Federico Faggin invented the first microprocessor. Half a century of building machines that process information — and then he spent the second half of his life arguing that this was never “the thing” itself. A chip can hold every fact about pain. Weight it, model it, run it a billion times a second. It will […]
This is a talk I gave on July 4, 2026 in Telč, Czech Republic. In 2015, a skatepark arrived in Janwaar — a small, remote village in Madhya Pradesh with no reliable electricity and a school most kids skipped. Nobody asked for it. But under two rules (“No school, no skateboarding” and “Girls first”), the […]
This talk is an argument for direction over prescription. I want to start with a very simple question. Think about a child who walked into your school this year. Five years old, maybe six. Can you picture someone specific? Good. Hold that. That child will finish school in 2037 or 2038. In a world we […]
I broke my shoulder hours after I had returned to Janwaar. Not dramatically. The kind of accident that happens on these roads at night. And then you stand there for a moment working out what has just changed. By the time I understood what had happened, someone had already noticed. That is the thing about […]
A Non-Human Way to the Gate Today marked my first international trip with real visa stakes — Germany to India — and something quietly strange happened along the way: I made it from check-in to gate without a single human interaction. Not one. Boarding pass? Machine. Passport control? Machine. Bag drop? Machine. Every checkpoint, every […]
I have been writing this book, in one form or another, for most of my adult life. Not always consciously. Not always with the intention of turning it into something anyone else would read. But the questions it circles — why do we live the way we live? how much of it did we actually […]
I am leaving for India in a few days. Everyone I know there has sent some version of the same message: it’s extreme, be careful. Not the usual seasonal warning. Something more urgent. More tired. Yesterday a longtime friend wrote from Banda, Uttar Pradesh — a district I know, with people I love. A record […]
A Nomad’s Compass to Change That Holds I have been carrying this for a while. In talks, in workshops, in conversations after conference sessions when someone pulls me aside and asks: but how did you actually do it? This booklet is my answer. It started with a simple question I asked myself in 2014 when […]
I have sat across from a lot of young people in the last few years. In villages. In universities. In conference rooms that were trying very hard to feel informal. In circles on the floor in Janwaar, where the rule was simple: whoever speaks, speaks for themselves. What I notice, more and more, is the […]
These are the values that run underneath every decision, every process, every moment of change we lived through in Janwaar, a social experiment I ran for 10 years — and equally through everything we didn’t pursue, through our struggles and our failures. They were not designed in advance. They became visible over time — through […]