B (6:18)

Thank you. And how do you navigate between these three countries? Do you aim at that tier one, or are you looking for founders who you think might be able to go into country two and ultimately country three?

C (6:39)

I think all of us in venture or really launching, I would say most consumer products have really kept India 3 out of our calculations. It's a very large country, 1.2 billion people or 1 billion people, but it's really outside of our consideration set. Now, one thing to keep in mind is it is not like India one is concentrated in a few cities and India one is in certain regions. It's spread across India. So sort of a good way to understand is if India is water or milk. And the India one is like the cream that cannot spread across. It's concentrated in a few regions. But there's no one part where like people talk about Italy and say southern Italy versus northern Italy, northern Italy, it's far more prosperous. Nothing like that in India. There are some trends where the southern part is a little southern and western parts are a little more richer, but nothing does it. But it's sort of spread across. And all of us really keep India 1 and 2 in mind. And if we're lucky, if the product can also appeal to India 2, very few products appeal to India 1 and India 2. That's because the hooks that are needed to grab onto the landmass of India 1 are not sufficient or are not relevant to the. To not to grab onto the landmarks of India too. What I mean is India one speaks a lot of English. They're very comfortable with what is happening in the US consumption patterns. You see them as really, and I like to think of this metaphor, that India won as a 51st state of the U.S. really. Okay, so, so, so that's. And because they're watching suits or friends and what have you, they're really consuming US culture. But India too is not a native English speakers. They can see English, some of them can understand English, but they're largely vernacular language speakers. While they can use the English Internet, they're not native and they don't leverage it well. Some of them have started using it for learning, some of them use it for shopping, etc. But they're not native users. The pattern, the way in which. So India one is very used to clicking on colored rectangles on flat glass screens and buying. But India too likes to use voice. And increasingly a lot of apps have started giving back, you know, interface, using the voice interface. And it'll be interesting if AI in the next few years can use this voice interface to help make the Internet palatable for India too. So this is sort of the lay of the land when it comes to venture funded startup. We largely focused on India 1 and.

B (9:23)

We have direct experience with that. In one of our verticals, Infinite books on the audio book, we are looking to be able to translate it into the very many languages spoken in India. And the AI is getting better and better and better at that. So we think it'll be an interesting experiment at least. And by the way, we're doing it entirely experimentally. We don't have any preconceived notions about how that might or might not work. But you've also written elsewhere that India is a low trust society. And are there specific things that you look for? First off, I guess this is a two part question in the country. One that is very comfortable with US culture, et cetera, is that still a low trust cohort or are they more like the United States in their trust? And then the second question would be, how do you build apps that work and appeal in a low trust society?

C (10:28)

Yeah, I think that India is a low trust country. There are parts of India, I guess the startup ecosystem, which is really the venture ecosystem, is a high trust market. So there are parts of it that are very similar to how it would work in the U.S. i think the venture ecosystem here is very highly evolved and that's a high trust. The parts of the market where there are a lot of American banks that are operating or even Indian companies, right? So concentrated in Bombay, some parts of other cities like Bangalore and some parts of Delhi would be high trust. But on an average, even India one would be low trust but lower in the trust levels than I would say Western countries. And a lot of it has to do with culture and the fact that, you know, at the end of the day we are a $2,600 per capita income country. Right. We have 1 40th on per capita income and it's only some parts of India which really have like anything about 10, $15,000. So a lot of that permeates itself through the. With regards to your second question, how do you build products which are high trust? Very interesting. And I'll give you an example of a particular feature which is somewhat unique to India and challenges it creates. So in us, if you want to buy a product from Amazon, Amazon has one click shopping, right? In India, it doesn't work. I literally have to do like 6, 7 clicks because the Reserve bank of India RBI, which is very powerful, which is one of the few institutions like the Fed, but much more trusted. They said a lot of customers are accidentally paying because Amazon made it one click and pay. No, we want, you know, more friction in buying. So literally you have to do multiple clicks. Then there is an OTP that I get, it's called a one time password which comes on my phone. So and not only do I have to put my cvv, sometimes I have to put it each time or I have to give special permission. Then the OTP comes. So there's a lot of friction in buying and it takes me five, six clicks. Whereas when I'm in the US everything is designed maybe to just separate money from me like in an instant, right? But in India there's so much friction. So that is one example for India 1, even for India 2 or even parts of India 1 e commerce is a good example. We have something called cash on delivery. So now this interesting us, you have to prepay for anything you want at your house or whatever. In India you can opt for cash on delivery. Now what it means is I do not believe that what you're sending me is the right thing. I want to see it, I want to see it, I want to make sure it is and then I'll pay. So cash on delivery still is a majority of Indian E commerce. And fact is people do pay digitally, but they want to see the product in their hands. Now this is an indicator of what a low trust economy has engendered. The fact also is that our addresses are very hard to make out, they're hard to pass. They're as simple as US addresses. 1320 Maple Drive, zip code. They are like half a mile long and they give you interesting things like come behind the temple, give me a shout and someone will come. And it's a fourth door with this. So one of the Indian apps, Swiggy, even has an option for photographing your door and adding it so that people who are delivering can see the door. So this is interesting. This one related to trust as much but so much as. So what it means is aligned with cash on delivery, aligned with the fact that addresses are hard to parse and etc. We have return rates which are very high. Some of our apparel companies which do fashion, e commerce have return rates as high as 40%. It's a nightmare to deal with like you know, because it, it vitiates a unit economics. So I'm giving you a lot of variety. But I thought two examples of what low trust mean at India one and India two.

B (14:48)

So yeah, as I listen to your response, I can't help but think that both of those were problems in the United States way earlier. Right. So cash on delivery code was very popular in the United States as we were emerging as a more unified country because the states were very, as you probably know, the states have their own constitutions and they have their own rules and regulations and all of that. And so most things were set COD because in that regard we were low trust. And then the friction on the one click payment. Same thing happened here when the Internet started to dominate. Right. And I think it's probably an apocryphal story, but it illustrates the point. It was really the Beanie Baby phenomenon in the United States that got people willing to put their credit card on ebay. Most people when Amazon was brand. I was a real super earlier adopter of the Internet and I still, and I'm a journal keeper too. And I just found something from like the mid-90s where it says I don't know if I'm ever going to put my credit card on the Internet. And then of course we became accustomed to it. Do you see similar things progressing that way in India as well?

C (16:13)

I do, I think over the last, I would say like 20 years. Internet has 20 plus years, like you know, 30 years. If you take 94 as sort of the early kind of wave of Internet in India, I would say yes, I've started seeing this trend towards more trust, less of friction, more people willing to use credit cards or at least digital payments. So certainly in the right direction. But I would say a lot of this is much faster in India 1, little less faster in India 2 and non existent in India 3.

B (16:47)

And so I have been very bullish on India Indian people. I mean the profile is. And now I'm learning, I'm probably profiling that India one but highly educated, incredible work. We have a joke at OSB that if an Indian CEO gets installed then yes.

C (17:12)

Yeah.

B (17:13)

So we view it very positively. But as I listen, it seems to me that penetration into country two and country three is going to be a very long adoption curve. And what are your thoughts on how that might happen? I could probably understand how you penetrate the aspiring country number two. That's just below that 30 million figure you gave for the top one. Do you ever see it like getting and permeating the third level?

C (17:49)

Yeah. So India one is about 30 million households and 120 million people.

B (17:53)

120 million.

C (17:54)

India two is about 70 million households and about 300 million people. I would say that I'm very hopeful of India too. Much more go for one. The per capita income is around $3,000 and typically they have low but rising percentage of their earnings as disposable income and typically around four to six thousand dollars. The disposable income becomes material enough to start influencing the Indian consumer market and at that point we'll start seeing them becoming a force. What is interesting is that there are people, there are companies which have been able to successfully sell into India too. Some of them are startups, some of them are not necessarily startups in the truest sense, but they are really larger companies launching brands. And one successful company is called zoodio Z U Dio. It is from India's, one of India's largest conglomerates, the Tata Group. The highly respected Tata Group, everything from SALT to software. You know, they run Europlanes as well. So they launched one of their companies, launched this brand called Zodio. Effectively it is, it is like Indian Zara, H and M but much lower priced, less than $10 typically. Right. You know, and basically what they did was they worked backwards. They said this is the price I want to kind of offer and this is the margin that I'm comfortable with, hence this is what I need to manufacture it at. They gave a large amount of volume to their suppliers and they were able to get goods at much lower prices. The markups were lower and they sold the product at lower prices. And extremely, they've been extremely successful. So it's kind of said that Indian consumers are not low price but they're high value more than low price. Right. And that has turned out to be true. So second, when it comes to for example, India is a big market for to. So there have been for example companies which have, there's a company called Hero Honda, sorry Hero Group, they earlier had a joint venture with Hero Honda but now they kind of separate. So Hero Group. So they, they have a very successful two wheeler brand which is very popular in like in India too. And a lot of it has to do with fuel efficiency. So they basically said we will do what it takes. And they created this, you know, four stroke engine so there's less power but it gives you tremendous mileage and that really matters in India. So these are two examples and there are many more of companies really working backwards from the price that they have to sell at making sure that the product has features which are relevant for India too and being able to kind of provide that value. And they've done very well. There is this gentleman, CK Prahlad, not so well known now but he's passed away. He was an American academic. He was at the University of Michigan. He wrote this book called the Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid where he talked about how Indian companies can actually sell into India 3. You know, with deep respect to Mr. Prahlad, I think India 3 is a little tough. I guess you could if you're selling products which are like consumer staples, maybe salt or grain or something like that. And another mode that's worked well is to do what's called sachetization, which is really the challenge. Instead of making big packs like you go to Costco and you see these jumbo packs, they won't work in India. You need like much smaller so sachets. Because Indians don't have very high income at one go and very few Indians are part of the formal economy. Out of the 1.4 billion people, there are about 600 million people in the labor force out of which about barely 10% are in the formal economy which means they get regular income every month and stuff like that. The blue collar population is about one third of this and the white collar is about 2/3 of this. So. So if you ask me, a lot of these factors also play itself in like this trend towards sagitization because when you don't have regular income, you're not able to save towards a lot of things, then you're very careful about what you're going to spend it on.

B (22:25)

And that brings to mind the stat that kind of blew my mind which is only 1.5% of the total population in India pays an income tax.

C (22:36)

Right? Yeah, this was. Yeah, yeah. So what's worth noting is, and this is how our two countries have evolved. The US is a very local, the local municipality. The states have a lot of power. So the center has, the union has power that is not decayed to the states. Right. So India is the other way around. The states have power. That's not begin to the union. The union is very powerful in India and that's just the way we've evolved because we basically adopted whatever practices the British had laid down. And the British, because they governed India as a colony, they had a very strong center. So we kind of just took over from that. And what's worth noting is unlike the US we have very few local taxes. I do not pay local taxes, but, Jill, I only pay the income tax, and I pay the goods and service tax, which is an indirect tax. But the fact is there are very few Indians kind of paying that. And I think over the last few years, and there's a kind of very different discussion, and I probably shouldn't go there. There's also been a desire by the Indian state to not expand the tax base, the direct tax base. So there's a saying right in the US no taxation without representation. It is a very important saying in the history of the United States. So in many ways, I think the powerful Indian state goes by the philosophy of no taxation, no representation. So what it means is that if you're not paying tax, then you do not have the right to ask for a lot of things. So the center is not held accountable for a lot of things. And what has happened over the last many decades is the Indian elite has sort of segregated themselves from participating in public goods. So we live in. So the elite of India live in large gated complexes today, which is sort of the equivalent of the white suburbs in the US this sort of. Okay, so not all the gated complexes are in the suburbs in India. Some of them are in the middle of the cities, but they're large gated complexes. They have security. They drive large cars. And there's a trend towards richer households buying more and more cars while public transport is used. Not enough public transport is used. There is a saying in the west that rich countries want where even millionaires and billionaires travel by public transportation. It's not so true in India. So kind of a roundabout way, but it's sort of this 1.5% or 22 million Indians paying all of the tax has many implications, and not all are necessarily healthy implications.

B (25:33)

Do you think that that is somehow a remnant of the case system in India? Is that still influencing the way things are going or not?

C (25:45)

Not this specific one. But I would say that if you take the Indian caste system, so India's unlike the British, like UK where there's a class system. I mean, you know, India is. Yeah, the caste matters far more. And it has not gone away completely, you know, So I would expect it to kind of come down every year. And it is reducing in large cities it's not as important. But then again, as a member of. I'm a privileged member of the upper caste, so I won't see it sort of. It's hard for me to kind of see the chart. Much like, for example, if you're a member of the minority in the us you will encounter former challenges which, for example, the white American will not encounter. Right. So I may not see it as much. I would say it's come down. There is a strong correlation with income and I would say caste. It is not decisive. There are reasonably large, but there are reasonable number of lower castes who have done well or middle class or have done well. But increasingly, I think a majority of the people who've done well economically well off are, I would say, certainly the upper castes. But the tax. So naturally that has an implication and who pays the tax, you know, so that is the way I would put it.

B (27:03)

Some of my younger colleagues at o' Shaughnessy Ventures who are working from India and are Indians obviously often joke that the largest variable whether India can be the powerhouse of the 21st century is the government. And they say that to me often enough every time I ask a question like, well, why isn't this happening, this happening, this happening. And then the refrain from them always is, look, you're right, we've got all of those things that you're mentioning. Highly educated, highly motivated capital formation is VCs like yourself. But they're like, the government is our greatest exogenous risk here. What do you think about that idea.

C (27:49)

To give credit to the government? They do understand that if they don't reform India, they're sitting on a time bomb because this is a country where there's a large number of people who are less economically well off. Unemployment is reasonably high. So to their credit, all governments, especially this government, has been very proactive in, I would say, investing. For example, when it comes to roads, railway infrastructure, for instance, has improved dramatically. That's it. I would say two areas where I would say we should see little more intervention. The first would be the tax. One, I think the Indian taxman can be very temperamental. For example, they can come back and say, you owe us money for the last 10 years and there's no statute of limitation there. And that does create challenges. The second is to do with interpretation of laws. And I would say there are enough examples of sectors where the sudden laws hobbled the growth of the sector. Now things are changing. But for a long time, India's drones had to be within line of sight so they couldn't be used in agriculture. They couldn't be used for many things. You have to get a lot of permission. So as a result, the biggest use case for drones was weddings. And because Indian weddings are, you know, they talk about big fan Greek weddings, Indian weddings are, boy, oh boy, they're bigger and fatter. And you had this trend where every wedding had a drone going up, shooting it from multiple angles, et cetera. So that's an example of, you know, how we kind of law hobbled the growth of the drone sector. Now things are changing. So I think these two are areas where I think we need to kind of see the Indian state ease up a little. But otherwise, I think they've been fairly, fairly be open to the idea that they have to invest. They can't stand in the way of growth. The other minor risk, and this is not so much for Indian companies, but for, I would say, global companies, is that there is a. And it's not only India, there is a sort of economic nationalism that is kind of rising. And what that means is the Indian, Indian state wants more control. We're seeing some of this in Brazil as we, you know, we saw it with X Twitter being shut down by the Brazilian Supreme Court. And there is a case that is slowly proceeding through the Indian legal system on WhatsApp. The contention is that WhatsApp should give the encryption keys to the Indian state because they worried that WhatsApp being used and WhatsApp is what the country runs on. Sitting in the US you probably don't understand how important WhatsApp is. It's a bit like how China, Tencent and Tencent's messenger is so central to the country. So we'll see how this goes. Some point they will understand and probably agree to some sort of middle ground. So I would say these three, a little bit of temperamental tax treatments, laws being applied little indiscriminately. And the third thing that I was mentioning, Jim, is about economic nationalism. So if you came into mind, these three, you know, temperamental tax treatment, treatment of laws, you know, indiscriminate manner, and finally economic nationalism. These are sort of three ways in which the government sort of creates challenges.

B (31:25)

I would say, yeah, we are investors in a fund that concentrates on Bangladesh. And one of the gps there said to me that Westerners get most things wrong there. And he gave us an example. He was talking to a potential lp and the LP said, yeah, well, I was looking at adoption rates of Internet in Bangladesh, and they're microscopic. Nobody seems to be using the Internet there. And he smiled and he goes, that's because they don't ask the right question. If you look at a survey that says, when was the last time you were on the Internet? It might seem along to a Westerner, right? But if you ask the question, when was the last time you were on WhatsApp? Or when was the last time you were on Facebook? It was today, because. And this is echoing the importance of WhatsApp in India as well. And it seems to me that if the state really wants the country to emerge as an economic powerhouse, they would at least understand the universal importance of those apps. Or am I just a Westerner totally getting it wrong?

C (32:46)

Yeah, I think they do understand. It's just that I think there are very powerful forces and it's not unique to India alone. We're seeing that in Brazil, we're seeing it in China, the state today. And sometimes egged on by the dynamic dynamics of politics internally and having to pander to a certain constituency sort of takes the stance that how can they, how can we surrender to the hegemony of the West? Right. And. And we now need to kind of regulate these. Sometimes it's good. I do appreciate that the EU has helped regulate Apple to change the Lightning port to the USB C port. And that is. That's a godsend. I can use different chargers now. I'm not reliant on the Apple charger, but sometimes it can get, you know, overtly kind of awkward. And I do hope that some of this regulation doesn't lead to a situation where, which leads to someone exiting the country, like X decide X had to exit. There's a force too. So I don't know if it'll happen tomorrow in India, but yeah, I mean, these are risks that sometimes you run. But I think overall, I think India is far more progressive. I mean, I must tell you that. And I think there is a keen understanding that, hey, India is far more connected into the global economic system and India stands to benefit far from it. And there are enough pulls and pressures, enough constituencies, you know, that sort of a middle ground will be reached in India.

B (34:17)

Do you still see a diaspora of people of some of the brightest minds and who would make natural entrepreneurs has that them leaving for places like the United States or other much more conducive to friendly laws and terms around venture. Is that still significant or are you seeing that slow down?

C (34:40)

I'm not seeing it slow down at all. I'm actually seeing it rise in certain parts of India. If you go to Punjab, which is in the north of India on the border with Pakistan. Historically it used to be India's most prosperous state. That's because it's fertile farmland and they benefited from irrigation projects laid down since the British time. And they also did very well when we had what's called the Green revolution, you know, when, when, when, when we got these seeds. But over farming, over fertilization and many other challenges, including some uses of terrorism, etc, has led to declining incomes, a lot of farmland being not productive anymore. And as a result, a lot of the youth in Punjab not finding gainful employment because industry has not grown there as much. As a result, a lot of Punjabis want to kind of migrate out. And was recently reading this podcast where the Economist editors in India were being interviewed and one of them spoke about how when you go to Punjab, almost every hoarding you can see is relocate to the uk, apply to this university in the uk, visa for UK etc, etc. So there are parts of India where that's, that's particularly, you know, prominent. There are, for example, the state I come from, Kerala, sends a lot of people to the Middle East. They work not always in white collar. A lot of it is blue collar, so similar to Punjab. So what we're seeing is the rise of blue collar migration has really gone up. When it comes to white collar migration, I think it is not the case that in the 60s, 70s, a lot of Indians migrated to the US because jobs were not hard to come by. So that's not true for white collar. Jobs are easier to come by. But the absolute numbers have gone up because there are a lot more of them, etc. And there's nothing wrong in it. Many of them want to study things, many of them get scholarships. So it's net positive for everyone because many of them send money back. But what we're seeing in blue collar kind of migration is something that's very interesting. And I do think a lot of it has to do with the challenging economic circumstances that they find themselves in. And I kind of talk about three E's in one of my reports. And one of them is English. So the elite Indians have access to English and use English as kind of a proxy. English is a gatekeeping device. The second is exams. So one way to break into India, one for India two people, is to do well in one of the government exams. All government jobs are two exams. And it's crazy how many years sometimes people take to kind of pass these exams. And effectively passing an exam guarantees you a regular income. And given that only about 50, 55 million people in India have regular income. You can imagine how big a difference, just 4% of Indian population have regular income. The third E, the first was English, the second was exam, the third is exit. When you don't have access to these two, then you look at exit as one B and we're seeing large numbers of that.

B (38:14)

And you wrote a very interesting piece that looks at what you call the English texts. Talk a little bit about that. And I found that piece very intriguing.

C (38:26)

So the English text is essentially fact that much of the Indian Internet, much of elite India's communication, much of public science in India tend to be in English when it's a public science. I mean it's changing now. So for example, if you go to a hotel and like a five star hotel, you will see most of the signs in English. If you go to a Starbucks in India you won't see anything inside in Hindi or Bengali or whatever Tamil, you'll see it only in English. When you go to Turkey or Germany, all of the Latin, all of the signs will be in German, some of them in tourists. Like in Istanbul you might see a little bit of English but if you're going to Ankara or something in Turkey you'll only see it in Turkish. That's fine because much of the population speaks like very few people speak English in India. The fact that India 1 all speaks English and is fluent in it mean that much of the sign boards etc are in of English. This concept of English tax came to me because one day I was sitting in the Bangalore airport and I saw that almost every sign internally inside the Bangalore airport was English other than like the transit signage. Only the transit signage was in the local language, Hindi and English. And all the shops were in English etc. And I said imagine. And I saw a few couple of people sitting there. There was an old man and a woman, they were wearing Indian dress like he was wearing a dhoti, a sarong equivalent and she was wearing a sari of okay. And they were old people and they were sitting peacefully and you know, they seemed, I can't prove for sure but this, they were speaking in Kannada and I thought like they probably weren't as fluent in English and I wondered how intimidating this would be for them. Like you know, everything in English etc. So this is what I call the English tax. The English tax is something that we enforce on non English speakers. A lot of apps in India are in English. A lot of like literature that comes out much of the same is in English. So for example, if you don't have access to good English, you're shut out of a lot of writing. AI should change it because translation history is very expensive. So hopefully AI will change some of these things for the better. So this is what I mean by the English tax. The English tax is the preponderance of English across apps, signages, literature so as to make it overwhelming for a non English speaker or non fluent English reader to kind of interface.

B (41:02)

Yeah, and I really identified with that because when I was in Japan in the late 1990s, the first call I made was back to my wife and I said, I don't understand anything here. I mean, I felt entirely like a foreign man in a foreign land because I couldn't even make a phone call. You would pick it up and they would give rapid fire Japanese and you'd be English and then it would just come rapid fire Japanese. And when I was reading the piece, I was like, wow, I understand that feeling and I agree with you that I think that AI and AI translation is going to help tremendously with that. But do you think that that was just a remnant of the English Raj or is that also a gatekeeping message?

C (41:55)

I think a lot of it is not gatekeeping as much as so much as just the fact that a lot of the elite Indians are very comfortable with English. But it's worth noting that most of the formal jobs, I would say English is used, I would say about 50% of the time, about 50% of the time they would speak in a different language. But if it is at the top, if it's really like, you know, in senior management, for instance, largely English, all written communication is largely English. All emails are English. I haven't got a single Hindi email, not a single Hindi email in all the years of work. And it is shocking. I mean, I would have expected at least one email to come to me. I'm not got a single email. So if you work, if you're going to work in corporate India, you, you can speak a little bit of Hindi or speak a little bit of Tamil and that's fine, right? But any written communication is almost entirely in English. It is not intentional. I mean, yes, gatekeeping is an outcome of that, but what it does is if I'm comfortable in English and I know that people come into these jobs, they come through the right colleges, they're comfortable in English, you know, and just turns out that people use English and it's how it is, there's a lot of path dependence that's really emerged because when the British were there, the elite. So there's this gentleman called McAuley. Okay. So he was kind of a British administrator, and he spoke about creating a middle race of Indians who would be able to mediate between the native Indians who didn't speak English and the British. And so sort of English speakers in India are what I call Macaulay's children. Okay. So a lot of the people who did well were people who knew English and who got into the bureaucracy, who got access to the top jobs, et cetera. And so that sort of continued. And I don't think it's very intentional gatekeeping, but certainly it helps that only a certain percentage speak English and these speakers get access to the best jobs. It's sort of a happy outcome for the English speakers.

B (44:07)

Yeah. And of course, it's not unique to India. It. Part of the emergence after World War II was English essentially becoming the world's language against many people's desires, of course, especially the French. But like, for example, the most prestigious scientific journal in Germany is published in English, not in German, because of that universality. And I also think that English is a fairly easy language to learn how to speak orally. It has a ton of idiom, especially American English is filled with idioms. I once had a guy who was a native Spanish speaker work for me, and he was telling me a story about how proud he was of. He's from Colombia, where he studied English and everything and had an MBA from a great institution here in the United States. And he had his first job. And he said. He went and he was quite pleased and everything. And he said by the end of the day, he went back and his wife said, how'd it go? And he was just crestfallen because he looked at his wife and say, I don't speak English at all. And he was specifically referring to American English is richly idiomatic. Right. Like water off a duck's back and things like that. And he was like, water off a duck's back.

C (45:35)

What does that mean?

B (45:37)

And so I think that that is part of the challenge with the emergence of English kind of as the de facto world language. But you've also written about what you called one of India's newest cat caste, which is highly educated, affluent, but inter caste marriage, inter religion marriage. And then you say the paradox there is they're at once the most visible, but also an invisible class. Talk to me a little bit about that.

C (46:09)

Yeah, that was my first big hit when it came to writing. I'd been writing for a long while, and then I wrote this article and it just went viral across India. I got a lot of fan mail and I got a lot of hate mail. And the fan mail came from people who said, oh, my God, you have described me. This is my identity. I'm an Indo Anglian. Every year I get one such meal. Now, it used to be a lot more earlier, the hate mail came from people who said, you don't use caste so loosely, young man. Like, you don't know anything about sociology, you don't know anything about politics, you don't know anything about and whatever. Right? You know, and you're just using caste. Like, you know. Of course, you know, I shouldn't have used caste so loosely. But what I was trying to say was, typically the Indian caste system has, you know, Brahmins at the top. And I said, there is a caste which is more elite than, like, not this or sort of other way to look at it, to say that they've broken free of the caste system and sort of they are a parallel to that, because anyone can be part of this system, and all it requires is for you to speak English fluently. But the objection was that to speak English fluently, you need to be a member of the privileged caste. And, well, I mean, it's hard for me to win every argument, but essentially, for example, in my house, my family speaks in English. And one day we were in Hong Kong, and I remember we're speaking English, and a gentleman asked us, where are you from? And I said, India. Like, okay, you're Indian, but where are you from? I said, india. Oh, but you speak so good English, like, you know. I said, yeah, but I'm not the only person. I don't know the exact numbers, but I would say there is a segment which I call India 1A or India Alpha, which is sort of a subset of India 1, about 8 to 10 million households. About 1 3rd reading of the households, 25, 30 million people who speak English very fluently at home and are more comfortable in English than in other languages. And one way to kind of become a member of this is typically be from when you and your wife are from different communities, two languages. And often the kid speaks in English because it's too confusing for the kid. And the husband and wife also don't know each other's languages. So they use English as an intermediating language, like an ingo franca, as they see, and the kids start speaking that. So I spoke. So. So I would say, but me and my wife, we do speak a language called Konkani, but we don't speak Kokani as much. And my hypothesis is I haven't been able to prove this, but I'm trying to prove this is that Indian languages have fewer words which describe emotional situations or contexts. I was reading this podcast where Charles Duhig is an author who has written this book called Super Communicators, where he talks about language having three components. There is the practical one. Please get me this book. Then there is social. How are you feeling, Jim? And the third one is, Jim, what you told me did not make me feel good. I think there was a melancholy what you said, or something like that. Right. So the third one is a challenging area. For example, in the language that we speak, I know enough words relating to the first practical context. I know enough words relating to the second social context. But when it comes to any emotional conversations with my wife, etc. Where we want to talk about issues, etcetera, we tend to use English a lot because English has far more emotional range. So what I mean, I'm willing to even pay a student to a PhD or I'm willing to kind of pay someone to do research. I want to find out how Indian languages rank my vocabulary. Do Indian languages have fewer words? B, do Indian languages have fewer words in the emotional bucket? Three, does the average Indian speaker have much more limited vocabulary, especially in the emotional bucket? If what I'm saying is true, then that explains a lot of why the elite use English a lot more, because the native Indian languages don't have enough empty range, especially on the emotional side, to express themselves.

B (50:45)

Wow, that is such a fascinating thesis. Now you've given me something that I'm going to be thinking about for the rest of the day, because I had a colleague who was Japanese and I got to know him really well, and we were talking about language and I asked him, do you think differently when you're thinking in English versus Japanese? And he looked at me and he goes, jim, I don't just think differently, I act differently. And I went, well, what do you mean? And he said, when I'm thinking in English, I'm much more like proactive. We can do this. Let's go take that hill.

C (51:25)

And he goes, when I'm thinking and.

B (51:27)

Talking with colleagues in Japanese, I go to a much more consensus oriented. Do you think that maybe taking that hill over there would be a good idea or no? And so I hadn't thought about it from the point of view of a lack of the ability to express emotions in that native language, because ultimately I think that's one of the things people get really wrong about capitalism. If you're going to be an incredibly successful founder, you better understand emotions because emotions are ultimately what drive a tremendous amount of decisions even for so called rationalists. Right? What they'll do is they'll make an emotional choice to buy a product, to subscribe to a service, et cetera, and then they'll paper it over after the fact with all the rational reasons for why they pick that particular product and or service. That is really fascinating and I will be thinking a lot about that. You also mentioned something that I found really interesting, especially given the fact that you in your three E's exams being so important and credentials being so important, you once said that you would rather get rid of the degree on your CV than stop writing. So this is kind of a two pronged question. You also mentioned that there aren't very many Indian venture capitalists who do write a lot like you do. So my first question is why is that? And then secondly, I am fascinated that given how important externally exam results and credentials are, you understand that the writing is even more important. And I'd like to hear your version.

C (53:25)

Of why we take the first one. Why VCs don't write. I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that in India, while the venture industry is reasonably sizable and there are a rising number of VCs now, I think the power imbalance is still much more in the VC's favor. Unlike the US where the power imbalance is in the elite founders favor, in India too it is changing, but slowly. So what happens is when there's a power asymmetry in the VC's favor, the VC can sit back and wait for the founder to approach him or her. In the US it's such a large market, there's so many founders and the market is relatively uncapped. That means if you miss out on something that's big, that could be $100 billion or more, which whereas India is relatively capped the sense we have the largest Indian venture is $36 billion, which is Flipkart, majority owned by Walmart. The Next one is 1/4 the size. Sorry, next one is half the size zomato and the third one is 1/4 the size. So relatively mistakes haven't been as expensive as in the us when the power changes, like for example, there are a lot more elite founders and those elite founders then have to pick you, which is how great venture happens. You have to be picked by the founders. It's unusual that someone once described venture as not an asset class, but an access class where the trick is really getting access to the best founders. And the only asset class where the asset picks the investor. Like you know, which is, which is sort of the founder. So, so that, so, so now in the US I'm not surprised that many VCs are writing because they're signaling to the founder, hey, like, you know, I'm relevant for you, I know the space, etc. They're trying to make themselves useful. In India, I think we are some ways off from that because relatively the VCs have more power and the founders have to go to them. And there are much fewer quality VCs and every founder knows that. Unlike in the US where there are many quality VCs and in India there are much fewer quality VCs. They have to kind of, they have no choice but to go and like, you know, they can't be pickers. There are few founders who can be pickers because they, they like second time founders, etc. It's changing, but it's slow. So this is one reason why vcs don't have to market themselves. I however, choose to market myself through writing. And for me, writing was the one way I could make an impression. I remember reading this Scott Adams article about how to be the only, where he said that, look, there are many Japanese speakers, there are many marketers, but if you are a Japanese speaking marketer in the U.S. then you're unique, right? Like, you know, it's like you. So you'll be the only. So I said, there are. I will never be the best vc. I, I don't know, maybe I will. But as of now, I don't know if it's a realistic ambition to have. I will never be the world's best writer, but can I be the world's best writing vc? Okay, that's tough too. But can I be the India's best VC who writes? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And I think that's the slot I've kind of carved out. And it's worked for me because I came into venture at the age of 43, had not been a founder, I had not worked in a startup and not been an investor. And I sometimes don't know what Karthik Reddy saw in me. Of course he told me what he saw in me was a person who reached out to me. He found it blue. But he did reach out and it kind of heard him out. And I said, yeah, sure, I'd like to kind of give venture a shot. And it's Worked well for me, but because I was like an outsider coming into venture, I wanted to market myself to founders and I wanted founders to find me. And hence writing became very critical. And the reason why exams don't matter enough is they feel like that doesn't help me stand out as much because even if I pass the toughest exam in India, typically the IIT entrance exam, it is not going to make me stand out because There are many VCs who are from IIT, but there are very few VCs who write like, you know, so. And that's what helps me stand out.

B (58:31)

Very smart. And that also leads me to what skill sets did you bring from your longer history in entertainment and media that were sort of immediately applicable on the venture capital side?

C (58:53)

So I worked for a long time in a company called the Times of India Group. It is India's largest newspaper company. Sort of like Gannett in the us Very well run, privately held, very profitable. And there was a. Well, there's no word for it, but there was a way of. And the companies. The name was Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd. The official name, you know, because it was a British company which was acquired by Indians. They kept the name Bennett Coleman Co. But. And they were kind of the. The term was. There was a Bennett approach or the Times approach to kind of look at the business and through a lens. And we worked with this gentleman called Sameer Jain, who's sort of the owner of the group. And he's sort of a brilliant mind and he looks at the world in a very unusual way. And there were a lot of principles that he looked the world through, which I learned. I used to work with him closely. I was his chief of staff for a while. And sort of this Bennett approach or the Bennett way or the Times way was something that I kind of brought in. In addition, I think working for what took decades, you worked with a lot of people. So. And for example, I had worked with a lot of salespeople and I understood that incentives matter a lot. And one of the unusual things I found was founders, startup founders did not pay attention to incentives. So, like, I would ask them, okay, this is the goal, which is to enter this market and like, who's driving this? And so they'll say xyz. So now tell them, okay, if this succeeds, how much will XYZ make? Let's say, why would he make more? He has ESOPs who make. Now I would say, okay, but he'll make that even if this doesn't succeed in the company does well, right so, and I would find that there's like a blind spot. And I would say like, oh, okay, on, for example, like, like I would say like, you need to set the incentives such that this person makes money only if the next person's incentives work. Like if I'm the salesperson and if you pay me well, if you pay me my incentive, but once I kind of convince the customer to give the money, I just take it, but the onboarding is a failure and the client then walks away. I still get my money. And I would say, how can you kind of design your incentives like that you need to design your incentives that you only get money after six months, nine months, etc, like, you know, when the customers like onboarded and like, you know, it's, it's a working partnership. So I think incentives was another kind of area where I was able to kind of really help my founders. The third one is really strategy. And I find that like, sometimes bringing the lens of strategy was very helpful. A lot of founders sometimes intuitively get it, but they're not business students, they're not studied business. And I find that this is sort of, I would say like a gray area for them. And these were the areas, strategy, incentives, and sort of this unique times approach to looking at data. For instance, where would say, like, don't look at the average, break up the average everything and really look at what is really working and what is not. Not that founders wouldn't do it, but I was able to kind of stress that to it.

B (62:45)

And that's part of what you also call narrative capital. Right? Where, where they have a strategy, they have the incentives. Right. And what you're helping them do is tell, tell the story better. And listening to you, it sounds like helping them understand, gee, these things over here really, really matter. And, and you need to think about them more. Are you finding that there's pushback on that from your founders or are they just thank you, thank you?

C (63:16)

No, no, they push back. Yeah, Founders, you know, they have the mind of their own. And in India, it's extraordinarily hard to start up. It's a very difficult place to do business, which is why when Indians come to the US they just find that, look, it's such an easy country to do business in if you take care of the basics you will do. They just can't believe it, the taxman isn't raiding them, etc. Etc. But India is hard to do business in, so it takes a special kind of person to be a founder in India. And I would say That I don't have it easy with any founder and I'm grateful for that. I don't want any founder to just accept what I say at face value. I love it when they push back and then I can push back. And finally end of the day, it's their business, they need to run it. They are the like, as Roosevelt says, men in the arena or women in the arena. And I respect that, you know, and I'm the person on the stands. But yeah, I got to be a mirror for the founder. I got to kind of show his or her face watts and all so that they're able to kind of take the corrective mission.

B (64:26)

And you've also said that really India is kind of a digital warfare state. What exactly do you mean by that?

C (64:37)

Yeah, digital welfare is a term that's kind of coined. I don't know who coined it, but I like it because it describes two parts. One is digital and the other is welfare. So digital means digital public infrastructure is one of the biggest big innovations that India has done in the last, I would say decade and more. Digital public infrastructure stands for broadly digital Lego blocks, basically product sets around identity payments and data exchange. So identity. All Indians have something called an Aadhaar number. So like a Social Security number, but an Aadhaar number detection payments. We have one of the most frictionless payment system called UPI where I can send money like a message. There are about 15 billion transactions that happened last month on UPI. Like it's crazy, right? Yeah, 15 billion transactions. The third is data exchange. Like for example, I don't need to carry physical copies of many documents like my driving license, my identity card. I have something called Digilocker where I can store it. And now the beauty is people can access their digital document remotely if I give them the right. And this can be used for other services like what's called the know your customer KYC, which is needed for financial transactions, etc. So these digital. The most important thing in this is digital payments and the digital of digital payments and the welfare state that is a lot of Indians are poor. And what the government has done is use the digital payment infrastructure and the fact that people, a lot of people are economically less to give subsidies to them rooted through this. So digital welfare state is really what this particular government actor, Mr. Modi has done. Well, they have kind of reinvented India as a digital welfare state where while it's, it's, it's, it's. There is a certain kind of DNA of socialism like you know, making sure. And they need to. It can't be hard capitalist because India is not a country which is 2600 per capita income. Like you know, large masses in poverty. They've had to kind of, you know, they have to take care of them. And what they've done is cleverly used the digital public infrastructure and digital payment infrastructure to drive the welfare. And that is why I call India digital welfare state.

B (67:34)

And you also refer to. Yeah, it sounds like you've mentioned a lot of things that in what you've called Tony Wang Tribeca and essentially that's cheap bandwidth smartphones and frictionless payments, smartphones in every pocket. And that was a huge inflection here in the United States as well. When the iPhone, for example, in 2011 started putting GPS in the phone itself, that opened up a huge number of markets that would have been impossible prior to that.

C (68:09)

Right.

B (68:10)

Like Uber, Uber Lyft, all of the delivery services, et cetera. And are you seeing things right now? If we have some listeners who are thinking India looks like a very attractive market, you have said it's not for beginners, but what are you seeing emerging from that trifecta and that welfare, digital welfare that you see as could be a very, very big thing over the next 10 years?

C (68:43)

Yeah. So a lot of these examples like the digital welfare state, etc. Has come from this particular publication that we do, which is what kind of very well known here. It's called the Indus Valley Report and it's online, you can access it. So the Indus Valley Report, the latest one, which we published around Feb. Late Feb. Early March every year. What we did is we actually cataloged interesting examples of digital public infrastructure. So there's something called autopay. Upi. Autopay. UPI is really the payment thing. So UPI has autopay system where so if you're a subscription product, for instance, a customer can set it and then they don't have to think about it. And what that has done is it's led to growth for a lot of companies which earlier struggled with getting consumers to pay. And there were a lot of Indian. Interesting. I'll give you two examples. There was a company called ShareChat in India and share chats think of it as Twitter or Instagram, but in non English languages. So they have different channels, each language is a channel. And so you go into your channel and kind of get a lot of content and share chat. Struggle with monetization because they try to advertising because a lot of the people who are on it are not necessarily affluent. Indians, you know, so they couldn't monetize those eyeballs. So how of late a lot of Indian media apps have started monetizing. So we have a company called Stage which does vernacular content they've been able to monetize. Furious. What made the difference was upi. So customers could not pay UPI searching lessly, they could pay very small sums. This again goes back to sachetization. So it's just $5 for the year. Okay. And content is produced very cheaply because they work backwards from what customers can afford to pay. And UPI autopay means customers subscribe, then they just renew. So I kind of spoken about how Stage leveraged UPI autopay here. I won't go into detail but for example we have invested recently in a company called Nama Yatri. Okay. And Namayatri is it means our travel and sort of think of it as Indian Uber. But the difference is as follows. Namaya 3 is built on an open source protocol called the Backend protocol. And the Backend protocol is created so that companies like Namyatri and others could leverage this protocol for logistics transport of goods or transport of people. And they find it a very interesting model where they actually charge 25 rupees which is sort of 30 cents every day to auto rickshaw driver which is like a tuk tuk or and eventually they'll get into cars as well. But they don't charge anything to the customer. So this different to Uber, when Uber, if I pay, you know, Uber takes 20% of the cut. So this is actually a kind of a different model and it was made possible only thanks to the digital public infrastructure that kind of came about. So I would say if you're in the US and you anyone can operate on this. Uber in fact is thinking about how to kind of leverage the backend protocol. What I would say is digital public infrastructure and a lot of the digital public goods that are emerging, whether it's Aadhaar for identity, UPI for payments, data exchange through DigiLocker, etc. And a lot of the other goods. Now for example health that there's something called ABA which I won't get into the full form of that but essentially it's like all your health records are available, then you have account aggregator network whereby if I'm a business and if I need to get access to debt like working capital loans, I can show that I can give access to my bank account. It's tokenized. It's it, you know it, it's and people the bank can See that, hey, he gets regular payments and this is enough of a credit history for us. We don't need to ask him to mortgage his house or anything like that. And historically the challenge has been that India is under penetrated on credit. Because a lot of credit in India is given only on the back of assets. Okay. Now because land records are so poor in India, homes cannot be more key. Unless you typically have your member of the elite like middle class or upper middle class. That is why gold is very popular in India. Indians hold so much gold. Why is India sinkhole for all the gold in the world? Because gold allows me to get access to. So, so there are all of these interesting. Also the fact that like we spoke about trust, low trust also manifests itself in a poor credit market. Because I will not believe you and I will not believe your credit history. But I want hard assets. But now things are changing because your credit history is now visible like can be accessed more easily and sort of what the government is trying to do is bring more people into the formal economy through this.

B (74:53)

That's fascinating because another one of the thesis that I have is that in the United States we are in many respects hampered by our very efficient paths. And I use our installed landlines system right as digital was coming online and Americans, the adoption curve in America for digital was actually quite a bit slower than the rest of the world. And one of the reasons for that was the rest of the world did not have the kind of really efficient infrastructure that the United States had developed. So in a way it hampered our ability to embrace the new digital networks and digital payments and all of those types of things. What are another few examples that you would think that would fall into this line? That it doesn't get developed, excuse me, doesn't get developed in the US because you know, we already have that infrastructure that you can take advantage of in India. That wouldn't be obvious to an American investor.

C (76:04)

One interesting example I would say is broader band Internet. Wired Internet with just about 30 million wired Internet connections in India, about 20 million wired phone lines in India, fixed phone lines. It's just plummeted. People are giving it up. My parents had wired phones own Jim. There was a time when we had to wait 10 years to get a phone line. I'm not, I kid you not like, you know, in the 80s, 70s and the 80s when India was socialist, it was so difficult to get a phone. I remember that I. We would get a phone call, we would give the number of the neighbor and phone calls would come saying that somebody's passed to me or something like that. And, you know, those are only emergency calls would come or somebody's passed an exam or somebody's getting married. And then my father would go. Then when he hit, like, a certain level in his government job, he got access to a house with a phone. Then he got access to a car. So I've seen how hard it's to get food. And then one day it all changed. Anyone get a mobile? If you put in the money, you could get a mobile. And so we just have about 18 or 20, 20 million phone lines in India, whereas the US is far more. And because India is a leapfrog nation, right. It's just leapfrog to the mobile handset and WI fi. Like, what are my conversations on WI fi? But a lot of Indians don't use WI fi. They use mobile Internet because WI fi means your house has to have good power, regular power. And. And if you don't have regular power, then you can't take really advantage of the wifi, which comes and goes. So only, what, 30 million Indian houses have wired broadband credit cards. Only 40 million Indians have credit cards. You know, and 40 million Indians, they have two, three cards. So about 100 million credit cards in India, very small. Okay. What we, what we really leapfrog to is the mobile Internet, mobile apps, and which is like upi. So India is a kind of a leapfrog nation. And I think that's a, that's, that's another metaphor for India, which, which I like. Teams.

B (78:35)

Yeah. I think that that's the way I think about it as well. So what are you most excited about in terms of both the ability to leapfrog and sort of the novel way what companies are really, you're looking at? You're just like, here's a classic example where we get to leapfrog. And also this is an amazing idea.

C (79:00)

Yeah. So I would say one way that's one trend line that is happening in India is a move from unorganized to organized. So there are ways of doing business which is on paper, which is on trust within a small community, on high interest rates or long payment cycles, which is now changing because you can use a mobile phone to kind of transact between each other. You can use the mobile phone to discover each other. The one wave that I'm seeing is really more and more Indian commodity markets coming online. Okay. So we're beginning to kind of see that this is, this, is this really one clear tendency. The second is that you can, you can. So B2, B marketplaces is the most obvious, you know, manifestation of that trend, which is unorganized to organize because earlier you would do a transaction in a particular region between trusted groups, etc. Now you can do transactions all India, etc. Someone can vouch for that. So that is something we are quite excited about. Apart from that, there are also, I would say, very interesting, unique Indian models emerging and which are you not find it anywhere else in the world. It's a combination of access to the mobile and the unique kind of UI and UX that it enables, as well as the nature of India as a low trust country, the type of technologies that are available, etc. So one is companies. There's an interesting company called Friend Frnd and they're a dating app. But dating here doesn't work the way dating works in the us. Here the challenge is that the two genders don't mix as much. So Friend says, don't worry about dating, let's get to talking. And what it does is it creates a chaperone who will help the two play games, right, and get comfortable with each other when the chaperone is there. And then if you want to date them directly and you want to pay up something, right, and sort of stuff like that. There's an interesting app called Sri Mandir. It means temple, like you know, honorary temple, whatever. And it's fascinating because, you know, Indians like to do what's called puja, which is like, you know, and they can attend virtual temples and do puja. And that's a very unique Indian kind of. Then there's an apple jar, which is, which is, which is where people can save small savings. Like, and you can transfer it and then buy gold with it. And like every. If you transfer like 40 rupees, it will buy 40 rupees with digital gold. So the very interesting, uniquely Indian apps born out of Indian consumer psychology, like unique interfaces that like Indian Internet offers as well as the low trust nature, et cetera. So I'm quite fascinated by all of these trends and we're really looking at these spaces. So one company we bet on and which succeeded well was Stage, which just mentioned, which is really about vernacular content. So sort of like Netflix for India, but they have very distinct Indian content produced extremely cheaply and they, they kind of cater to people who don't get the kind of content that they would like to enjoy and now they get access to that. So these are all opportunities that I'm excited about.

B (82:56)

I think it's a tremendously exciting time for India and I think I'M fascinated by the differences, but also by just the huge. Just like the opportunities you just mentioned. Those are very exciting to me because they're very unique to the country itself. And yet there might be people who pay attention to what's hot elsewhere, might be able to adopt it to their home country, at least in the strategy of being able to think about things like that. Well, this has been remarkably fun for me to listen to you. I love what you write. And we have a final question here that's kind of fun. We make you emperor of the world. You can't kill anyone, you can't put anybody in a free education camp. But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that will incept the entire population of the earth Whenever their next morning is, they're going to wake up and they're going to have those two things that you say they're going to think of as their own wonderful new ideas and they're going to turn to themselves or whomever their significant other is and say, you know, unlike all those other ideas that I had in the morning and were inspiring, but I never acted on, I'm going to act on both of these ideas that I got today. What are you going to incept into the world?

C (84:34)

Oh my God. How. And yeah, this is a surprise.

B (84:38)

Yeah.

C (84:41)

Well, I think. And these ideas could be anything.

B (84:44)

Anything. Anything.

C (84:46)

Certainly. I think the world's a very unfair, unkind place and certainly want one of those ideas to be one where we are able to kind of be a lot more kinder. So perhaps it could be in the form of, you know, I'm probably kind of rambling now, but being really able to kind of understand the other person. So whenever you talk to a person, you're able to kind of immediately understand challenges that they have. Right. You know, and you, you and you immediately able to act based on that. So it's sort of like a magical power whereby like I'm talking to you and I'm not shouting at you because you're not done trying to understand what is it that, you know, led to this one. And sort of, I understand the intent really well and I'll be able to kind of understand the intent. So, so, and I understand what is driving you to make that action. And I kind of see you not take the action, but the intent and the circumstances that led to it would be one where I would say people should kind of have more and more understanding of that dent. And the second would be to just reduce the religiousness of the world. Like, and if I could say everybody could become irrelegious, like, you know, I'm not saying people should become less mindful. There's certainly aspects of every religion that I find fascinating, whether the Jewish Shabbat to Buddhist meditation, etc. But I would certainly want religion as we know it to just disappear from the world. So I would say intent, not actions, is the way to understand people or understanding circumstances, not actions or behavior. And second would be to kind of remove religion from the map, probably make the world a kind of safer place.

B (86:37)

Those are both absolutely fascinating, and I think I agree that both would make the world a safer place. The ability to, as we would say in America, walk a mile in that person's shoes and understand what was driving them is something that is sorely lacking. And then the idea that traditional institutionalized religion, you could have a very healthy debate on whether that has been a net positive or a net negative for the world at large. And I do love your distinction. You're not talking about meaning, you're not talking about all of that. I think what you're getting after there is the tribalism of certain religions and the animosity and hurt and pain that they cause, probably a net negative. So I think both of those are excellent things to incept in the world. Thank you so much for joining me and for your time. You have a wonderful perspective, and we will make certain that all of your links, everyone will be able to find you when we release the podcast, we release both in video and audio, but all of the links to finding you will be there. And I'm certainly glad we found you. And thank you so much for giving me so much of your time.

C (87:55)

Thank you, Jim. Been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

B (87:58)

All right, cheers. Bye bye.

C (88:04)

Sa.