On May-18-2020, I launched my first ever podcast, the You+AI Podcast which is now available on all the popular platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. This is an account of what got me here.
The quest
We have all loved stories right from when we were kids. Hearing stories of experience, lives lived, folk tales, fables, fantasies, legends, often comfort us and help us understand the world we live in better. To me, the love of stories told helped me become genuinely curious about the various ways of experiencing things in my life e.g. baking a cake, drawing a picture, making a photo, writing a poem, investing money, driving a car, listening to music, appreciating a movie etc. Hearing these from people I met helped me forge a bond with them and they continue to live in my memory even when the person is no longer in touch.
There are some people who have such fascinating stories of their lives that you cannot help but just marvel at their experiences. One such person for me is a close family friend of ours, Mr. M. As an auditor in a firm, his job required him to travel to many different places – big cities, towns, districts and even small villages across the length and breadth of India. The experiences that he collected over his life span a whole spectrum e.g. the story of how he was forced to stay in a village due to a curfew for 18 days and the only vegetable available there was bitter gourd which his kind host managed to cook in many creative ways; the story of how he was driven around a small town in an auto-rickshaw by none other than the erstwhile prince of that region; the story of how he found food in a desolate village in the dead of winter; the story of how a domesticated elephant named Phoolkali guided them to safety out of a forest and many more. I have loved the countless afternoons that I’ve spent with Mr. M over some freshly brewed coffee.
After a few years of this, I felt strongly that such stories from Mr. M and others that I heard should be shared with a broader audience and I could perhaps be the instrument to make that happen. At the time, a few years back, the only obvious way for me to share stories was to capture it in a series of blogs or in a book. So, I implored Mr. M to write down his stories but that didn’t go very far. Next, I took down notes and tried to write out a story but I found out that I wasn’t able to convey the essence and spirit of it as Mr. M could. Fast forward two to three years, I heard of speech-to-text and I attempted to set up a session where I would interview Mr. M about one of his experiences and he would answer, which would be transcribed into text by my phone. This worked to an extent but we had to stop multiple times in between for the phone to catch-up or to stop and edit what had been transcribed. This meant the flow of our conversation and hence the story was interrupted multiple times. So, this too didn’t go the distance.
One time, I went on with my friends to a forest in southern India. At night, having dinner around a bonfire besides the rest house deep inside the forest, we were chatting about all things under the sun. My friend Mr. U, an avid wildlife photographer delved into how he developed a love of nature and the experiences in his youth that made him take up wildlife photography as a hobby. I grabbed my phone then, asked my friend if I could record and then continued to hear the stories as the phone kept recording the experience under the starry sky and quiet surroundings bereft of vehicle traffic noise. The next morning, over breakfast, we all started hearing what my phone had recorded and we loved it. We loved the flow of the story, the questions that I had asked in-between to simplify the story for my own understanding and the fact that there was no background noise in the recording to spoil the experience, except the gentle croaking of frogs that added to the wildlife story that my friend was narrating. Many other friends that I shared this story with also loved hearing the experience. This was a new dawn for me and the realization of the mantra – listen, simplify and share.
Enter Artificial Intelligence
Around the same time, my interest in the area of Artificial Intelligence was growing. As I read more, I began to understand that this was not yet another fad but something that would stay with us and influence our lives for the better. As any other technologist, I have seen previous waves of technology and know that these waves come and go but some stay a lot longer – the wave of Artificial Intelligence is one of the latter kind. As I spent more time learning the basics and experimenting with it at work as well as outside of it, I realized that I could attempt sharing my learning. That led me to set up a simple Q and A around Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning which I started sharing with the world via SoundCloud. I took one question at a time and tried to answer it in a simple and intuitive way, without any visual aids like slides or videos. Each audio clip was between 3-5 minutes and when I shared these, I heard back good things from people who were on this learning path. The feedback certainly helped me get better and I even got suggestions for questions that I should take up further and that led me to explore directions that I hadn’t. The lesson for me was that sharing helped shape my learning even better.
To learn more and keep myself updated with the state of the art in AI, I started reading more – blogs, books; following social media handles; watching YouTube videos of tutorials and listening more to podcasts in the AI/ML domain. One podcast that is my favorite is the TWIMLAI Podcast hosted by Sam Charrington. Sam’s guest lineup includes a diverse group of people working in all domains within AI and ML. The good thing is that the Podcast doesn’t just get celebrities or influencers but most often regular engineering folks who build products and solutions that work. Here too, I was able to listen to the stories of people, simplify them for my understanding and share the same in conversations with my friends and colleagues – the mantra (listen, simplify and share) was being put to use!
Enter Healthcare
We’ve several doctors in our extended family. Therefore conversations about medicine, about patients and treatments, drugs for common ailments and lifestyle for good health have been topics of discussions in family meetups for a long time. Last year, when I met my cousin Dr. G and stayed over at his place, we had a lot to catch up. The state of healthcare featured prominently in our catch up and I was happy to hear all the latest and greatest around it from Dr. G. The most troubling though was what Dr. G called the erosion of the doctor-patient relationship and how that erosion had grown stronger over the decades of medical practice. It was interesting to know that this was not just an India phenomenon but had a universal character to it. My quest then became to find a technological solution to that eroding doctor-patient relationship and as I was a student of AI, I started looking for how AI could solve this problem, if at all.
I came across several AI in Healthcare books and looking at what was being read the most, Deep Medicine by Eric Topol clearly stood out. Dr. Eric Topol, a Cardiologist in the USA, sets the context as the current state of healthcare in the USA and then goes on to explore the various facets and specializations within medicine where AI could be used in a meaningful manner to better outcomes. In this book, Eric Topol covers the breadth of medicine, summarizes the important developments in academia, highlights the trends that are shaping healthcare and showcases products and solutions of various startups in the Healthcare + AI domain, remaining true all the while to the overarching goal of fostering the doctor-patient relationship that would lead to the best outcomes for the patient.
As I gushed often about Deep Medicine to Dr. G, he became curious and he too invested time to read through the book. Our voices then got in sync and we spent many hours over many calls discussing the various aspects and contextualizing them within the state of medical care in India. When we met again and started discussing Healthcare and this time with AI, I quickly pulled out my phone and set it to record, just the way I had done earlier with Mr. U. Forty minutes went by and our constructive conversation was interrupted by the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. As we listened to what we had recorded, I realized that this would be my pilot – a prototype that I could share with family, friends and colleagues to get their feedback. I went on to do that and besides all the positive and encouraging talk, we also heard what we had to do better – the background noise had to be cut down, the volume of our voices was not the same at some places, we had been more repetitive about some of the points than was necessary, adding an introduction would have helped appreciate the context better, a summary at the end would serve as a nice takeaway etc. I owe my deep thanks to all those who took time to listen to the pilot and gave me valuable suggestions for improvement.
Tinkering
It was time for me to go back to the drawing board and see how I could improve the audio experience for my audience. Enter Audacity – the audio editing software. For the next several days and weeks, I spent time learning how to use Audacity to do the same i.e. cut out background noise (harder than what I had imagined), balance the voice of multiple speakers, trim where necessary, add multiple tracks and make a composite track out of that, introduce effects like fade-in, fade-out and silence where needed etc. The output of all this tinkering was that the audio was sounding a lot better, crisper and to the point. The next was to invest in better equipment than just use our mobile phones and the attached earpiece and microphone.
A Google search plus watching YouTube videos on How to Podcast? got me the necessary list of things I could consider. I went ahead and bought the following – a pair of microphones with cables, a pre-amplifier box, a pair of headsets, stands for the microphones, pop filters, microphone holders and a laptop. With that in place, it was time to put all this to test.
Dr. G led me to Dr.P and it was in Dr. P’s office that I set up all the equipment and got ready to record the first podcast. The test passed – it all went smoothly and without a glitch – we were all happy at how the show had come together. Of course, this recording did require some editing and tinkering with Audacity but to a far lesser degree than what I had done with the pilot.
Putting it all together
As Dr. G put it, one podcastee (the show guest) leads the podcaster (the show host) to another podcastee. Through word of mouth, one-by-one and over the next few months, I met with many more doctors, listened to their stories on healthcare, asked them questions to simplify my understanding with the intent of sharing that with the rest of the world. On May-18-2020, the You+AI podcast, focused on exploring the use and impact of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, went on air on the Internet. The You+AI podcast is available on all popular podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts besides others. One can also catch it by heading to the youplusai website.
That was a moment for me to look back and thank everyone who had helped me get to that milestone in my life. This podcast is as much for me as for anyone else on our planet – it is an actualization of the mantra that I have internalized as my own – listen, simplify and share. I am grateful to the audience that has heard the first few episodes of this podcast and has given me suggestions of how to take this further.
What next?
Thank you for being with me thus far. Please join me as I continue to document my explorations along this path by following my handle on Twitter.
P.S. – Those of you who are wondering when will the fascinating stories of Mr. M be heard – I can assure you that I am trying very hard to convince Mr. M to work with me and bring those stories to light.