The How This Works show - Episodes Tagged with “People”

Thejus Chakravarthy

Skipper Chong Warson — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:15:00 -0500

This show with Thejus Chakravarthy ranges over a wide variety of topics but along the way we find out about his professional and life experiences in making change in the world.

We start with his origins crowning in a cab in Mumbai, India, the ease in which his right shoulder dislocates after a show once upon a time with his hardcore band Lovers and Killers, the joy of Royal Farm (RoFo) fried chicken, and the brilliance of a 'hot now' Krispy Kreme donut. Skipper and Thejus also get into his two books, Brushfire and The Flywheel and The Lever where they get into some of the foundational details, including Henry Ford's creation of the 40 hour workweek, the Stanford prison experiment done by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority figures, the notion of 'it's always the system', the Ben Franklin effect, Thejus' experience creating an instructional system out of open source technologies, Donella Meadows' essay on leverage points, and Gamergate. See if you can pick out the Seth Godin namedrop.

Interesting note about Thejus' previous band — Lovers and Killers, then Caestles, and now Queen Wolf as well as a second band called Infinite Pizza. While he formally left that band about five years ago, they're still making music and he helps with production and occasionally contributes. Here's an audio family tree/playlist:

"An Hour Left of Forever" from Lovers & Killers' 2006 album Tropic of Cancer (YouTube or Spotify)
"William Blake" from Caestles' 2010 album A Treatise of Human Combustion (YouTube or Spotify)
Infinite Pizza at the Windup Space in Baltimore on July 13, 2014 (YouTube)

Queen Wolf and Infinite Pizza are both on Bandcamp, if you want to indulge deeper.

After the outro music, you can hear Skipper spring on Thejus a request to read the opening bit from "Brushfire".

This episode was edited and mastered by Troy Lococo.

Special Guest: Thejus Chakravarthy.

Links:

Stephanie Krivitzky

Skipper Chong Warson — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 08:00:00 -0500

Stephanie Krivitzky, currently in New York City, talks to Skipper about how she gets things done, starting with family discussions around the dinner table and then into her current role as creative director at Misen, a cookware company.

The conversation hits so many points, starting with her frustration with baths, how the notion of logistics eventually fed into the concept of getting things done, how hustling and freelancing built her discipline, using your own motivations and demotiavtions as an aligning principle, how getting things done for other people is different than when you're working for yourself, thinking about the Eisenhower Matrix graph with its four quadrants of high/low impact and high/low effort to prioritize your work, what happens when you never do a thing you're supposed to (read: like Skipper's example of not being very good at flossing at night), to-do lists as part of the process of reflecting back on how something went, and how she thinks of her own to-do lists as little diaries.

Towards the end of the episode, Skipper mentions a card-based productivity system of which he couldn't recall the name. It's called Analog.

After the outro music, you can hear Stephanie talk about her friend of 14 years already wanting to listen to this episode. 😃🎉

This episode was edited and mastered by Troy Lococo.

Special Guest: Stephanie Krivitzky.

Links:

Nicolai Lipscomb

Skipper Chong Warson — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 08:00:00 -0500

Starting under mentorship with James Beard winner Barbara Lynch, Nicolai Lipscomb has chefed at some of the best restuarants in the world, full stop — Arzak, El Celler Can Roca, at Fundacion Alicia with scientists and nutritionists under the direction of Ferran Adria and Pere Castells, the list goes on and on. And so this conversation with Skipper Chong Warson ranges the globe, starting in Half Moon Bay, Calif. to bungee jumping outside Vancouver Island, British Columbia to working in high pressure kitchens in Boston, Mass.; San Sebastián, Spain; Girona, Spain; and back to northern Calif. again among other locations.

The topics range from talking about thrill seeking in motorcycle riding/bungee jumping, homemade Eggo waffles cooling on chopsticks, falling into and grinding through the ever challenging work of making and serving some of the most highly regarded food in the world while racing the clock and the swirling kitchen chaos, the requisite patience to not rush food, the secret to great paella, the importance of downtime in working as a chef, and the brain drain in running restuarants that's happening during COVID-19.

One thing that we learned is that restaurants are the number one employer in Calif. And working backwards from the idea that the golden state has 1/8 of the United States population and by some estimates the various 2020 shutdown orders will end up closing 50% of restaurants that aren't backed by chains or corporations, that's a huge impact of which we weren't aware.

While recording, Skipper mistakingly attributes Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours of work equals mastery theory to "Blink" instead of "Outliers". (He corrected it with Nicolai offline as soon as he was able.)

Stay tuned after the outro music for a bit of tape where Nicolai first mentions working on the line for the first time in six years.

This episode was edited and mastered by Troy Lococo.

Special Guest: Nicolai Lipscomb.

Links: