When in India, I did end this podcast early due to the bad air quality. @nikhilkamathcio was a gracious host and we were having a great time. The problem was that the room we were in circulated outside air which made the air purifier I'd brought with me ineffective. Inside, the AQI was 130 and PM2.5 was 75 µg/m³, which is equal to smoking 3.4 cigarettes for 24 hours of exposure. This was my third day in India and the air pollution had made my skin break out in rash and my eyes and throat burn. Air pollution has been so normalized in India that no one even notices anymore despite the science of its negative effects being well known. People would be outside running. Babies and small children exposed from birth. No one wore a mask which can significantly decrease exposure. It was so confusing. The evidence shows that India would improve the health of its population more by cleaning up air quality than by curing all cancers. I am unsure why India's leaders do not make air quality a national emergency. I don't know what interests, money and power keep things the way they are but it's really bad for the entire country. When I returned to the U.S., my eyes were fresh to see what is normalized to me. I saw obesity everywhere. 42.4% of American are obese and because I was around it all the time, I had been mostly oblivious to it. In many contexts, obesity is worse than air pollution in the long term. Why wouldn't American leaders declare a national emergency on obesity? What interests, money and power keep things the way they are but are really bad for the entire country.

The Ghosts We Inherit: India's 'New Money' Story My mother reuses tea leaves until the water runs clear. My friend's father keeps a wooden box in his closet, with carefully folded bills arranged by denomination. Another's maintains a small diary tracking every household expense down to the last rupee. These aren't quirks – they're battle scars from a generation that survived on less. We are their children. We carry their financial trauma in our wallets, even as we tap them against sleek payment terminals at craft coffee shops.