Give your funeral better material

When you’re at a funeral, you’ll notice something missing when near and dear ones speak about those who’ve passed: their normal behavior. No one ever talks about how someone hoed a straight line and played with a straight bat down the pitch. We talk about their quirks. The quaint oddities. That wild thing they did once that surprised us. When you travel across the country to be with your friend at his dad’s funeral, he will tell you that you didn’t have to do it. But he will remember it forever. That you were there.

Here’s the thing: none of us are normal. We’re all weird in our own ways. Most of us spend our lives hiding our oddities and trying to be rational. This makes sense at some level. Being rational has payoffs. Except it’s not so memorable.

What even is normal? It has never been the same thing through time. Emperor Augustus of Rome was the most powerful man in the world in his time. He slept on a bed of hay. That was normal. He and Alexander of Macedonia and Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar never once experienced a hot shower. That was normal. I recently watched a movie about President Garfield. He was shot by a crazy man. As he lay dying, they brought in a half a million pounds of ice and blew air over it to keep the President of the United States cool. They did not have air conditioning then.

This morning, I got up in my cool home, went to my bathroom, brushed my teeth, and had a hot shower. All normal things which were extraordinarily hard or impossible once. You, me and a million others dance on the graves of dead problems every morning in our mundane lives. Problems people once thought would never die. We solved them all.

Here’s a crazy story.

Dostoevsky was 28 when he faced a firing squad. Blind folded. Hands tied, he could hear the rifles being loaded. That’s when the reprieve came. At the very last second. His sentence was commuted. As it turned out, his execution was staged. Psychological torture meant to break the dissidents. It triggered a savage, lifelong epilepsy. But it never broke him. They sent him to Siberia where he worked with criminals. His epilepsy got worse.

When he got out, he was broke. In sheer desperation, he wrote the Gambler in 26 days. He married the stenographer who typed his manuscript. Her name was Anna. Then came the big bang of creativity. Crime and Punishment. The Idiot. The Brothers Karamazov. These are some of the greatest books written in the Russian language. Possibly in any language.

Here’s another one.

Joseph Campbell lived in a shack for five years where he did nothing but read for nine hours a day. This was a man who had no job or income or even a plan. He called those years “the most fertile years of my life.” This was the man who wrote “the hero’s journey.” He spent five years doing nothing this world would call productive. Luckily for him, there was no WhatsApp back in the day.

You can’t have ideas if you don’t read. You can’t articulate ideas if you don’t write. You can’t put ideas into practice if you don’t create. I don’t know why I said this. It seems to fit in this essay somewhere. But I couldn’t figure out where. So I’ve put it here instead of forgetting about it.

It took humans over 2 million years to master fire, build homes, make spears and raise their own food. In the 16th century, something magical happened. We learned HOW to solve problems. The scientific method emerged. And the world has never been the same ever since. Every problem that has ever been solved started with a weird guess. Nothing great ever came out of people trying to be rational or reasonable. You have to be willing to look ridiculous before you’re proven right. Maybe you’ll be proven right. Maybe you won’t. But there’s something to be said for allowing yourself to consider the absurd.

Your death is going to come on an ordinary day, amid unfinished plans and the world will go on existing without you. Go ahead and try something weird. Give them something to talk about at your funeral.

Do write back. The weirdest comment will get a mention next week on the What Ho! Report.

Have a good weekend.

Happy 250th, America

This week, I have a few unconnected thoughts.

There’s a lot being said about AI and LLMs, and how powerful they are becoming. There is a growing unease about all of this. I think it’s because a majority of people (like 90 percent of the people out there) are not tech savvy and have no way of knowing what is going on, even if it’s explained to them really well. It’s not that they’re deficient in gray matter. It’s just how tech works. Tech tends to be cult-ish, has its own jargon and lingo, and there are insiders and outsiders in this cult. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, even tech folks in software could not understand the lingo of telecom and networks, which were dramatically changing the world at that time. It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious about feeling inadequate. Trust me, you’re in good company. Some of the smartest people in the world haven’t the foggiest idea how AI works.

For a majority of my (meagre) audience, the question is more likely: How is this going to affect my children? Most of us have crossed over to the other side and have either retired or don’t need to hold a job for financial reasons. Our concerns are more about the next generation.

Here is what I urge you to consider: LLMs are not reasoning engines. They are probability engines. They’re not natively intelligent. They are very good at building patterns based on probabilities. If you ask an LLM, “Should I be anxious about AI?” – it will predict the answer you’re looking for and give it to you, while mimicking an expert. The key part is “giving you what you want.” Sycophancy is a bigger problem with ChatGPT, Gemini et al than even hallucination, where the AI just makes stuff up.

But there are areas where its predictive ability is useful. This is where AI becomes the most potent. Writing code is a well structured activity. When you write code, and you write lines A, B and C, there is a fairly high likelihood D must follow, and what D should look like in a given context. Ergo, AI will become better at coding and eventually replace software programmers. I’m sure you can think of other structured activities where AI can be put to use. The thing is – even the most structured jobs have an element of judgement and unpredictability to them. So humans will stay in the picture. Their numbers will shrink but they will be needed.

This – AI cannot reason but only predict what’s next – gives me reason to believe that society might not collapse wholesale. Will AI ever be able to reason? I seriously doubt it. Will AI disrupt the status quo? Yes, in a lot of ways. Even if AI eliminates 20-30 percent of all jobs, it will be cataclysmic. Can your kid avoid being one of those who is disrupted by AI? I don’t know if it’s possible to fool proof oneself from the coming tidal wave, other than learning to swim. A learning mindset will be super critical. Learning how to learn, the ability to self-teach, and a solid work ethic will never go out of fashion. I’d argue – encouraging your kids to teach themselves something creative and fun like a new language or an instrument – will not only enrich their lives but add a super critical life-skill to their repertoire. They will learn to teach themselves and that will pay off over a lifetime.

Speaking of historic transformations, the biggest in human history may have been the evolution of languages. Not programming languages but human ones. Around the time humans began to farm, there were about ten million people on Earth. They spoke about ten thousand languages. No language had more than two thousand speakers. Today, eight billion people speak about seven thousand languages, which fall into 140 families. Most of us speak languages that fall into just five of them. Of these, two families are behemoths: Indo-European, whose representative is English, and Sino-Tibetan, which includes Mandarin Chinese. If you include second or subsequent language-speakers, Indo-European is by far the largest language family the world has ever known. Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European. Where did these Indo-European languages start? That is the subject of the book I’ve been reading these last couple of weeks. The book is titled “Proto,” the name assigned to the mother of Indo-European languages. If this interests you, check it out.

I have only vague memories of the weeks leading up to the day I became a US citizen in 2002. But I remember the ceremony itself vividly. It was at the Masonic Center in San Francisco. I felt moved by it. It was startling because I hadn’t expected to be moved by it. It was supposed to be purely transactional. We only got our US passports because we were moving to Singapore (and later India) at that time.

I was born in India. Giving up my Indian citizenship felt like a betrayal, a fracture in my identity. India is the mother who raised me, who formed who I was until I turned 21. But America is the mother who adopted me, who opened her arms and showered abundant love and opportunity on a brown kid who showed up on her shores from ten thousand miles away. I am the child of two beautiful mothers. That is how it will be until the day I die. I’d dare you to find a luckier man than I am.

I feel the weight of that destiny more than ever this week as America turns 250. This country is by no means perfect. She carries a deeply flawed, heavy history written in the scars of slavery, racism, patriarchy, and exclusion. It is a long, painful list. Even so, the light outshines the dark. America has, at her core, been a monumental force for good in this world. And the best part of this great country? Its people. I have never met people with bigger hearts, or a more restless desire to do better, than Americans.

That is why I am proud to be an American. May God bless her. Happy 250th birthday, my dear.

Have an amazing weekend!

A perfectly normal week in America

It’s an incredible time to be alive. Dr. Mehmet Oz, a man who once spent 45 minutes on national TV extolling the benefits of consistent bowel movements, is now the official White House Press Secretary. Usually, a press secretary’s job is to gracefully dodge tricky questions about foreign policy or inflation. But with Dr. Oz at the microphone, it is entirely possible that a reporter’s question about the Strait of Hormuz could be answered with a recommendation for a green coffee bean extract. “Look, I don’t know much about the armed forces strategy, but I can tell you that three servings of wild yam root can do wonders to relieve your constipation.”

Texas has decided that the best way to prepare school children to enter the modern world is to have them read the Bible. Third graders will deal with the plague of frogs before they encounter long form division. In the same week, Trump signed two executive orders directing federal agencies to protect Americans from “future quantum computers.” While Washington mandarins try to figure out post-quantum cryptography algorithms and how to avoid hacks from 2040, Texas school kids will be tested on how many cubits make up Noah’s Ark. No word yet on whether they’ll be taught that Jonah’s whale was a mammal and not a fish.

The Supreme Court entered the chat this week with a pair of 6-3 rulings that essentially allow the administration to strip deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants and turn away asylum seekers at the southern border before they set foot on US soil. Samuel Alito, one of the justices, commented, “A guest does not arrive in a house when he knocks on the front door.” Fair point. Well played, Samuel. Just so you know, all four of Justice Samuel Alito’s grandparents immigrated to the United States from Italy. They came from Calabria on a ship and knocked on the front door. Times have changed. Now, we can hide behind the couch and pretend no one’s at home when someone rings the front door bell.

AI is now coming for your wallet. There is a shortage of memory chips. Why is there a shortage? Because artificial intelligence companies are buying every single piece of silicon on the planet to train their large language models. Apple announced this week that this memory shortage has pushed the costs higher, and ergo, raised prices on their laptops and iPads. Basically, you have to pay more for a laptop because a server farm in Utah needs those chips to power an AI bot that can generate a picture of a golden retriever dressed as a pirate.

First, Trump said that he had destroyed Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities. And then he said they had to go to war with Iran. Not sure exactly why. Hadn’t they already destroyed it? This is the guy who started his second term promising to end “Forever Wars” with “a single phone call.” Somehow, we have ended up in this logjam between the Art of the Deal and the Axis of Evil, where Trump has agreed to pay the Iranians 300 billion dollars for having assassinated their Ayatollah. At this rate, Iran is three Ayatollahs away from pocketing a trillion dollars.

At this point, Trump is handling matters with the precision of a toddler playing with a grenade. He is getting his lunch money stolen from both sides. At one end, the Iranians are treating him like an escape room enthusiast who doesn’t know how to read the clues. They signed his “historic” peace deal on Monday and then casually lobbed a drone at a cargo ship on Thursday. Meanwhile, Netanyahu is treating Trump like a confused resident in an assisted living facility. Bibi holds his hand, points him toward the cameras for a photo-op, nods politely at his rants, and then bombs Beirut, wrecking peace talks.

Come to think of it, learning about Noah’s Ark might not be a bad idea. If things go to hell, we might need one.

Have a great weekend!

PS; The FIFA World Cup is on. More on that next weekend. Enjoy the games!

Elmo, AI Dividends, and a British Accent

California’s Hunger Games

California just wrapped up its primary elections for Governor, among other things. The way it works around here, there is an “open” primary in which all candidates, Democrat and Republican, pile into the same ballot. Only the top two make the cut for the General Election in November.

This year’s top two are Steve Hilton, a Republican former Fox News host and former aide of David Cameron in the UK. Apparently his English accent sounded sophisticated to the hillbillies of central California, enough to propel him to the top spot so far. Xavier Becerra, a lifelong Democrat, came in at number two by simply promising that he is definitely not Steve Hilton. Tom Steyer, the billionaire who everyone sees only around election time,, and a local sheriff missed the cut by a mile, proving neither money nor a badge is good enough. BTW, they still haven’t finished counting the votes yet.

The Republican candidate doesn’t stand a chance in November. I honestly can’t tell you if that’s a blessing or a curse.

Oops, Trump’s Personal Piggy Bank is Gone.

This week, the White House officially gave up the ghost on its attempt to create a $1.8 Billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” Astonishingly, it appears that there are limits to the shenanigans Trump can pull off. Originally, the fund was designed to pay damages to anyone who felt bullied by the US government, which is practically everyone in the world tbh.

When critics pointed out that the fund looked more like a Kickstarter for Trump’s near and dear, the backlash got so spicy that a handful of Senate Republicans threatened to mutiny over it. Realizing that it looked too obvious even by his standards, Trump asked his people to take the idea behind the proverbial barn and put it down. RIP to the most flagrantly shameless scam ever tried by a POTUS.

Uncle Sam Wants to Buy the Matrix

This week, Trump announced that the government might buy a stake in OpenAI, the maker of chatGPT. Apparently, CEO Sam Altman of OpenAI has floated this utopian future to the White House: Government will own a piece of OpenAI. In turn, the company will pay “AI Dividends” out of its corporate profits, which can be used by the government to pay US citizens a monthly income to offset the fact that a chatbot took their jobs. Yes, a chatbot might pay your rent in the future.

Anthropic, a competitor and the maker of Claude, has denied being part of these discussions.

To top it off, Trump has signed a new executive order that now requires AI companies to show Uncle Sam their code for a security vibe-check before unleashing it into the wild.

Welcome to our future.

Even Elmo Had to Pick a Side

We are officially broken as a people.

There was a time when extreme tribalism was restricted to British soccer fans, college football and white country clubs in Texas. You painted your face, wore your team’s jersey, got drunk before kickoff and shook your fist at the opponents.

These days, it has leaked into the most mundane corners of everyday life.

Take Stanley drinking cups. Drinking water used to be for hydration once. Today, it’s part of a gang affiliation ritual. Owning the “right drinking cup” has become a basis for social acceptance. Teens in high schools are facing ostracization for carrying an “off brand” water vessel. Thanks TikTok.

Take the recent ruckus in the WNBA. What should have been a historic, universally celebrated boom for women’s basketball quickly turned into a toxic internet battlefield. The media and fans drew a hard line in the sand between rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. You couldn’t just be a basketball fan who enjoyed watching two incredibly talented athletes. If you praised one, you were accused of tearing down the other. Damn.

This week, we may have peaked with the Elmo affair. And, I say this with the fond hope that peaks usually lead to declines.

This last week, the NBA finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs got off the ground. Both fine teams. My favorite, the Spurs, are expected to lose. In the lead up to the Finals, Elmo, a puppet for those who don’t know him, hopped online to say, “Elmo hopes both teams have fun.” It was a classic and innocent dose of kindergarten diplomacy.

You’ll never believe what happened next. The Knicks fans went absolutely bonkers. Because Sesame Street studios are located in Manhattan, the feral New York fans ripped Elmo a new one, accusing him of being a traitor to his own twon. Elmo’s Twitter account was flooded with thousands of unhinged responses, many threatening bodily violence and mayhem. One prominent fan account demanded, “PICK A SIDE COWARD.” Another grimly warned the puppet, “These streets ain’t sesame.” Even the New York City Department of Transportation joined the dogpile, tweeting a photo of an uptown Sesame Street sign with the tongue-in-cheek threat: “Don’t make us take this down, bro.”

There is something stilling and calming about watching utter chaos. Your eyes glaze as you watch the roofs burn. Your mind tunes out. And you begin to breathe evenly. I must be in a dream, right? This too shall pass. That is exactly how I felt watching this unfold online. It perfectly exemplifies our current psychological landscape.

Even the middle ground is a hazard zone now. You can actually get canceled for being neutral. If you’re not actively cheering for someone – whether a party, a smartphone, a pop star or a basketball team – you will be deemed hostile and traitorous. No, don’t even think about making a joke.

When a fuzzy puppet whose purpose is to teach toddlers to share cannot survive a basketball rivalry without being told to watch his back, you know we’re approaching peak-chaos. Listen, if Elmo can’t manage to stay neutral in 2026, the rest of us don’t stand a freaking chance.

Have a good weekend.

PS: I’m on travel for the next two weeks. I’ll write you after that. Cheers.

Open Bar on the Titanic

News has never been a source of comfort, mainly because we don’t want it to be. Let’s face it – Deep down, we have this primal urge to watch the gears turn. We don’t tune in to find out what’s working. We tune in to watch the train wrecks. We look for evidence of the less fortunate and the morally depraved to reassure ourselves that we are both lucky and virtuous. It’s a sordid little ecosystem. A classic case of “can’t live with it, can’t live without it.”

Lately, the American news diet has been a steady stream of three ingredients: wars, corruption, and AI. On any given Tuesday, the feed is a dizzying blur. The US is bombing Iran, Israel is doing the equivalent in Lebanon, and yet, somehow, there’s simultaneously a whisper about a backroom deal between Washington and Tehran. Trump is on TV delivering his daily diatribe against a woman reporter, or frankly anyone else who dared to breathe in his direction that morning. Meanwhile, the Ukraine-Russia war has apparently “peaked” in the public consciousness. No one wants to hear about it anymore, which is wild considering how fervently the entire internet was rooting for Putin’s absolute demise just a few years ago. Boredom, it turns out, beats geopolitics.

The economic news is just as surreal: every other week, some mega-tech conglomerate announces record-shattering, historic profits, and immediately celebrates by laying off ten thousand people. Gigantic sums of money are being spent on building datacenters and what not. And no one is telling us what they’re expecting to get out of them. It feels like the economy is running primarily on this “AI build out.” Take it away and there is not much to write about.

On the local news front, you just get a smaller radius of doom: a hit-and-run on a street five miles from your home, a gunman at a mall, and so on. There’s always a tech billionaire somewhere in California at any point in time currently spending millions to block the public from his private beach. There’s always something weird that the Oakland mayor is doing. There’s always a senior citizen who gave away his Bank of America account details when someone called and asked.

Globally, it’s a comedy of a different sort. The UK government is “tottering” again. Governments in the UK have been tottering for well over a decade now, yet it’s still breaking news. Will Keir Starmer hold on? Honestly, no one will remember his name the second he is gone, just like his immediate predecessors have vanished from our collective memory. What was the name of that Indian dude again who was PM for a while? Elsewhere in Europe, a German minister, or sometimes a Spanish one, depending on the shift rotation, is saying something nasty about Trump on any given Thursday. The Scandinavians? No one thinks of them until a civil war breaks out in Sri Lanka and they somehow manage to insert themselves as the polite, blonde mediators.

The news from the subcontinent isn’t exactly a basket of cheer either, though Pakistan has been surprisingly quiet. Well, they’re brokering that peace deal between Iran and the US. I’m certain they’re up to some shenanigans behind the scenes, but for now, they just aren’t making the cut for the prime-time news cycle.

India, meanwhile, is dominated by the usual programming: Modi winning some mathematically improbable state election, cementing his status as a legend. He’s been a legend for a while, of course. No one throws a political party quite like Modi. Has he had work done on his face? The photos on my feed lately show a remarkably well sculpted visage with high cheekbones that deserve their own investigative journalism piece.

My YouTube algorithm has decided these days that I’m a doom-scroller. Every third video on my recommended feed now asks, “Is India in trouble?” But in the middle of this algorithmic chaos, I stumbled onto a gem: the “Cockroach Janata Party,” or CJP. Apparently, an Indian student at Boston University started this “movement” as a joke, calling on “the lazy and the unemployed” to unite. Within three days, twenty million Gen-Zers actually signed up. Naturally, the Indian government panicked, declared it a threat to national security, and scrubbed them from social media.

What I’m realizing is that things are escalating by the day, and we’ve become adept at rapidly normalizing the insanity around us. We’re not fazed by any of this anymore. For example: Trump has openly looted billions using crypto tokens. He recently signed an executive order creating a $1.8 billion “national fund” to pay damages to anyone “unfairly sued” by the US government. By “anyone,” he primarily means himself. In all likelihood, that fund is a bespoke, taxpayer-funded checking account for his own personal needs. To top it off, the order exempts him and his family from being audited by the IRS ever again.

By any stretch of the imagination, this is breathtaking, cinematic corruption. Sure, people are screaming into the void on cable TV, but the rest of us are just anxious, exhausted, and silently furious. The breaking point is here, sitting on the couch in the room with us. November’s election seems a lifetime away, but I don’t think people are going to forget the bizarre theater of 2026 anytime soon. Let’s see what Trump has accomplished so far: started a war he can’t win or exit, driven prices into the stratosphere, created personal slush funds, berated women, and politically executed any Republican who looks at him sideways. And yet, it’s still unclear if the Republicans will actually lose ground in November. Go figure.

But hey, at least the stock market is fun! The market in 2026 has been an absolute banger. No new high is high enough and it just keeps climbing. We now have fourteen companies valued at a trillion dollars or more, and they are all American. OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are all preparing to go public at trillion-dollar-plus valuations. These are heady times that will be written into history books. Whether for good or bad reasons, time will tell. But when your stock portfolio has swelled to proportions that you know you don’t deserve, perhaps the knots in the stomach become more tolerable?

We are living in some weird mutant hybrid of 1973 and 1999. It’s Watergate-level ethics and corruption mixed with a crippling oil crisis, combined with peak dot-com bubble euphoria and irrational exuberance. I don’t think American history has ever quite seen a moment this beautifully insane. We’re dancing on the decks of the Titanic but at least there is an open bar and the drinks are flowing.

Have a great weekend!