirituality, because spirituality is the thing that you can you can you can see the Earth as a whole system through like system dynamics, and all of that which very, very few people are exposed to far fewer than are exposed to spirituality, or you. And again, that goes at it via a very cerebral methodology. Or you can have the experiential thing, which is religion, essentially, religion does that for you. And you can pick any religion, I mean, pick, Zen take, if you take Islam, and you take the entire congregation lining up and bowing towards a single point, simultaneously, you create the sense of synchronicity, and you what you’re doing is you’re placing the individual, you’re, again, what you’re doing is you’re zooming out, you’re zooming out from the individual, and you’re placing them in the community, in the sense of a hole. And that hole gives you this sense of a joined up spirit. And that joined up spirit with the rest of humanity connects you with the rest of the world as well, again, like take any religion and a core part of that is going to a place of worship, which you don’t have to do, but there’s an energy that you get from going into a church with the entire congregation that when in, in Hinduism, and Sikhism, the word itself is called Satsang, which you can translate that as congregation. But the real translation is such some like together in song almost like together in verse like universe, you created your own mini universe, the congregation is its own mini universe, like all of these things, are experientially putting you in contact with other people. And when do we do that now we live individual lives in our individual flat, we don’t live with our parents, like I think it’s everything is so individual to such a reduction, like to such a fractal level that the consequence of that is how can you not feel separated?

Neville Mehra
There’s so much there, we’re definitely going to have to do a part two, there’s so much there I want to explore philosophically. And I think we also must come back to what happened after your sabbatical because there’s a lot there that we can talk about and sort of how those lessons learned kind of played out in your own life and career. But as you describe this sort of intersection between religion and spirituality and like sort of the greater human condition, I think one of my weirdest beliefs and it’s not something that I necessarily like accept as true in the way Two plus two equals four is true, right. But it’s the kind of thing that I that I spend time just sort of pondering. And that’s like when you look at a tree to go back to our favorite example from earlier, you see like a leaf on the tree, and you kind of you know that it’s an individual leaf, but you don’t really see it as separate from the tree, at least as long as as long as it’s on there, especially to the extent that like, it would be really foolish. If one leaf on the tree somehow, like sucked up all the light and the energy and the water to the at the expense of all the other leaves on the tree, like just looking at it from from the outside, you could see that if it killed off all the rest of the branches or something by doing by doing something like that it would harm the overall organism to its own peril, right like that, that leaf wouldn’t be doing itself any favors by destroying the rest of the tree by sucking up all the light. Now I know that the way they’re connected, that’s not really how it works. But I often wonder,

Vikram Seth
but there’s a reason. There’s a reason that that’s not the way it works right as him, right? It’s not a coincidence, right? But that’s not how

Neville Mehra
it works. And I often wonder, are we not just some giant human super organism, right? Where we see ourselves or even even simpler example to imagine, right? Like, you know, is the finger on the hand is my like, little finger? On the end of my hand, self-aware? Does it see itself as like an individual thing rather than just part of the overall me? And if it’s part of the overall me, I mean, I obviously think it’s part of the overall me, I don’t want my like the finger on my right hand to like, chop off the finger on my left hand in order to like, you know, become a more prominent finger, something like that just sounds bizarre saying it. But I often think that, are we any different, like, as a human species, we see ourselves as all these individuals running around, but are we not just part of some giant super organism? And then and if that’s true, if you accept that then sort of changes everything about our behavior, and all of these games become zero sum? And why are we sort of living the way that we do and chasing the things that we chase after

Vikram Seth
it’s funny that so first of all, my headphones are going to die? So we’re, we’re we’re definitely approaching that point. It’s funny that some of the most successful billionaires in the world if you listen to some of the things they say, they will talk about playing infinite games, and they will talk about positive some games, and they will talk about Win Win solution. How did they get there? If they’re like, if if if our societal assumption that this is a dog eat dog world, competition is important, everything is zero sum? If that’s a correct assumption, then how did these people make it to the top, I’m just throwing now there. But also, I mean, this is an opinion 100% An opinion, I could probably back it up with stuff. But I do feel that our core nature is a reason that we keep coming back to spirituality. And even though we made our lives secular and our society secular, we can’t get rid of the thing, those core aspects of spirituality, we simply can’t get rid of it. Because we have this massive hole in ourselves, and this void of meaning without those things. So I do feel that our core nature is everything as one and is seeing everything as a single organism. And it is kind of like the remnants of that traditional wisdom, like what was that movie called Avatar and all of that you still eat the still eat the animal for sustenance, but you give gratitude to the animal for giving itself to you for your sustenance, etc. Like you see that as a whole. And I do feel like that is a natural state of being. And it’s interesting how exactly it’s completely going on in different place. But look at crypto and look at web three. And look at one of the major things developing in there, which is Dow and Dow is our decentralized autonomous organization. And they’re essentially trying to they’re essentially organizations which are trying to pull back in this joined up aligned a sense incentive structure of organizing or making a company in inverted commas, which everybody part owns and CO owns, and therefore kind of turning on its head, the traditional organization where you have these mismatched incentive structures based on competition and based on hierarchy and based on lack and scarcity. And you go to this other crypto in itself is in is all built on game theory built on trying out experimenting with different ways of how can we coordinate society by changing monetary incentives in such a way that you actually create this win win win outcome and win win win for self society and planet so it’s interesting that when we’re also doing the same thing, we’re trying to get back to the same place with the some of the most frontier tech and concepts that we have

Neville Mehra
that I had never really kind of like connected those thoughts before I think we’re going to have to do a whole deep dive into crypto and where you see all this going. And especially because what you’re saying makes sense the way you’re saying it, but it’s also somewhat counter to the typical narrative, which is proof of work mining is very compute intensive, which is very energy intensive, therefore, like, you know, Bitcoin, ie crypto is destroying the planet. And that’s a very, I think it’s a bad take. But it’s also sort of like, you know, running together a bunch of things that are related, but not necessarily the same. But I would say that it’s it’s probably a somewhat common opinion from the people who have bothered to like, have any opinion on this. I think it’s a common opinion. And what you’re saying is actually, in some ways, the opposite in that we could be using these technologies, where there’s the potential for these technologies to evolve in a way that actually undoes some of the harm of the last few centuries of greed and industrialization. Let’s call

Vikram Seth
Well, I mean, if you just, yeah, we can save the details for another one. But even if you just look at the primary mechanism by that, that all of crypto works with in terms of how does it make a decision it through a consensus mechanism consensus, as opposed to dictatorship consensus, as opposed to top down this decision? Right? It’s, it’s bringing the power literally, even with proof of work and Bitcoin, it’s still a consensus mechanism. It’s still not a single actor, making a decision for the entire network. It’s all of this is ledger, technology, and decentralized. And you know, we can dive into what all of that actually means. But the main point I’m trying to make here is whatever level you look at all of this, the underlying layer, decentralized consensus, everybody has a say everybody involved in that network has a say. And that itself is a fundamentally different way of organizing society, it’s closer to what we did closer to how a tribe makes a decision, although the tribe will probably still have elders, like it’s closer to that than it is to how, for example, shell operate right now. Although ironically, shell is highly consensus driven. So it’s probably a really bad example. But

Neville Mehra
it’s a good example. Because because with all of these beliefs, I’ll spoil one of the cliffhangers. And that is Vikram ended up back at Shell after this sabbatical. So I think we’re gonna have to, yeah, so we’re gonna have to, well, you ended up back there. And And given all that we’re talking about now, like, one could easily listen to this episode, especially the second kind of half of what we’ve talked about and say, Okay, this guy’s like, you know, probably like a hippie yoga teacher, like, I gave away all my possessions and took a vow of poverty and like, lives in Bali and wears, you know, potato sacks. And that’s, you know, not not at all who you are, in one way, right. So, I think there’s, there’s a lot to kind of talk about this, again, what might look like on the surface might appear as sort of like contrasting opposites. But actually, there’s a way to kind of work within the system and do what you want to do. And I would love to kind of make that the main topic of round two and also talk Yes, what so the rest of the sabbatical what you did after the sabbatical, and what kind of corporate life has been for you since then, we hinted at Bounce Bhangra, but we didn’t really talk a lot about what that is, we definitely need to come back to that and then into all the crypto stuff and downs and everything else that you’re exploring and what’s next. So I’ve got all those bookmarked as topics for for round to look forward to Vikram thank you so much for joining having needless to say, we’re going to do a round two. So thank you. Yeah, it’s been a pleasure.