The Affairs of Ants

"The world may be in the grip of political and financial upheaval, but that does not mean the ants should stop going about their business." 

"Their affairs are as serious as ours and they make no noise about it."

Ruskin Bond

The difficulty of writing

Nobody takes it for granted that they can get on a tabla and play it with the virtuosity of Zakir Hussain. For that matter, nobody claims they can stay on the crease as doggedly as Rahul Dravid can. Or drive an F1 car like Mika Hakkinen.

But to write is dreadfully easy, is a fondly held assumption. What muscle may it need, some ask, to write?

One narrative has it that writers offer opinions. And that to opine is easy. In any which case, everybody has an opinion on all narratives in the wind. If tutored in a language, some literature can be read on any theme and an opinion can be authored around why a narrative may be desirable or undesirable. The facts be damned.

Then there are writers of another kind. These are the ones who think all that is needed are reservoirs of imagination to draw from. Their output, when put to words, they claim, are works of fiction and poetry. Here again, popular narrative has it that to create works of such kinds, people sit someplace quiet and contemplate, until inspiration strikes. They then hammer away, in solitude, until they think it presentable.

“Quaint” is a charitable word that comes to mind to describe these world views.

Some perspective is needed here. When that legendary physicist Richard Feynman pays an ode to a flower, why is it that he sees much beauty in it? So much so, that he can offer an opinion on why it matters to the biological ecosystem around it even as he thinks of it as a work of art. What gives him the mental muscle to be a physicist who can morph into a botanist to dissect a flower, an ecologist to survey the landscape, and an artist to appreciate the beauty in it?

Convention has it artists are the kinds who can see beauty intuitively and place a premium on it over others. But Feynman can see beauty in a flower because his mind can appreciate it from more perspectives than an artist, as convention defines these creatures, can ever imagine:

From the BBC Interview for Horizon 'The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Animated by Fraser Davidson

"I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimetre; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colours in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the colour. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower.”

Implicit to that assertion is that a scientist is an artist as well. If he can articulate it as clearly as that, he now morphs into a powerful story teller—or a writer in the purest sense—the kind of creature who can live in multiple worlds and embrace ambiguity.

The writer’s dilemma

While there is much that can be communicated by words, only a writer who has expended much time on the craft can tell a story. Because stories, much like Feynman’s metaphorical flower, must be examined.

Who may the various protagonists in it be? What may be the various motivations that drive them? Where may their allegiances lie? When did they make up their minds about where they are? Why do they stand where they are now?

Questions of these kinds are asked by people who probe, like detectives.

When questions such as these are asked, a writer finds himself staring at not one story—but multiple stories. How then is a writer to fuse it into a cohesive narrative that does justice to all the protagonists? People who attempt to synthesize narratives and comprehend the essence of what outcomes may emerge are leaders.

Because real stories come from real people. And when probed sincerely, people tell the truth. Any good writer knows everybody’s truth is a function of the world they reside in. But writers also know, that the world a person lives in has much to do with where their subject lives in. The world, writers also know, is not linear. But it resides on a continuum of time. The question writers then have to ask when listening to a story is, which part of time is the subject’s story emerging from? They may be telling the truth. But it is their truth. To look at it dispassionately then and holistically, a writer must step back and look at the subject in perspective, dispassionately, even as he offers a compassionate ear. How different may that be from a mental health professional?

What may have been true yesterday in City A and as witnessed by Person X may sound like a falsehood to Person Y in City B—both of whom may claim to be witnesses to the same event. The fact is, both are telling the truth, but offering different perspectives. How may a writer then weave through their stories to stitch a cohesive narrative and ensure it has beauty woven into it as well?

This is ambiguous territory because whose eyes is the truth to be looked at from? This is what those in science and religion have been at loggerheads at forever.

But all these are the domains a writer must navigate. There is much work that goes into it not evident to the uninitiated eye. That is why exasperation creeps in when I hear talk about how “content is now a commodity”. 

Much of this has to do with the rise of the internet and an extremely popular story of how it has helped create a democracy in publishing. Apparently, this democracy ended a tin pot dictatorship run by publishers, writers and editors. In this lovely world, people can walk into public parks called the world wide web, create their own domains where they may park blogs or personal websites, and populate it with prose and poetry that may otherwise have gone unnoticed. If they may choose, there are social media platforms of all kinds to choose from as well.

There is much merit in this story. Because for too long, large parts of published content were controlled by a community that lived in gated communities. Their arrogance stays intact and they remain snooty. What hasn’t dawned upon them is that they now look like clowns posing as gatekeepers of all things libertarian.

But it is equally true that when walls of any kinds are broken down, democracies allow masses of mediocrity to come in as well. And the din created by the claps and coins mediocrity embraces, outshouts anything the polite interruptions that subtlety and nuance valiantly attempts.

To listen in to their voices takes much work and effort. But us humans are wired to be lazy. It is inevitable then that mediocrity rises to the top.

So, how is to one look for a good writer and skim past the mediocre? 

Why writers ask

Before I delve further, two disclosures must be made: 

1. I gave up on God a long while ago.
2. I did not choose the following passage. It chose me.

The passage appears in Night, a book by the Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. He survived the Holocaust. It stuck as pertinent when thinking of what kind of questions make for good questions.

“Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fibre in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because he kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end up in the furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?”

That passage doesn’t read like a question. It contains much anguish instead. But those familiar with Wiesel know he had a tortured soul. And that this passage emerged from his days after having witnessed the Holocaust as a young boy. It was a question he had grappled with in his head and is a theme he engaged with in much detail for all his life.

When looked at by the naïve, it is the kind of question anyone can ask. But when read closely, it is of the kind that can be asked only by somebody who may have seen horror first-hand.

Bluntly put, if I wore my editor’s hat, this is the kind of question that can emerge from a reporter who has done “been to the grass roots”. Because what is clear to a trained eye here is that when framed in this manner and articulated with as much passion, believers may be rattled.

Their responses it may evoke from them may be of two kinds.

The milder ones may respond with “The Lord behaves in mysterious ways”.

The aggressive will insist anyone who asks a question like this be gagged for questioning their God.

Non-believers like me will find their biases confirmed in this question.

But writers do not stop at having reported on the horrors they witnessed. They insist on exploring if other views may exist. Because they know multiple answers may emerge. Who is to know where the truth and their answer may lie? For them, the question marks the beginning of the journey to tell a story and it is too early to offer an opinion of any kind.

Writers choose to listen

Writing begins when you start to listen. Because the full story cannot be told or a firm opinion formed basis a single conversation. Because when multiple world views are sought, it challenges a writer to engage with worlds he had never imagined possible.

By way of example, in thinking of Richard Feynman, the easiest assumption to make of him as a scientist is that he places a premium on falsifiability over faith. I had imagined him in my mind as the kind who may suggest, I don’t believe in miracles and other such assorted phenomena.

But in listening to his Ode to a Flower, he asserts something else altogether I never thought could have emerged from him.

“It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe beyond man, to think of what it means without man—as it was for the great part of its long history, and as it is in the great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to see life as part of the universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is rarely described. It usually ends in laughter, delight in the futility of trying to understand. These scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged simply as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems to be inadequate.”

This was a challenge to my belief that science must discard all faith in the idea of god to progress relentlessly. Because “God knows” is a thought-terminating, lazy and clichéd answer to all fundamental questions. If this be introduced, it can kill the scientific mind. How can the two possibly co-exist?

When probed some more and poring over the conversations of Krista Tippet in that marvelous book of hers that is Einstein’s God, one of the many pages in it include her interaction with the biologist Carl Freit. He describes his clinical pursuit of cancer as religious study of the Talmud as “dual intellectual quests”. 

Science asks penetrating questions of “how”, he explains, yet, “the physical universe doesn’t come beset with values…. From the scientific perspective, everything that we can discover we should discover. The problem comes up once you’ve discovered it.”

To place that into perspective, he offers the dilemma researchers were confronted with when exploring the potential energy of an atom. The original intent was to exploit the energy embedded in it. On the other hand, it can also be used to create a bomb that can annihilate humanity even as cure’s cancer. What ought atomic energy be looked at from then?

Between Feynman’s assertion on appreciating awe and the dichotomy Freit present’s, a writer now stumbles upon that the answer to Weisel’s anguished question is not a simple one. What intersections may it lie at? Is it possible no answers exist? Does the joy in writing lie in the quest for answers?

Writers live alone

There are no answers to questions like these. It is a dilemma every writer must wrestle with. Must the story be given up on? Ought it be told as it is now and left for the reader to imagine what the outcomes maybe? Or is this the time to offer an opinion?

There is a dilemma Freit the scientist has grappled with as well, and shared with Tibbet.

“The typical human problem, and one whose answer religion aims to supply, is always of the following form: Should I do this? Should we do this? Should the government do this? To answer these questions we can resolve it into two parts: First — If I do this, what will happen? — and second — Do I want that to happen? What would come of it of value — of good?”

In attempting to resolve this question, he broke it down into two parts.

a) Should I do this? Should we do it? Should the government do this?

That is a scientific question. Because you won’t know until you try. And science insists you try. Who knows what outcomes may emerge out of it?

b) But once I know what will come of it, how may I, or we or the government use it?

That is not for science to answer. It is a moral question and requires much deliberation. Who is to decide what is right for whom and in what context? Is there some divine intervention that can be called in for here?

These are questions to which there are no answers. Whatever emerges can challenge both the believer and the non-believer.

It is inevitable then that a writer retreat into loneliness. Because all of what has listened in to, must be absorbed. Some sense of it must be made so a story can be told. How is he to answer know after all his investigations if god exists or not?

Embedded in Weisel’s question is an insinuation if there is a god, it must be an evil creature and must be revolted against. But if that be taken at face value, and as articulated by Feynman, perils exist that we may miss what may be magnificent. But the magnificence in it must be given much thought as well cautions Freid, because of the dichotomies in the answers caution Freit.

To offer an opinion now, a writer must go through gut-wrenching loneliness. This is a story that goes untold.

Writers never stop

When loneliness of this kind stares at a writer, it can be terrifying to take an informed position. One choice they have is to abandon the mental ask that it takes to form an opinion and stick to telling the narrative as it is. Or they can continue to search. Who is to know where a pointer may lie?

It is entirely possible that it may lie in the soul of the subject who asked the question. When Wiesel is read closer, he offers what lenses does he look at god from.

When he was as anguished as he was, he turned to the scriptures. ironically, it led him to Moses, the ancestor of his forefathers as described in the scriptures his forefathers had handed him. On close scrutiny, it turns out, Moses had felt the same loneliness that Wiesel had at one point. It compelled him to study Moses in much detail and answers on leadership started to emerge for Wiesel.

“Naturally, a true leader cannot function without those whom he or she leads. By the same token, the leader cannot work or live in their midst as one of them. Hence the ambivalence of his or her position. There must be some distance between the leader and those being led; otherwise the leader will be neither respected nor obeyed. A certain mystique must surround the leader, isolating him or her from those whose servant he or she is called upon to be or has been elected to be. Is there a leader, here or anywhere, who does not find time to complain about the terrible solitude at moments of decision?”

And so, Weisel concluded:

“Here is Moses’s singularity. A man of the situation, he was always there when needed, and then he gave himself completely to his task. He had no ambition to become a prophet, but once he became one, he was the greatest. He did not seek the role of political or military leader, but once he took it on, he was the best. Philosophers would say that if a human being is what he or she becomes, Moses was a human being par excellence.”

It was some of the finest lessons on life and living a tortured soul could get. The outcomes of which were books and a life dedicated to the pursuit of philosophy.

Writers, then write

After all of this is done, a writer gets down to write. Consider this passage that follows that was created by Gary Provost.

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”

Why is work of this kind different from the music that emerges out of Zakir Hussain’s tabla or the flourish with which Rahul Dravid crafts a century?

(This was first published in Mint on Sunday. All copyrights vest with HT Media)

Grown men don't cry

I don't know what led me to this talk. It was sometime ago that I had picked up Paul Kalanithi's book When Breath Becomes Air.

In this talk, his wife Lucy reflects on how the two of them got together, their life, the calls they took as he lay dying, what it is like for her now that he is gone, and why did they decide to have a child even as he was dying. I must admit to feeling a lump in my throat as I heard her speak.

A lot many people find the idea of death very difficult to deal with -- they want to turn the other way. But it is something I think I have wrapped my head around. I came very close to dying seven years ago. Nobody thought I'd make it past the portal I had gotten into. I don't remember all of what happened then. But I certainly do know what happened as dad died a little over a year ago, and all the thoughts that went through my mind. 

One line though kept going through my mind. Grown men don't cry. So even as dad was dying, I sat and wrote that out why, Grown men don't cry.

And I'd signed off with the lines of that song that prompted it all, 

I’m sittin’ here with my kids and my wife

And everything that I hold dear in my life

We say grace and thank the LordGot so much to be thankful for

Then it’s up the stairs and off to bed and my little girl says “I haven’t had my story yet.” 

And everything weighin’ on my mind disappears just like that

When she lifts her head off her pillow and says, “I Love You Dad” 

I don’t know why they say grown men don’t cry

I don’t know why they say grown men don’t cry

Do you have to go today?

Shut the eyes, and listen to Farida Khanum sing this.

How can anyone sing as beautifully as this? And how can anybody write lyrics that can go through stone? 

Be afraid. But not very afraid

A question I am often asked is, “Why did you get out of your comfort zone?” By any which yardstick, I ought to have stuck to honing my skills as a journalist and a writer. To which my simple answer is: “Because if I didn’t, I’d be obsolete before I hail the next Uber.” Uber is the new F-word. I don’t mean that in a derisive way. But in a context. That if we don’t take cognizance of entities like Uber and the forces that are shaping it, it is only a matter of time before a lot many of our livelihoods will be obsolete. 

To most people who’ve grown watching businesses evolve, this company makes no sense. I mean, come to think of it, what is it? An app that resides on my phone and allows me to hail taxis from wherever I am. It owns nothing. And by all accounts, is one of the most unprofitable start-ups the world has ever seen. But for whatever strange reason, it is among the most valuable and sought after. 

But users like you and me are enamoured by it; traditional service providers don’t know how to deal with it; policymakers have no clue what sense to make of this animal; and it is just but one metaphor for how the world is changing dramatically—India included. I touched upon how it is just one among the many things changing dramatically and how the ground beneath India’s feet is shifting on Founding Fuel, the platform I co-founded.

Back to Uber. Why does it concern me? The questions first started playing on my mind when Joyson Thomas, an acquaintance from my earlier avatar at Network18, called out of the blue. He and I used to share an occasional cup of chai outside our former workplace in suburban Mumbai every once a while during breaks at work. We hadn’t connected in a while.

“And what have you been up to?” I asked of him. I knew him as somebody deeply embedded in the stock markets. Much like me, he was trained to manage newsrooms, write reports, stay connected 24x7 with market movements and manage people across the country.

“I’ve been at work for a while on a project. It still has a long way to go. But look at it and tell me what you think,” he said. “It’s stuff I think you’ll like,” he said, sounding confident. I was intrigued and probed him more. Turns out, he had re-invented himself. When we last spoke, his was a six-person entity tailored for stock market investors. He was talking to me from his car. His partner was someplace else on the road as well. In fact, nobody from the team was at any designated workplace. “I’m into the artificial intelligence (AI) business now,” he said. 

That got my attention and I looked up his entity, Markets Mojo, right away. It is built, he told me, to eventually eliminate intermediaries like research analysts, advisers, and other assorted intermediaries. Dummies and uninterested folks like me who would like a give a shot at multiplying their monies without having to deal with expensive consultants prone to human biases and errors will find this compelling, he promised.

The tech junkie in me got excited. Artificial intelligence is an area I am deeply interested in. I believe it has already percolated our lives in insidious ways and we are clueless about a lot of how it powers the way we live. 

Some poring under the hood of Markets Mojo later, turns out there are a few hundred algorithms that do all the hard work here that humans would otherwise do. I am not qualified to either endorse it or offer a review of how good or bad it is from a technical perspective. To my untrained eyes, what I saw is something that does a decent job and saves me time.

If I need to invest in the markets, the interface asks me a few simple questions. For instance, what is my risk appetite, how much monies do I have on hand, how long am I willing to wait it out, etc. Algorithms at the back-end then build a customized portfolio for me. 

Over time, as it gets to know and understand me better on the back of data it collects and the markets it tracks, it will refine my portfolio and help maximize returns on my investments. For a consumer, it is a sexy proposition. 

It's another matter altogether that the regulators haven’t figured out how to deal with this creature. So, while it can be designed to actively buy and sell on the stock markets at just the right time, regulation don’t allow it. So, it stops at sending me alerts on what I ought to do next. Whether I choose to act or not is something it can nudge me towards, but cannot compel me.

That said, in one fell swoop, all of my years studying finance and earning a degree is not worth the paper it is printed on. A few hundred algorithms contain all of the knowledge it took me a few years to acquire. And it learns every day to get better and better at what it does by learning more. It does nothing else. 

If Markets Mojo takes off, why do I need the services of a research analyst? Why do I need an investment consultant? This thing is built to hum in the background and do all of what they do. What happens then to my friends from B-school who are research analysts? And professionals who make a living on the back of advice? Assuming for a moment that in the future regulators decide it is okay to allow algorithms to trade on the markets, it will buy and sell for me as well at just the right time. If that happens, those in the broking business go kaput as well. 

Allow me to reiterate. I am unwilling to endorse Markets Mojo yet because I don’t understand how good these algorithms that power the engines are. Be that as it may, it is a compelling proposition and one I think ought to be understood better. 

To do that, I turned to a few people. My first pit stop was Pedro Dominigos. He is widely acknowledged across the world as one of the finest minds at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, is a researcher at the University of Washington and author of The Master Algorithm. If you would much rather listen to a talk by him on the theme, it can be viewed here. I had the privilege of listening in on a by-invitation only conversation with him and came out astonished. 

A question refused to leave my mind: What am I listening to here? Am I watching a new species evolve? I am Homo sapiens? What will this species be called? Homo algos? Will my young girls live at the intersection of two worlds? If they have children, what kind of creatures will they be? 

The Master Algorithm deals with some interesting questions. To put things into perspective, what happens when you and I hail an Uber to get from Point A to Point B? How do the algorithms at the back-end match the right kind of driver and car to meet my ideal requirements? Based on my behaviour in the past, what will I do? Do I have any preferences? How do I behave? How do certain drivers behave? What routes do I like? 

Extrapolate these questions into other situations. How does a search engine built by Google or Microsoft’s personal assistant Cortana understand me? How does it anticipate my needs and attempt to complete my statements? 

How does any of my email service provider understand without any inputs from me that an email is addressed to me as a personal one and ought to come to my inbox? Did you know, for instance, that way back in 2014, Amazon gained a patent for “anticipatory shipping”? What it means is that even before you make up your mind to buy a product, Amazon’s algorithms would have figured out whether you or I will buy it, have it packaged and keep it ready to be shipped to our preferred address. 

Even as these questions were playing on my mind after listening to Dominigos, I pulled my phone out and hailed a taxi—by default, an Uber. And that is when Uber, as if by serendipity, started to fall into some perspective. It is not an aggregator. It is an entity built on the back of artificial intelligence. It is the future. People punting on it are punting on the future. Where is it headed? All I can know is, I don’t know.

I mindlessly hailed it as is my wont now when my car and man Friday aren’t around. This time around, the app didn’t look like a taxi aggregation service. There was something else happening. What can this beast potentially evolve into? Why is so much being bet on and invested in it? 

I got back home and started to look Uber up. Turns out, it has an internal mandate. No office can be manned by more than three people anywhere in the world. Why hire people when algorithms can do the job? There are no drivers on its rolls, nor does it have assets like taxis. People who own taxis or fleet operators with a licence to ply one can plug into the system. Few people seem to know how Uber works. But on the back of conversations with drivers and formal talks with researchers in artificial intelligence, I figured there are a lot of interesting things happening.

For any technology to take off, it ought to do two things well: 

a) Resolve a problem.

b) Create demand and fulfil supply.

In this case, the problem is to find a cab when you need one. But demand must be huge and the supplies proportionate. So, in trying to solve a problem, the experience on the platform must be hassle-free for the consumer. If any problems come their way, consumers will exit. And with that, demand will evaporate. 

If there’s too little demand and too many taxis, nobody makes money. Balancing all of this for humans can be complex. But algorithms can do the job in real time smartly. How do you think surge pricing works? A traditional company cannot compute the complexities in real time. But artificial intelligence can. 

Uber would be worried as well if its drivers earn low incomes. It is therefore in its best interests to convey to them in no uncertain terms that the company will do all it can to protect their interests. This is done in subtle ways. 

Did you know, for instance, that as a passenger, at the end of every ride, a driver rates you in much the same way you rate a driver? I managed to convince a driver to share my rating with me if I gave him a five-star rating. Turns out my average is 4.5. 

I am not entirely sure about this. But most drivers tell me this is a variable the algorithms factor into my fares when “surge pricing” kicks in. So, if I have been bad to drivers in the past, the kind of fares I pay will be higher. There’s a price to be paid for being bad. On the other hand, if I have been a good passenger, at peak hours, I may pay lower fares. 

But like I said earlier, these algorithms are a black box and is the subject of much speculation. There are many variables that go into it and are beyond my comprehension. At the time of sending this dispatch out, queries sent to Uber a little over two weeks earlier had not elicited any response.

That is why I turned to Girish Nathan, a senior scientist at Microsoft based at the company’s headquarters in the US. Girish is into machine learning and his interests lie in healthcare and how it can be deployed. In the past he has worked on machine learning at Amazon and how to deploy online advertising intelligently at Yahoo.

Conversations with him were an eye-opener. “It’s a thin line,” he told me, on what separates the human brain and artificial intelligence. Because I’ve known him for a while now, I took the liberty to ask him to dumb things down for me. “It’s changing our lives completely, yaar,” he told me over the phone and put many things into perspective. 

I asked him to stick to a few examples I am familiar with so I get the gist of what is it people like him are working on. This is a complex field, people who understand it are difficult come by, and are largely secretive about what they do. He told me he cannot get into specifics about other entities because he does not have direct access to how researchers there are going about it. He can only hazard informed guesses. So, I asked him that if I were to prompt him around my observations, would he be able to tell me if I am guessing along the right lines? He agreed to the proposition.

I shared with him an experience I had on Uber Pool—a premise that matches riders headed to the same location. That way, you split costs and driver earns more as well. A win-win for everyone. But rules exist. The driver is not allowed to wait for more than two minutes at a pick-up point, unless the co-rider explicitly agrees to wait a bit more. 

On a trip, I was on, somebody kept trying to book a ride. Each time the driver got close to the pick-up point, the person would cancel the ride. I don’t remember how many times now—but I think it was thrice. I had time on hand. And because I was curious to see what happens, I waited to see how the man at the wheel responded to the same pick-up request, seeing as he is not allowed to decline a ride.

Finally, he got to the pick-up point. He waited. The person who had booked the ride didn’t turn up after the mandated two minutes. The driver asked me if I’m okay with waiting a bit more. I agreed. So, he waited. The person didn’t turn up and Uber’s systems asked him to move. He drove away. A few minutes later, the person called up. I heard on the speakerphone as the caller yelled. The driver didn’t react and only said it was against company policy to wait past a certain time.

At the end of the ride, I was asked to rate both the driver and my co-passenger. I gave the driver a good rating. When the system prompted me to rate the co-passenger and offer any comments if any, I spoke about the coarse language that was used against the driver. The system logged that in as well. 

Much later, I figured, Uber would compensate the driver for the loss in revenue that accrued to him on account of the passenger not having turned up. As for the abusive passenger, the algorithms had factored it into their databases. 

Turns out, following that, some interesting things will happen:

• Uber’s driver will be happy to be compensated for what would otherwise have been a loss. 

• An impression was conveyed to the driver Uber is on his side—no matter what. One more incentive to stay longer on the road. 

• I saved money. A good incentive to carpool again.

I asked Girish what could possibly happen next. He said a few things could potentially happen here. And this is true not just for Uber, but on pretty much every platform we interact with. 

Algorithms learn from the data collected from users. This is true for Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, any search engine, chatbots of all kinds, email service providers, the smartphones we hold in our hands now, and everything else that we’ve come to take for granted.

He reckons the algorithms that power Uber are rather straightforward. 

• It learns how to navigate from Google, for instance. Google Maps shows the driver how to navigate the shortest route from one place to another. But satellite data streaming into Google also shows traffic on that route. So, it may re-route it over a longer distance, but cut down on the time that may otherwise be wasted on traffic. It may cost me a little more money but will save time. The algorithm has to take a call. How does it do that?

• It is entirely possible though that I may be a prickly kind of person who insists on taking the same route every day. Anything else may upset me. I may have other traits built into me. For instance, I spend more time in cheaper restaurants and bargain hunting. Uber’s algorithms would have figured that out. For that matter, so would Facebook, Google, Amazon or even your bank and credit card company and every entity that uses big data and is working with AI researchers.

And how do they know of it? Because of the smartphone I carry around in my pocket all of the time with their apps on it and the cards I swipe every place I go. To use these apps to their fullest potential, I may have given them permission to track me all the time, even if I am not using their services. 

Think about it for a moment. Why does Uber want to collect data on where am I even when I am not using its services? Why does Uber urge me to allow it to track me all of the time? Long story short, if I am a scrooge, it will know what kind of surge pricing it can push me to. Allow me to reiterate—Uber isn’t telling and between Girish and me, we are only speculating. Are there people at the company who manage this deliberately? “No way,” says Girish. “Get this right. These are self-learning algorithms at work.”

But why just Uber? Girish tells me that based what I look for on my search engines, who my friends are on Facebook, what kind of tweets I post on Twitter, what am I browsing for on Amazon, the algorithms working at the back-ends of each of these entities are now intelligent enough to work backwards and build a complete profile of who I am, what is my propensity to use their products and even nail down the PIN code of where I live and what apartment block I reside in. 

Based on these factors, the AI can even predict whether or not I actually have the financial muscle in me to buy what is it I am looking at and when. All these companies know what kind of products will get my attention; what ads appeal to me; and what puts me off. They know me better than my wife or mother does. Trying to fob them off is not just futile, it is petulant.

Does it make them evil?

Both Dominigos and Girish vehemently disagree. Embrace them instead, they argue. Understand how they operate. Live with them. They are here. They are smart. And how smart are they? Some tinkering around with them suggest they are certainly smarter than I am. 

Allow me give you but a few instances of how to make the most of what the world is coming to.

• If you look for search for an item on a website a multiple number of times, the algorithms that power it figures you want it real bad. So, the next time around you look for it, it might just bump the price up. How do you get around it?

If I like something, but think it out of bounds for me, I run a “recipe” for it called IFTT—an acronym for “If This Then That”. I’ve alluded to it an earlier dispatch. Click here to begin looking for these recipes. To give you but one instance of how it works, I am a book and software junkie. Books I buy off Amazon and software I keep track of on Product Hunt. 

• I carry an iPhone with me with the IFTT widget loaded on it. It has instructions to notify me each time the price of a book drops to a point I think viable; and on Product Hunt to notify me when categories of software I am interested in are given away for junkies like me to try as promos. Each time it happens, my widget notifies me. Another app I purchased to keep track of my discretionary spending powers on any given day called DayCost Pro tells me whether I have the budget left for the month to acquire it right away or let it pass. If green-lit, I go for it. Else, I wince and let it go.

• Much poring over my genomic and lifestyle data later, I figured I don’t have much time left. My genetics are such that I am prone to rare neuro-degenerative disorders. I was hit badly in 2011 on the back of bad lifestyle choices. 

Soon after, I did some preliminary investigations and all pointers indicated I won’t live past 66. But heck, I’m not ready to go anyplace in a hurry. So, some lifestyle changes later, the data collected at various points using apps like Cardiograph, an app I latched onto from the App store when its price dropped to zero, indicates my heart rate has dropped from the 80s to the mid-70s.

I’ve failed to quit smoking yet. I can see the spikes there and what it’s doing on Cardiograph when I light up. But on the back of other changes, my lifespan needle has moved up to 68. At least that is what the data suggests, unless a truck runs me over. Heck, my younger girl is just four and can do with some more of me around, I suspect. My older girl is turning out to be bloody good at tae kwon do and I want be around to cheer for her.

• A few months of data collection later, I figured I work best in the mornings. So I’m up now usually by 4am. And contrary to most advice that the first thing to do is get a good workout first thing, it doesn’t work for me. My spreadsheets show I operate better after I have taken that half hour to brew my masala chai, and give myself a little time to focus and meditate using the pro version of Headspace. Following that, I need time with Evernote, my default note taking software of choice to review what happened and discuss with myself all of what needs to be done. If I get on social media, respond to emails or take phone calls during those hours, my productivity drops dramatically during the rest of the day. 

Data. It’s all there in the data. I can go on and on. But my limited point is this: If left to my brain, I’d have gone with pleasure. When outsourced to data and one more potent tool called artificial intelligence, both in a larger context of the world around me and my personal ecosystem, I’m having a lot of fun. 

This is not to suggest all is well. Things are evolving. Last week for instance, my emails to Sidin, my editor at Mint on Sunday, were auto-deleted. I sat pretty assuming I’d met my deadline until he checked whatever happened. Between the both of us, we don’t know what happened. Nobody knows. 

In hindsight, what I now know is the algorithms screwed up. But it would have figured based on the patterns in the correspondence between Sidin and me that on those dates it screwed up. Without the both of us knowing, it will make a quiet note of all that transpired.

But these algorithms will live, scientists will notice patterns, and they will build in systems that will actually “penalize” the algorithms for not having identified what they ought to have done. The poor creatures will actually feel “pain” in much the same way that you and I do. The lines between humans and machines are blurring. 

Should you and I be afraid? Yes. If we don’t keep learning, our days our numbered.

Should we be very afraid? No. As Girish told me, there are checks and balances in place built into the system so real humans like him can only see patterns and nothing is personally identifiable. All personal information is anonymized. These algorithms are making the world a better place to live in. “Most people are afraid because they don’t understand it,” says Girish.

By all accounts, that curse is also a blessing: May you live in interesting times.

This article was originally published in LiveMint & all rights vest with the HT Media. This piece may not be reproduced without permission from the editor

Robert Krulwich at Berkeley on Journalism

So, ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 2011 –today you’re on the brink, about to cross over….

Last week, you had projects and deadlines and meetings and not a second to spare… And next week? Well, for many of you next week will be luxuriously relaxed with just a touch, or for some of you maybe more than a touch of ”Uh Oh” because your tomorrows may be looking just a bit too relaxed, just a little bit too “I don’t know what’s next-ish” than you’d like and that’swhat I want to talk about today.

I want to talk to you about your tomorrows in journalism….

It is, I know, hard to find a job.

I’m guessing you look at the world of newspapers and magazines and broadcasters and webcasters and Huffposts and Daily Beasts and sometimes the whole bunch of ’em feel like the City of Troy – you know,  this high walled, Fortress of Journalism, occupied by people who somehow got in before you did and now they’re looking down at you… little you, a newbie standing alone on the beachand you’re looking up,  thinking: “Hey! How’d you get in there?… and they’re not telling…

But the question’s still a good one:  How these days does anybody get a good job in journalism, a job where you are surrounded by good people, people you envy and admire, people like the folks you just spent two years with at this school? (I mean not all of them –but I imagine that each of you now have one or two or maybe three friends that you made here that you know are good at what they do, and sometimes better than good… and sometimes better than you. )

So how do you taste more of what you tasted here, which (if I can presume) includes the thrill of occasionally writing a good sentence, of asking exactly the right question at the right moment, of making two pieces of tape fit perfectly together, of getting to meet new people, go new places, see things unfold… these little satisfactions of journalism… how can you have more of that?

That’s all you’re asking, right? That’s all you want. That, and a salary.

And yet it seems so hard right now.

You can send resumes, you can phone friends. You can phone friends of friends, call up people and try to make a quick impression, but does that get you the job? For some of you, yes.  Some of you, not yet.

It took 10 years for those Greeks to figure a way into Troy… ten years on the friggin’ beach until finally the cleverest guy in the group – the “wily’ Ulysses – figured out a way, involving an oversized horse, which makes you wonder: how wily do you have to be to get a job?

What if – and here’s a horrible thought – that because you were born in 1980, or 82, 85, 87, graduating into a job-stricken, wildly changing economy… maybe you’re just doomed.

Some of you must be thinking that—and for you who are, and to your parents, I say: No, no, and no.

I am here to tell you, that you are stepping into a world that is riper, more pregnant with newness, new ideas, new beats, new opportunities than most generations of journalists before you. You are lucky to be you, very lucky, though you may not be feeling it at the moment.

So let me tell you a feel-bad story that should make you feel good.

It’s about a guy who got a job as a correspondent at CBS News, in its day, the best place in the world to work. And he got it at the age of 23. He’d had a short stint at the Charlotte News in North Carolina; he’d written some good pieces and got a call… literally, he got called and was asked to come to the CBS Building, then on Madison Avenue in New York, where he was offered a writing job on the spot. These things actually happened. And because he was fast, a natural stylist with a keen eye, it happened to Charles Kuralt. That was his name, Charles Kuralt.

And he knew how lucky he was…because at that first job interview, as he walked from the elevator to the guy he was supposed to talk to, on his way down the hall, he passed a door – it was closed, but on it, lettered in gold, were the words “Mr. Murrow”, as in Edward R. Murrow, who was at that moment the anchor of the evening newscast. And when he was hired as a writer there, he could looked around at the mailboxes with names on them that in those days, those names, you may not know them now, but those names back then were legends: Eric Serveried, Charles Collingwood, Richard C. Hottelet, Daniel Shorr, Robert Trout.  This was friggin unbelievable: to be one of Murrow’s boys – at 23 – when you practically ARE a boy! Oh my god.

And then, not too long after, he had his big break.

As I say, he was a news writer, writing copy off in a corner, sometimes for Murrow, but he’s pretty much an indoors guy, and he’s dreaming of course, of getting outdoors where things are happening and one night – in the middle of the night, on the graveyard shift, two a.m.—the bell on the wire ticker goes off and says an airplane has just fallen short of the runway at LaGuardia Airport and is sinking in the East River, right now.

And Kuralt and the night editor flip a coin for who’s going to go, Charles wins and runs downstairs, jumps into a cab and says “Take me To LaGuardia.” The problem is, no sooner are they out of the midtown tunnel, then the cab gets snarled in some weird pre dawn, fire engines-heading-to-the-airporttraffic jam, so Kuralt leaps out, and starts running through the tangled cars up the highway when he sees a guy on a motorcycle weaving his way through the traffic, so he waves his hands wildly, flags him down, says he’s a news reporter, there’s a plane in the water, he’s on deadline, “take me!” and the motorcycle guy jerks his thumb at the saddle on his bike, says “Hold On’   and then, like a stunt driver, zigzags through the cars to the airport and Kuralt is one of the first on the scene, where he climbs over fences, gets the interviews, and makes it onto the evening news. After which he’s anointed “correspondent”, the youngest ever…at 23.

Charles Kuralt not only could write nicely. He had a voice and a calm and a style that was… well, let’s just say when I got to CBS, I felt about Charles Kuralt they way Kuralt felt about Edward R. Murrow… I thought he was remarkable. There have been few reporters in my lifetime that I admired more.

So fast forward 40 years… to 1990 or so. Now I am on the same floor with Kuralt, right next door. And I liked to wander into his office because, well, because, it felt like a privilege. Every time I walked through his door I felt that I had a hall pass to yak with Zeus, if only I could disguise my… well, my admiration… I liked him so…

So on one particular day, it was a late fall afternoon, near to Thanksgiving, and the sun was low in the sky and when I walked in Charles was at his desk, sitting there, back lit by the sun, like a saint. And at first all I could see was his silhouette… but when my eyes adjusted, it was strange. He was holding what looked like a reefer between his thumb and index finger (which wasn’t a habit I would ever associate with Charles).  It was rolled, like a joint, very tight, but I could tell this bit of paper had been carved out of the front page of a Wall Street Journal that was lying on his desk. He had seen something on that front page, and he had, with his pen, drawn a circle around it so many times – over and over – that the piece had come loose and he’d taken this fragment and twisted it into this skinny little shape… and when I walked in, he put the twisted thing down on his desk top, all alone, then he looked at me, got up, a little unsteadily, he pointed to the paper, and then he left the room.

And I wondered, What is it? What’s he got?  So I looked at the paper, and on the front page there was a story about CBS. This was a while ago, so I may not have all the details right, but it seems that CBS had paid a huge hunk of money to get a new station manager to work at WBBM, their premier Chicago station… and the story of this producer was that he had been hired by a Miami station that was very low rated, nobody watched it, until this guy, who’s name I don’t remember any more, got the idea to hire very buff, very curvey, very news-delicious newscasters, both men and women, and have them deliver many of their reports from the beach, often in beach wear and sometimes, from in the water, where they got kind of wet, showingoff their extra beautiful parts, and the station in a multi-station market had leapt from a, you know 6 percent share to something miraculous, like a 50 percent share. Half the people in Miami who were watching news on television were now watching this guy’s station… and when I opened the little twisted bit of paper, Charlie’s reefer, the paragraph that he had circled over and over, that paragraph said that CBS, Edward R. Murrow’s CBS, Charlie Kuralt’s CBS, had just hired this guy to be the new station manager.

And that’s when Charles came back into the room, and slumped down in his chair and looked at me like a man who had lost a friend. Or like a man betrayed. And the thing is, as I tell you this story now, I’m sure a lot of you are thinking, “Of course. CBS is a business and if a business can get a 50 share of a market, (If any business can get a fifty percent share of any market, if there’s a way to do that….) you’ve gotta know someone’s going to try. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t.  Beachwear in Chicago can be a little tricky come October, but come on, this isn’t shocking, this is what businesses do.

But when Charles Kuralt went to CBS, it wasn’t a business. It was a calling. It had saints. It had heroes. It had character. And it protected its own. If you went into battle, in World War 2 or in Korea or in Vietnam, for CBS, and you found yourself under fire, in harm’s way, if you survived, you were honored the way soldiers honor each other. Charles and his cameraman Freddy Deitrich, had been fired on Vietnam. They were caught in an ambush, and a soldier they’d been covering, a Lieutenant Son, from the South Vietnamese Army had come over to see if they were ok and at that moment, a sniper shot Son through the head and he fell right where Kuralt was. Right next to him.

After that, Kuralt knew, because this is how it worked back then… everybody at CBSwould remember his service, would remember what he’d risked to get a story and after that, he pretty much had a lifetime contract. Even if, later, they didn’t like you that much, they wouldn’t fire you. I’m not saying CBS was always honorable. It wasn’t. I’m not saying it was always noble. It wasn’t. But it did offer men like Kuralt a deal: It said to you: “Give us your heart, give us your best years, and we will protect you. We will pay you. We will keep you. And you will part of us. And you will be proud to be part of us.”

And Charles Kuralt bought that deal hook, line and sinker, but then – on the afternoon I’m talking about… in the 1990s, after a bunch of ownership and management shuffles, by the time he read that story in the Wall Street Journal, he knew that the bloom was off his rose, that CBS was becoming, like so many companies before and after, a place where they would go for the quick fix, hire the hottie, then fire the hottie, love you on Monday, leave you on Thursday, or maybe even Wednesday… or Tuesday, and he hadn’t seen it coming. He had believed in Murrow. He just didn’t believe in this.

And I remember saying to him on that day… in that office, me on my side of his desk, and him on his side, in the setting sun… “Here’s the difference, Charles, between my generation and yours. Here’s what my friends will never do, that you and your friends DID do: we will never trust a company that hires us, no matter how good, how proud it is at this moment, to stay loyal to us. To protect us. We will never put our faith in a corporation, even a good one. We can’t. Because everything we know tells us that we will be disappointed. That we are vulnerable. And you, sitting here, are just another example of what my friends already know.”

Though I’ll tell you… thinking of him hitching a ride on a motorcycle, gunning his way down the Grand Central Parkway from a plane crash, clasping the hottest story of the day to his chest and taking it home to Mr. Murrow, a young news gladiator working for the best company on earth… it would be so wonderful to be able to walk into a place and not have to worry again about anything but your work. But that world has vanished. Poof!

Which is only to say that the notion that if you could get yourself into the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, Time, Newsweek, they’d take you in, teach you,  protect you….

Those days – first, didn’t last long…

Maybe one, one and a half generations got that deal.

And for you, the generation after me, I’ll say to you what I said to my hero, Charles:

You can’t trust big companies to keep you safe.

I know most of you don’t and I’m just here to remind you: A job at NBC, ESPN, New York Times, NPR, may look safe today – but things change. They always change. And companies won’t protect you from that change. They can’t. And these days, they don’t even try.

Which brings me back to where I started.

If you want to make a life in this business, if you want to begin, and survive and flourish, how do you do it?

How do you start?

Well I think there’s a way.

There’s always a way, but lately I’ve noticed a pattern emerging. And I’ve seen it work for a number of people who are close to your age… I’ve watched them step from obscurity… to notice… to a little money… and then to a actual salary, following this route.

It isn’t easy.

But here’s what I’ve noticed.

Some people when they look for a job in journalism ask themselves, What do I like to do and Who can take me there? Who can get me to a war zone? To a ballpark? To Wall Street? To politicians, to movie stars? Who’s got the vehicle? And you send them your resume and you say, “I want a seat in your car.” … And you wait.

But there are some people, who don’t wait.

I don’t know exactly what going on inside them; but they have this… hunger. It’s almost like an ache.

Something inside you says I can’t wait to be asked I just have to jump in and do it.

I was one of those people. When I was a teenager I loved political conventions. My mom watched them on TV, she was really into politics, so I watched with her… and there was something about nominating conventions… all those senators and mayors and political bosses in a huge, blazing room with the banners and balloons and funny hats, choosing and bargaining, will it be Kennedy or Stevenson, the cameras, the lights, the drama, I just… when I got a little older… I just wanted to see it for myself.

So at age 20, I think it was, and this is just really kind of crazy behavior, I decided I’d just go. There was a political convention in Chicago in 1967, one year before the riots in 68. It was a political convention for left wing anti-war activists planning to nominate Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Benjamin Spock the world famous baby doctor/pediatrician as President and Vice President… it was called The New Politics Convention. And I thought, I’m going to go and “cover” that convention.

I had no idea what it meant to “cover” anything…except that when you watched real reporters on TV… I noticed they all had “credentials”, something impressive hanging around their necks. So, to prepare, I went to Art Brown’s Art Supply store in New York and got some pre-inked letters, called LettraSet , cause in those days no one hadprinters and fonts at home. All you had was a typewriter, and no one’s going to fall for a credential that’s typed. No. So,  for $2.50, I got myself a sheet of pre-inked Bodoni bold letters, fifty a’s, fifty b’s fifty c’s…and letter by letter, rubbing with a stylus, I forged an I.D. for some reason from the Yale Daily News.

I didn’t go to Yale. I went to Oberlin College. I was on the Oberlin paper. But some sick impulse told me Oberlin wouldn’t be impressive enough, so I painstakingly created a Yale Press card with a Yale logo and made up all these different looking signatures with different colored pens, and I then laminated the thing, twice. I thought lamination was crucial. The more plastic you had around your ID, the more credible the forgery and when I walked into the Hilton Hotel in Chicago I was looking pretty good…except for the fact that the Yale Daily news had actually sent a reporter to this convention, he later became an undersecretary of state, Strobe Talbot, and he was two people behind me on the registration line when we were waiting to get in, so for the next three days,  I had to constantly make sure that Strobe Talbot and I were never, ever in the same room… But the thing is: they let me in. And I just… did it. I learned what reporters do by watching them, and then copying what I saw.  I ran up corridors. I interviewed people. I took frantic notes. I’d rush from ballrooms to the convention pressroom and type like crazy, what exactly I don’t remember, cos nobody had sent me there; I was writing nothing to nobody.  It was a pantomime, the whole thing, but I was in heaven. At one point there was a fight in a corridor, while the fight was still going on – and this was Chicago, people really hit each other – I squirreled on my belly underneath the fightingto get a quote from the first victim, whose name happened to be Maliewsky, or some long Polish name with lots of vowels, not easy to spell but I knew everybody would want to know the right spelling – I’d just learned that – so lying on the floor I say to him, “How do you spell Maliewsky? M, A, L, I or is it E? and with his head pressed to the carpet, he tells me, and I squiggle back out, and ten minutes later I’m standing in the pressroom… once I was sure Strobe Talbot wasn’t there, and I’m spelling Maliewsky and then, generously I’m…. sharing my quote! Oh man.

When I went home, by total chance, I was seated on the plane back to New York (which cost, by the way, in those days, 30 dollars if you were under 22)  next to none other thanDr.Benjamin Spock, the now anointed vice presidential nominee. So I had an exclusive interview with THE GUY! It was an exclusive for nobody… but still… I was so excited, we shared a cab back downtown and I left my clothes in his cab. The next day, my mother called me (cause my parents’ address was on the bag) and she said, “Do you know Dr. Spock? Cause he just left your clothes in our lobby.” And there was no way I could tell my mother what I’d done. No way.

I still have trouble explaining to myself. I just wanted to be there. And, I should tell you I wasn’t, like, planning a career or dreaming dreams of a life in journalism. In fact, I had just seen Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird and I wanted to be him. A trial lawyer, that was my dream. So after college and national service I went to law school.  Journalism wasn’t my first love… or my only love, but the seed was planted. And then later, when I graduated law school and had this deep, haunting feeling that I’d made a mistake, and I’d didn’t have the talent or the character to be Gregory Peck,  then asked myself… well, what can I do? What am I good at? And I thought, well, I’m good at explaining things… I like learning stuff and meeting people and who gets to do that? And I remembered my weekend in Chicago…

And the thing is, at that moment, after law school, I was desperate to be good at something, and Journalism, I thought, might save me from being a nobody.

And, because I’d had that crazy weekend, I had a sly feeling, maybe it could be better than that. Some combination of desire and desperation gave me my next plan: I went to my living room, with a tape recorder and I composed a ten part series about Presidential Impeachments. Richard Nixon was being investigated by Congress at that time… this was the Watergate era, and I just wrote ten questions I thought might be on peoples’ minds:

If a president is impeached does he go right to jail? No. He goes on trial.

Who runs the trial? Who’s the judge?

Who’s the jury?

If Senators are supposed to weigh the evidence like jurors, what if 6 of them are in the bathroom during important testimony. Normal Jurors can’t go to the bathroom, but I bet Senators can?

Who is Nixon’s lawyer?

Who is the prosecutor?

Does the President go to work when he’s being impeached?

And so on…

And I took all these questions, and because I’d gone to law school, I answered them and performed a question and answer 40 minute drama, for some reason, in the style of Howard Cosell, the great ABC sportscaster. Why I did my impeachment lesson as a sportscast, I have no idea. It was not a… uh… big success, But one radio station, a community, underground,  lefty kind of station, found it curiously plausible. And that’s all it took, one. That tape got me my first job…

But the impulse, to explain, to write, to tell, began here… [tapping heart] On my insides.

Journalism doesn’t have to be your first love… or your only love.

You can come to it in desperation, because you can’t think of anything better to do with your life, that it’s this or the abyss.

But once you get going… it helps if you love it. There are different things to love. Some of you, no doubt, have learned to love the spotlight, you want to be the narrator… the on-camera, the presenter, the voice, the big byline.

Others of you may choose producing, designing, managing, staying out of sight, shaping the product.

Some of you like speed. Find something, get it right, get it on, go home. Some of you like it slower:  go somewhere, hang out, mull it over, write a draft… take your time…

What you love can differ, but the love, once it comes, that feeling of waking up with a kind of eagerness, a crazy momentum that pushes you into your day, an excitement you realize you don’t ever want to go way… that’s important.

If you don’t have that feeling, maybe you’re lucky. You can lead a more sane life.  But if you do – I say congratulations. You have what it takes to begin.

What you do next? Well, the obvious option is to go to Conde Nast, Sports Illustrated, MTV.  They’re there. You can go in and pour coffee for the person who sharpens the pencil for the person who writes the copy and work your way all the way to the top. That’s what Charles Kuralt did. And in his day, with his talent, he did it very fast.

But here’s another way.

It’s not easy. It’s not for everybody. Just something to think about.

Suppose, instead of waiting for a job offer from the New Yorker, suppose next month, you go to your living room, sit down, and just do what you love to do. If you write, you write. You write a blog. If you shoot, find a friend, someone you know and like, and the two of you write a script. You make something. No one will pay you. No one will care, No one will notice, except of course you and the people you’re doing it with. But then you publish, you put it on line, which these days is totally doable, and then… you do it again.

Now I understand that if you’re married, or have a kid, you can’t not make money. And I know that it is not fun, it’s the opposite of fun, to juggle rent payments with car payments, to fudge medical bills, to play roulette with your credit cards, to have bills that must be paid month after month after month, that don’t go down, and I know about friends and siblings who didn’t go crazy, who didn’t try to become professional storytellers, who became normal things, like sales people, and doctors and teachersand are now moving into homes, buying real furniture and making you feel like you are slipping backwards in the world for the sin offollowing a dream. I know about that.

But let me tell you what I’ve also seen.

I’ve also seen, in my most recent area, science journalism, I’ve seen people do just what I’ve proposed. I’ve seen people, literally, go home, write a blog about dinosaurs (in one case), neuroscience, biology. Nobody asked them. They just did. On their own. By themselves.

After they wrote, they tweeted and facebooked and flogged their blogs, and because they were good, and worked hard, within a year or two, magazines asked them to affiliate (on financial terms that were insulting), but they did that, and their blogs got an audience, and then they got magazine assignments, then agents, then book deals, and now, three, four years after they began, these folks, five or six of them, are beginning to break through. They are becoming not just science writers with jobs, they are becoming THE science writers, the ones people read, and look to… they’re going places. And they’re doing it on their own terms! In their own voice, they’re free to be themselves AND they’re paid for it!

How they managed, I don’t know. Some of them worked by day and wrote by night.

Some lived with their parents. Some must have struck deals with spouses or with friends.

But I notice, because I talk to them, and now I often work with them… I notice that they get courage from each other. They’ve got a kind of community. At first it was virtual; they wrote each other. Then they met each other. Now they support each other. Watch out for each other. One day, I imagine, they will get and give each other jobs. And they share a sensibility, a generational sense, that this is how “we” do it.

News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It’s a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different.  Anderson Cooper, different still. When you grow up in different decades, you laugh at different jokes, hear different machines, (typewriters versus computers, pinball machines versus Mario Brothers), you hear different ads, jingles, songs, sounds.

When you talk or write or film, you work with the music inside you, the music that formed you. Different generations have different musics in them, so whatever they do, it’s going to come out differently and it will speak in beats of their own generation.

The people in charge, of course, don’t want to change. They like the music they’ve got.  To the newcomers, they say, “Wait your turn”.

But in a world like this… rampant with new technologies, and new ways to do things, the newcomers… that means you… you here today, you have to trust your music… It’s how you talk to people your age, your generation. This is how we change.

After all, when it began in the 1930’s, Time, the weekly news magazine, was a radical idea created by young Henry Luce and his college friends. The New Yorker got its beats from young James Thurber and his buddy E.B. White, and their boss Harold Ross, I was at Rolling Stone when Jann Wenner put together his amazing gang of writers, designers, critics, photographers. Then Ira Glass did it again with Gen Xers. Each of these groups have a shared feel; they are expressing something that belongs to their age, their time.

So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.

Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy.  Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.

And when it comes to security, to protection, your friends may take better care of you than CBS took care of Charles Kuralt in the end. In every career, your job is to make and tell stories, of course. You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back.

And maybe that’s your way into Troy.

There you are, on the beach, with the other newbies, looking up. Maybe somebody inside will throw you a key and let you in… But more likely, most of you will have to find your own Trojan Horse.

And maybe, for your generation, the Trojan Horse is what you’ve got, your talent, backed by a legion of friends. Not friends in high places. This is the era of Friends in Low Places. The ones you meet now, who will notice you, challenge you, work with you, and watch your back. Maybe they will be your strength.

If you choose to go this way, you won’t have Charles Kuralt’s instant success. It will take time. It will probably be very lonely. A living room is not a news room. It doesn’t feel like one. You know you’re alone. And on the way, you might get scarily close to not being able to afford a living room.

But what I’ve noticed is that people who fall in love with journalism, who stay at it, who stay stubborn, very often win. I don’t know why, but I’ve seen it happen over and over.

So, here, for what it’s worth, ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 2011, is my graduation advice. Some of you will say, “This is a fantasy. Pay this man no attention,” but hey, you invited me, so here’s what I’ve got:

If you can… fall in love, with the work, with people you work with, with your dreams and their dreams. Whatever it was that got you to this school, don’t let it go. Whatever kept you here, don’t let that go. Believe in your friends. Believe that what you and your friends have to say… that the way you’re saying it – is something new in the world.

And don’t stop. Just hold on… and keep loving what you love… and you’ll see. In the end, they’ll let you stay.

Thank you.