Two people from different fields — online or in person — spending a focused session working on something they're both curious about. You leave with something made, something learned, and very likely a new person in your corner.
I've been thinking about this for a while.
There are people I want to work with — curious, from fields completely different from mine — and I never quite have the right context to actually sit down and make something with them. Not just talk, but do something together and see what we find.
Oyster Club is my attempt to create that context deliberately. Find someone interesting. Spend a focused stretch on something neither of you has fully figured out. See what appears when two people from different worlds look at the same thing.
I don't know exactly what will come of it. That's sort of the point.
— PrabakaranFind someone from a completely different field — a doctor, an economist, an engineer, a designer — and spend a focused session thinking together on something neither of you has fully figured out yet.
When two people from different fields look at the same thing, each one has to explain their own assumptions to the other. In that conversation, something usually appears — a question worth asking, an angle neither of you could have found alone. Not solving something obvious together, but finding something worth solving that neither of you would have reached on your own.
You might arrive with something specific — a dataset, a paper, a half-formed idea. Or you might arrive curious, and the thing worth working on finds you once you're both in it. Sometimes what gets made is an experiment or a prototype. Sometimes it's a question that wasn't there before. Both count. And if it's worth continuing, you keep going.
One honest note: this is not about performing or signalling. Career outcomes can follow from genuinely good work — but they are a byproduct, not the point. The intention is simpler: curiosity and connection, for their own sake.
The best sessions come from unexpected pairings. Two people who would never normally work together, looking at the same problem from completely different angles. Here is what that can look like:
A behavioral economist and a pharmacist sit down together. They start wondering why people reach for certain OTC drugs the way they do — the psychology, the habits, the moment of decision. They sketch a small study. Neither could have framed it that way alone.
An engineer and someone who loves exploring the city pull open a public dataset together. Within an hour they have mapped something interesting that nobody had looked at quite that way. A small finding. A beginning.
Two people read the same paper on how language models behave and decide to run a quick experiment to test what they read. They write it up — something small and real they can both point to.
An economist and a software engineer spend a session trying to understand the same concept — how it's defined on paper, where it actually shows up in the world. They end with something neither had going in: a shared picture of it.
The most interesting thing is rarely the problem you arrived with. It is the one that appears when two people start explaining their own world to each other. What the session is actually for
More happens in a focused session than you'd expect. You can gain real clarity on a concept you've been circling for weeks. Sketch a clean structure out of something that felt formless. Run a quick experiment to test an intuition. Read a paper together and write up what you both noticed. Pull open a dataset and find something in it worth looking at twice. Define a problem statement that didn't exist when you sat down. One step forward is the goal — not the whole staircase.
AI is a third partner in the room. When you need to understand something quickly, prototype a rough version, or run an experiment — it helps you go further than either person could reach alone. You spend the session thinking, not searching.
No fixed agenda, no audience, no performance. You build what it leads you to. The output could be a prototype, a note, a clear question, or just a direction you both believe in. If it is a seed for something bigger, you take it from there.
Real connections
You meet through the work, not through small talk. The person you built something with becomes someone you keep in touch with — and come back to.
A new lens
Explaining your own work to someone from a completely different field changes how you understand it yourself. That shift tends to stay with you.
Something made
A small experiment, a sketch, a published note, a clear question. Something concrete — and a seed for whatever comes next.
The harder thing to describe is what comes after. You met someone real, thought together in a way you rarely get to, and something came from it — in ways you couldn't have predicted. A friendship. A way of seeing something you didn't have before. A direction that only appeared because two different people looked at the same thing. That is what it's actually for.
These are the questions currently on the table — threads being explored with people from different fields. If any of them pull at you, that is a good place to start.
RL for Business Applications
AI for Organizational Behaviour
Latent Space Communication of Agents
RL and World Models
Not limited to AI. These happen to be the threads open right now — but co-build sessions are genuinely open to any domain. Medicine, economics, linguistics, urban systems, policy, anything you are truly curious about and want to do something with. The field matters less than the question.
Prabakaran Chandran
Curious about AI, the world, and how different kinds of people think about the same things. He wanted a simple way to meet interesting people and actually do something with them — not just talk. Oyster Club is that. If the idea resonates, run your own.
Right now, Oyster Club is one person finding interesting people and setting up sessions. But the longer idea is something bigger: a place where any two people can find their fellow oyster.
You should not need to know Prabakaran to get a co-builder. You should be able to show up somewhere — a platform, an IRL event — say what you are curious about, and find the person from a completely different world who wants to look at the same thing. The pairing happens. The session happens. Something gets made.
That is what this is building toward. A network of people who know how to make things with strangers. Sessions that scale beyond one organiser. IRL meetups where the pairing happens in the same room. If that idea resonates with you — as a participant, a collaborator, or someone who wants to run this in your own city — reach out.
Want to join an active thread, bring a question of your own, or explore building this in your city? Tell me a bit about yourself and what you are curious about. I read everything and reply to all of it.