The Exchanges

Q Can you arrive at the answer which I removed and I'm telling you that this was the answer?

A Right. But you can only use the thing that you can see. So you don't see the answer on the input. You have to predict it. But I'm telling you when, during training, I tell you what it is. And so the system can adjust its parameter to its parameters in a Supervised fashion. So the only difference, the difference is not in the algorithms themselves. It's basically supervised learning, but it's in the structure of the system and the way the data is, uh, is used and produced. You don't need to basically have, uh, you know, someone going through millions of images and telling you, uh, this is a cat or a dog at a table. Um, you just show an image of a dog, a cat, or a table, and you Corrupt it, partially change it, change the colors maybe, or something, um, and then ask the system to recover the original one from the corrupted one. So that's, that's, uh, one particular form of self-supervised learning, and this is what's been incredibly successful for natural language understanding. So things like, so chatbots are, uh, or LLMs, large language models, are a special case of that, where you train a system to predict a word, But you only allow it to look at the words, the words that precede it, you know, that are to the left of it. Um, and that requires kind of building the neural net in a particular way so that the connections that, that predict one word only look at the, the words that…

AI assessment note: “ask the system to recover the original one from the corrupted one”

Q Is this a part of self-supervised learning?

A So you could think of this as an instance of self-supervised learning because you only need Sequences of symbols, and it doesn't matter where they come from, and you don't, they don't necessarily come from human production if they are not text. If it, you know, it could be, for example, a sequence of frames for a video, right? I mean, you would have to turn it into discrete objects, which of course is difficult, but, um, but it's, you know, whatever data comes to you. So, uh, in the late nineties, um, Uh, some people had the idea that, in particular Yoshua Bengio, the idea that you could use a neural net to, to do this prediction instead of Filling up tables with conditional probabilities that you measure from text. Just train a neural net to predict the next word, ok? Give it a context of words and just train it to produce a probability distribution over the next word. And he experimented with this with, you know, neural nets that were big for the time, but small by today's standards. And one difficulty was you cannot exactly predict what word is going to come next, so you have to produce a probability over all the words. And There's maybe a 100,000 words in a typical, um, uh, language, and so that means you're, you need to output a 100,000 scores, one for each word that indicates with which probability that word follows the, the previous sequence of words. Um, so it demonstra…

AI assessment note: “So you could think of this as an instance of self-supervised learning because”

Q Can you explain, Uncle, briefly what is redevelopment?

A Redevelopment is an existing old building. Where the building has become old, the existing people who are the owners of that particular development, they call it society in Mumbai, they want a newer place with that much more bigger facilities, and probably since the FSI has changed, they'll get that much more built up area extra. So that's how the redevelopment starts. So, more, more apartments, more square footage, and most importantly is better plumbing, better lighting system, better vertical transportation, and better parking. So, of course, they, the quality of life improves, better facilities also, and by being there as the old society, they get that incrementally higher square footage, which either they can sell back to the developer or Keep it for themselves. They get a slightly larger home. Like when we did that redevelopment, we wouldn't buy. I'm not giving one for one, then there's nobody's really. So it has to be one, four into .3 or .4 or .5 times more. So if I've got a hundred square meter house, if I get a 130 or 140 square meter house, my house is going to become a little larger. It's going to become newer with better finishes and better fittings. And obviously what happens is the other, the, the sweetener is while this is going to get built, I get my rental. I move into another alternate accommodation. The builder pays the, the, the rental and the rehabilitatio…

AI assessment note: “Redevelopment is an existing old building. Where the building has become old”

Q So when you say beckon is a protocol, you mean it's a bunch of rules? Yeah. Of the language Beckin, in a way.

A No, it's a bunch of rules for transactional stuff, for people to buy and sell things. And it can be used in commerce. So, ONDC uses Beckin as an underlying protocol. And ONDC today does twelve billion transactions a month. It's used in mobility with Namayatri, which does a hundred and 50,000 transactions a day, where people are ordering auto rickshaws. Again, You know, it's a different model than an aggregator because you pay directly to the taxi auto guy. And it's being used in energy. We are building something called unified energy interface. People can buy and sell electricity. So any, anywhere that you have to buy and sell things between different people in a consistent way, Beacon is the way to do it. Beacon is a way to do it.

AI assessment note: “No, it's a bunch of rules for transactional stuff, for people to buy and sell”

Q When did you start learning dancing and all?

A Um, I think when I was five, my mom realized that I danced well, and I could dance, and I had that in, like, inherent thing in me. Um, I, one day, so in my mom's college, you know, you have these college fests, and then in the middle, you have fillers. Right? Because one performance and the other performance is time. So, sometimes they, you know, put people from the audience and all, so I just got on, she put me on stage, and I was five, and I danced on Akhya Milaun, Kabhi Akhya Churaun, and I was like, full on there. I used to like, copy Madhuri Dixit. And, uh, She got the fact that I could dance, and she put me in Kathak Kendra in Mandi House. Um, you know, and I did a full-on, like, foundation course. I used to not like classical dance. I used to really hate coming back from school and my mom dragging me 45 minutes to one hour away to learn Kathak.

AI assessment note: “when I was five... she put me in Kathak Kendra in Mandi House”

Q Does that change? I hear so many people in marriages, how the, how your partner is with your family is a game changer. I've heard this from so many people.

A I think so, no. It's because you love your family, and another person who is an outsider is loving your family the way you love your family, and that's something which, even though if, even if it's not real, you know, even if it's an effort, it's still an effort. Because that kind of effort is not easy, you know. And to continue doing it, uh, it's very rare that everything just falls into place, no? Everyone just gets along. So it's always an effort. Um, my mother and Alia have a very good relationship. Uh, they're very honest with each other. More honest than I am with my mother, Alia is with my mother. And, uh, that makes me very happy, you know, because surrounded by women. My mother, my sister, my sister's daughter, now, Alia, Raha, and they're just the best women in the world. It's a lot of female energy around.

AI assessment note: “I think so, no. It's because you love your family”

Q So you finished college in New York. And then?

A Then I came back, like I said, my father said, too much attention, go back, do something. You're too young. I was, Must be like, 20, 21. Spent another year there, trying to come back. When I came back, every director in the film industry wanted to launch me. But I was a big fan of Sanjay Lila Bansali. And I'm like, every director wants to work with me, why isn't Sanjay Lila Bansali offering me a movie? So I was like, maybe he's not aware of me. So I went, made a resume, and sat outside his office. Didn't tell him who I was, but I waited. He was not there. I left the resume. I went home. He called me the next day, and he, of course, reading my name, understood who I was, and I told him I'm a big fan. Devdas had just released at that time, and I loved Devdas. Alhamdulillah, chikai sanam. Big fan of that film. And the first day when he met me, he said that, I want to make a film with you. And so that was, ambition was achieved right there. Uh, but that one year or one and a half years I spent assisting on Black, uh, with Mr. Bansali, was actually the biggest film school of my life. Uh, because A, he was a very hard taskmaster. We were working 14:15 hours a day. Uh, we were, um, I, there were 10 other assistants, and because I was who I was. I was not, um, some special kid. You know, I was like everybody, and he was, um, he was very short-tempered, so we used to, like, face a lot o…

AI assessment note: “Then I came back, like I said, my father said, too much attention”

Q past, we've done a school project together. We're doing something around malnutrition together. I think the impact and the effort that they're putting into India in improving society, uh, is, is, uh, is great. And I hope you guys continue this association with India for a long time. Do you want to talk a little bit about your relationship with India and how it's evolved over the last many years?

A Well, I mean, I've had a fantastic relationship with India, starting with the Microsoft experience where, and we hired some very smart IIT graduates, brought them to Seattle. Later, they go back, uh, create a development center for us, uh, that's now in four locations, 25,000 people, and, of course, a lot of the amazing people I work with and have so much fun, uh, in the Microsoft success with are, Uh, part of the team who had hired from India, you know, top of that list is Satya, uh, who know, uh, is doing a great job as CEO. So in my digital first career, uh, the connection to India was, uh, fun and made a huge difference, um, In what the company was able to achieve. It was during that time that I was kind of learning, oh, wow, India is such a study in contrast, you know, you know, first class in so many ways, but still a lot of poverty, uh, and challenges, and, uh, you know, I was beginning to think, okay, how do I give this money back, uh, together with, uh, Melinda, and so she came over as we were starting to do foundation work. Um, I start the foundations, I fund it in the year 2000, so I'm 45 years old and still, um, full-time. I stay full-time for another, uh, eight years. Um, but India becomes, you know, an important place for us because we realize that vaccines, Uh, were this missing, uh, thing, and it was a crime that these, uh, diarrheal rotavirus vaccines were gett…

AI assessment note: “I've had a fantastic relationship with India, starting with the Microsoft experience”

Q Do you want to tell everybody who does not know what is YPO? Give us a minute on YPO.

A YPO is the young president's organization. It's originally a US organization, but has more than 14 chapters, I think 15 or 16 chapters now in India. It brings together businessmen, professionals in a very close group. So in Mumbai, for example, I think a total of 300 members might be there. And we organize a lot of learning events. Like I was just telling, right? We're visiting Seoul next week. And we're doing a lot of learning activity. We're actually visiting Sean's large craft on office, where we're meeting the CEO, etc. I think it's a great networking event. And you may get to know a lot of great people. You're in YPO, so you can add to that. What I didn't, but yeah.

AI assessment note: “YPO is the young president's organization. It's originally a US organization”

Q Can you give me the example of a publisher and a game developer? The distinction?

A Sure. So, uh, for example, I mean, I think Crafton recently, like, just, just to kind of, um, give you a very live example, Crafton worked with a company called ZeptoLab that has a game for, uh, the global market, and they worked with them to make an Indian-specific version of the game. So I don't know what the exact deal terms were, but I assume that they would pay for part or full development cost. They would have a revenue share with them, may potentially give them a, a guarantee of some kind, some initial, you know, payment, and then, and then it would be up to Krafton to actually market and distribute the game. The developer, after they finished developing the game, would, would either, like, in, for a premium game, they'd be done, for a live-operated free-to-play game, they, they would continue to operate the game and then share, share in the success of the game through a revenue share.

AI assessment note: “Crafton worked with a company called ZeptoLab that has a game”

Q Where was that inspired from? Do you feel like you're a thug in real life?

A Uh, not really. People do think that I'm a little bit of like have a bullish nature in the gaming industry, but that's not true. I think that's just because, you know, things that I've been luckily been able to do, which I'm very proud of across the last six years. The name story is very simple. Eight-bit was my clan name in a game called Clash Royale, which I was heavily invested into as a casual gamer, not professionally. I was pursuing my CA interest. And I had something to do in, uh, to get, because I don't want to step out, spend a lot of time studying. So that was a game I was heavily invested into. I made a clan eight bit. That's how the prefix of my name came in. And thug is actually a short form of thug life, which is also from a song from a movie called dictator college days, nothing to do. I said, it's a good name, good name, you know, getting fascinated by movies. So, and then Uh, actually when I used to play PUBG Mobile, it did not take eight bit thug life as my full name. So I left out life and it's eight bit thug and rest is history.

AI assessment note: “Uh, not really. People do think that I'm a little bit of like have a bullish nature”

Q the University of Michigan free course. I learned whatever Roblox is, and then I built not A hyper casual, but a casual game, which is mobile first, because most people in India are playing on mobile. You said 97%. Do I then integrate influencers, discord and twitch to sell the game and get the word out? Is there a particular way to do that? How does a game garner virality?

A See, that's a very typical way of doing it. Like you're launching a product in the market and you have influencers talking about it. The other way of how me as a game mode want things to happen is involve those influencers or those key stakeholders or those gamers that you actually want to target. Obviously it cannot be the entire cohort, but at your alpha or pre beta stage or even before alpha. So this is one thing that Indus did, the super gaming that I'm talking about. Indus invited us a year and a half back to, you know, just show us the game and just take casual feedback of how it's doing. What do you think about it? I think those are some key things that are very important. And it really helped strike a chord between, so it was me and mortal who went there. That, you know, if they invited us at such a stage to take feedback, that means it's a sort of a moral responsibility towards us that when this game comes out, we'll talk about it. And we actually went ahead and talked about it. Even today we talk about it. Like that's the reason I'm talking about it because I felt really connected to it. So I believe that generally the development storyline also helps. That was the case with, ah, what, how Riot does it. You know, they will call the game Project X. Then they will talk about it for two years. Then they will release teasers. Then there will be leaks that will come out. A…

AI assessment note: “involve those influencers or those key stakeholders... at your alpha or pre beta stage”

Q Where was that inspired from? Do you feel like you're a thug in real life?

A Uh, not really. People do think that I'm a little bit of like have a bullish nature in the gaming industry, but that's not true. I think that's just because, you know, things that I've been luckily been able to do, which I'm very proud of across the last six years. The name story is very simple. Eight-bit was my clan name in a game called Clash Royale, which I was heavily invested into as a casual gamer, not professionally. I was pursuing my CA interest. And I had something to do in, uh, to get, because I don't want to step out, spend a lot of time studying. So that was a game I was heavily invested into. I made a clan eight bit. That's how the prefix of my name came in. And thug is actually a short form of thug life, which is also from a song from a movie called dictator college days, nothing to do. I said, it's a good name, good name, you know, getting fascinated by movies. So, and then Uh, actually when I used to play PUBG Mobile, it did not take eight bit thug life as my full name. So I left out life and it's eight bit thug and rest is history.

AI assessment note: “Uh, not really. People do think that I'm a little bit of like”

Q the University of Michigan free course. I learned whatever Roblox is, and then I built not A hyper casual, but a casual game, which is mobile first, because most people in India are playing on mobile. You said 97%. Do I then integrate influencers, discord and twitch to sell the game and get the word out? Is there a particular way to do that? How does a game garner virality?

A See, that's a very typical way of doing it. Like you're launching a product in the market and you have influencers talking about it. The other way of how me as a game mode want things to happen is involve those influencers or those key stakeholders or those gamers that you actually want to target. Obviously it cannot be the entire cohort, but at your alpha or pre beta stage or even before alpha. So this is one thing that Indus did, the super gaming that I'm talking about. Indus invited us a year and a half back to, you know, just show us the game and just take casual feedback of how it's doing. What do you think about it? I think those are some key things that are very important. And it really helped strike a chord between, so it was me and mortal who went there. That, you know, if they invited us at such a stage to take feedback, that means it's a sort of a moral responsibility towards us that when this game comes out, we'll talk about it. And we actually went ahead and talked about it. Even today we talk about it. Like that's the reason I'm talking about it because I felt really connected to it. So I believe that generally the development storyline also helps. That was the case with, ah, what, how Riot does it. You know, they will call the game Project X. Then they will talk about it for two years. Then they will release teasers. Then there will be leaks that will come out. A…

AI assessment note: “involve those influencers or those key stakeholders... at your alpha or pre beta stage”

Q Tell us a bit about IPCC, which is, uh, I think for many people, the Bible of this industry, right?

A So as part of my work at CPR, I was, um, uh, so, so, so, you know, I, I both publish and I do policy work, right? So as part of the policy work, we get invited to sit on government committees and so on and so forth. But a core belief of our group is that we have to be, our work and our, Policy positions need to be based on rigorous work, and therefore publication is an important part of that. So in that context, I got engaged with the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So it's a really strange beast, right? So it's, it's three working groups, science, impacts, and what are called response strategies. How do you respond to it? And I was in the third of these, and I did it twice. Each cycle takes seven years. So the way it works is you don't come up with new information, but you, your group is meant to be the authoritative compilation of existing information. So I was tasked this last time around with the unbelievably impossible task of compiling all the information for chapter 13, one of 17 chapters, and my chapter was called National and Subnational Policies and Institutions. So all the policies and all the institutions needed to address climate change. And we had to pull that together over the COVID period through zoom calls, you know, with, with authors all over the world. And it's a very, very complex process because governments take this really seriously, …

AI assessment note: “it's three working groups, science, impacts, and what are called response strategies.”

Q To a stupid person like me, how would you explain what your PhD is in? One line.

A Very simple. Um, I just engineered a few microorganisms to break down agricultural waste, basically crop residue, which continues to remain a problem. Five years after I finished my PhD and converted to ethanol. So ethanol as a fuel additive. Um, it was at the center of energy biosciences and, and, uh, the key skills I developed was once again, how do you create a community of microorganisms to do What do you want them to do? But the problem we were solving was how do you prevent crop burning instead of coming up with ways of disposing of the crop in more meaningful ways? Suppose you could convert it to something more useful, which in our case we thought was ethanol. The government was making a heavy push for something known as second generation cellulosic ethanol, which is basically to use non-food sources as a feedstock for making ethanol as a fuel additive.

AI assessment note: “I just engineered a few microorganisms to break down agricultural waste”

Q Can you tell us a bit more about that? What are you guys doing at Sun Mobility?

A So what we do is that, um, um, We've taken two parts. Let's start with the micromobility, and if you sell a vehicle sans the battery without the battery, the cost of the vehicle can be cheaper than internal combustion engine vehicle, right? So we heard that the cost of batteries are 30%. In some form factors, it could be 50%. In buses and trucks, it could be even 60%, right? So depending on where you are, between 30 to 60%, so it would be the cost of battery. So if you know the battery, battery management system, even the charging system, Then the cost that any IC vehicle, any electric vehicle can be cheaper than an ICE vehicle, any form factor today. And if you look at the amortized cost of energy, a battery, and the cost of energy is cheaper than fuel. And then if you think of, I can swap it in a minute, then you've addressed both the range anxiety and the refueling time. So the concept is to create battery as a service, right? But then create it across a common solution across All platforms. So we took two wheelers use one battery, smaller rickshaws use two, larger loaders use three, and something like a Tata Ace would use four batteries. So anything from a scooter up to two tons, which is 80% of India, could use one battery and one infrastructure solutioning, right? And, and work across this format. So that was the idea around the micromobility. Then we have solutions for t…

AI assessment note: “The concept is to create battery as a service, right? But then create it across”

Q How is that? How, how do you get yourself in these places?

A I think YouTube had a huge role to play in that. Um, I, 2019 is when, um, YouTube kind of reached out to me for this program called Creators for Change. 2018. And, uh, they were like, do you want to, so they pick a few creators from across the world and they put like a band of us together and they're like, make videos for this program called Creators for Change. And every year they have different, um, themes. In 2019, in 2018 is when they reached out for the first time, and then 2019 was the second year. And that's when, um, there was this documentary that they were making with Michelle Obama for girls education. And they reached out to me for that. And I think that was my first kind of Step up from what I was doing back home. And that kind of opened a lot of doors for me. So YouTube has been a huge cheerleader in my journey beyond just doing the content that I was natively doing on my channel, just putting me out there, giving me a platform to speak about things. And then I happened to meet Nikhil Taneja, who kind of put me in touch with goalkeepers. So that's how that started. The UNDP kind of came in through Both these channels. So it, it kind of went into a whole domino effect once the first Creators for Change video went out. And, um, yeah, so that's how, that's how it began.

AI assessment note: “I think YouTube had a huge role to play in that.”

Q Has your, was your dad like a career, ah, when did he start cooking? Like, when did this become a profession for him? Journalism and then this?

A Yes. So, you know, he's written many books, and some of these, some of these books, especially Prashad has become like a common stay at Catering colleges and schools. It's, it's literally used as a tool to make people learn cooking. He was never a chef. He was a journalist who simply had a God given palette. And his palette was so sublime that he could work with the great chefs of India and improve recipes. But more than that, he was a historian. He devoted his life to documenting, researching, and then, you know, recording Indian food because unlike French or German or, you know, Japanese, any of these cuisines are fairly well documented. There are standardized recipes. In India, we had this Khansama culture where these really good cooks and chefs want to hide recipes. So the recipes were never documented and they were all over the place. You know, even.

AI assessment note: “He was never a chef. He was a journalist who simply had a God given”

Q a bar on the beach. I know so many of my friends who knew nothing about restaurants, but attempted it because it was some childhood passion or dream of theirs. So this is something to really bear in mind. So the first thing I think we should really arrive at is, Across the board, odds of first restaurant being successful. What do you think is an accurate number? 10%? 20%?

A So is the highest morbidity rate business in the world. 90% around that of restaurants failed within the first year and around 96% within 18 months. And the biggest reason you won't believe is not necessarily lack of passion or getting into it for glamorous reasons. It's undercapitalization. People have money to build a restaurant, but they don't plan for the gestation, right? And the gestation is what can kill you. It can demotivate you. It can make the quality become bad because you don't have money to pay the bills. So you start compromising. And unfortunately that's just the nature. I think this is a passion play restaurants in general. It's not a nine to five. It's a lifestyle choice. You have to get into it for the right reasons.

AI assessment note: “90% around that of restaurants failed within the first year”

Q What happened to Biocon between the early years and eighties? To 98. It scaled significantly.

A So basically we scaled quite a lot, and, and my Irish entrepreneurs actually sold out to Unilever 10 years into my partnership. And that to me was another very, very exciting inflection point. Because having Unilever as my partners, even though they were minor partners, you know, launched me into a very new orbit of professionalism and global benchmarks. You know, everything that they did at Unilever was You know, of, of world-class global standards, and they wanted every company in that group to follow those benchmarks. So that was very, very good for me because I quickly sort of transformed the business from a very amateurish entrepreneurial company to a very professional company where I had to sort of learn the Unilever way of doing things. You know, whether it was, um, um, Financial reporting, whether it was good manufacturing practices, whether it was, um, uh, you know, compliance and regulatory, uh, aspects. And then most of all, it was about IP. You know, as a big company, they focused a lot on IP, which I hadn't really understood as a, as an entrepreneurial company. They were the ones who basically made me realize that you're doing something so innovative, make sure that you cover the IP. That's what taught me about intellectual property. So I think I, I was fortunate to professionalize and learn a lot of things because of Unilever. And I dealt with Unilever in as a ver…

AI assessment note: “my Irish entrepreneurs actually sold out to Unilever 10 years into my partnership.”

Q Can you give us like very briefly what is biopharmaceutical and what is a statin?

A So, uh, a biopharmaceutical is a, is a pharmaceutical produced from any kind of life science origin. So normally when you make a pharmaceutical product, it's all a chemical process. You use chemicals, you synthesize the chemicals, and you make the molecule. In biopharmaceuticals, you actually use living organisms to produce the molecule, and you extract it out. So it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, a biological product. So that's why it's called a biopharmaceutical. So the first statin I made was called lovastatin, which was made from a, a fungal fermentation process. So you use fungi. So we used to use fungi to make enzymes. And then I found that you could actually use certain fungi to make lovastatin. And what does statin do? It's a cholesterol reducing drug.

AI assessment note: “what does statin do? It's a cholesterol reducing drug.”

Q So it's gym plus pranayama three, four times a week. Okay. Can I ask you another question? Your idea to send, your idea to nudge the kids to be actors?

A No, not at all. Uh, their decision, as a matter of fact, uh, uh, we'd gone to Atlanta to Emory for Thea, and she saw the college, everything done, loved it, got admission. On our way back, she tells me at the airport, you know, Baba, I'm not really happy doing, uh, this. I said, what do you want to do? She says, I want to be in the, in the business of films and entertainment. And I said, are you sure about it? And she says, yes. I said, you know what, it's a lovely place, but baby, will you be able to accept failure? Is something that you need to be ready about, because that's very stressful. That Friday kills me every time. If I have a bad gut, it's that Friday that gives me the bad gut, not my food. You know, it's the anxiety that, that kills me and nothing else, because the world is judging me. I've worked a year for, to create something with a team, and somebody sits there in the 1:10 minutes and says, you know, bullshit. And that's what goes viral, and that's what works, because that's what people would like to, to spread. So, that's the only thing I tell the kids. If you're ready to take failure, you don't look at it as failure. You look at it as a learning, or you say, you know what, I tried something, I failed, uh, take it up. Because if you fail, nobody let you go. The media will pounce on you, people will pounce on you, because the world is looking at you. You know, y…

AI assessment note: “No, not at all. Uh, their decision, as a matter of fact”

Q And what did you do in media first?

A So, literally that, it was pretty much that, and I think the first thing that happened is, there was an advertising agency called Lintas Law, and Alec Padamsi, who used to do a lot of theater with, I used to do a lot of theater with, so he came in one fine day and said, you know, Hindustan Leavers wants to do India's first sponsored program, and that's pretty much how the company was born, and he said, we've got to make 13 episodes of a TV show, do you want to make it? And I said, oh, why are you coming to me? He says, you just look like the guy who's going to be able to put it all together. And I think that's how the media path started.

AI assessment note: “we've got to make 13 episodes of a TV show, do you want to make it?”

Q Do you think because you both have a bird's eye view on Kabaddi, do you see cricket losing the kind of viewership with the newer generations than it did in maybe, for maybe people in their thirties and forties? What about the youngsters?

A I don't think so. I think There is enough space in India for multiple sports to coexist. And I think cricket is around to stay. You can never say forever. If you look at a sport like baseball, for example, in the U S it is on a steady kind of declining trend, but the U S still has four major sports. And they are, for me, it's more about the fact that they emphasize different elements of human skill. You think about a baseball, that's a little more like cricket, a basketball that is about a height, Reflexes, you know, uh, endurance, intensity, American football. You'll often see some of those footballers are fat, you know, uh, and there's a whole host of, uh, different skill sets on a football field. The act of going to a football game is like an all day event, two hours from the city, as opposed to a basketball game, which is like going to a movie. I see the same kind of thing manifesting itself, uh, in India. Same thing in the UK with rugby, cricket, football. Kabaddi is very different from cricket in the kind of elements of human skill that it emphasizes. And it's a very different viewership proposition. It's a shorter game. It's a 40 minute game. It's a very high intensity, 32nd piece. And I think that's what makes it exciting. And you can go for a Kabaddi game as a family, like you would for a movie in the evening. See it and come back.

AI assessment note: “I don't think so. I think There is enough space in India for multiple sports”

Q No, but how did you go from starting to tweet, spending a few hours a day?

A So YouTube had started a program. So we started making YouTube videos. Um, our goal was how can we make stuff that's freely watchable on the internet that's, that you couldn't do on television. Which is what our brand of comedy also was. Then one thing led to another, we started making videos, and this is pre-Geo times where getting a million views was like a big deal. I remember the first video that we made that got a million views Barkha that called us to be on our show, and etc, etc, etc, and then we were like, okay, what's the next comedic dream that we want to do? Fulfill. Next we were like, okay, we want to do odd shows in, you know, India's biggest auditoriums. Go around the country. And then, you know, the following year, that day we started, we sold out Siri Ford auditorium to one half thousand people. Then we were like, what else do we want to do? And we were like, oh, we want to do a comedy roast that has not been done in India. We've seen the Western roast, then we did that, that did 6000 people at the dome. We started taking those boxes one by one by one. And one thing led to another, and today I'm here at Nikhil Kamath's house talking about social media.

AI assessment note: “So YouTube had started a program. So we started making YouTube videos.”

Q So Vidit's wife is, uh, again, a very successful entrepreneur. She has this brand of clothing called, uh, My Bliss Club. You want to say something?

A Yeah. So, so basically she started this business about two and a half, three years ago. And like, it's a very mission driven business. What she's trying to solve is she's fundamentally building the first women focused fitness brand, right? Because in India, most fitness brands have always been associated with men. Like no one saw women focus problems. So she started this two and a half, three years ago, and she wants to kind of build a culture of movement in her own words, right? So she wants people to move a lot more. Fitness is not just about having like some crazy sick pack abs, but like everyone, whatever you do, every single day, even if you walk a hundred meters, you're moving and how can you make that journey more fulfilling? So she started this two and a half, three years ago, and it's been doing pretty well.

AI assessment note: “What she's trying to solve is she's fundamentally building the first women focused fitness brand”

Q Since we are in China today, maybe we can begin by you telling us how the Chinese economy is doing now?

A I think the economy is stabilizing. I think, uh, uh, we have been having some, uh, corrections in the housing market over the past five years that's taking a drag on the macroeconomy. That being said, I think, I mean, the, uh, the new growth engine, I mean, being the, uh, the so-called, uh, new quality productive forces, uh, higher-end manufacturing, uh, new technology, AI, and, uh, high-end semiconductors are coming up pretty strongly. There are a couple of issues that's bothering the economy right now. One is, of course, consumption, which is not growing as strongly as people are hoping for. The other is, of course, increasing frictions on the export or the trade side of the economy. But both sides are doing okay. Relatively speaking, in the global context, people are just wishing for the better.

AI assessment note: “I think the economy is stabilizing. I think, uh, uh, we have been having”

Q Isn't that what the Clarity Act is for? Like, I read parts of it, but it seemed like you're not allowed to pass it on, and after this act you can.

A Yeah. So this is being carefully, has been carefully negotiated in the draft Clarity Act. Uh, the banks kind of made this concern out there in the world that, um, they didn't want any rewards to be paid on idle balances. So that made it into the latest draft of the Clarity Act. But as long as the customer is doing some sort of activity, like a payment or trading, then they would be eligible to get these rewards. So the customer can still, at least in the current draft, if it becomes law, Um, and it's currently allowed under the, the genius act, which already became law. Um, customers would get, you know, they could get the majority of these, uh, benefits from the underlying dollars held in short-term US treasuries. Um, so that's the current arrangement. And then you, you had asked about another three to four percent. I wasn't sure what, what that part was.

AI assessment note: “as long as the customer is doing some sort of activity... then they would be eligible”

Q So what are these being used for now? Say Bitcoin has become a store of value. Yeah. What is being built on top of proof of stake? Like, what's the real world use case today?

A Yeah. Well, another example would be, um, borrowing and lending. So, you know, in many places in the world, it's kind of difficult for people to get access to credit. Um, and in the, in these people call these like DeFi protocols, like decentralized finance. Um, these are all using smart contracts. So in this world, um, you can have a number of people who are, have money willing to lend and money they want to borrow. And you can have, um, an interest rate that gets generated, right? Um, you know, you had mentioned earlier, people on Coinbase can actually choose to lend their money out and earn these yields and things. That's using a DeFi protocol underneath. So some of these have reached maturity where, um, and it's, by the way, it's global, right? So anybody in the world can participate in this.

AI assessment note: “Well, another example would be, um, borrowing and lending.”