– Veda Blackbox – 15th August 2026
First before anything can you vote me here! lets win this thing
https://genflix.ai/studio/naman/film/the-last-drop
Thanks coffee on me!
🏋️ Health
Gym is going well and I want to be honest about what that actually means right now. The sessions are happening, the effort is there, and the energy I carry out of each workout is real. But the eating is not catching up with the training. I am eating more than I am burning and I know it, and acknowledging it is the first step to fixing it. The goal is 74 kilograms. I am at 79. The marriage is coming, the deadline is real, and the motivation is as concrete as it gets. We are going to get there. That is not a wish, it is a plan.
I also read something from Harvard this week that recalibrated how I think about the gym entirely. David Sinclair, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, put it plainly: there is a big difference between your birthdays and your biological age, and only the second one can be changed. Half of how fast or slow you age is genetics. The other half is entirely yours. Your lifestyle, your movement, your stress levels, your food. Half of your future health is sitting in your own hands right now.
The part that hit me differently was this: worrying about aging actually speeds up the biological aging process. Anxiety about your health changes how genes function at a cellular level. Your body starts looking older than it is because of the stress of thinking about it. That is a strange loop — the fear of aging accelerating the very thing you fear. The implication is clear: stop catastrophising about the body and start doing the work. Movement is described as the closest thing to a longevity drug that currently exists. It improves nearly every system simultaneously. I already knew the gym mattered. Now I know it matters in ways I was not fully accounting for.
💻 Work
This was one of those weeks where the hours don’t look civilised on paper. Stayed till 1 AM for the whole stretch, which is the kind of thing that sounds bad in the telling but feels like something else while you are in it. When the work has urgency and the output is moving, late nights feel different from exhausted nights. This felt like the first kind.
We launched Agent Two at work and I got to build the promo for it alongside some genuinely good people. I am not fully happy with what I made. I want to say that clearly because I think the honesty of it matters more than performing satisfaction I don’t feel. But it is out. It exists. And something out in the world that I am not completely happy with is more valuable to me right now than a perfect version sitting on my hard drive.
We also got nominated for the Australian AI Film Festival. I am sitting with that one. The nomination means the work crossed a threshold someone else set — and that is not nothing. Vikas says he is bringing six thousand votes from his gaon. I do not fully believe him, but I appreciate the energy. We will win regardless.
The bigger thing I am thinking about is the image I carry at work. I still feel like people see me as the editor first and the thinker second. I want to be the person who handles the project from the idea stage, not just the execution stage. I think this will shift as things move forward, because I am already thinking differently about the work. But the image is sticky. You have to show people a new version of you repeatedly before they update their perception. I am in the middle of that process.
📖 Learning
Two things this week that sat completely differently but both mattered.
The first was a Tim Ferriss compilation on writing — a full episode of his podcast featuring conversations with Elizabeth Gilbert, Seth Godin, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Lamott, and others, all on the craft of writing. The single idea that cut through everything else was this: you do not wait to be inspired. You start working. Full stop. The version of yourself that waits for the right feeling before picking up the pen is the version that never ships anything.
Anne Lamott said something in there that I wrote down immediately. Every first draft by every author you have ever admired began as something unreadable. The difference between the writers who build a body of work and the ones who talk about building one is simply that the first group kept going through the unreadable drafts until the work became what it needed to be. Bad writing over time cannot persist if you keep at it. That is the whole game. Not inspiration. Not talent. Not the right moment. Consistent work over time.
The connection to the work this week is direct. The promo I built for Agent Two — I said I was not happy with it. But I put it out anyway. That is the only way to get to the better version. The bad draft teaches you what the next one needs to be. You cannot learn that from a draft that never ships.
The second was the Harvard aging article which I covered in Health. But from a learning perspective, the insight I am taking forward is this: your biological age is a software problem, not a hardware one. Sinclair calls it the Information Theory of Aging — your body is a computer and aging is the corruption of its software. Which means it is at least partially maintainable. That framing changes what I think about consistency with the gym, food, and sleep. Not vanity. Not the wedding. Maintenance of the software.
☕ Small Wins
The Sunday routine is locked in now and this is the thing I am most quietly proud of this week. Wake up. Versova for football. After the game, Starbucks. Meet SG. Open the laptop and work for three hours minimum. By the time the rest of the city is figuring out its Sunday, I have already moved my work forward, had a proper conversation with someone who is building something, and played a sport I genuinely love. Three hours of that routine are worth more than a full day of scattered, unfocused work. The structure is doing something for me that motivation alone could never do.
SG shared some ideas this week that I am going to start executing. I cannot say more than that yet but the direction is good and the energy behind it is real.
The Australian AI Film Festival nomination. Already said it above but it belongs here too, in the small wins section, where it can sit without being over-explained.
Learning Spanish and being able to ask for directions now. That is genuinely new. Six weeks ago I could order coffee. Now I can navigate a conversation about location. The accumulation is happening.
📚 A Line That Stayed
“There’s a big difference between your birthdays and your biological age — and only the latter can be changed.”
— David Sinclair, Harvard Medical School
I read this and immediately thought about the gym differently. Not as weight loss. Not as the wedding goal. As software maintenance. Sinclair’s framing is that we are not machines wearing down with time — we are computers running programs, and aging is what happens when those programs start to corrupt. Which means the lifestyle choices I make every day are either patching the software or letting the corruption spread.
The thing that made this personal was the second part: at least half of that corruption rate is in my hands. Fifty percent of how I age is my call. That is not a small number. That is not a marginal percentage. Half. The gym sessions, the food, the sleep, the stress management, the social connection — all of it is either slowing the clock or speeding it up. I want to be someone who treats that information seriously and not just intellectually.
The connection to the hunger philosophy I wrote about this week is direct. You do not accept the “better than nothing” version of your health any more than you accept it in your work. You want the whole thing. You maintain the software like it matters. Because it does.
🧠 Brain Refreshment
Tim Ferriss — Writing Inspiration Episode #878
A proper listen this week. The compilation format works because you get five or six different minds circling the same problem from completely different angles. Seth Godin on Isaac Asimov writing four hundred books. Anne Lamott on first drafts. Joyce Carol Oates on showing up. Elizabeth Gilbert on not overthinking the work. The consensus across all of them was the same thing said in different voices: start before you are ready, build through habit not inspiration, ship the imperfect version and learn from it.
Harvard Health — What Factors Speed Up Aging
Already in the health and learning sections above, but worth listing here for the record. Sinclair’s Information Theory of Aging is the kind of idea that does not leave you after you read it. The software framing changes everything about how you think about your body.
🎵 Music
🎵 Parmish Verma — Behja (new album)
✍️ A Poem by Me
Coming home every day brings peace,
Finding work, we exist in quiet hum,
Every night flowing by, every night,
Counting stars, wishing we had those same 2-4 people back.
💭 Closing Thoughts
I had a thought this week that I want to say plainly because I think it matters more than it sounds.
“It’s good, better than nothing” is a trap. It is a line people say to comfort themselves for not winning. I have been around it recently — in conversations, in competition contexts, in how people respond to their own output. And I understand it as comfort. I understand that sometimes you genuinely cannot do more. But I do not want to make a habit of being comfortable with a small portion of the pie when I know I am capable of the whole thing.
Cristiano Ronaldo talks about this. Michael Phelps talks about this. Pain is the most beautiful thing you can have — not because it is pleasant but because it is proof that you are going after something that actually costs you something. The people who only reach for what they know they can get do not know what they are capable of. I want to keep reaching for things that scare me a little.
The Sunday routine at Versova, then Starbucks, then three hours of real work — this is a version of that. I built a structure that removes the question of whether I feel like it. I just go. And every week I go, the answer to “what are you making?” gets a little more real.
The Europe trip is in the plan now. Three lakhs if I go alone — Claude told me, so it is on the record. I am saving. I am planning. The plan is real now, not just an idea.
See you next week.
— Naman
Mumbai
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