India, Feb. 28 -- 1How did you manage to avoid being swayed by the Haight-Ashbury hippie counterculture era in the US and later in Afghanistan too? I saw a lot of people fall off the trail. There used to be a whole graveyard in 1970s Kabul of kids who had overdosed. I was never a big drug user. I had more self-control because I could sense it wasn't a good long-term strategy. I enjoyed the music that was being made by some of the wilder brands. I wanted to live along on the edge. That was exciting to me. I enjoyed creative work, and being associated with creative people; I could think creatively. I was more of a business person, which is why I took the path I took, and I took it very seriously without going overboard with the party scene. 2In the book, you note that MTV's biggest concern was the remote control. With music aggregators like Spotify and the AI ChatGPT-led disruption in the music industry, what's your take on where things are headed? People always said, MTV, you help shorten people's attention spans. Now, we live in a world where everybody can watch anything they want on any device at any time they want. How do you even get people's attention? It's a huge challenge. You have to be a master of social media. You need younger people to help show you the way. I don't think it's impossible if you've a good product. Good things still somehow get found, but you're never going to have the monoculture that we had. We require really smart people to navigate this change, and I'm not the man for that job right now. 3You write about Jimmy Carter's protectionism. Please reflect on Trump's tariffs, and young entrepreneurs affected by government policies. I feel so sorry for young companies in the States. Companies that are big, who can maybe take a hit like Apple, but someone who's importing furniture from Indonesia, or someone who's importing clothing, they don't have a lot of money to play around with. They're getting wiped out. Their dreams are being dashed. They had wisely created a supply chain, and then all of a sudden, a guy comes in, and changes the rules. I think this is worse than Carter's [time]. Trump is doing this unilaterally. He doesn't need any Congress or anyone to support him. It's really disgraceful, this idea that we're going to bring manufacturing back to the States. It's just a dream. It's not going to happen. Who's going to invest money in a factory in the States when they see that it's so mercurial, the leadership? Nobody. Prices are going to be higher. Unemployment is going to be higher. A lot of young and middle-aged people who have small or medium-sized companies are going to go out of business. I remember, in my day, Indian exporters were really hurt when the US market closed down. What's happening is going to be a lot worse. The Indo-US relationship was getting strong, and I think that progress now has stalled. But I'm an optimist at heart and I think this era will pass and will be seen as a hiccup, and we'll get back to dealing with common sense....