Episode 64 with Vishaka George

Reuben's Podcast

0:00

-1:34:21

Episode 64 with Vishaka George

Live on Youtube with timestamps

Reuben N

Oct 30, 2023

This week I released my conversation with Vishaka George where we chatted about journalism, the newsroom, aging parents, podcasts, teaching about climate change, her book - House of Uncommons - a fiction book about children with HIV, her work at PARI, death, charity, meritocracy and more.

I have grand plans for the podcasts but often find myself overwhelmed seeing how much work there is to do. So to make it easier, I’m making one small improvement with every new episode. This week it was adding subtitles and time stamps to YouTube.

Subtitles just help to follow the conversation better and in the rare case you’re like me and viewing the video by hovering above it (but not clicking). You can’t remove the subtitles since they are part of the video but that’s something I’d like to further improve. You’ll also see subtitles in the IG Reels too.

Timestamps will allow you to jump to different parts of the conversation. You can see all the topics we chat about and jump right to it. At some point, I might break the entire episode into shorter videos, but that’s a lot of work for now.

You can watch the whole video below.

and here are all the timestamps for the episode -

00:00 Intro 3:15 Banglore 4:30 Aging Parents 9:25 Why Vishaka listens to the podcast 13:05 Recap of the last decade 16:00 Favorite memory from College 18:15 Dream vs Reality of being a journalist 23:45 Professional dissonance 28:55 PARI 34:55 Hardest part of the job 36:50 Advice for a new journalist 39:50 Savoir Complex 41:50 Measuring Progress 45:16 Charity 51:05 Writing Fiction 53:45 House of Uncommons 55:30 Thinking about Death 1:02:00 Explaing the Climate Crisis to Kids 1:09:15 Hope 1:11:30 Meritocracy 1:16:55 Advice for your younger self 1:21:05 Questions for Reuben 1:27:25 Wrapping up

Aging Parents

During our conversation, we spoke about how our parents are getting visibility older every passing year. Here’s an extract from Tim Urban’s essay The Tail End that I find very powerful -

I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.
Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.
When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. If I lay out the total days I’ll ever spend with each of my parents—assuming I’m as lucky as can be—this becomes starkly clear:
It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.