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Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju

Founder of Urban Farmie, a vegetarian-global food blog; former Boston Consulting Group Partner and TED speaker on food systems (Stanford MS-MBA).

Aug 18, 2026

ChristinaHOST
7:56
But
7:56
then most of my work happens in either co-work or in code.
8:01
Code is, you know, maybe we can just set that aside for the time being because it is essentially a developer interface.
8:07
So it's able to talk to your computer's terminal.
8:10
You can code in it.
8:12
You don't need code.
8:14
Quark gets you 95% of the way there because it can do all of the things, almost all of the things that code can do, except it's not scary looking.

34 MINS LATER

speaker_3ADVERTISER
41:59
There
6:43
Yeah.
6:44
as it always goes with these things.
6:46
And, you know, you realize there's a little human that's not going to understand like, oh, you know, when it was just me and my husband, he's also in a similarly kind of crazy career.
6:55
And so he gets it and I got it and we just made it work.
6:58
But it's impossible with a child.
7:01
And of course, I think BCG was very, very like generous and supportive and they've done so much to make it work.
7:09
But at some point it started feeling like I was kind of failing at everything.

8 MINS LATER

15:42
So like what was the entry point? And then fast forward a little bit and say, you know, paint a picture of what it could look like for creators to really be leveraging these tools.
10:35
The same way at all,
10:36
right? And so what ends up happening is that I started doing this stuff, whether it was for writing, you know, short emails to send out, or it was for Instagram hooks or whatever.
10:47
And it would write something and I'd read it and be like, this is kind of there but this is not really me uh like for instance i hate the rule of three and that's a rhetorical pattern that ai loves so it'll just be like fast flavorful and unforgettable oh yes oh my gosh i hate it i hate it i hate it um i am british educated and so we use a lot of m dashes and oxford commas but then when you see it in ai i actually have to like as much as it pained me i had to create a rule to be like nope this is not gonna work And you have to be like, you start getting more specific, but then that's why it also corrodes over time.
11:25
Because if you got specific in one place, and I think before we started recording, I was sharing this example.
11:32
So Instagram hooks keep changing.
11:35
Last month, a question-based hook was working best for me.
11:38
So I was literally telling it, hey, question-based hooks are working better, so give me more question-based hooks for X, Y, and Z reels.

8 MINS LATER

20:08
Is there anything else that you can think of since you're such an AI guru and you're a blogger? What else can help us with AI in our businesses? Any other little tips or tidbits you have for us?

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