Nikesh Shukla

Mm

... and fear it's all gonna go away very, so I've just gotta hit this really hard and it sort of obliterated my like sense of self and personal life.

You know, in terms of being here and being able to survive, like I think to loop it back round to community again I guess like one of the things you'll, I'm sure you've noticed is the people you still hang around with are the people who are still there.

Like and a lot of people I know since then have dropped off for, for good reasons and bad reasons and

But I really enjoy being able to express myself, and I fe- I felt I was able to finally get back to who I was, center myself again.

And for my 36th birthday, I bought myself, um, a book called, um, How to Find Your Voice by Nikesh Shukla.

And Nikesh Shukla is a writer I really admire, and I was very interested in in those days.

But that was a time when Twitter was, um, a really good actual real source of information.

It really isn't that now.

But, um, Nikesh Shukla has a very interesting, um, prologue where he talks about when he was growing up, he wanted to be a rapper.

And, uh, he also was very obsessed with a band called Asian Dub Foundation.

And in fact, he had a moment where he got to meet Digger Zaman, the original frontman of ADF, and my, my favorite, um, and, uh, talk about music and writing, and, uh, that's his, one of his stories.

Um, Justin Reynolds is an awesome American YA writer, and he's written for Miles Morales.

And then we've got Nikesh Shukla, who if you don't know his stuff, like, check him out.

He's awesome, and he wrote Spider-Man: India, or he, I think he was one of the writers, but he wr- uh, he wrote why, uh, Spider-Man: India, and it's so awesome, and if you can check it out, it's really cool, and check out his other stuff.

So yeah, Nikesh Shukla-

Brilliant

... is just...

And it, it was a reminder for me that I haven't done a top-- I haven't talked-- Well, I've talked about being a parent, but I haven't talked specifically about being a specific kind of parent in a while.

I did the, I think over two years ago now, roughly two years ago, or it was after the genocide started, so it was in 2024, early 2024, I think, a, a podcast with three other parents, uh, Nikesh Shukla, Danal Kurd, and Fabienne Goa, on, um, kind of ra- I think the title was, like, Raising a Brown Child in a Time of Genocide, something along those lines, which was a reference to, uh, Nikesh's book, uh, Brown Child, I think it's called.

And we talked about, like, the intensity of it all.

It was a very emotional episode.