Saravanan.Org - Happiness through Clarity

09 Dec

Diabetic Surgery (or Metabolic Surgery) for Beating Diabetes

Diabetic Surgery (or Metabolic Surgery)

I can’t conclude the series on beating diabetes without talking about diabetic surgery. After all, diabetic surgery (sometimes called metabolic surgery) beats the cruel disease, thereby adding 15 to 20 years over just a single weekend. Even though this solutions has been around for decades, for reasons that I don’t quite understand, diabetic surgery is the best kept secret of the diabetes treatment industry!

Disclosure

The last blog post I wrote was on the 2nd of November “2014”, more than an year ago. It was on using exercise to beat back diabetes. I planned to add one more blog post to the series on beating diabetes to address diabetic surgery.

But then, from late December 2014, I started spending my time with my friends at Lifeline Hospitals, working on conceiving and implementing health care growth strategies. As part of this work, I work on building a brand for the diabeticsurgery.com solutions offered by them. Though I am going to remain objective and truthful, you should know that I have a conflict of interest here.

Diabetic Surgery (or Metabolic Surgery)

Re-configuring the digestive tract seem to send diabetes into remission in at least in 85% of the cases. If the patient is younger, or has been diabetic for lesser number of years, the changes of remission is very close to 100%.

This is the only fail-proof and scientifically proven way to send diabetes in to complete remission. As against diabetic surgery,

Very low calorie diet will require life long maintenance of calorie restriction, combined with regular and rigorous exercise. Even then, the insulin resistance will continue to progress, albeit in a much slower pace.
Ketogenic diet, again, is to be a lifelong commitment. It won’t work if it is not combined with regular and rigorous exercise. Plus, no one really knows the effect of long term carbohydrate elimination.
Except in mild cases of pre-diabetes, exercise alone won’t normalize the insulin resistance. it needs to be combined with one of the two diets I had mentioned above.

But diabetic surgery takes the patient back to the days before they became diabetic. What it means is that post surgery, the patient needs to live a somewhat disciplined life. Else, they will end up becoming diabetic after several years. But there are several recorded cases of people living diabetic free for more than 30 years.

How does diabetic surgery (or metabolic surgery) work?

I’ve heart all kind of explanation as to why reconfiguration of the digestive tract makes one insulin resistance. Only thing that makes sense is that change in the digestive tract changes the enrocrinological profile in the body, thereby reversing the insulin resistance. But what are these exact changes are still not understood.

It is interesting how insulin resistance now appears to be a disease of the gut!

Diabetic Surgery (or metabolic surgery) works by reversing the insulin resistance. Pancreas of the patients undergoing this procedure must still retain its ability to produce healthy amount of insulin. Else, even after reversing insulin, the body won’t be producing sufficient quantity of insulin to clear the blood sugar form the blood stream and the diabetes will continue.

So, success of diabetic surgery depends on the body’s insulin reserves. If the body has good insulin reserves, the changes of reversing the diabetes is pretty good. Patients usually lose their diabetes within a matter of few weeks. Patients with muted insulin reserve may take a few months.

The surgery typically takes about an hour on the table. And a couple of days of hospital stay.

I am one of those people with inadequate insulin reserve and I am unlikely to become non-diabetic after the surgery. Till such time some new medical breakthrough comes along, I will have to contend with the combination of ketogenic diet and regular exercise to keep the diabetes under control. In the year and a half that I had been on this combination, my HbA1c has always hovered around 5.4. I sincerely hope that it is helping me to delay the diabetic complications.

02 Nov

Beating Diabetes: Exercise

Diabetes-and-Exercise

While exercise cannot work alone in beating diabetes, it can and must be used as a powerful, adjunct. Here are three exercise protocols that I have found helpful:

HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training)

You can take any activity which can be ramped up to rigorous pace and do a HIIT with it. I usually prefer HIIT on an elliptical machine. The protocol I use is:

2 minutes of warm up
HIIT Cycles of ’20 seconds of all out exertion’, followed by ’40 seconds of moderate exertion’

Typically, it is sufficient if you do about 8 HIIT cycles per day. In all, including warm up, you will need 10 minutes to complete one session. With that, your exercise quota for the day will be over!

HIIT is an anaerobic exercise and with the protocol I mentioned above, your heart muscle is put on a lot of load. So, follow these precautions:

HIIT training increases the turbulence of blood flow. If you have clogged arteries, turbulence can dislodge the plaques. That could be fatal. Don’t take up HIIT if you are not in top shape. If you are in doubt, ask your doctor.
If you feel discomfort, don’t push on
If you are new to HIIT, start off with ‘warm up + 4 cycles’. That will be just 6 minutes to start with. You can eventually ramp up to 8 cycles or more.
Give at least four days, if not more, between two HIIT sessions for the heart muscles to recover

HIIT is a great protocol if you know what you are doing. Even though you are spending just 10 minutes, once every 4 days, sprinting induces HGH (Human Growth Hormone) secretion. HGH melts the fat away!

HIIT won’t tone your muscles. But it will increase your overall fitness. Combine it with weight training and core strengthening for aesthetic appeal and ‘performance’.

BBS (Body by Science)

Developed by Dr. Doug McGuff, BBS (book, video, website) is everything that HIIT is not. And you spend even less time on BBS!

Here is the BBS protocol in a nutshell:

Take 5 exercises, namely Lat pull down, chest press, rowing, shoulder press and leg press
Execute each one, in the given order, non-stop for 90 seconds
The amount of weight you use must be just the right amount of load to cause muscle fatigue just before you reach the 90 seconds mark
Give a break of just 30 seconds after each 90 seconds work out

That’s it. Nothing more. The whole session takes just under 10 minutes.

You do the exercise once again

After the body has fully recovered (when you just start, your muscles recover in about 5 days; but with time, as you go adding load, you may have to wait 10 to 14 days between sessions).
Increase the load by 10% from the previous session

If the body has not recovered fully, you won’t be able to increase the load. Load increase is essential for muscle growth. Muscle growth is essential for increase of fitness and aesthetics.

Dr. McGuff claims that BBS increases aerobic capacity too. You must read his book or watch his video to understand how.

Also, when you are on BBS, McGuff expects you to adopt a low carb diet like Primal Diet. This is because the exercise program is based on emptying your glycogen reserves once a week and then topping it up over the next few days. Personally, I think Primal Diet has too much of carbohydrate for a diabetic. I think a diabetic must restrict the carb intake to 50g per day, and the protein to about 150g per day. That can be achieved only with a ketogenic diet.

Unlike HIIT, BBS is exceedingly safe protocol. Gym injuries are almost nil. If your gym has Nautilus like equipment, which are more designed load your muscles uniformly over the loading cycle, it makes BBS even safer.

One caveat though: If you are diabetic, you should go to the gym at least 5 days a week. That helps you to keep the blood glucose levels at an even keel across the week. So, when I am on BBS, instead of doing all the muscle group just once a week, I do one muscle group each day, but attack it from different angle using various exercises. However, I maintain the ’90 second non-stop’ guideline for each loading.

Max-OT (Maximum Over Training)

This is another strength training protocol. I use this if I want to spend more time at the gym (BBS gets over before even you realize), particularly on a day when I have something to ruminate on the mind. Which is almost every day!

Unlike BBS, Max-OT is unsafe. With Max-OT, I had injured myself at least three times in the past. But it helps me carry bigger weights. Somehow, for reasons that I can’t explain, it matters!

With Max OT protocol, you warm up and load each muscle group in the following stages:

12 reps: 1/2 (50%) your max load
9 reps: 1/2 (50%) your max load
6 reps: 2/3 (67%) your max load
3 reps: 4/5 (80%) of your max load
1 rep: 9/10 (90%) of your max load
2 to 4 reps: Max load
2 to 4 reps: Max load

Of course, you can take about a minute rest between each loading.

For the best effect, Max OT is carried out with free weights. When free weights are used, your limbs are required to control several degrees of movement. Which is expected to strengthen multiple-muscle fibers.

But you should be aware that free weights at maximum capacity is always a recipe for disaster. Under Max load, keep the concentration on every one of your muscle fibers. Or else, you are guaranteed to injure yourself.

With Max-OT, I work out about 5 days a week, each day for one particular muscle group. So, each muscle group is loaded once every week. I am able to increase the max load by about 10% every 3 weeks or so. Increase in max load, of course, is essential to get better results.

Supplements

All three protocols that I have shared are anaerobic. I am not a big fan of aerobic exercises. I think they lack focus and intensity for my taste. Regardless of which protocol you chose, you are better off with these supplements:

Drink some water with BCAA before and during the exercise (with HIIT, you won’t have time drink anything during exercising)
Take a scoop of whey protein, mixed with water, after exercise
Every day, take 100mg Co-enzyme Q10, 1g L-Carnitine, 1g Vitamin C, 400iU Vitamin E, 2g EPA+DHA (from Omega 3) and a multi-vitamin
Guys wanting to build muscle mass usually load carbs. DO NOT. Since you are diabetic, you already have lots of glucose floating around in you blood. One of the main reasons you are exercising is to utilize the glucose that is already in your blood. All post-workout drinks have carbs in them. You can’t have them. More interestingly, you don’t need them.
Of course, after extended work out, your sugar levels may drop. If you expect it, keep some sweets around to gobble them. Instead, you can also work on getting your body keto-adopted. In which case, you body burns fat for fuel (as against burning glucose for fuel). Since you are holding mega-storage of calories in the form of fat (good enough for 100 days or more), once you become keto adopted, you will never have to worry about hypoglycemia.

Diet Control

If you are diabetic (T2), there is no way you are going to control your Type-2 diabetes without controlling your diet. There are two diametrically opposite philosophies on what kind of diet is good for diabetics:

Neal Bernard has been very successful in treating scores of diabetics on ultra-low fat, low-GL, largely vegetarian, food
On ketogenic diet, you take only 10% carbs, but 70% fat and you can have all the animal origin food that you want

I strongly prefer the later. The least important reasons is that the food id delicious. Also, it feels right on the body. Most importantly, there is well understood science behind ketogenic diet. However, no one knows how or why Neal Bernard diet works.

Go here for more posts on Beating Diabetes.

31 Oct

Beating Diabetes: Ketogenic Diet

ketogenic-diet

Even though New Castle diet helped me reverse diabetes briefly, I was unsatisfied with it during maintenance period (I was adding back a paunch, having difficulty with adding muscle mass) as a tool for beating diabetes, I went looking for a better solution and stumbled on to ketogenic diet.

When I started looking for a better alternative to New Castle diet, I vaguely recalled a TED talk by Peter Attia, wherein he was talking about eating fat rich food and to successfully reverse his pre-diabetes. Back when I heard it first, it sounded too illogical for me to take it seriously. His crying on the stage didn’t help the matter much either!

But desperation is a mother of invention. I went looking for the talk again and googled his name to land up in his blog EatingAcademy. I learnt about the low-carb/high-fat diet, discovered pioneers like Stephen Phinney and the secrets that have been hidden in plain sight for the last 30 years:

Fat in the blood and stored in the body are produced endogenously. It is not the fat the fat we eat
In response to the carbs we eat, body produces plenty of insulin. Protein we eat produce some amount of insulin. Whereas, when we eat fat, body doesn’t produce any insulin at all
Since presence of insulin is required for storing fat, don’t eat insulin causing food and you won’t put on fat

Translation:
Eat very little carbs
some protein and
lots of fat

The general practice among the low-carb crowd is to consume 10% of daily calorie input from carbs, 20% from protein and 70% from fat.

When we eat so little carbohydrate, body runs out of glucose as fuel. It starts breaking down the fat into ketones and uses it for fuel. Hence this type of diet is called ketogenic diet.

I went and bought a bunch of Kindle books on ketogenic diet and one of them, The Blood Code, turned out to be a gem. Like Peter Attia, the author of the book, Richard Maurer, is a physician who was diagnosed with diabetes. He adopted ketogenic diet to reverse his diabetes and to help several others to do so. In the book, he presented a simple way to arrive at suggested amount carb intake based on the measure of one’s Insulin Resistance (HOMA-IR).

Other than that, Richard Maurer also brings across an important aspect of ketogenic food:

The body stores about 2,000C of glucose in the muscle and liver, largely derived from carbohydrate that we eat. When the body runs on carbohydrate as fuel, the fuel runs out in a day or two.

However, there is 9,000C of stored energy in every kg of body fat. It means that an adult male of about 25BMI stores about 150,000C to 200,000C of energy as fat! That is sufficient to fuel the body for 100 to 200 days!

Ketogenic food came with the added promises of

No more paunch
No more diabetes
No more blood sugar spiking (since one doesn’t eat carbs) and hence there is no risk of microangiopathy
Eat till satiation kicks in (at this point in time, I am eating about 2,300C and still losing fat)
Though I am not a foodie, I can’t ignore that the food is delicious

At this point in time, I had been on keto for nearly three months.

My blood sugar and lipid levels normalized during the first 10 days
Three months in, my HbA1c is at 5.0%, putting me squarely in non-diabetic range
My energy levels are up throughout the day
No incidences of dysthymia that I can think of
Mind is laser focused most of the time
My androgen and cortisol levels are better than they used to be

Are there any catches?

You must expect some ‘mind-fog’ in the first few days after starting keto (to me, it felt like that ‘mind could not breath’; I had to eat something to feel better). But once your body switches to ketones as primary fuel, which happens in a few days/weeks, mind becomes clearer than it was on carb fuel.
Low carb causes hair fall, at least for a few weeks after starting
There is no Indian keto recipe that I am aware of
Carb is everywhere. Cooking low-carb food poses special challenges
Carb is cheap; packaged food is almost always carb rich
If you carb-binge, particularly if you were/are diabetic and/or obese, you will have to work the next three to four weeks to reverse the damage
My low density cholesterol (LDL) level have grown astronomically high; but keto crowd advises us to ignore it and measure LDL-P instead
Ketogenic food is known to reduce bone density and increase chances of kidney stone; presently, I’m looking for a way to
This, I think, is the most important of all catches: No one knows what a life-time of ketogenic food will do to the body. After all, it took us world 50 years of indulgence to realize that low-fat food causes obesity, isn’t it!

My wife Ann has done a phenomenal job of putting together a keto menu for the family. Visit her blog at ann.saravanan.org as she plans to share here discoveries.

Visit this link for my other posts on beating diabetes, including my take on diabetic surgery.

30 Oct

Beating Diabetes: New Castle Diet

New Castle University

I know of only three ways of beating diabetes. New Castle Diet is the first tool I tried.

For several years now, surgeons all over the world have noticed that when diabetic patients under went weight-loss gastric bypass surgery, their diabetes reversed in just a few days (though, weight loss took several months). Prof. Roy Taylor of New Castle University posited that these patients reversed their diabetes because, after surgery, fat deposits from their liver cleared quickly.

Evidences are now mounting that gastric bypass fundamentally changes the hormonal profile of the body, thereby reverses the insulin resistance. But New Castle University went about and designed a diet based plan to quickly lose weight. Their hypothesized as follows:

When body fat is stored in liver and pancreas, it causes diabetes
When people go on weight reduction, fat from the liver and pancreas clears, reversing diabetes
For some people, the fat in liver/pancreas might start clearing only when their body fat percentage is below 15%. Others can reverse their diabetes at a much higher body fat percentage

You can read more about New Castle University’s Diabetes Research here.

With New Castle’s 800C diet, one could lose about 2kg (5 lb) per week. All over the world, people have been doing low calorie fasting for religious reasons. That gave me the confidence that I certainly will not be killing myself on an 800C diet. Besides, it was so easy to implement, there was no good reason not to try.

On New Castle diet, this is what I consumed each day, for 21 days:

4 meal replacement drinks, 4 hours between each drink. Based on the brand I chose, each drink varied between 110C to 170C. Some times, I added a scoop of whey protein with a drink. Each scoop contributed another 100C.
One salad between two drinks, or a total of 3 salads per day. The salad was made without starchy vegetables and dressing (or with low calorie dressing). Each salad contributed between 50C and 100C
3 liters of water
1 multi-vitamin tablet (meal replacement drinks usually come with multi-vitamins added; however, I found it inadequate)

Despite my worries about fainting in the middle of some road, this is how my body responded:

Days 1 to 3: Nothing unusual happened. Lost 3kg (7 lb). Must have been mostly water loss.
Day 4: Ketosis kicked in. Entered into a mild state of euphoria
Day 6: Even through the body was not running out of energy, food craving started. I think it must have been more of spice craving
Day 8 and 9: Food craving subsided. Tiredness and irritability set in. Hit the bed early
Day 10: No more tiredness. But lost 2kg (5 lb) more over the next two days
Day 17 & 18: Tiredness and irritability sets in again
Day 19: Tiredness lifted. Lost 2 more kg (5 lb) over next two days
Day 21: Last day of dieting. In all, lost 7kg (15 lb)

Here is an interesting observation:

Body behaves as if it keeps fat storage in several fixed deposits (FD). It fights hard for two or three days before it breaks every FD.

You need to be really careful when body fights back. This is when you are likely to slip from dieting. Always remember, the body can be real sneaky too. So, brute force is never enough.

Here are some simple techniques I used to keep myself from slipping:

When I felt hungry, I drank water (New Castle recommendation)
Just stick to the formula. Don’t think about food substitution, etc. Thinking about food, for whatever reason, weakens your will power
Treat will power as a limited resource. Avoid expending it unnecessarily
Avoid parties, festivals, functions, etc., where you will have ample opportunities to deviate
Be forthright with people close to you about your dieting and demand their support
Carry a sachet or two of meal replacement and vegetable salad with you when you leave home
Keep your mind occupied with something. Anything
Now that you are going to be saving lots of time in preparing and consuming the regular meal, have a plan to put the saved time into use

On New Castle diet, these were my blood sugar readings. Blood sugar readings are on the Y-axis and day of dieting is on the X-axis:

BG-during-New-Castle-diet

The fasting blood sugar normalized on the 6th day and the post-prandial (2 hours after breakfast) sugar levels normalized on the5th day! On the 21st day, the fasting sugar dropped to 78! Ever since I started measuring, my sugar levels never was this robust.

But there is a catch:

Over the subsequent few months, I regained half of what I lost
Dieting made me lose lean body mass and my body fat percentage went back to what it was when I started
The blood sugar went back to diabetic range

Of course, New Castle University anticipates it. So they recommend that when we get back to normal diet

Limit the calorie intake to 1,300C
Start weight training to increase the upper body muscle mass

While weight training under 1,300C diet

I had muscle ache
Poor muscle gain
I started building a small paunch
I was still getting hypoglycemic in the evenings

Hypoglycemia and paunch were telling evidence that my metabolic syndrome still persisted. From the research literature on gastric bypass that I read, I learnt that weight loss through lifestyle changes do not change the underlying hormone profile. Based on that, I speculated that my body is still working towards adding more fat. Even though my blood sugar is in safe levels two hours after a meal, it might still be spiking to dangerous levels (of above 250 where small blood vessel damage, called microangiopathy happens) immediately after a typical meal.

I went to ketogenic diet, looking for a more elegant solution.

In the meanwhile, though New Castle diet didn’t work for me to permanently push back diabetes, I’ll recommend it for anyone trying to quickly lose about 5kg (11 lb) to 15kg (33 lb).

Go to this Beating Diabetes page for more of…well…beating diabetes!

13 Jun

Darwin’s Triplets: Life in a Color Wheel

Identical Triplets In the earlier post Evolution 101, we saw how evolution works in the wild. It discussed about how a particular biological trait is selected in a population. Darwin called this “Natural Selection“. Eventually it turned out that Natural Selection is an umbrella term for three different types of selection:

“Me” Selection
Sexual Selection
Group Selection

The interplay of these three selection forces makes us who we are. Like the inter-play of three primary colors make all the hues that we can see in the nature. In other words, it is as of we live a life in a color wheel.

“Me” Selection

Me-Selection

“Me Selection” is a term that I coined. I use it to represent selection of traits that help an individual animal to live longer. Traits like tortoise’s shell or cheetah’s speed or some of the examples of Me Selection. Traits that help the animal to find a better mate, make more babies or take care of the herd’s interest don’t come under “Me Selection”.

Sexual Selection

Sexual-Selection

Some biological traits help animals to secure better quantity or quality (or both) mates. These traits pervade a population through Sexual Selection. Often, sexually selected features contribute very little to an animal’s survival (Me Selection) or the survival of community in which it lives (Group Selection).

A good example of Sexual Selection is peacock’s tail feather. Luxurious tail feather in a peacock advertises to the peahen that the male is physically/genetically fit. Tail feathers don’t increase the survival of the peacock. If anything, it only makes it difficult for the peacock to catch its prey or run/fly away from the predators. Tail feathers are also metabolically expensive to maintain.

The only advantage with a nice, long and iridescent tail feather is that a lesser peacock can’t fake it. Tail feather, in other words, is a honest signal. If the peahen selects a peacock for its tail feather, the peahen can be reasonably sure that it mated with a genetically superior male. Tail feather in a peacock is called a sexual ornament.

Sexual ornaments are there everywhere. The best sexual ornament is the one that serves as a honest signal (i.e. something that a lesser animal can’t fake).

The strangest of the sexual ornaments, you would never guess, is the human brain!

Another thing: Evolution of sexual ornaments tends to ‘run away’. Long tail feathers become longer and longer over relatively small number of generations.

Study of Sexual Selection, unfortunately, is full of political land mines, taboos and unacceptable conclusions. Hence, this is not as well studied as it must be. Even the researchers who study Sexual Selection publish their findings with great caution. As a result, some of the vital insights that come from understanding Sexual Selection (and how it shapes up who we are) are not available to the general public. What a loss!

Group Selection

Group-Selection

Group Selection is the least understood of the selection forces. Even its very existence is not yet widely accepted. But Group Selection gives such an elegant explanation to so many strange human behavior that we will never understand who we really are without understanding what kind of effects the Group Selection forces have on us.

Group Selection is a funny thing. It works on making the genetic material from a particular group succeed over the genetic material of other groups. It doesn’t care about genetic material of an individual animal like the Me and Sexual Selections do. On the surface, Group Selection looks like a Group vs Group war. While that is true, Group Selection has a greater impact than that.

Group Selection pits the interest of a Group against the interest of the individuals who belongs in that group! Group Selection makes an individual to subjugate its own self-interest to the interest of the group. When the interest of an individual clashes with the interest of the group, the group often doesn’t hesitate to get ride of the individual!

When we think about group selection, we must remember one thing:

A part of 'the group that live in' lives inside each one of us.

At one level, each one of us is the group. We act in a way that subjugates the interest of other people to the common good of the group. We willingly sacrifice some of our own self interest in the alter of the common good. How much of self interest we sacrifice, or how much of similar sacrifice we demand from others, changes based on the situation we are in. Our sense of group identity and altruism are highly elastic.

War, where we the survival of the entire group is threatened, make us more altruistic than we usually are. In the middle of the battle field, men often put the lives of their comrades above their own. Contrary to this, when an individual is in a situation wherein its own self interest is not easily jeopardized by the dangers that the society faces, the individual tends to become less altruistic than it usually is.

Feeling the Selection Forces

In an individual, selection forces express themselves as emotions/feelings.

“Me Selection” may express itself as hunger, fear, cold, warmth, satiety, anger, etc.
Sexual Selection may express itself as pride, libido, competitiveness, creativity, etc.
But the way we feel the Group Selection is interesting. The sense of oneness you feel when you stand in front of God, well, that is the Group Selection forces you are feeling. When you feel the forces of Group Selection, you have a strong urge to merge and lose the sense of your self into the identify of the group.

Emotions of Group Selection are just as seductive, if not more, as the emotions of Me Selection or Sexual Selection. Though, we don’t readily recognize it. The interplay of the three selection forces determines who we are and how our societies are made. Interplay-of-Selection-Forces

Some of our traits are fostered by two or three different selection forces. For example, having a broad shoulder and good shoulder muscles in a human male helps him to be a good hunter (Me Selection) and also helps him to find more/better mates (Sexual Selection). Being a good hunter, while it caters to Me Selection forces, sharing the spoils with the group also caters to the Group Selection forces.

When a particular trait is exclusive to a single selection force, expression of that trait might be opposed by other forces. For example, human equivalent of peacock’s tail feather (sexual selection) is often considered as vanity and looked down upon by the society (group selection). Whereas, for a woman who is looking to select a mate, display of honest signal by a man is all that matters. Life-In-A-Color-Wheel

Our natural desires and urges are endless and shifting inter-play of the three selection forces that played a part in molding us. At any given point in time, your natural feelings are just a pixel on the beautiful color wheel. At times, you play on the periphery. And at times, you play right at the center. But usually, you are somewhere in between.

Life becomes simple and uncomplicated when you understand the color wheel of selection forces and then design your life around that understanding

What is your preferred color
Where do they come from
What is their significance
What is good about them
What is bad about them
Why has your color choice changed over time
What else are you giving up when you chose your color
Why is someone else angry about your color choice

Life in a color wheel might be the simplest answer to so many of your life’s dilemmas. In the future posts, let’s take a closer look at the inter-play of these hues.

I promise you, it will be nothing less than liberating.

11 Jun

Evolution 101

We can’t understand human nature without understanding the forces of evolution that made us who we are. We are the happiest if we design our lives/societies around the human nature, like a glove is designed around a hand. Failed philosophies like Marxism and Objectivism are results of failing to design our societies around what evolution has made us to be.

In a series of future posts, we will dissect the impact that evolution has on our nature. In this post, let us make sure that we have a clear understanding of how evolution works.

Take a look at the image above. Let’s start with an animal called ‘Grey Circle’. Due to genetic mutation, the babies of Grey Circle, shown below the horizontal line, are likely to be slightly different from the original (parent). Of the three babies, the White Circle has a mutation gives it a survival/propagation disadvantage (e.g. being born without limbs). The genes of Black Circle were mutated in such a way that it has some special advantages over others (e.g. ability to run faster). And the baby Grey Circle has no advantage or disadvantage over its parent.

Second-Generation-After-Mutation

Over the subsequent generations, White Circle population dies out. But the number of Black Circles in the population increases.

Advantageous-Mutation-Over-Generations

With every passing generation, there are more Black Circles in the population for every Grey Circle.

Inter-Breeding-of-Mutants

Of course, Grey Circles and Black Circles may end up inter-breeding. But for the purpose of this discussion, let’s ignore it.

Eventually, the Black Circles dominate the entire population as they successfully out-compete the Grey Circles. Thus, a new population is born with a new trait.

Here is an important takeaway:

If a trait is found in all animals, it must have offered a significant advantage in the evolutionary past. After all, all animals without the trait were wiped out across generations.

For example, take human population. Wherever in the world they are found, humans are always intelligent (when compared with other animals), don’t have body fur, have language, etc. Intelligence and language skills must have been so important at some point in our evolutionary past that all proto-humans without these traits were wiped off from the gene pool

Let’s look beyond humans. Every animal in the planet has a strong drive to self-preserve. In the case of sexually reproducing animals, all of them seek mate. We can then conclude that the animals that didn’t bother about self-preservation or mate selection got wiped out from the gene pool.

Mutations-keep-popping-up

Of course, mutation is a messy business. It is never just Black or Grey. Mutations keep happening all the time, in million different forms. Some of the mutations/traits end up dominating the entire population (e.g. intelligence in humans) . Some of the mutations/traits persist in the population, but they never fully dominates the population (e.g. skin color, super-intelligence, schizophrenia). Some mutations/traits get wiped off from the population immediately (e.g. anencephaly) or eventually.

Evolution carries forward that traits that eventually dominate the population. Period. Evolution doesn’t care for good, bad, virtuous, evil, etc. When we hear the phrase “survival of the fittest”, we tend to confuse it with “survival of the superior”, however one likes to define superior. Evolution is blind to anything other than population explosion.

In the next post, we’ll look into three sub-types of evolutionary forces.

28 May

Sam Harris on Lying

Sam-Harris Sam Harris is one of the sharpest thinkers I had come across. Here are some excerpts from one of his thinnest books, Lying. Though the book is not as well thought out as some of his other works, I culled out these gems from the book. I put a next to the ones that hit a chord somewhere. Though, you might want to put your heat next to something else:

We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret , guilt, and disappointment. And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.
Endless forms of suffering and embarrassment could be easily avoided by simply telling the truth.
The boundary between lying and deception is often vague. It is even possible to deceive with the truth.
People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs— that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions— the more consequential the lie.
To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.
To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one’s beliefs.
If one is not sure whether or not something is true, representing one’s degree of uncertainty is a form of honesty.
The intent to communicate honestly is the measure of truthfulness.
Even liars rate their deceptive interactions as less pleasant than truthful ones.
Deception and suspicion are two sides of the same coin. Research suggests that all forms of lying— including white lies meant to spare the feelings of others— are associated with less satisfying relationships.
Honest people are a refuge.
You know [the honest people] will tell you when they think you have failed— and for this reason their praise cannot be mistaken for mere flattery.
Honesty is a gift we can give to others.
[If we are honest,] we can simply be ourselves in every moment.
In committing to being honest with everyone, we commit to avoiding a wide range of long-term problems, but at the cost of occasional short-term discomfort.
To [be honest] is also to hold a mirror up to one’s life—because a commitment to telling the truth requires that one pay attention to what the truth is in every moment.
Honesty can force any dysfunction in your life to the surface.
Lying is the lifeblood of addiction.
Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission).
Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding— these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.
Responding honestly to the subtext would not be lying.
Unless one commits to telling the truth in situations like this , however, one finds that the edges creep inward, and exceptions to the principle of honesty begin to multiply.
False encouragement is a kind of theft: It steals time, energy, and motivation that a person could put toward some other purpose.
[Lucy] lied so effortlessly and persuasively that Jessica was left wondering if she had ever been deceived by Lucy in the past.
Failures of personal integrity, once revealed, are rarely forgotten.
A commitment to honesty does not necessarily require that we disclose facts about ourselves that we would prefer to keep private .
Psychopaths can assume the burden of mental accounting [of lying] without any obvious distress.
Lies beget other lies.
When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of.
Tell enough lies, and the effort needed to keep your audience in the dark eventually becomes unsustainable. While you might be spared a direct accusation of dishonesty, many people will conclude, for reasons they might be unable to pinpoint, that they cannot trust you. You will begin to seem like someone who is always dancing around the facts.
No one ever quite confronts [the liars], but everyone begins to treat them like creatures of fiction. Such people are often quietly shunned, for reasons they probably never understand.
Liars trust those they deceive less than they otherwise might— and the more damaging their lies, the less they trust, or even like, their victims.
To lie is to recoil from relationship.
Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste

Sam Harris makes me realize that my biggest personal achievement is that I have trained myself to lie very little, if at all.

I ‘think’ that I never lie on things that are consequential (though I do succumb to the temptations of occasional white lies). I make it a point to indicate the probability of my uncertainty when it matters. I never pretend that an intentional act of omission with the intent to deceive doesn’t amount to lying. Neither do I intentionally mislead someone when a truthful communication is warranted!

Note: Of course, I don't confuse protecting my privacy with lying.

Stopping the habit of lying some twenty years ago was a great character builder. Being married to someone whose take on honesty is very similar to my own has been the single biggest blessing in my relationship. If there is one trait that I would love for my son to pick up from me, it would be my soft corner for honesty. Luckily, I see no reason why that won’t happen.

26 May

Dragons of Idea Age

Dragaons of Idea Age

In the last five posts, I argued that we have just entered the idea age, another renaissance, and what can we do to prepare for it. This post is about the unique risks that idea age is bringing to your business/career.

Exponential Growth

Exponential growth is a double edged cutting sword. If you not on an exponential growth, or if you are on a slower exponential curve, someone else will set up so much of lead over you in a short time that you might as well go home and hand your boots!

Different-exponential-curves

The graph above shows two exponential curves, one growing at just twice the rate of another. But the difference is startling even after a short growth run. WhatsApp, which is a company designed for the exponential era, has half the market capitalization as Tata Enterprise. WhatsApp employs just 55 people and is 5 years old. Whereas, Tata enterprise employs a small country and it is more than a 100 years old.

Because a competitor growing at faster exponential rate can set a very large lead over others, the slower growing company will soon be marginalized and fail to be of any significance to anyone.

Agility over Accuracy

Early-exponential-start

Because exponential curves grow quite quickly, a delayed start is worse than slow start! In the exponential era, agility in terms of quick start and quick execution is more important than getting things right. Time and again, companies and countries have proven that being faster (Thailand) is better than being right (India). Among the exponential companies, everyone is expected to be reasonably accuracy. But that is just the entry ticket. The real differentiation is the speed at which they execute their business.

Software is Eating the World

Marc Andreeson (of Netscape fame) famously told that ‘software is eating the world’. Everything is getting digitized. Healthcare is the next industry that is dangerously close to getting disrupted by digitization.

Giants like IBM, Google, Qualcom, Apple, etc. are working on solutions that will record better health data, analyze it better, do better diagnosis, do cheaper diagnosis, etc. They are all in the verge of producing a working commercial solution over the next few years. When they are rolled out, the current healthcare model will be stood on its head.

Other disruptions that are already under way are Uber and Airbnb. Uber is disrupting taxi services all over the world. They own no taxi cabs (only thing they own is an app), but there are talks in the rumor mill that Uber is going to be the next $ 100b company. By the way, when self-driven cars become common place over the next few years, services like Uber will kill automobile manufacturers too.

Airbnb is disrupting hotel services all over the world and it is already valued around $10b. Airbnb too doesn’t own a single hotel room. Only thing they own is an app!

If software companies can disrupt taxi services ‘and’ automobile manufacturers, what do you think they will do to your business! It is a question that is worth pondering over hard and fast.

Network Externality

Network-externality

Imagine you invented fax machine. Just after you made the first fax machine, when there is only one fax machine in the whole world, the utility of the machine would have been zero. After all, who would you have sent a fax to!

But then, when you made the second fax machine and put it in someone else’s office, your own machine will become valuable. Thus, with the addition of every fax machine in the world, the value of your own machine goes up. Not only that, when a new fax machine is added to the network, the utility of everyone’s fax machine goes up too!

The value of fax machines around the world keep going up when more people start using it. Eventually, the utility of fax machine becomes so high that no one can afford not to have a fax machine. In other words, the network effect becomes so strong that it traps you inside it. The cost of breaking away from the network is too high that the network becomes self-perpetuating.

That is network effect or network-externality.

Software companies are much more dangerous when it comes to exploiting network externalities. Because the cost of servicing an incremental user is next to nothing, software companies can quickly grow the network of their users. That’s why in software, the leaders like Windows and Oracle have always had upward of 90% market share!

What we must take note is that all software-enabled services, like FaceBook, Google Maps, Airbnb, Uber, etc. are also enjoying the advantage brought to them by network externality.

So, if and when your business is going to be digitized, you can be sure that it will be yanked so fast and so definitely that you will have no option but to walk away. What is really bad about it is that the software company that is going to eat your meal doesn’t even have to have an office in your country!

What now?

Ask yourself these questions:

If Google (or Airbnb or Uber) wanted to get into your business today, how will they do it?
Can I do what they would have done?
Do I have the capability in me to manage an exponentially growing business?
If my answer to one or both the questions above, what can I do to acquire the missing capability? Or, what would be my Plan-B when someone starts digitizing my business?

Click Idea Age for all posts related to this project

24 May

Idea Age is here. How can you get yourself ready?

It is not a secret that we are facing exponential threats from resource crunch and environmental degradation. This 5 post series argues that in response, we are inventing a new idea age.

Exponential Threats talks about the seriousness and inevitability of growing threats humanity is facing.
In Exponential Technology, we argue that our technology, our best ally, is not sufficient to tackle these threats. We will also need unprecedented level of human ingenuity.
In Origin of Ideas, we see where human ingenuity comes from.
In Age of Creativity, we see that we are entering an era of unprecedented global creativity.
In this last post, we address how you can prepare for the idea age

It’s all about Networks

To understand creativity, we need to understand networks. Network

Creativity is the process of combining two or more existing ideas (shown as a ‘node’ in the image above) in a new and useful way.
Every idea is a network of two or more ideas. So, each node is a network in itself.

We can use the image above to represent a single brain by taking each “node” as an idea (or knowledge or information) inside that brain. Or we can use the same image to represent creativity at the level of a society. Then each node is taken to represent an individual brain. A network becomes ‘stronger’ when the number of nodes or the interconnection between the nodes increase. Now, let’s see how we can prepare ourselves for the idea age.

Idea Age is also Exponential Era

We live in an exponential era where changes happen in ever increasing pace. One bad thing about the exponential era is that the difference between the winners and the ‘also-ran’ is huge. We are presently in an important point in history. People who ride the exponential tide now will have a very different future from the people who remain in the 20th century. Of course, we are not arguing that the life in the bleeding edge of exponential era must necessarily be better than the slow and steady pace of the past. But some like it hot. And fast. Here are few simple things you can do to hitch your super-exciting exponential ride.

Get out of Paucity Mentality

Openness will be a substantially important hallmark of the idea age. People who operate with paucity mind-set are usually too afraid to open up. In the Idea Age, operating in isolation are too slow. Also, team consisting of different skill sets is usually much more effective than a genius operating in isolation. The difference will be more striking with passage of time.

What are the things that you are too afraid to share? What is the worst thing that will happen if you start sharing them? How do you know you are right about it? Don't forget to apply this question to your personal life too!

Become an Idea Altruist

In Idea Age, everyone has an idea that they don’t have enough time to implement. So, you are less likely to have your idea stolen today. Start sharing your ideas. You can start by sharing ideas that are not critical to your livelihood. And then move on to sharing life-or-death secrets. When you start sharing ideas, you become visible to others with similar interest. They might incorporate your ideas in their scheme of things, or lend their ideas for you to use, there by making both of you better off.

List three ideas that you think others will benefit from. And how can you share them with others? Blog, FaceBook, talks, forums, interest groups, white papers, stories...?

Education and Experience

Education is a journey. Not a destiny. Never stop educating yourself. We have cart load of online educations resources available these days. Some of them are listed below:

Most online education resources are free. There are interest groups, discussion forums, group efforts… In Idea Age, education is a life long process. Every time you learn something new, you increase the number of idea-nodes inside your brain.

If self-education is not your cup of tea, try by learning something that you love. It does't have to have practical value.

Once in a while, learn something that is completely unrelated and irrelevant to you. In an area where you already have proven expertise, any new learning will bring only incremental advantage. When you deal with a completely unrelated subject, anything you learn will increase your knowledge graph by a huge margin.

Of course, we shouldn't forget that 'doing' is a form of learning too! So, go and do something that you haven't done before.

More importantly, block time out for solitude. Most people require some quite time once in a while to digest and assimilate what they have learnt.

Future favors the Networked

Idea Age is all about networking of ideas. Learning increases the number of idea-nodes inside your head. To increase the number of nodes outside your head, connect with other heads. Identify at least one person from each of the following category and connect with them:

People who have common interest
People who have no common interest
Idea altruists
Super-networkers
Life-long learners
Opinion makers

Have habits built into your life that provide ample networking opportunities. For example

Participate in networking events
Write/talk about your ideas
Participate in online forums
If needed, block out time every week (or every day) specifically for expanding your network

Of course, when you are expanding your network, you must take care to ensure that the quality of your network is maintained at all times. Or else, you can easily end up being inundated.

Network. Look for quality, similarity and variety.

Healthy Body and Brain

Of course, if you can’t maintain a healthy body and a physically fit brain, none of the above really matter. Here are some basic guidelines for maintaining healthy body and brain. These are rudimentary, but non-negotiable:

Maintain healthy weight
If you have cardiac or glycemic issues, eat low GL, zero oil, no dairy, vegan
Moderate alcohol, no smoking
Supplement with multivits, antioxidants, Omega 3, etc. Anti-ageing?
Exercise
Sleep prepares the brain for creativity

Here are three best kept secrets that will help you live much longer and have a healthier life:

You are the designer of your body – at least, from this point on
Your brain starts dying when you stop learning
Your body starts dying when you stop having sex – except when you go on calorie restriction, in which case you extend your lifespan, but shut down your sex drive

A New Chapter?

In all probabilities, Idea Age is mark of a new chapter in human history. By the time this renaissance is through, our lives would have become more different than any of us have dreamed of. When you prepare yourself to enter the Idea Age, I want you to keep one thought in your mind: You are very likely to live past 100. If that is true, how do you plan to spend the additional time?

This post has four prequels and they are listed below in their order
- Exponential Threats identifies the growing threats that are going to hit is so fast we won't have a choice but to change our present way of living
- In Exponential Technology, we argue that our technology, our best ally, is not sufficient to tackle these threats. We will also need unprecedented level of human ingenuity.
- In Origin of Ideas, we ask where human ingenuity comes from.
- In Age of Creativity, we see that we are entering an era of unprecedented global creativity.

23 May

Age of Creativity

Age Of Creativity

This 5 post series addresses as to how “we are facing exponential threats from resource crunch and environmental degradation and in response, we are inventing a new idea age”.

Exponential Threats identifies the growing threats we are presently facing
In Exponential Technology, we argue that our technology, our best ally, is not sufficient to tackle these threats. To do that, unprecedented level of human ingenuity should come into play.
In Origin of Ideas, we discuss the source of human ingenuity, both inside an individual’s head and across the society.
In this post, Age of Creativity, we will see why we are entering an era of unprecedented global creativity.
In the last post, we address how you can prepare for the coming Idea Age

There are a bunch of reason for us to believe that we have entered a new age of creativity. Another renaissance. But in its scope, this one will be like no other. By the time it has run its course, humankind would have, I speculate, made a clean break with the past.

New Knowledge

Creativity is a process of combining existing ideas/knowledge in a new and useful way. The process of creativity can be thought of as forming new connections in a network of ideas. In a network, addition of a new node encourages sprouting new connections (image below).

Network with newNode

If we are considering idea generation at social level, then we can treat each human being as a node in our network. As we have seen in an earlier post, bigger human population creates more new nodes.

But if we ignore the physical containers of idea/knowledge/information, every new discovery or idea becomes another node in the fabric. When a new node is added to a network, it makes new pathways possible (image below).

New Node New Pathways

Birth of an node (idea) increases the number of existing connection (ideas), which in turn increase the possibilities of several more connections (ideas) germinating.

Note: If you have already noticed the fractal nature of ideas, you will find intuitively understand the recursive nature of the paragraph above.

Thus, the new ideas increase exponentially in quantity! Today, we are seeing important new ideas coming in every day, with each new idea begetting even more ideas. We are getting inundated with creative opportunities. Understand the idea-inundation is key to preparing for the age of creativity.

New ideas have another interesting effect. When we come across novelty, it increases the levels of a brain chemical called dopamine. Among other things, dopamine inside our brain increases the alertness and focus.

Note: Dopamine is also responsible for feel-good and libido. It also plays a major role in romance. Effect of dopamine is designed to wear off with repeated exposure. Translation: Less novelty, less dopamine.

Brains are built in such a way that we love to work with novel stuff. Novelty tickles our brain cells into working with them. With so many new things popping up all around us, we are all gradually becoming idea generating machines (the only way to work with a new information is to integrate it with the rest of our knowledge base, which is same as forming new connections to the novel idea).

New Tools

Vast majority of younger generation is familiar with tools for data analysis, visualization and (product) design. These tools are helping us to combine ideas much more easily, and with far less resources and time.

We also have massive interest-groups online, who come together to create, fine tune, implement and exploit new ideas. Idea generators get almost instantaneous quality feedback. Instantaneous feedback is the corner stone building expertise in any domain.

Global Size Melting Pot

Large Melting Pot

Today, we not only have more than 7 billion brains in the network, these brains are also inter-connected in a way that was unheard of even 25 years ago! While internet is the pipeline through which the connectivity happens, we have several internet-dependent devices that improve the quality and pay-off of the connections.

Social media is one such device that helps us extract more juice out of global connectivity. The world has now become a huge monkey-see-monkey-do society, with each of us learning from everyone else. Because we all show our best face in the social media, we are learning positive habits/attitude from each other in unprecedented speed. And by helping us to learn to express ourselves in small steps, social media is helping us all to become creative.

Other devices that help us make the world one huge melting pot are online communities, special interest groups (already discussed above), cheap access to markets, free online education, etc.

Attitude Shift

Honey Bees

We are not strangers to the win-win nature of idea sharing. However, we have had tremendous reservations in sharing ideas that brought power and money. But that has changed now.

Today, we have more opportunities than any one of us can handle alone. Besides, the speed of change is so rapid that there is not enough time for a single person to build sufficient expertise to exploit a domain. Consequently, we are beginning to more freely share all sorts of ideas. In a world where a product has a typical life cycle of 3 to 5 years, one lone individual trying to build an edifice out of a single idea over 20 years is often a recipe for disaster.

We are also going through another important attitude shift: We are rediscovering the pleasure of belonging to a community.

We are social animals. We seem to be biologically pre-disposed to deriving pleasure from sharing. We are taking the pleasure community to new levels by becoming pioneers of sharing. We already share things from cars to clothes to house. Sharing, or Collaboration Economy, is becoming the next big thing and a manna for the folks keen on sustainability.

Role of Current Economy

With the global recession, the people in the West now have more time than they have money. The resource crunch is incentivising them to become more creative and democratizing the process of idea generation.

In the same time, masses of people in the developing countries across Asia and Africa are leaving poverty behind. These people now have some surplus time and money. They are beginning to explore things beyond basic survival. There is a good chance that this population, which has leapfrogged into knowledge world, will be more adapt in working with ideas than the earlier generations that came off the boat.

Threat to Survival

The last factor that democratizes the idea generation process is the pressure from the serious survival threats that our civilization is facing presently. Because of their exponential nature, the threats will hit us so fast that our existing creative infrastructure won’t be able to handle them. We will end up recruiting all creative faculties, every human brain that is ready to contribute.

In the next article in this series, we will see what we can do to prepare for the idea age.