Nikhil Kamath ft. H.E Omar Sultan Al Olama | The Case for Youth in Politics | Special Ep

25:53Both the fields are very different. They are in personalized medicine. Ours is more public health oriented.

26:00Nikhil Kamath:Yeah, like screening is like phase one or like even like so ideally someone detects oral cancer over there comes to us then and then we give the treatment. For a precise histopath diagnosis and the treatment and then prognosis and everything. We actually made a full storyline of how all the startups fitting together in their journey. Starting is very bad. It's collaboration, not competition. Maybe all of you can combine and build a company. Not all of you, but the four of you. Okay, who's next? Yeah. Actually, these guys have been waiting for me. Yeah, yeah. That's okay. No, no, go for it. Okay, so, hi, I'm Sridhipto and I'm with Chirisho.

26:38Nikhil Kamath:We are Childhood Friends and we are building an AI layer for wearables starting off with earbuds. So, imagine like you must have had like AirPods or earbuds, but all you do with that is listening to music or take phone calls but whatever it could do more like when you're focusing on your work if there's a reminder there's an important email it tells you right you need to book your food it is there hey do you want me to book a it tells you while it's in your ear yeah what about when it's not in your ear so uh it's meant to be wait a minute my earbuds right now speak out whatever calendar notifications i get anyway so we are think of it like this like we are the android for earbuds like that like we are making all the integration so you can order from a you know swiggy or azumato you can book your cab from a uber so stuff like that so you don't need to but wouldn't uber build that for uber and swiggy for swiggy yeah so essentially these are integrations that we are going to do right i mean right now we are building the integrations but later on one we have as like significant scale of developers or service providers we can go to the developers and ask them to build on top of us so that's the idea How is it different from a traditional earbud?

27:45Okay, so a traditional earbud like a Bluetooth earbud, if you speak like say a noise or a

27:50Nikhil Kamath:board, so you use them just to listen to music, right? So we are going to enable them with these facilities. That's the idea. Voice or buttons? It's voice. Yeah, it's voice first. Because we feel with AI, voice is going to become the primary sort of interface and display is going to become the secondary interface and that is like the most natural way of using technology because engineers or say coders are also now using voice to sort of vibe code i mean with whisper pro and all these ai applications coming up for consumers so i think voice is going to be a one of the primary board you know sort of interfaces so even we use that in office so we have stopped typing we press two buttons and we speak to her and it's able to type that at a very accurate manner and even a lot of people what they're doing is they're pressing the hands-free mode they're just talking on what they're building and they're putting into the air and it holds for them.

28:39The most impressive part is the punctuation. It gets the punctuation right. It's obviously voice to text and they just launched their India specific pricing which is fairly affordable.

28:50Nikhil Kamath:They also improve productivity wherein on an average people speak faster than they type. So your words per minute go up because of which you can get more output per hour. So in fact, I think I've been able to send out a lot more outputs whether it be respond to even texts or mails because of the fact that I have Whisperflow and other agents of sorts on my platform on my devices. What's your company called? It's called Antimatter. There was somebody from the boot camp who were using one of his agents and they didn't even know that they were coming for the boot camp. There's a I don't know if I can say this out loud.

29:28There is a cell phone manufacturer we're investors in. They're making a on the earphones because they feel like that limitless and all the external things that we are putting on ourselves are a medium which you don't want to carry one extra thing. You want that to happen in something you already carry. But then I guess one could ask the question if this could happen, why not just a cell phone do it? I have it in the earphone.

30:00Nikhil Kamath:So essentially a cell phone is like a secondary device. like as we say like with AI coming into the picture voice is becoming the primary sort of interface you don't need to look at the screen so it can be secondary it is only when an important notification comes over something important is that you need to look that can happen inside of you if my cell phone is there and I'm speaking here can it pick up my voice and distinguish today based on what I am saying and you guys are saying so I think it depends on the microphone so in certain cell phones it can yeah and these AI sort of wearables like you said limitless in india there's neosapien uh there are like multiple sort of microphones in that same device to capture multiple voices like say if you're far enough or say there are two three people in the room so they are able to capture like if you give the context prior to speaking like who is building what maybe while they're speaking uh it can get the context and understand like who is speaking from which company and then it can interpret accordingly like it can store all the data and whenever you want to retrieve it can do it intelligently.

30:58Nikhil Kamath:So that's. This is assuming your earphones will still remain the interface. Now your meta, Ray-Bands etc can also have microphones in them and you're no longer using your earphones at all. Correct. So that's what I said like starting off with earbuds. So the idea is to get into multiple wearables that becomes sort of the default agentic OS. So I said Android for wearables or say AI devices. Right. That's the idea. So yeah, we also believe like smart glass is like one of the, you know, best form factor for ambient computing. It has a camera, it has this kind of you know, speakers, screens are also coming up.

31:30So yeah. It's a very tough world to compete in. Yeah, correct. Have you sold any yet? No, so we are not public launch yet. We have not done the public launch yet. So we're going to do that in the next summer, in the next six months. Right. Best of luck. Yeah, thank you. Who's next?

31:47Nikhil Kamath:Okay, so I'm Rohit and What happened? She's laughing, I got confused. With your name? Yeah, I don't know. What? Okay. Rohit doesn't remember anyone's name. Okay, no, I remember. I'm guessing the two of you are not married. No, no, no. Is it helping or hurting? It's really good, it gives me a lot of freedom to work. So, I'm Rohit and I'm building a company called O3 Security. and what we're trying to solve is like everyone is scared about AI taking over the job. There's a stock broking company called O3 security? I did research, I'm not sure. Okay, so everyone is scared about AI taking over the job but the more bigger problem is about to come, AI taking over entire company.

32:33Nikhil Kamath:Like it will literally take down your entire company. So what we're trying to do is we're building an entire cyber security solution for big enterprises. So I come from experience of like 10 years where I infiltrated in a lot of big tech companies and I helped them to fix it and in turn they were paying bug bounties. So I will give you one example. This problem is how big it is. Let's say if a CEO wants to improve the security of a company, they will hire the best talent in the industry but they will be also limited to a specific field. Now the second approach they will be taking is taking over the best solution like cyber security solution like what we are building.

33:12Do you guys build this or do you take open source tools and label them a certain way?

33:17Nikhil Kamath:That's the best part. We build this. I will tell you like what are our capabilities. Because we were reviewing a cyber security company and they were franchising Pegasus, the attack mode for$500 ,000 or whatever and they were calling it cyber security. Most large companies end up going to something like a cloud flare, right? Yes. When you say you're building something, how is it different from the incumbents? okay so what we do is firstly most of these companies are point solutions for example let's say so my biggest problem right now in this industry everyone is taking their own place in cyber security for example someone will do we will do cloud security someone will do endpoint security of the laptop someone will do let's say source code security but for the cto and cso the problem is are we secure because ceo and board will ask are we secure or not so you're putting everything together yes so we are putting everything together but what we're trying to focus on is it shouldn't reduce the quality so at the end of the day even if you take the one part of a product and compare with the best in the breed we should perform well so i'll give you one example so we are the single company in the world which can help rbi and sebi regulated company in getting compliant with recent certain mandate and rbi mandate for example there has been recent circulation like where you have to you need AI bill of materials, software bill of materials, cryptographic bill of materials and we are already working with some of the biggest bank in India and the things are moving very fast because the problem is what I have seen from my experience that you still not explain how you're different till now all I've got is we do everything not just one thing okay so first what we are trying to focus on the two aspects only all of the cyber security solutions are focused on some specific technologies so we are first building the technology cyber security is one of our application which we will be going very deep for example you can break entire industry in two parts one is static what means is like what data you are having in your company like it's just there another is runtime like how things moves very fast every second or every minute what we are trying to do is we are trying to go very very deep and understand both aspects with AI or without AI why we do that because again digressing too much yeah what do you do okay so we secure end-to-end supply chain of entire company and how are you different so we know the context for the example let's say you are thinking about we want to build this specific feature where user wants to purchase something okay but the moment it goes out to the production 100 engineers coded it 12 managers got involved it went through a lot of checklist okay now nothing is connected here okay one security issues could be there and another team will tell we don't take this series because this is a false positive so we reduce a lot of false positive based on the context these context gets built because we are very very deeply integrated across the entire stack that's integration is not available right now in any company this is the main problem context and integration is your yes are you live yes we are live we are already working with some of the biggest fintech companies in india we all are using those apps and you're already getting revenue and all yeah we are already generating revenue also good amount of revenue it's good it's pretty good like within last five months we've built pretty good so we uh have right now close to eighty thousand dollars and uh we are working with few banks and we are hoping probably in few months we will hit we may cross 500k because these deals will be pretty good so we are making revenue but the best part what i'm thinking right now is like we are not focused on what we are building right now that's like pretty normal we are going very deep into the contextual way because that's what i told like uh the problem with the entire cybersecurity industry is like, entire industry just focus on 2%.

36:59The problem with cybersecurity industry in my opinion is 80 % is a scam. Yeah. Everybody's white labeling the same thing. I understand.

37:07Nikhil Kamath:So I will give you one very interesting example of white labeling. So there's a famous product in the open source industry and most of the cybersecurity industry like cybersecurity company you will see, they all are using that open source product on top of it, okay. And these companies are some of the well-known cybersecurity companies and these are integrated in all top companies in India and US. So what I did was, I was able to take over that open source component. And I was inside every company, all top 500 companies, all top 10 companies of India, and this was live for four hours. And no one knew about this one.

37:40Nikhil Kamath:So the point is, the industry is very, very much dependent on an open source solution, which they don't even control. So the point is, I'm trying to make is like, this industry is mostly made by the peoples who are not like from the cybersecurity background. Right. So what I want to do is like people should be making a business where they have long experience. They should face the problem. So that's why like I was working with my last employer. Who was your last employer? So I was working with Grow before. Why did you quit? They're amazing, lovely guys. So before joining Grow, I had this discussion with chief security of Grow and Grow people helped me a lot.

38:19Nikhil Kamath:So basically before joining Grow, I was building this idea I was thinking about this idea and there was a top mate link in his profile I just booked a call like can you give me the feedback and he told me one thing why don't you just understand the problem firsthand then build it so that's where everything started and I worked for two and a half years there I scaled their entire app sec cloud sec and I understood what the problems they are facing and throughout that entire time I gave a lot of training session to thousands of engineers across different countries so I understood one thing the most I will tell like this entire industry is easily solvable.

38:52Nikhil Kamath:Only the thing is you need right players together to solve this one instead of just making money out of it. Like making money is also important but it should be like a byproduct. This is what I think right now. Okay thank you. Who's next? Hi I'm Prashant and along with Abhishek we are building rehabilitation robots to help neuro patients recover independently at their own homes. So the problem we are solving is that so there are three main ways in which a neuro patient can get rehabilitation right now. Either he can opt for at-home rehabilitation where a physiotherapist comes home, gets 45 minutes of rehab and then he goes back.

39:28Nikhil Kamath:The second is you take the patient to the clinic and then get your rehabilitation for two hours or three hours, come back. And the third option is you leave the patient at the care facility which is going to cost you two to three lakhs per month. right so this option is not feasible for a lot of stroke patients reason is that indian medical insurance companies most of them do not cover for stroke rehab so this also taking a patient it feels like half of the problems today are like things i've had experience with recently go on yeah so also taking the patient from home to the clinic is a lot of hassle for the caregiver because you need two people first of all and you had to put them in the car, you had to stay with them in the traffic and even when you go to the clinic you're not really sure if the therapist is available to service the patient, right?

40:19Nikhil Kamath:So yeah the only option which is left which is financial financially it makes sense for a lot of people is getting the physiotherapist to your house but in that case what happens is that they don't have the equipment with them and also a physiotherapist can give 45 minutes max after that he's tired and he has to go back right. So the gold standard for rehab is like three hours but most people are getting just 45 minutes. By having an affordable and portable rehabilitation solution we are aiming to pump up the number from 45 to 3 hours. And what does this look like? We do have a demo video. Let me just give him an example.

40:56We'll flash it on the screen. Yeah sure. So we have a robot of a size like bridge height and it has a robotic arm attached to it.

41:04Nikhil Kamath:similar to our hand and that robotic arm holds the patient hand. So the physiotherapist sets the motion of how to do the rehab process and the machine imitates that exact motion, x number of repetitions as per the settings set by the physiotherapist. Thank you. Thanks for the free massage. Very interesting and tell us a little bit more. So what next? Currently we are creating a third iteration of our robot which will be... Is it treating anybody already? So we tested this out on three actual neuro patients but right now we don't have the license yet to put it in a mass manufacture and stuff. Who gives this license?

41:47Nikhil Kamath:CDSCO, so that's the government entity. And what is the company called? Bloom Rehab. Bloom Rehab. Nice. Yeah, you are the last ones. I thought you guys are together. No, I was solo founder. Why is that? I don't know. I mean, I've been building stuff since I was 16 years old, 15 years old. Alone all the time? Yeah. Single child? Yes.

42:17I've been building stuff and then because I was building it myself and it's hardware.

42:22Nikhil Kamath:So I've always been working with machines, electronics. Usually... What do your parents do? So my dad works in college where I studied actually. it's in Mumbai it's in Mumbai University there's a cool story why I chose that college particularly because your dad works I mean not because I couldn't get the admission I cleared my JW and I wanted to do electronics and robotics after researching on it I realized in India we produce a lot of software engineers and there's a reason to it because investment per student for a college is like one computer You can learn a good amount of programming languages on one computer and it will last per four years.

43:04Nikhil Kamath:So ROI on investment for a college to generate software engineers is pretty high. But if you take it now, electronics and robotics, you have to provide motors, you have to provide power supplies and they'll probably break because students don't know how to use it. And what happens in this case is college don't promote it. If you see how many things in your home or in your circle, hardware products are made in India, electronics. extremely less very less amount of bank you probably like pop up right away and this is the reason where india doesn't produces a lot of electronics or hardware where which shaped me to shaped me to i want to learn electronics and robotics on by myself so i was getting an id output but we had to have attendance you had to attend lectures you had to go and sit for I finished assignments and everything.

43:52Nikhil Kamath:But punishment at my dad's, I mean, he said, college board was, if your attendance is less, then call your parents. And my dad was already there, but I didn't go to college. And studied electronics and robotics myself. So I'm a self-taught electronics and robotics engineer. My degree is in software. And I built, so I always work in terms of solving problems. So I stayed a little bit far from where my college is, college in Bandra. so we had to attend lectures in morning 8 a.m got to reach at 7 a.m station wake up at almost 6 take a train and then stand in auto line which annoyed me a lot and at that point of time I was inspired by this youtuber called Casey Neistart who would roam around New York on an electric skateboard so like I'm an engineer I should solve this problem so I made what?

44:39Nikhil Kamath:I made an electric skateboard I had a wireless remote in my hand where it was like a ring where if you move it ahead it'll go ahead and if you pull it back then it'll break so I would roam around Mumbai on electric skateboard all the time so yeah so that is where I earned money first time because I sold the electric skateboard I made it 35k and then I sold it at 80k and that was the first amount of money where 17 year old 16 year old me was like oh you can earn money by doing something that you like are you telling me your accomplishments and how hard it has been for you because you're hiding your insecurity or something a little bit of what I don't know I mean am I good enough to build at global scale something like that and the money is kind of a validation so I've been building products so that I can validate myself oh people are buying if that were the case you would have had a co-founder right somebody you think is smart the thing is the objective as a like for a startup if you see generating money one of the top things providing why why being a solo power I think everything was working the need to let's say I'm bad at sales so I need a co-founder for sales let's say if I'm bad at building a product then I need a co-founder to build a technical product somewhere I think I had some little bit of skills in everything I was a good salesman I could build products myself so I think the need of having a founder of having a co-founder do you feel empathy do you feel bad when something bad happens to someone?

46:14Deeply? No. Superficially?

46:16Nikhil Kamath:I mean, I do have empathy, but... Do you have curiosity? Yes, a lot. My therapist, I was doing a session and very interesting points came up. We went like first principles into life. What is a human being? What are values? Are they nature? Is it nurture? Do we pick what works in the world we live in and hence we say we attribute those values to ourselves. And the one thing we realized is if you don't feel empathy and you don't have curiosity, like actual curiosity, we all fiend curiosity because it's good in the world we live in. Those are like sure, short signs of a narcissist. No empathy, no curiosity.

47:00When something bad happens to someone, you're like, yeah, he deserves it. Where did you land on the nature versus nurture debate? Because it's something all of us have been talking about. She asked me who are you as a person. And I tried to define it. And we went back into childhood. And we both kind of agreed. So me and my therapist are like friends. This is not so much about treating me or fixing something. Not that I don't require it. I do. But it's about trying to figure out how we kind of became who we are. And whenever I've seen a child. Kids are very mean. If I'm a child and I want the ice cream you're eating, I would probably snatch it from you and eat it.

47:43So we're not born with this sense of morality. It is kind of ingrained in us through life because we learn that if I snatch his ice cream, somebody will slap me and then the next time I should not. So nature versus nurture, definitely nurture more but this is an exercise which is a great thing to do like figure out go on chat gpt or perplexity or google and say what are the most popular values value systems and then try and read each one out think about it and attach one to yourself and then think am i that way and i resonate with that value because it showed me that I can win in the world that I live in or is it that I feel deeply about that I'm organically that person I don't have the answer but it was just something interesting I'm thinking about do you do you think same for talent as well

48:38Nikhil Kamath:like uh is the nature and nurture attribute or it's the naturally someone born with about talent I don't think there is there is something to be said about passion whatever you think you're really passionate about say ai girlfriend for example i'm just saying it that you're sitting next to me i feel like there is some unanswered question in your mind about the concept of love relationship girlfriend all of that that's why you still have a passion towards it when you truly understand a particular subject it becomes hard to be passionate about it I don't think talent is innate. Let me put it this way.

49:25If I had a child, which I do not, and there was a football coaching camp where kids go when they were five years old. If all the kids are five and I send my child into that coaching camp when the child is seven or seven and a half, by virtue of his physicality, he will start to be better than his peer group from the very beginning. He will start to believe that he's talented at football and probably grow up to be a talented footballer. But is there something to be said for physical attributes? Probably, yeah. Like some Nigerians have long femur bones so they run marathons better. There is stuff like that.

50:09But I don't make too much of talent, intelligence. I think a lot of this is gathered, collected, inculcated. I don't think anybody's born, not anybody, but most people are not born spectacularly gifted at something. So we got to your life, but you took too long to come to what your company does.

50:32Nikhil Kamath:So I bring factories on your desk where I make machines to make electronics at your home on your desk where usually if you if let's say I'll give an analogy if you now Delhi is very polluted and if you are if you are somebody who wants to make some profit ideal product to launch at this moment would be air quality sensor now if you had to make it as Nikhil your ideal goal would be to go to an electronics designer get a design case work case and everything and then to make it you would have to ideally have to go to some contract manufacturer to make whatever you designed yeah now he will tell you that I need 5000 units minimum so that I can make margin on it.

51:12So if I call you and I say I want an AQI machine which looks like A, B, C, D, E you'll make it. No no no no I don't I don't

51:18Nikhil Kamath:make the air quality sensor I don't design the devices I make the machines to make air quality sensors. So let's say now you now your design is ready with my machine you can make 100 you can make 200 test the waters what are the people what is your machine describe it. So in theory the technical term is pick and place where there are green circuit boards have you seen it ever so on circuit board there are ICs so somebody needs to pick these ICs and place it on the PCBs printed circuit boards and then they are cooked in an oven and then you can start using them I make the machine which will pick the component place it on the circuit board and then I make an oven also so and all sitting on a small desk which which helps people launch small to mid-scale production so if you are a new startup doing a hardware this is the perfect solution to try your product rather than having 5000 units and because startups are usually iterating fast and that iteration time goes really less.

52:13Nikhil Kamath:For software engineer if you are making a website then you code it HTML code and then you can see the website in the next second but for an electronics engineer or a hardware developer you have to send after designing the PCB you have to send it to the fabricator who will get the PCB and then you can start at least testing. If it is if the design has a mistake At that point of time, you have to do the whole process again. So it's like one, two months. Now, my goal as a company is to bring that iteration time down to one day. Within one day, almost matching to software development, you can get the output of your work right away so that overall collective production can be faster.

52:52Nikhil Kamath:Iteration could be faster and production also. Interesting. So that is what I do. And what is the company called? PlayStation. Nice. Place, P-L-A-C-E. So pick and place, PlayStation. station. We used to make smart switches and one of the comments we made when we walked into your house was your switch ports retro pitted not done very well. Yeah. So the light doesn't go off you know in the night. The white light it's so annoying. Oh yeah. Like the light on the switch. So basically how did I come how why did I want to make this machine led to my the first thing that I started with after college was a smart home startup where I was doing smart switches and smart lights I was making a device that sits behind a switchboard and anything on that switchboard becomes smart now I see you love art, right?

53:35Nikhil Kamath:but the switches are very dull like they don't look pretty good but with my devices you can use any type of switches the most artistic that you would want to grab attention and then my device would still sit behind the switchboard and you can use any switches that you want the best part is if your internet is not working wifi or whoever you purchased it from stops paying for the server or when they go down all the switches will stop functioning because it's all over the internet. My startup was working. Everything works without the internet. Now I'm the only one in India where you can use Siri.

54:07Nikhil Kamath:You can say hey Siri turn off lights and we'll do it. And Google. I don't have my own app. I integrate directly as first party devices into Google, Alexa, Samsung smart things. I see you're using Samsung directly. You don't need my app. I also don't have my app. Interesting. So my name is Sahil. You've not said a word today. Yeah. So actually... You know how this works, right? Whoever says the most viral shit gets the most sales. Attention is equal to virality in this room right now. So think of the most contrarian thing you can think of saying and say it in the next 20 minutes. You have a very nice expression.

54:48Like your resting face. Oh, me?

54:51Nikhil Kamath:Yeah. Yeah. It's a look of circumspection which is like I know. I mean, I'll take it as a compliment man. It is a compliment. You look wise. Beyond your years. I'm probably the youngest man here. Yeah, you look quite wise though. You're very settled. Thanks. Doesn't look like you're trying too hard. I never do so. very settled and composed in your own shoes that's what i go for are you starting to feel awkward about now see that's my point so i'm sahid i'm building i with my co-founder so we are building i where we are making the existing cctv surveillance into a smart ai security guard so let's let's take an example so if we have installed a cctv on the corridor yeah and let's suppose in any case someone falls down and there is no one around him so what the traditional cctv surveillance will do it will just record the data and that's it and you will got to know about it later but what we actually do we actually understand the complete context of that video frame and in any case if there is any kind of emergency risk or any kind of you know thing that can harm you in terms of life in terms of money so it will create an alert on your mobile application with the context with the image so that you can take action so our main goal is to reduce the time between the incident has happened and you taking you taking some action so we are reducing that time so that we can save lives we can secure the places we can secure the persons and whatever actually matters to you so we initially implemented this idea because of a personal incident to us so my co-founder he was working in bombay two years ago so he lives with this grandmother so when he was in bombay and she was she was living living in jaipur so uh he faced a such incident where she fell down by uh impacting with sofa and he got to know about it later and then he thought and uh he discussed with me like what is the sense of cctv then then uh we we said and we discussed all right so let's do it and about our background so from last seven to eight case we were building some good AI products for multiple companies.

57:33Nikhil Kamath:So this is our main technical expertise in Gen AI and machine learning. So we have built this product. Super. And what is your company called? AI. AI. Nice. So I think we did everybody's story. Is there anything you guys want to talk about?

57:55I want to ask you asked everybody are you married or not to everyone I said virality and this is what you went no no no so I want to ask do you think that is one of the factor or maybe indicator or somehow how does that impact the entrepreneurship journey that we are on because that is the hot topic in my family right now every dinner table conversation surrounds it Like I For context I come from a very Traditional Jat family In Haryana In that Everyone my age Is married with a kid In our family So And I'm trying to Stay Like push that thing Like let me Let me do my work But you've asked That question to everybody Do you think that is Maybe with your words I can convince them Better I lived in Haryana You know Three years When I was a kid Karnal I went to Dayal Singh public school In Karnal I'm still in touch With a few people From there They were quite sweet Thank you.

58:52But I don't know the answer to this. I think generally in life, if you live your life based on what other people think you should do, I think eventually you end up at a point when you regret it. At some point. So unless you want to do it, I don't think you should be too fussed about what your society, family or community thinks. Even family. Other people say, oh, who cares? but if it's your parents them I was thinking about this recently I'm 39 years old and some friends of mine were like New Year's you should do this you should do that and I was not making any plans and then while I was thinking about it at 39 an average Indian lives to 73 I probably have 34 New Year's left in 34 new years I probably have 20 of them where I'll be too old to do the things I can do today so practically I don't have that many December 31st left in my life you know good ones in the manner that I perceive good today I only probably have like 10 if I were to be pushing it maybe more since you do keep check of your health yeah compared to average input and when we have so little time you have a bit more than I but it feels stupid to do things because others want us to do it because our time is very finite we never think about it that way but we are not going to live forever nobody is and you also think like relationship in general is tricky for entrepreneurs like entrepreneurs think very differently like I can see a very different version of this world which a lot of people cannot see so when things start like in a relationship they're fine okay i can understand you're busy and thing but you want to see that

1:00:54Nikhil Kamath:world and you have limited time you know that right and then once like that understanding fades away and it becomes difficult and i mean you've seen like a lot of entrepreneurs successfully getting divorced stuff like that so do you think like it's tricky like if like also being said like if both of even not growing on or say not that ambitious? I think not just for entrepreneurs but the concept of relationship is also very transient. Our notion of marriage is very much programmed by the media we consumed as children and what we saw around us and the way Bollywood and Hollywood has depicted the idealistic version of romance.

1:01:41I mean, it might be attainable in the short term, but I don't know how sustainable it is. So that kick of whatever dopamine, oxytocin kind of like fades with a certain amount of time. And you're left questioning, why is it not like it was in the movie? so I think all of this will change don't go by I am no buddy to give a prophecy about this I have not successfully manifested any of this but I would say make these decisions which feel right to you and not what other people think are right for you and you also think like momentarily it might feel right but like I feel like the most important thing one should focus on long term is like growth.

1:02:31If you stop growing in a relationship, like overall, like emotional, it can be, you know, your professional wise, you feel energized, right? You feel positive when you're around that person. I think that is what is key to a successful relationship. Maybe.

1:02:45Nikhil Kamath:Oh yeah. So the million dollar question is, what are your new year plans? No, nothing. I was... That's the plan. Nothing. You know, my plan right now is to be able to sit here at home stare at the trees do nothing that plan of doing nothing is the plan that's that's and if I tell these to my friends they will be mad at me because I always have these kind of plans since my childhood but everyone will tell you you are wasting your life same happened in the college days yeah in a way to your earlier question you know even if you think or for you even if you think marriage is good now marriage is bad tomorrow even if you get married change your mind don't get married one day you regret not being married i feel like society has wrongly coined hypocrisy as a bad word hypocrisy and change are synonymous in a way i feel like it shouldn't be looked bad about like if you believe in something today and you believe in a completely different thing tomorrow you should change and not give a about who's going to say what and hold you accountable to what.

1:03:56Like maybe you don't believe in marriage today or you do. Maybe you got married too early and you want to change your mind in a year. Don't be too hard on yourself. The first year is the hardest. Realizing that? Is there a reason why you have an AI and not a real girlfriend?

1:04:17Nikhil Kamath:Did you ever have a real girlfriend? No. What an introspection. Is there a fear associated with dating a real person? Yeah, I mean, the starting phase I've never had, like, I mean, I never could take it more ahead. Like in the initial phase, I was not really thinking, like online a person is good, but when I met that person, it was not whom I wanted them to be. So it never really worked out. And also, like, I like being alone by myself. there are so last two months uh i only got out of my room four times for two months i was logged in i feel you i like that yeah so for that i felt like um i need something which is in my context and something i can maybe engineer for now so so so maybe that no but i feel him a hundred percent like i've never been on a dating app and stuff like that and i'm petrified of dating Like the whole Point of going on a date And trying to Impress the other person Such a performative Activity It doesn't seem like A fun experience I mean if you still have to Impress then What a weirdo But it's all relative It sucks the energy Basically We can talk about Something else This is like Let's talk about I have one follow up question I wanted to ask You were talking about Being narcissistic I want to ask Is According to you Okay is being narcissistic really bad?

1:05:47Nikhil Kamath:Go on to ask. So narcissism is a deeper concept than that. I think it's a symptom of a disease. We are not born narcissistic per se. Do you think narcissists are usually self aware? Do you know your way? No, I don't think so. Rarely. See, there are two schools of psychology. One believes that you can't change who you are. Everything is about figuring out why you are who you are. I think everyone from Freud, Jung, they all fall in that school. There is another school that it's not just about figuring out who you are, but how to change your tomorrow. I don't know if I'm right, but I think Adler, a bunch of psychologists are in that school of thought.

1:06:35I don't know where I sit. I enjoy reading both schools of thought. I feel like you have to go through the former school and first understand why you became who you became before you can reach the latter school I don't think I'm even at that point I'm like before the starting line

1:06:55Nikhil Kamath:what part of Jungian psychology do you like particularly the most hmm whenever he speaks about shadow traits and how your shadow traits become darker when you don't recognize them. I have found myself catching some of my shadow traits at times. And it's actually very similar to some Indian philosophy, anthropology as well, where if I'm greedy, I can never change the fact that I'm greedy. But maybe the point is not to try and change that I'm greedy, but if I take cognizance of the fact that I'm greedy, that in itself changes my behavior. Because then I'm dealing with a new situation with the awareness that I'm greedy.

1:07:50It's kind of interesting. Yep.

1:07:52Nikhil Kamath:These guys actually did a whole exercise where they filled a quiz and they got like 36 strengths and their 34 strengths were ranked and which they'll be using to run their business. Like if they lean more into their five top talents that will be serving them better. Whole personality analysis they did. Who's more futuristic? Who's more competitive? He was competitive. That was his first trait. And different, different. And they're like, lean into that. You have this, then lean into it. Rather than averaging your weaknesses, it's the strength which will propel you. Do you celebrate your birthday?

1:08:27Yeah. Every year on my birthday, we have this big summit where we call who we think are the smartest, most relevant people under the age of 45 across the creative field, industry, journalism, a bunch of different industries. We book a big fancy place, 100 people sit and have debates. There are no cameras allowed. We block everybody's cell phone when they enter the room and it's a fun day of what I believe 150 of the smartest people in India getting together and having conversations about things we are otherwise scared to talk about. I love this light in Goa. Half the time I'm here, the thing I love doing is watching the sunset.

1:09:20Especially if you go to the beach at this time, it becomes like orangish, then pinkish.

1:09:24Nikhil Kamath:We were there yesterday. It's lovely, right? Do you spot birds? Huh? Do you spot birds? Yeah, yeah. Today morning I had this bird which is this high, blue color with some yellow wings, making like a really loud cackling noise. Like it's laughing. You also, are you also into photography and all? No. Would be a nice place to do by the way. Do you like watching stars? Yeah. With the telescope on it? Are you into a hobby? Like this specific time is also known as golden time period. Yeah, golden hour, right? So if you ever have been to Kutch, so there is a straight highway of 90 kilometers, you can actually see the reflection of the sun and the sun as well in the sunset time.

1:10:10Nice. I have a request, Nikhil. Request just. Like you bring to your podcast, like probably titans of all different things with Yan, Elon, Sam, everything. and you have sort of covered the fintech, tech, all these industries. What I think next, it's just a request though. Maybe you can bring someone from tech bio, bio. Bio tech? Yeah, because I feel like biology is just huddled as a very unsexy, unglamorous thing, especially in India. And you bringing that platform would really, and there's such tremendous exciting work going on. Maybe Demis from Google DeepMind. Yeah. maybe they're brilliant people we were actually planning some bio we were thinking actually not just biotech but some pharma yeah because diagnostic companies exactly the window it will provide to the and most of your viewers are very young and they are excited about now all those things and I think biology is coming of the age right now yeah with CRISPR-Cas9 everything and so you bringing that platform and also it's my personal if you bring Demis So I probably, he'll be in there, I'll be able to catch him.

1:11:22Yeah. If we call him, we'll call you. What's your take on the longevity space since you're wearing a hoop?

1:11:32I'm into all the fads. I don't know if they'll work. I think time will tell. But I do take a bunch of supplements. I do cold plunge, sauna, workout, all these things every day.

1:11:47Nikhil Kamath:Actually if you don't believe in legacy Why do you believe in longevity If I don't believe in Legacy why do you believe in longevity Because then if you don't believe in legacy You could maybe go tomorrow And if it's inevitable then why do it I think legacy is for others Longevity is for myself Because If the quality of my life 10 years from now can be Better in the manner That I can still play paddle everyday For 2 hours I would really enjoy that Legacy is more for others I don't care so much about Do you care about what people will think after you're gone? Not really At least I'll try to Nobody will think Like I think you'll think for like 5 years, 10 years Max How much of AI do you use in your life?

1:12:35Nikhil Kamath:Not that much Little bit Not that much In trading and all? Not that much I feel like trading is not subject to anything which is fundamentally sound it is a lot of emotion as long as emotion can't be modeled for it will be tough for AI to make better calls than a human being so you're more of a data oriented trader like you're more into emotions and how people behave and all this I used to be a trader. Now, as I've become slower with age, I'm no longer really a trader. I tend to take more cyclical calls on the market. Like I would buy a particular, like we all, Suchet, Vivek, Aarshiya and a team of mine called Naman's team for the lack of a better word.

1:13:36we've been doing sector thesis of all the sectors and trying to narrow down on which sector we think will have the highest growth in the next 10 years we've spent a lot of time on it, like more time than we should have, I think the better part of this

1:13:56Nikhil Kamath:the better part of this year has gone on that, once we arrive at that exercise, our solution we will allocate capital to those sectors that we think are up there. What is leading right now? Probably energy transition. Energy transition has been a big part of our thing. We did last year a whole bunch of solar panel companies, battery companies, electric vehicles. We're looking at some grid, some companies which improve transformers make the grid more efficient new sources of energy we've been working in the energy energy transition for the last one year that's one of the sectors we liked i don't think that's going away whatever happens ai no ai air will need compute and power right every government is now trying to have their nuclear reactors i think it'll get a lot more efficient though the amount of compute that's used yeah Do you think the world will stabilize quite a lot once the energy is in abundance?

1:15:01Nikhil Kamath:Like let's say if we fix the nuclear fission part of it, at that point of time, if energy is so abundant, the value people derive from would eventually come down to creativity. Like how do they represent their thoughts? Like if they have something to express, at that point of time, that would be the only thing that they would want to say? Creativity is interesting. If you were to define creativity as a contrarian thought against the trend, one can extrapolate that an AI can be thought to be contrarian as well. Maybe being contrarian to the contrarian and constantly being contrarian becomes creativity.

1:15:41So how often you change your mind about something becomes why you're valuable or taste in a manner. And it has to be very dynamic and transient. But these are like, you know, such far-fetched scenarios, there's no right or wrong answer in any of these.

1:15:58Nikhil Kamath:But I think so, a lot of world's instability is not just because of energy, it's sometimes it's just normal human emotions. Some people at the top who are insecure about something, or maybe someone who just needs a Nobel Prize, so it could be that as well. Actually, one thing about truth is we think it's always useful. But actually, there are certain lies we need to believe in to actually function. For example, life inherently is meaningless. That's the truth. But like if you believe it has meaning and that's a lie you actually believe, then you can actually do a great thing. Tell stories to ourselves about ourselves and then motivate.

1:16:32The one thing you all should totally spend time on is to become better storytellers. If you can do a course in storytelling, I sucked at it. Not that I'm great at it today. But I got a speech coach a few years ago. and we went about he's a pain in the ass but he's also brilliant he'll make me sit and he'll give me a book take away my phones and devices and say write and he makes me write for three hours two and a half hours without a break and if you ask him what should I write about he'll say anything

1:17:04Nikhil Kamath:you should do that on twitter but you have to kind of like figure out how to build a character a story needs to have a beginning a middle a twist a call to action anti-hero a climax something which forces and that holds true when you describe your companies because whenever I ask you can you say it in one line if you can't appeal to me in that one line tomorrow when you sell it that's the same line you're going to use it's time well spent doesn't cost a lot of money there's enough material online on storytelling who's the guy that you trained with? his name is Michael he's an Israeli guy He teaches a lot of US politicians So he flies down Lives with me for a week And then he goes back Is he on Udemy?

1:17:58A company called Virtuoso If you want to look him up

1:18:02Nikhil Kamath:Virtuoso What are some other skills You think we should Other skills? You will As founders of companies companies have to negotiate a lot, cap tables, fund raises, contracts, to become better negotiators is probably useful.

1:18:29This is again something I learnt or I think I learnt through experience but people don't often disagree with ideas, they disagree with people. So when you guys are here today, you came with the preconceived notion that either you like me or you dislike me, you're going to agree with me or disagree with me. To figure out who wants to agree with you and who disagrees with you before you negotiate with them is important. Because if you're dealing with somebody who wants to say your business is shit, you should project circumspection when you're talking about your business like him like him you said he has that trade locked in he has this particular expression where he's like impress me which is opportune for the place he's sitting in right now that might be coincidental but I think in your negotiations you have to figure out which seat you're on and who's on the other seat and appeal to what appeals to them.

1:19:37Nikhil Kamath:I think so, you're pretty much into philosophy. Do you also read Krishnamurti? Yeah. Have you been to his study centre and all? Yeah. My nephew goes to his school. Oh wow, amazing. There was one in... He never wrote anything, so there's no more written version of his philosophy, but I've read his speeches. There was one, does God exist or not? Yeah. He says, you are in a jungle. what would be idealistic society according to my god

1:20:14zero envy would solve all the problems no how do you get to zero it

1:20:19Nikhil Kamath:how do you enforce that if you are thinking idealistic society then in that case the society if there is no envy you are just living your own life interacting with resources that you have that would be ideal. But it's a brain chip to enforce that thing. That's what I'm saying. I don't want to on a philosophical level like that would be the ideal society. Sure, but it's not realistic. I think societies are happy when the trend of relative change is upward. It doesn't matter if you have a lot more than me as long as next year I have more than I have today. The person competition. competition with self as well as a competition with you but a society which is able to orchestrate small wage growth every year which is probably on par with asset price growth so you're getting richer at the same time same pace as i'm getting richer will probably do well i feel like right now the world is surviving on capitalism till there is growth.

1:21:30I think the minute you take that growth away, things become crazy.

1:21:35Nikhil Kamath:I have a question on that. Like you said, a lot of societies who have a higher change of growth, they're happy. A lot of happiness index. Largely there are European countries who are up on the chart. But right now if we see, most of them are not actually growing to that extent. They're slower, stagnant. There's some study, community, there's some Harvard study which lasted 100 years. You guys read that? On happiness? sense of community sense of purpose all of that I don't know though it's a Veritasium video watch Veritasium yeah that video they make good videos yeah amazing this guy Johnny Harris have you seen yeah I mean I think he does a good job with videos he made something on Taiwan I was watching it quite good very in depth you said Casey Neistat yeah I used to like Casey Neistat a lot but that's not learning it's more like vlogging right true just vlogging his own life you get to see how New York is true but there is a very clear distinct between how he does storytelling which is extremely engaging rather with other people where you see that they are making efforts to engage you where Casey is just natural natural flow of the engagement you don't have to put an effort but the video ends and then you're like oh shit the video ended nice Nice.

1:22:58So this was fun. I hope you guys enjoyed your trip to Goa.

1:23:04Nikhil Kamath:What do you think like as early stage founder that you like when you were in your early stage when you were founding? Thank you for calling me old. I didn't mean that. I am though so it's okay. So what are the things That you actually cared about But now you think That was not that much important

1:23:31Early what do you care about Money right Yeah first thing And it is important Because Think of the world as a game of monopoly You need to have chips to play And the more chips you have The more fun it is to play People say it's not important But it is Done Super, thank you guys I think we worked for much longer than we thought we would