Thought Behind Things · Jul 28, 2025 · 1:45:45
Why Pakistan needs an inclusive university, not another elite one
Jahanzeb Burana, co-founder of the National Institute of Technology — Pakistan's first university powered by Arizona State University — on why higher education here has been chasing the wrong model, what it actually takes to bring an American university to Pakistan, and why mindset will matter more than content in an AI-shaped job market.
with Jahanzeb Burana
16 min read
A second federally chartered university, and why the partnership is the point
The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation as a continuation of a longer thread he has been pulling on the show — the future of Pakistan’s services-export economy, and the simple fact that those exports cannot scale without a much larger pool of educated graduates feeding into them. The previous episode had been with the chairman of the Higher Education Commission. This one sits next to it: a private-sector view of the same problem, from a co-founder building a new institution in real time.
Jahanzeb Burana is introduced as the co-founder and vice president of the National Institute of Technology. NIT is the second federally chartered private university in Pakistan, and the first to be set up in partnership with Arizona State University. Burana, by his own description, is “not from the education sector,” and he frames that as an asset. He trained as an investment banker, finished an MBA at Harvard Business School in 2010, worked in private equity across Asia and parts of Africa, and spent time in Pakistan’s public sector before turning to education with his co-founder Shazeb roughly five years ago.
The framing he sets up early is precise. “If there is a way to really redefine a society or uplift a society,” he tells Muzamil, “education is the way to do that.” NIT did not start from an idle napkin sketch. Burana and his co-founder had already worked in K-twelve and run an ed-tech venture aimed at democratising English-language access. The conclusion they kept arriving at was structural: innovating at the K-twelve level does not move the needle when there is nowhere for those students to go afterwards. The destination has to be fixed first.
The numbers Muzamil keeps repeating
Muzamil returns to a statistic he has cited on the show before, and he encourages listeners to verify it themselves through the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. Roughly fifty lakh Pakistanis turn eighteen each year. Of those, around twenty-five lakh never go to school. Of the twenty-five lakh who graduate high school, the total number of higher-education seats available is around five lakh.
That ratio reframes the entire public conversation about whether degrees are worth getting. “We have a discourse in Pakistan,” Muzamil says, “about whether university degrees are better or skills are better — when in fact most kids don’t even have the opportunity to get a university education in the first place.” The HEC chairman, he notes, claims the enrolment ratio has been pushed up to around thirteen percent. Burana adds the context: that is still one of the lowest in the region.
This is where Burana makes the first of several arguments that will recur. Private-sector universities began appearing in Pakistan in earnest around 2012 and 2013, and the “mushroom growth” that followed was, in itself, evidence of demand the public sector could not meet. The early wave of private universities competed on superficial proxies for quality — carpeted classrooms, air conditioning, large screens — but the underlying market signal was real.
Why copying Harvard in Karachi is a category error
Muzamil presses on the cynicism that hangs over private higher education in Pakistan: the suspicion that anyone running a university is running a business, and that anyone running a business in education is, by definition, cutting corners.
Burana’s response is one of the sharper passages of the conversation. The model that critics implicitly hold up — the Harvard or Oxford-style elite research university — is, in his reading, the wrong model to chase in an emerging market. Those institutions sit on enormous endowments. Those endowments subsidise local students, fund research, and free faculty to publish in journals like Econometrica. None of that financial base exists in Pakistan. “Because we set the wrong goal and the wrong ambition without understanding that a higher institution of the kind that we look up to needs a certain resource base,” he says, “we end up failing — and then we say, look, our professors’ research just sits in our cupboards.”
What an emerging market actually needs, he argues, is great teaching institutions at scale. Research can be focused, targeted, and tied to public-policy priorities — engineering, renewable energy, cotton — but the mass-market function of higher education is to teach well, place graduates into careers, and do that at a price point that can be sustained without an endowment.
Which brings him to financial sustainability. “Financial sustainability is not a crime,” he says. “The crime is that after financial sustainability, you didn’t deliver quality.” The real grievance behind the cynicism, in his reading, is not that universities make money — it is that they make money without producing graduates who can do anything with the degree.
The fast graduate’s quiet observation about salaries
Muzamil interjects with a personal note that lands well. He graduated from FAST in 2015. FAST ran on an endowment model — a principal endowment from BCCI in the 1980s that compounded over decades, allowing the institution to keep fees low and quality high. He has stayed in touch with his professors. What he has watched in the last four to five years is a salary problem he describes very directly. The same instructor who is producing the strongest students in a graduating batch — the kind of instructor who is single-handedly responsible for the talent that emerges from the cohort — is now being offered remote AIML jobs at ten, twelve, fifteen thousand dollars a month. A non-profit university paying three to five lakh rupees cannot hold that person against the private market.
The implication is precisely Burana’s point in reverse. A university that wants to deliver quality has to be able to pay for the people who deliver it. A university that is structurally underpriced will lose the people who matter, and the quality argument collapses from the inside.
The lion, the mouse, and the ASU partnership
The mechanics of the ASU partnership are where the conversation gets most concrete, and it is here that Burana tells the analogy that does most of the work in the episode.
NIT, he is careful to point out, is not a tuition centre. It is a federally chartered university in its own right — ASU does not partner with non-chartered institutions. What “powered by ASU” means is that ASU holds equity in NIT. They sit on the management committee. They are part of the operating governance. They are part of quality assurance. They are involved in the appointment of key local positions.
To explain why this structure matters, Burana reaches for the old fable of the lion caught in a net asking the mouse for help. The mouse hesitates: once the lion is free, the lion’s incentives will change, and the mouse will be eaten. The lion’s answer is to take out his teeth and hand them to the mouse. “When you bring a global operating partner like ASU into your governance structure,” Burana says, “it is like taking out your teeth and giving them away. Even if someone wanted to dilute on quality later, they would not be able to.”
That signalling is the substance of the partnership. ASU is one of the largest public-sector universities in the United States, has been ranked number one for innovation in the US — ahead of Harvard and MIT — was the first university to partner formally with OpenAI, and recently launched a global K-twelve school with Sal Khan. They run roughly thirty universities around the world through their global platform Cintana, including the Galala University in Egypt and a forthcoming American University of Riyadh. “This is not ASU’s first rodeo,” Burana says.
Three plus one, four plus one, and what the student actually walks away with
Muzamil asks the practical question. What does the partnership mean for a student sitting in a classroom in Pakistan?
The answer is unusually crisp. NIT’s undergraduate students can do three years at NIT and transfer to ASU for their fourth year, graduating with an ASU degree. They can also do four years at NIT and a one-year master’s at ASU. For students who meet a defined academic performance criterion, the transfer to ASU is guaranteed. The visa, Burana is careful to note, is not — that is a separate government question — but a guaranteed admission to a major US public university clearly improves the odds.
Crucially, a student who completes the fourth year at ASU graduates as an ASU graduate, not an NIT graduate. They become indistinguishable from any other ASU alumnus in the US job market. They sit on the same OPT clock, compete for the same H-1B sponsorships, and tap into the same alumni network. This is a meaningfully different shape than the British TNE-style programmes that have existed in Pakistan, where a student gets a foreign degree without ever becoming part of the issuing university’s actual graduating class. The Cintana network — Egypt, Turkey, Spain, soon Saudi Arabia — extends the connections further.
For curriculum, ASU’s content is now in NIT’s hands, with the right to translate it into Urdu. Faculty members retain the flexibility to teach their courses their way, but the skeleton of what is taught — the learning outcomes, the credit-hour structure — has to meet ASU’s standards, because that is what makes the transfer of credits possible. The triangulation between ASU’s standards, HEC’s requirements, and Pakistan’s local market is where Cintana’s experience across emerging markets becomes useful.
The fifth industrial revolution, and the mindset question
About two-thirds of the way through, Muzamil zooms out to the question he most wants to ask. The global economy is in the early stages of what he calls the fifth industrial revolution. The education systems most countries inherited were designed for the fourth — moving an agricultural workforce into factories, and training people to repeat a small set of tasks reliably. Pakistan, in his reading, has inherited that DNA and is still building a workforce optimised for redundant labour, just as automation is making redundant labour the first category of work to disappear.
What replaces it, he argues, is interdisciplinary thinking, judgement, and creativity. He cites his own experience at FAST — a hardcore engineering school where he was, in his words, “the artist type,” and where an entire field like UI/UX could have opened up if the institution had been able to take design seriously. The structural problem he names is that Pakistan’s undergraduate system locks students into a fixed track from day one, with little room to discover what they actually want to do.
Burana’s response is the heart of the episode. He agrees with the diagnosis and then reframes the prescription. Universities globally, he says, have enormous inertia. He has seen it at top-tier K-twelve schools in New York, where introducing entrepreneurship or critical thinking into the curriculum is treated as harder than introducing a piano lesson. The opening of this moment is real, but it has to be used.
He breaks what a graduating student needs into two parts: content and mindset. Content is the easier part. The harder part — and the one that has been treated as a “nice-to-have” — is mindset. “I will always be in a mode of learning and unlearning,” is how he frames the mindset he wants NIT graduates to leave with. “I am on a continuous mission to disrupt myself.” His framing is that anything that can be measured will be automated; the durable human work will be where judgement and subjectivity matter. The mindset he wants to instil is the only thing that travels across an uncertain four-year window.
He tells a story from a US longitudinal study to make the point. Two groups of students received standard feedback on an English test. One group received one extra line — “I believe in you. I think you can do better.” Years later, the group that had received that single sentence performed measurably better in academics. The capacity did not change. The mindset did. That, he argues, is what an education institution can deliberately design for, and what most of them refuse to.
Range, T-shaped people, and why a Harvard MBA didn’t want to be a general manager
Muzamil pushes Burana on the interdisciplinary point. The university is called the National Institute of Technology, and its initial degree offerings are heavy on computer science, AI, cyber security, and data science. How does an institution with that surface area produce graduates with range, rather than narrow technologists?
Burana’s answer pulls a specific thread. The American liberal-arts model, he points out, is built around a wider pyramid in the first two years. An NIT engineering student will not spend their first two years immersed only in engineering — they will take maths, social sciences, and humanities before narrowing. The British model, by contrast, narrows at A-level. Range, in his view, has been “massively underappreciated” in Pakistan, and it is becoming the asset.
He uses the language of T-shaped talent — someone with a broad range across the top and deep expertise in one domain — and notes that the most interesting new companies are organising themselves around that shape. Steve Jobs’s font-design class at Reed is the example everyone cites; the underlying principle is more general. Drawing from a wide set of experiences to inform a specific problem is the human skill that does not get automated.
Muzamil ties this back to a piece of writing he has carried with him: the cartoonist behind Dilbert describing how he stopped trying to be the best at any one thing and instead combined modest skills — an office job, an interest in doodling, a sense of humour — into a niche almost no one else was competing in. “The bar was low because nobody else was doing it,” is how he summarises it. The argument is that range protects you precisely because it removes you from the line everyone else is queuing in. “Now in the AI world,” he adds, “that line is crumbling anyway.”
Burana’s own example is sharper. Doug Becker, the founder of Cintana — and previously of Laureate, once the largest higher-education company in the world, owning some seventy universities — did not come from academia. “For somebody who’s not from academia to set up the largest higher-education company in the world,” he says, “can only happen when someone with a range comes in from a fresh perspective.”
The work-ethic problem nobody wants to name
Muzamil presses on the part of the services-export story that does not show up in talent-brochure decks. He has spoken to exporters and IT-services buyers, in Pakistan and abroad, and the feedback he keeps hearing is not that Pakistani technical skill is lacking — it is competitive. The gap is work ethic. Discipline. Communication. Globalised thinking. The judgement of how to show up in a corporate context.
His structural reading is that Pakistan’s last twenty years of uplift has been heavily concentrated in Punjab, which is roughly half the population. The result is that when the world meets “a Pakistani worker” at scale, it is increasingly meeting a worker from Punjab’s mass market — often a first-generation university student, often a first-generation corporate worker. That worker has skill but lacks the silent infrastructure of how-things-are-done that an elite-cream graduate from a top-tier university used to bring pre-built.
Burana agrees and reframes this as the exact failure mode of the higher-education sector. The student arriving from a third-tier city, living in a hostel for the first time, going through a metropolis for the first time — that student is going through a structured cultural training whether the university designs it or not. The job of the university is to take ownership of that. He proposes a concrete KPI: job-placement ratio of alumni. If that becomes the single source of truth, every other design decision — soft skills, communication, work ethic, time management — can be reverse-engineered from it.
He balances this with a second observation. The definition of “productive” is also shifting. The world his parents grew up in had workers staying at a single company for thirty-five or forty years; the world today has people switching jobs every four to five. When he was at HBS, HBS produced general managers. By 2010, very few of his classmates wanted to be general managers. The single-track corporate career path that work ethic used to be measured against is itself dissolving. Both sides will have to evolve — graduates and the institutions that employ them.
Pakistan in 2050, told through a road and a tubewell
Muzamil closes with the question he asks most guests. Burana spent years at Harvard, years working outside Pakistan, and chose to come back and invest in this. What does he think Pakistan looks like in twenty-five years?
His answer is grounded rather than abstract. He grew up in southern Punjab. As a child, driving from Lahore to his village took six, seven, eight hours on the GT Road, bumpy enough that watches would fall off wrists. The same drive today takes three and a half hours, the bulk of it on the motorway. As a child, electricity in his village came on for two hours a day; a generator would be pulled to life by a rope to get through the rest. Today the village is solarised, with 3G and 4G, and WhatsApp calls run from there to the rest of the world.
“Do you discount all of that and say, well, it just happened by accident, but otherwise we’ve gone in the wrong direction?” he asks. “That’s not it.” His thesis is that Pakistan has been on a slow upward path — in infrastructure, in digital payments, in the rural-urban migration that has emptied agricultural labour into cities and into services. Not every country has done even that. At a certain inflection point, momentum compounds. The talent base, he allows, is closer to raw material than finished product — “raw material is plentiful; talent has to be carved out” — but the raw material is there.
By the end of the conversation, Burana’s frame for 2050 is not a number. It is a delta. “There is going to be a delta,” he says. “And it is going to be a statistically significant delta. We are going to be better.” When Muzamil asks whether the rate of change accelerates after that point, the answer is yes — momentum compounds, ecosystems start to speak to each other, and the pieces of a wider jigsaw start fitting in. The shark-tank-Urdu version of Pakistan’s entrepreneurial culture, he notes almost as an aside, is a small but real example of an ecosystem maturing in plain sight.
Muzamil closes the conversation at the one-hour-thirty-minute mark with the framing that lands the episode. “I think a lot of the rails are being built right now,” he says, “and once those rails are built, the trains will be faster.” NIT’s first batch will graduate in four years. That is when the philosophy gets tested against the outcomes.
Full transcript
नमस्कार, नमस्तेर, नमस्तेर. Welcome back to another episode of thought behind things. जैसा कि आपको पता है मैं जोक की तरह पड़ा हूं कि Pakistan का education system जो है वह बिल्कुल ही फ़ार्क है education का निज़ाम बदलेगा? किस तरीके से potentially नई opportunities आएंगी services sector के अंदर? आपको पता है कि मैं इस बात का बड़ा हामी हूं कि Pakistan में services sector के exports को grow करना है. मेरे हिसाब से by '20 $3,030,000,000,000 dollars की हम exports कर रहे होंगे. लेकिन यह ख़ाब बड़े अच्छे हैं. इस ख़ाब तक पहुंचने के लिए आपको एक raw material चाहिए होता है. आपको एक फौज चाहिए होती है smart, पढ़े लिखे बच्चों की जो कि वह eventually services perform कर सकें जिनको आप outsource करेंगे या आप globally बेचेंगे. इस चीज़ को जाहिर है कि मैंने बड़े RCC study किया पिछले दो तीन साल. I've been very actively working on this and trying to understand अभी पिछले episode के अंदर आपने HEC के chairman से भी सुना कि Pakistan की government क्या सोच रही है कि हमने आने वाले वक़्त के अंदर किस तरीके से अपने higher education को particularly, you know, redesign करना है skills के अंदर वग़ैरह वग़ैरह. इसी के साथ एक और बड़ी interesting conversation आज हमारे पास. We have with us today जहांज़ेब बुराना साहब who is the cofounder and vice president of the National Institute of Technology. यह I believe second federally chartered university है जो Pakistan में खुल रही है but that's not just it. यह है private university but it is backed by the Arizona State University, one of the largest in the world. There's a lot of interesting inside, a lot of groundbreaking things that hopefully will be happening in Pakistan, you know, with the introduction of this university and a lot of the changes that these guys want to sort of bring in. First of all, I'd like to welcome जानजेव. Sir sir, thank you so much for being part of the show. Thank you so much, sir. Such a pleasure. जानजेव भाई, पहले तो मुझे थोड़ा सा बताएं. We'll dive deeper into NIT. We'll, you know, we'll get to know more about आप लोगों का vision क्या है? What exactly are you guys doing differently? But I wanna understand a bit about you because, know, you brought this university to Pakistan. You had this vision, and it's been a while. Tell me about your own journey. How did you start, and how did you come about education as something that you like to do? So,
miss अमनसचय, so again, such a pleasure to be here with you. So, NIT is the result of years of dreaming and then years of work. मैं और मेरे cofounder Shazeb, जिन्होंने, you know, we we started this about five years ago. My own quick personal background and what led up to this, so, you know, I don't come from the education sector which I think is an advantage क्योंकि जब आप non expert, non sector specific perspective लाते हैं, I think that allows for you to reconsider things and look at things from a fresher perspective which is where, you know, changes can happen, disruptions can happen, right? So I, by training, am an investment banker and private equity background, investment background. I did that out of business school. I graduated MBA at the Harvard Business School 2010. Then I've been doing private equity. फिर कुछ तेर public sector में Pakistan में वापस आकर काम किया and the growing need that across doing investments across Asia, parts of Africa, जो growing realization over and over again मुझे होती थी वह यह थी कि, you know, if there is a way to, really, redefine a society or uplift a society, education is the way to do that. And, so that's where the desire to do something in the education space, something broad and vague in the education space in Pakistan was born. With discussions and conversations, and then I and Shahzeb had we have known each other for a very long time. We're very good friends and then there was a meeting of the heart, meeting of the mind and we said कि university बनाते हैं, right? And so it started literally so not from the garage but if that was an analogy it it started with very basic dreaming and very basic conversations and here we are. Interesting.
तो थोड़ा सा मुझे NIT का आपने कहा you know it really started with very basic ideas कि यार ठीक है university बनानी है. I am curious I mean was it as basic as a couple of guys get together and उन्हें napkin के ऊपर लिखते हैं कि यार यह idea है for a startup तो was it really did it start off with कि यार एक university बनाते हैं. I mean building a university is not a is an uphill task particularly in Pakistan. So great
question. I mean so you know I let me double click quickly on, a piece of the journey, I think, that's required to, kind of shed more light on why the university so we also started, I've worked in the primary education, early education sector, K-twelve sector में भी काम किया, EdTech venture भी किया, so did an EdTech venture, to democratize access to English language in Pakistan. And the recurring theme that came back over and over again was que हमारा we have a very low, higher education enrollment ratio, and one of the lowest in the region. उससे होता यह है कि, you know, yes, you have an education sector where kids go to a K-twelve primary school and, you know, they go through their middle school and high school. लेकिन अगर ऊपर enrollment ratio बहुत low है and you don't have enough great institutions on the top that can pull students and give them a continued momentum to go through the education journey, तो आपका high school तक, FA-FA seat तक हमारी अपनी market में बहुत ज़्यादा metric तक, बहुत high drop out rate है. So it was almost like looking backwards and saying कि आप K-twelve में innovation करते रहेंगे but if you're going to and so I'm when I say that I'm being very specific कि it's not about there are great elite schools in Pakistan but I am talking about how do you create impact across the market. आप K-twelve में अगर आप innovation करते भी हैं, if the student is not going beyond high school and there is no path ahead of great quality education that can then campus to career transition जो करवा सके, आपका बच्चा उधर ही drop out हो जाता है. So it was like looking backwards and saying कि I think we first need to get to the destination and fix the destination, which is a higher education, which is the last degree before you will go on to your careers. And then that will have ripple effects backwards in terms of the rest of the education sector. So that's why it was not just saying, 'cachá, चलो' and we had been through that experience of saying, we know the we know the earlier education space. So that's why the university, लेकिन it was not just any university. I think पहले दिन से we were very, very clear कि हमें एक international standard की university बनानी है जिसमें हमें we don't have to go through a learning curve and there was a big design principle for us as we thought about it कि हमें एक ऐसी university बनानी है where we bring in a global operator that can ensure कि इसका standard global है. वह उतना put put your money where your mouth is, वैली बात होती है. You know, so everybody can claim to be global and, you know, global is, you know, it's a fairly cliched word. लेकिन how do you actually- what does that mean, right? And how do you- how do you actually really bring substance to that claim? And so that's where then the kind of conversation started off and the struggle started of saying Pakistan में बनानी है, global operator attract करके लाना and how do you do that? Makes sense. मैं थोड़ा सा just nitpicking on what you said. You said Pakistan is one of the lowest enrollment rates in the region.
Again, HEC के chairman से मेरी discussion हुई. He said कि जी, हमने Pakistan के बहुत abysmal numbers थे, but we brought it up to 13%. Again, for people, मैं बार बार यह number दोहराता हूं. But यह आप ख़ुद भी जाकर verify कर लीजिएगा. Pakistan Bureau statistics का बड़ा ज़बरदस्त sensors का data पड़ा हुआ है जिसको आप utilize कर सकते to actually even, you know, extrapolate कि अगले पंद्रह बीस सालों के तरीका situation होगी. But Pakistan में roughly अठारह साल की उम्र को पचास लाख बच्चा पहुंचता है. उसमें से पच्चीस लाख जो है वह school नहीं जाता. जो पच्चीस लाख school जाता है, जो हां पच्चीस लाख जो finally high school से graduate करता है, उनके लिए total higher education की जो seatएं available हैं वह पांच लाख हैं. तो हमारे यहां discussion हमारे online discourse की यह है कि university degree बेहतर है या skills बेहतर है. When in fact तमाम बच्चों के पास opportunity भी नहीं है कि वह university की education in the first place ले सकें. जब हम university education की जाहिर है बात करते हैं तो उसमें बहुत सारे factors हैं जिसके ऊपर हम detail में आऐंगे. But I wanna take your input in the demand side of things first of all. सबसे पहला लोगों को यह समझना पड़ा ज़रूरी है कि भाई इस time के ऊपर ना yes we will talk about quality and I will I will dive deeper into all of those things कि जी आप लोग कैसे ensure कर रहे हैं कि जी quality हमारी होगी, future proofing होगी, वगैरह वगैरह लोगों के दस सवाल आते हैं. But the number one thing is कि क्या Pakistan को मज़ीद education institutions की ज़रूरत है? क्या इतनी demand exist करती है?
Mister अमन, so an absolute yes and there we have numbers to show that and the narrative to show that. I'll actually start with the get with few statistics on numbers and so get them out of the way and then talk about the narrative and and and the voice over to that. Because हमारे public sector key capacity for all the reasons that we all know, resource limitations, etc, उस तरीके से public higher education institutions की capacity has not been able to keep pace with the growing demand. Private sector was allowed to come in through, setting up what one may call for profit higher education institutions and they started I think 2012, 2013. And ever since then we have seen a mushroom growth of private sector universities, that have then come in, into the higher education space. So, which in itself is a proof of the fact कि आपकी this was a response from the private sector, from the market to the growing demand और वह शुरू शुरू में वह demand खाली बड़ी basic level पर ही cater हो गई. See, so not to kind of get into the quality conversation लेकिन अगर class में carpet है, AC है, बड़ी screen लगी हुई है, so these were the proxy factors that people would look at as a proxy for quality के अच्छा you know and which was public sector वह नहीं दे रहा था you know, very bad resource limitations हैं public sector की. So private sector ने बहुत market share लिया भी है उस वजह से higher education के. So, so वह तो आपके कुछ basic numbers हैं but there is a narrative to that too कि वह और वह यह है कि देखिए across emerging markets जहां campus to career transition and you know it's one of the key themes for us. जहां वह उसकी where that transition looks hopeful, आपकी enrollment बढ़ेगी. जब campus to career transition में challenge आता है and you know one of the things that happens in emerging markets is आपको लोग मिलेंगे and I am sure you have met a few. पांच masters degrees हैं. Masters in Islamiad, masters in philosophy, masters in economics. एक five unrelated things, international relations, you know, वह क्या होता है? वह होता यह है कि आपने एक degree की, you went out into the job market. आपको job नहीं मिली. What did you do? You went back to the campus to do another degree और आपने फिर अपनी किस्मत try की. You went back into the job market, फिरने मिली आपने तीसरी masters की degree कर दी. तो people would continue to जो बेचारे अगर वह transition नहीं हो पा रहा they'll continue to hide behind the walls of academia. एक masters, दूसरा masters, तीसरा masters के as if it was last the lack of the right degree that was not allowing them to start a career. अगर वह situation रहे और वह economy wide situation हो तो फिर that has an impact जहां आपकी demand for higher education गिर जाएगी because people see that, right? People can anticipate that and people would try to get into vocational training and skills and let's just do something not worth the time and investment. But I think कि Hamari, you know, yes, we have been through economically challenging times. We, you know, as as far as I can remember, I'm I'm I'm I'm 40 now as as long as as far back as I can look. We've always been through challenging times, right? There has never been a time thinking up or out of the challenging times. That's what emerging markets are. You continue to emerge, right? You're जब emerge हो जाएंगे, that's the difference. But you can't remember. But but we have we have private sector has grown. We've had private sector universities come in. उनसे quality I would say कि, you know, yes, there are issues but I think market में जो higher education का role है वह ज़्यादा visible हुआ है. जिस वजह से I believe के long answer to your question yes, there is a demand. Makes sense. So,
tailor into that demand side, right? किसी demand exist करती है, पहला लोगों का thought यह आती है और Pakistan में, unfortunately the reason why I am, मैं आपको start में ही ना थोड़ा सा तंग कर रहा हूं. Please. वह वजह उसकी यह है कि education unfortunately has a, has a bad rap in Pakistan, right? So, you talk about anything. You talk about Ponzi schemes and people will, there will be takers for it immediately. But the minute you start talking about education, there is a cynical eye talking about कि यार यह कोई मंजन बेच रहा है, you know, यह profit for profit institutes हैं, इन्होंने business बना लिया है इसको, वगैरह वगैरह वगैरह. And so, yes there is demand but what would you say to to people who are saying oh you know private sectors come in that is the reason why the quality of education has gone to shit because oh you know अब तो यह एक business की तरह किया जा रहा है, इतना noble profession था, अब वह noble तरीके से तो नहीं किया जा रहा. बस photocopy machine की तरह हमें बस enrollment चाहिए. बच्चों को हमने, you know, उसको degree बांटनी है and then मेरे साथ का दर्द ही नहीं है. For the university, जो पांच masters बांट रहा है, theoretically उनका तो काम चल रहा है. वह पांच masters करवा रहे हैं उस बंदे को और वह आखिर में still industry में नहीं जा रहा. Madam Mister, I think it's a, it's a very valid point. It's a concern that,
that's a very valid concern that I would have as a parent, I would have as a student as well. So I completely empathize with that. There is a very fine balance or a pretty thin line here between ensuring financial sustainability of the institution and ensuring the quality of education that the institution needs to deliver. And so a little bit let me elaborate on that, right? Quality हमारे Pakistan में, emerging markets में और across developing markets जो western higher education model है, जहां पर आपकी universities have massive endowments that support them और those endowments allow those universities to subsidize local students, not foreign students but local students को आप subsidized higher education दे देते हैं and those endowments allow for massive research to happen and that that research and publications and, you know, pushing the boundaries of knowledge and great PhDs and Nobel laureates being produced allows a massive financial resource base जो government provide कर रही होती है. अगर आप अभी America में current scenario देखें तो जब current government ने Harvard की support base को या financial support base को अभी रोक दिया है या challenge किया है, the institution has started to struggle with saying, look, how do you mobilize resources, right? और यह वह context है जिसमें alumni भी are giving back. There is, but how do you how do you sustain the endowment because that supports research? हमारे यहां यह होता है कि हम, so we define quality as कि अब हम एक Harvard या Oxford create करेंगे यहां पर. हमें एक एक हम research करेंगे. हमारे यहां बड़ी Nobel Lauder, हमारा बड़ी research worried होगी top का हम एक institution बनाएंगे higher education without realizing कि we don't have the endowment to support that, to subsidize that, to support that research nor the facilities. तो because we set the wrong goal and the wrong ambition without understanding कि higher institution of the kind that we look up to a certain resource base. इसलिए वह हम गलत model जब set करते हैं अपने लिए तो फिर हम fail होते हैं और फिर कहते कि देखो हमारे professors जब research करते हैं तो वह तो हमारी अपनी अलमारियों में पड़ी रह जाती है. वह तो Econometrica में Big Journal in Economics या you know the top journals where you would publish, नहीं तो कभी publish नहीं होती. हमारे कितने authors हैं जो publish होते हैं, उनका कसूर नहीं है. वह ecosystem और वह जो financial base and the time, जो resources and the network impact of being able to collaborate with other academics वह नहीं मिला होता ना. तो वह view of higher education in the context of an emerging market एक गलत model है to emulate or to try to look up to. आपको यहां पर great teaching institutions बनाने हैं that can create impact at scale. You can have great research and focused areas that you back with a lot of support and that can be public policy, that can be government initiative कि देखो मुझे engineering में यह करना है, मुझे renewable energy में यह करना है, Pakistan की critical need है, मुझे cotton को करना है. That can be indigenous demand driven public policy initiative. लेकिन mass scale पर जो मुझे job market create करनी है, को support करना है, अपनी next generation को enable करना है, उसके लिए I need great quality teaching institutions. Now, quality teaching institutions, now therefore if the private sector is going to do it, to be financially sustainable. हमारे यहां क्योंकि वह होता है ना कि हम एक at a societal level we pick on a piece of a problem without understanding the whole ecosystem in which that resides. Tax base बहुत low है, government का education budget बहुत low है. किसी भी government का, this is not a political statement, किसी भी government का allocation low है health care education में. अब जब वह सब कुछ low है और public sector step in नहीं कर रहा, तो public sector क्या करता है? Public sector private sector को allow करता है through the right regulations कि आप आ जाओ और public sector यह role लेता है कि मैं regulator हूं, मैं regulate करूंगा standards को. तो HEC does that in Pakistan's case, federal level पर. आप institution चलाएं, मैं आपको regulate करूंगा. तो HEC regulate कर रहा है. अब लेकिन जब private sector आएगा तो private sector has to ensure कि एक university जो tuition dependent है, वह financially sustainable हो सके. तो all of that to say कि financial sustainability is not a crime. Crime is कि अगर आपने financial sustainability के बाद quality deliver नहीं की, that's a problem. हमारे यहां जो problem, I think what's really happening is when people say कि देखो वह पैसे बना रहे हैं, business बना रही है. I think what they're really saying is कि यह बनाने के बाद भी quality नहीं दे रहे हैं because that's the real pain point. अगर मुझे मैंने अपनी चार साल की undergraduate की investment किया और उसके बाद I see that that has enabled me now to come into the society as a different person तो I don't have remorse. I don't have regret looking backwards. लेकिन अगर वह सारा कुछ करने के बाद I am unable to figure out a way forward, Yes, then that's a problem.
That makes sense and इसके अंदर अगर मैं अपने थोड़े 2¢ डाल सकूं. पहला तो यह है कि I graduated from FAST. FAST effectively endowment model पर चली थी BCCI ने nineteen eighties के अंदर उनको एक principal endowment दी थी जो कि बढ़ते बढ़ते eventually वो पहुंची जहा पे वो आज है. Fast के अंदर, when I graduated in 2015, उसके बाद आया I was in touch with my professors, some of the best professors that are working there. अब वह मतलब वही था कि अगर वह अपनी fees थोड़ी सी बढ़ाता बढ़ाता fast तो students तो कब डाल देते कि यार देखो ज़रा हम लूट रहे हैं, यह कर रहे हैं, वह कर रहे हैं. तो उन्होंने और and fast is not like it's a it's an effectively a non profit. वह बड़ा subsidize करके ideally उसको place करते हैं. तो पिछले चार पांच सालों में होना यह शुरू हो गया. जब यह आपका dollar पहले सौ से डेढ़ सौ पर गया, फिर डेढ़ सौ से, you know, ढाई सौ, तीन सौ पर चला गया. और यह मुझे personally पता है कि some of the, not even some of the, all of the best instructors at FAST who by the way यानी कि मेरे batch के अंदर जितने भी हीरे निकले थे वह सारे उन instructors की पैदाभार थे और यह literally आपके particular instructors ही होते हैं जो कि बच्चों को ले जाते हैं, very honestly. System can only do so much, right? You have, you need to have the right talent, attract the right talent जो कि परे venturi education, quality education impart कर सकता है. होना यह शुरू हो गया कि यार वहां पर उनकी आपकी तनख्वाह कितनी है? तीन लाख, चार लाख, पांच लाख रुपया. अब वह private sector से उसी बंदे को वह बंदा top research कर रहा है, let's say AIML के अंदर. उसको दस, बारह, पंद्रह हज़ार dollar की remote job offer हो रही है. तो it's not यह. कोई भी बंदा क्यों बढ़ रही है? क्या है? कितना है? But on the other side of the ILI Ventury realized कि अच्छा नहीं there is an entire modeling जो कि इसमें play करती है and if you want that same quality तो private sector का जो pull है for the same quality of instructor वह इतना strong है कि उससे compete करते करते फिर there has to be a financial sustainability as you've as you've said it. दूसरा मेरे लिए एक बड़ा interesting moment आया था जब यह तकरीबन last year आपकी Central Asian states के अंदर कुछ riots होना शुरू हो गई थी. Thousands of student जो है वह Kazakhstan और Uzbekistan और पत्री Kyrgyzstan में पढ़ाए जाकर और वह उस time के ऊपर realization हुई कि पूरे पूरे you know agent का network है जो कि बच्चों को भेज रहा है. वजह क्या आती है? वजह और वह it's not cheap like it's We have to now start getting into कि भाई how do we create that ecosystem in Pakistan. Again पचास लाख का अगर मैं पांच percent बारह percent अगर enrollment test या higher education का आपका ratio है इसको मैं सत्रह percent भी भी ले जाना चाहूंगा तो It's still a very small percentage of your population, right? So, so it's a it's a very real problem and it requires a very real solution. And then the third last thought जो उसमें मैं दूंगा वह यह है कि जो आपकी top दिनों दिल्ली Pakistan में talent निकला भी है, वह University और Lums और इन्हीं का ही निकला है. तो data shows us कि private sector has historically done a better job. इसी से मैं try करूंगा अगला सवाल कि when you look at, let's say, Habib University और Lums और university, like sort of, in a lot of ways boutique universities like that. Right? So, they have these simple campus universities. एक खुल गया. उन्होंने अपना comfort zone बना लिया है. वह एक pyramid के top पर बैठे में और वह निकालते रहते हैं बच्चे. How do you compare what you are trying to do with, let's say, Lums or Habib University?
So, Amos Amal, firstly great thoughts. You're exactly on dot जो आप तीनों points क्या रहते हैं. So, you know, the the point on our students, lot of our students going abroad particularly to Central Asian countries to do medical for instance which is a big pain point कि हां कि हां medical का quota बहुत limited होता है and बच्चे वहां चले जाते हैं is also a very heavy forex drain on Pakistan. Given that we have a Forex issue, it's, you know, it's something that, should be a public policy priority in my view. And again, back to how do we compare with the lums and habibs of the world, right? Look, so I think it goes back to, what's the ambition, and how do you create impact? What's the philosophy on that? And I, by the way, am a big believer, as a quick side note, in the fact that there can be multiple truths and there can be multiple simultaneously. And what I mean when I say that is, look, there can be two different ambition models or vision models and they are both- can be both equally noble. So Lums and the work that Habib does and other great private sector universities in Pakistan are doing अपने अपने perspective में is all highly noble and, you know, I highly-highly respect that. The vision that so the vision that we have is कि scale पर impact कैसे create करना है, right? क्योंकि जो on two fifty million odd, you know, population that we're sitting at, up yes, no single university can serve the entire market लेकिन वह जो ecosystem of universities बनाना है वह bit by bit करके शुरू होगा. How do you create impact at scale? And that's where, you know, I and Shahzeb both were very inspired by, ASU's vision, ASU's charter, and that's how, you know, meeting of the hearts happened, in fact. लेकिन without going too deep into that just quickly, I think the headline is okay, a lot of universities or top tier universities pride, or take pride in how exclusive they are. Okay. You know, teen percent or some. Mean, can you can be as exclusive as one wants to be. ASU has a model of saying que, like, given the age that we're going into, and this is part of their charter, and very dear to, their president, Michael How do you make a higher education inclusive and yet provide quality? Because we have to appreciate - जो आपने शायद शुरू, maybe you alluded to it - we have to appreciate कि the context is changing very fast and in an AI enabled world that we are in and are fast moving further deeper into, higher education is going to go through disruption, a massive disruption. Class of twenty twenty five this year that graduated in The US, one of the lowest job placement rates ever in history because we can have views on that. That's a separate conversation, but it's real. It's there, right? Entry level jobs massively impacted. The higher education cannot continue with the same complacency and inward looking view कि मैं तो यही हूं and you know behind these big walls मैं इसी तरीके से education दूंगा. Higher education industry would evolve as an and I actually mean the industry would evolve. It would need to take new shapes and you see that. You see, I mean who could have imagined कि Harvard online चला जाएगा, right? And अपने आप को Facebook पर advertise कर रहा होगा. Why would Harvard need to advertise online courses on Facebook? I mean, content is Harvard man. लेकिन it's happening because that's where, that's how the industry is evolving, right? तो हमारा, our vision or mission compared to Lums and Habibs and other great universities in Pakistan, I think we particularly want an inclusive university in line with ASU's kind of model, but a university where we can with the inclusivity provide, a high degree of quality, but being an inclusive university क्योंकि जैसे आप पहले figures quote कर रहे थे, for kids who the education system has to be more considerate I believe given particularly the markets that we're, that that we're in और उन markets में बच्चों को both in classroom and outside of classroom अगर आप enable नहीं करेंगे, empowered नहीं करेंगे और train नहीं करेंगे and I want to double emphasize that, highlight that in classroom and outside classroom. If that- if that training doesn't happen for four years and your student is graduating only with a good GPA, that's not going to help. You know, it it so so that's in in our my view, the vision differentiator between, what we're trying to achieve, which is how do you create impact at scale? How do you take in large numbers of students, create impact on those large numbers? Given ASU's resources, they're one of the biggest online content creators in the world. HEC के पास ASU का बहुत, mean, Coursera, EdEx page, ASU का massive online that, I don't know, like 90,000 plus courses, etcetera, videos and content. Now that we have exclusive rights to that, we have the right we have the right to translate them into उर्दू. I think beyond just the university and the campus, we want to be able to provide those to second tier cities, third tier cities. And so that's all part of the vision of saying, look, how do you, how do you create that impact across Pakistan, इंशालाह.
Makes sense. अगर मैं again, so थोड़ा सा जो model मैं समझाऊं आपकी बात से भी और मेरी understanding भी जो develop हुई है. I think the the the winning model effectively is कि आपके पास demand exist करनी चाहिए, which we know कि exist करती है Pakistan में. आपके पास profitability essentially या financial sustainability होनी चाहिए. Because अगर वह नहीं होगी तो कहीं ना कहीं आप quality में compromise करके एक बस चीज़ चला रहे होंगे. And then obviously the third and most important is tied to the quality which is the outcome कि भाई outcome exactly. ठीक है, मैंने यह define कर लिया कि भाई मेरे पास I have enough students to serve and I definitely have. जो जाहिर है कि उसके अंदर वह demand supply है, जितनी आपकी इस वक़्त potential आप service कर सकते हैं उसके हिसाब से. आप एक price point define कर लेंगे कि यार यह मेरा fee structure है और उसके हिसाब से मैं, you know, I'll I'll I'll start taking kids. The most important thing then for me would be कि जी, how do you ensure quality? Now quality को मैं दो steps में divide करूंगा. पहला तो यह है कि जी, you've mentioned ASU multiple times. Pakistan में historically, this is not the first time that there is a partnership happening with a foreign institution, right? We have the entire A levels, O levels, Cambridge structure that has existed as a parallel to our existing, like, a high school system. Separately, उसी को आगे ले जाते हुए आपके पास University of London degrees exist करती हैं for law, for this, for that. External programs, you know, घर के अंदर आप खोल लें और वह आप Cambridge की तरह के exams करवा लें और degree आपके हाथ में होगी. You know, it's a very simple. वह bypass करके एक बड़ा random सा एक model exist करता है जिसमें आप जो है ना university हैं भी but नहीं भी हैं और आप जो है ना वह UK के degrees essentially आप लोगों को दे रहे हैं. Multiple times आपने ASU का ज़िक्र किया है. I wanna go deeper into कि भाई how does how exactly does this partnership help? Like, what exactly are they doing for you when they're coming in as a partner? And are they coming in as a partner? Are they coming in as a, you know, take our name and, you know, we're connected one way or the other. आपने global उसका भी बात क्या है? I wanna get a deeper insight on on ASU. उनकी वह सिर्फ़ Arizona State University है? Do they have a global presence? उसका सारा का सारा? And then the second tier would be कि with, let's say, an international player who has that sort of global outreach and scale and all of that, even then यह global एक situation create हो रही है जिसमें the future of education is very confusing, right? And so I want to dive deeper into later on. I'll start off with the first And so how do you ensure quality? You're in an interesting time. Maybe it's the best time to start because it's the start of a new era, the fifth industrial revolution and potentially it's the worst because convincing people that right at the end of the last cycle कि you know what we're we're we're we're starting a university, वह एक बड़ा confusing हो रहा है. So what are your thoughts on both of these things?
So, I'll start with the first one. जैसे आपने कहा. So, exactly right? This is not the first time that a foreign university is partnering but this is the first time that a partnership of this nature has happened. जो so let me just get into specifics a little bit. जो British TNE programs हैं, you know, the way British universities, University of London, Pakistan में अपनी degrees offer कर रहे हैं. They offer, they happen through partnerships जहां पर आपको उनकी degree मिल जाती है, cetera et cetera और आप यहां पर बैठकर courses attend कर लेते हैं और fee दे देते हैं. That's a very different model to how ASU operates and what this partnership is. This is not, we are not a tuition center for instance. We are a federally chartered university in our own right, by the HEC. So we have a federal charter which was ASU's requirement. ASU does not partner with non chartered institutions. That's one. But ASU is, you know, they're very particular about how they define this relationship. And this relationship is we are NIT, but we're powered by ASU. And what powered by ASU means is they have, they have an equity stake in the university. So they are a shareholder in the university, which means that they sit on the management committee of the university. They are part of the operating governance structure of the university. They are part of therefore the quality assurance of the university and they are part of appointment of the key local positions and organizational setup of the university. यह सब कुछ इसलिए है कि मैं आपको एक quick सी मज़ेदार analogy देता हूं कि you know, in economics we used to talk about this idea of signaling, right, and how do you signal something और उसकी एक मज़े की analogy यह थी कि एक शेर है और वह गिर गया है, एक एक net में फ़ंस गया है जो पचपन में story पढ़ते थे ना और वह चूआ पास है गुज़रा है और वह चूए को कहता है कि भाई यह nut मेरा काट दो. तो मैं मैं बड़ा तुम्हारा मशकूर होऊंगा. तो चुआ कहता है कि नहीं जब मैं काट दूंगा तो तुम मुझे खा जाओगे. अब चुआ अपनी जगह पर ठीक है because the claims that the share is making right now are in a particular context. जब वह आज़ाद हो जाएगा तो उसका decision reference और decision making framework और हो जाएगा. Incentives और हो जाएंगे और वह कहेगा कि अब I'll rather eat you. तो शेर कहता कि यार मैं अपनी caller, अपनी तुम्हें commitment कैसे signal करूं कि मैं तुम्हें नहीं खाऊंगा? तो चुआ कहता है कि मुझे अपने दांत निकाल के बाहर रख दो. So I know for sure that even if you want to change your mind, you will not be able to change it and that is a very instructive analogy for NIT's case क्योंकि जब आप अपने governance structure में एक global operating partner like ASU को ले आते हैं, it is like अपने दांत निकाल के दे देना because अब मैं कहूं कि अच्छा जी हम तो कल हमारे students आ गए हैं, आपका मकसद पूरा हो गया है. अब जो भी quality देनी है, let's start diluting on quality. You can't even if someone wanted to, they would not be able to do that because you have a global, one of the largest public sector universities in the world teaching north of डेढ़ दो लाख बच्चे whose brand is at stake and they are part of the governance structure, shareholding structure of the university. तो वह NIT therefore can never, even if someone wanted to, depart or have a departure from the standards that we have set for ourselves. तो वह मैंने analogy इसलिए दी because it's like, it is like saying you're actually putting money where your mouth, is. You're actually committing कि quality ensure हो जाए. तो इस nature इस इस nature की partnership पहले कभी नहीं हुई. This is a first American university therefore in Pakistan as we, you know, like to put it, which is the way to ensure for us the way to ensure quality क्योंकि मतलब होता ही है ना for any any venture that you would do. There is a learning curve that you would get through. लेकिन education sector में आप वह learning curve का risk ले नहीं सकते क्योंकि बच्चों की ज़िंदगियां are at stake and so what do you do? If you bring in an operator who has operated universities around the world and this was another big plus for us for why we partnered up with ASU. This is not ASU's first rodeo, so to speak, right? They operate north of 29, 30 universities around the world, EC Model Cooper. They run, for instance, the largest university, one of the largest universities Egypt that the president of Egypt gave to them called Galala University. It's run by ASU Santana. Santana is their it's it's ASU's global platform, जो उनको global लेकर जा रहा So it's run by ASU Santana. So so, you know, this is not the first time they are operating in emerging markets, developing markets. They understand the context of developing markets. They understand कैसे यहां पर operate किया जाता है. तो एक ऐसे global partner के साथ who has done it a gazillion times before, knows how it's done, is one of the strongest content creators in the world, has a massive online content and is very innovative, has been consistently ranked number one in innovation in The US. I don't like to confess, but given my HBS bias, but, you know, it comes ahead of Harvard and MIT and all others. They- so they were the first ones to partner up with OpenAI, for instance, right, become official partners with ChatGPT. They've launched with सैल खान, खान academy वाले जो हैं, उनके साथ they've just launched a global K-twelve school. So they're very enterprising, forward looking, innovative and that's what really clicked to us, clicked with us because, you know, that is the that is the spirit that you would want in a partner एक जिसके साथ आपकी collaboration है, जो आपके साथ that you are entering into literally till death, you know, do we stay together वाली बात है ना कि you know, it's a lifelong partnership होती है. So that's on the first branch of your question.
Right. Before I go to the AI part, I just want to dive deeper into a little bit deeper into these this partnership. Partnership. And, again, for people who don't know, ASU has produced five Nobel laureates. They have numerous blitzer prize winners. They're, owner of the number one in innovation, top five in online programs. So, they're, you know, they're they're they're not a यह random नहीं है. जो आपने यह वाली बात की थी कि they're working in 20 other universities or working with 20 other universities. So, when पहला तो मुझे यह बताएं कि आपने कहा कि भाई they're they're part of the governance structure and they're part of the key figures. Are they also part of designing what is taught और-or the curriculum? क्योंकि यह बड़ा problem है Pakistan. मैं उसका मैं context देता हूं आपको. जो बड़ा मसला है university का, जो जो जो conversation है, जो discussion होती है, वह यह होती है कि जी, it's yes, teachers are bad in a lot of ways and उसके बड़े economic reasons भी हैं वगैरह वगैरह, जो भी. But आपको पढ़ाया भी एक बहुत redundant बीस साल पुराना curriculum पढ़ाया जा रहा है. जो पढ़ाया जा रहा है, वह एक बड़ा रट्टा style, you know, पढ़ाया जा रहा है. And again, in a in a fast changing environment, I don't have a lot of hope from Pakistan because हम lag effect पर चलते हैं. Generally, कोई भी developing country lag effect पर चलेगी, right? तो जो अगर मैं upside निकालूंगा एक global university की वह मैं यह निकालूंगा कि यार वह लोग actually आ करके मुझे जो लोग वहां पर कर रहे हैं वह चीज़ बहुत rapidly वह मुझे यहां पर भी deploy करके देंगे because they are able to see the world much closer in how it's changing. But उसमें जाहिर है कि there is always that bias कि भाई developing world and developed world के अंदर context बहुत ज़्यादा difference होता है और फिर काफ़ी दफ़ा जब आप developed world या context developing में लेकर आते हैं तो एक अजीब सी खिचड़ी मत जाती है. So, जो ज़्यादा interesting चीज़ होगी वह यह होगी कि जी there is a wide range of experience across multiple different regions. Asia में भी है, South America में भी है, वग़ैरह वग़ैरह. Are they actually taking? So, पहला question यार, they involved in the curriculum, in the way that the programs are designed? And दूसरा question यह है कि does the experience and expertise from a lot of these other, I know they're in Turkey as well if I'm not wrong. Yeah. They're in Egypt. Lot of these markets are producing quality talent, services based markets हैं, बड़ी population की markets हैं, very similar to Pakistan. Egypt बहुत है Pakistan के comparable समझा जाता उनकी भी economic crisis culturally वगैरह. क्या वह वाली learnings भी Pakistan में आ रही हैं? So that, you know, we can then be वह एक model है ना? हर किसी के पास भी perfect model नहीं होता. Models optimize होते हैं based on what you experience. Will we be able to utilize that experience as well? जी.
So excellent question, फ़िलहाल. Yes, so yes-yes on the curriculum part. जो the, you know, what is taught is entirely dependent on उसमें जो main input है, वह is the content ना? Is the design, the the the learning outcome of the course, जो आप learning objective define करें and then the content that you used to get to that learning objective. वह, given as I mentioned, given ASU's massive, massive content base is all now, in NIT's lap, so to speak. And because the relationship is such that हमारा बच्चा जो तीन साल यहां पड़ता है, will be able to transfer their credit hours and could potentially go to ASU in their fourth year and get their terminal degree from ASU instead of NIT. To ensure कि वह credit hour transfer हो सके और वह उसे accept कर लें, ASU has to ensure कि जो यहां पर what is being taught meets their standard because that's only when the transfer can happen. So, with three plus one है for an undergraduate or four plus one है, they do an undergrad here and then they go for a one year masters at ASU. Either way, ASU got to ensure कि जो आपका बच्चा आ रहा है जिसे वह four plus one में भी guaranteed masters का admission दे रहा है NIT के बाद, उसकी जो qualification है वह standard को meet कर रही है कि वह ASU को acceptable है. So therefore they are very much their academic team, you know, is part of the governance structure live interacting with faculty and team here to develop and guide the course development process. अब उसमें होता universities में यह है आप you would know जो faculty members होते हैं they they they want flexibility in how they design the courses that they teach तो वह flexibility तो एक faculty member के पास होती है but the boundaries and the content that's taught in that is then those the entire skeleton of that is then dictated by ASU with the advantage to the faculty कि उनकी सारी resource base, all of that is made available. It's much easier for a faculty member जो उसमें flexibility भी चाहें and, you know, which is a which is an academic right that I very much, you know, stand behind. So, ASU allows that to happen but within the guardrails of what they- जो credit transfer को ensure किसके. So, so, so, so that's, that's that. To वह 100% they are, is what powered by ASUSG. A quick thought on this. जो आपका three plus one program again for people who don't know, what is, what's that program program? So, तो three plus one optionality या three plus देखिए आपका American undergraduate system चार साल का undergrad है. So, चार साल के undergrad में जो पहले तीन साल हैं अगर वह बच्चा NIT में पढ़ रहा है, so they could do their as an American parlance freshman year, sophomore year, junior year, NIT में कर रहा है और फिर वह अपने senior year के लिए which is the last year, अपने graduating year के लिए the student could transfer to ASU in The US, could go there और उनके तीन साल के यहां के जितना उन्होंने courses लिए हैं, वह credit hours transfer हो जाएंगे to ASU. ASU हमारे बच्चे को, NIT के बच्चे को discount भी देगा on the fees जो यहां से बचा जा रहा है हमारे से three plus one program में और फिर आखिरी साल वह अपना ASU में पढ़कर America में the final degree that they get, it could be the, it will be the ASU degree if they choose to pursue that. उसमें fee difference है so you know ASU has a different fee तो जब बच्चा वहां जाकर पढ़ेगा तो you know it's in it's in वह फिर dollars में है it's a different figure versus what it's here but वह option हमारे बच्चों के पास है. तो all of that to say कि वह जो transferability of for this to be effective, it requires कि ASU हमारे credit hours को accept कर ले which doesn't happen easily, right? Like आप भाई Pakistan हां, unions क्यों पढ़ रहे
that makes sense. मुझे इसमें यह भी बताइएगा कि is this a guaranteed transfer
for three plus one and four plus one? जी, तो बच्चों के लिए who meet a certain academic performance criterion है, वह performance criterion तो उनके लिए guaranteed transfer है. उसमें जो बच्चे, so the transfer is guaranteed but I like to clarify क्योंकि बच्चों का अगला सवाल होता है कि कल visa भी guaranteed है, Visa is not part of because you know, that's the right fair thing to say. Visa is not part of any universities, you know. Of course. वह वह तो एक independent government है but yes, does it help that you're already in an ASU partnership university going to a guaranteed admission transfer to one of the largest public sector universities in The US? Yes, of course. So does it increase the chances of visa? Yes. Does it guarantee a visa? No. Of course not और वह there is a entirely different वह government policy
है, you know, क्या चल रहा है? Policy क्या चल रही है? उसके ऊपर बहुत dependent भी है. But just tying to this particular question, जब वह बच्चा let's say चौथे साल में graduate करता है ASU से, with they graduate with an ASU degree. Yes. Yes, they graduate with an ASU degree.
जब वह America चला जाता है, they graduate with an ASU degree, not an NIT degree. They graduate with an ASU degree. Interesting
and so do they एक average बच्चा जो करने जाएगा वहां पर, चार साल actually लगाएगा वहां पर और वहां पर graduate करेगा तो उसको I think दो साल का या एक साल का वह OPT मिलता है जिस पर वह job ढूंढता है और फिर eventually अगर उसको, h one b sponsor कर देगा कोई company तो eventually आगे अपना career चला लेता है, right? Masters के case में again very similar. Mostly वही होता है कि masters वाले जो ज़रा higher quality वाले बच्चे होते हैं वह फिर potentially employers green cards भी apply करते थे अगर वह ऐसी industries में. What I'm trying to understand is कि एक आपके ना जिस तरह यह UK में भी इस तरह के programs हैं, UK का जो जो एक slide जाहिर है Pakistan में जब लोग आकर higher ed को देख रहे होते हैं, particularly private sector के अंदर there's a price point जिसमें एक बड़ा particular type का बच्चा आ रहा होता है. वह जब बाहर देख रहा है तो वह यह देख रहा है कि यार मुझे global opportunities में जाकर काम करना है, मुझे global companies में जाकर काम करना है, मुझे अगर वह वाली quality की education मिली. पाकिस्तानियों के लिए unfortunately हमारे policy का मसला है, जो भी मसला है, हमारे पास वह pathways उस तरह से exist नहीं करते. जिस तरह से let's say India में exist करते हैं, वहां पर पूरी फौज जाती है. China ने पढ़े से पहले इस तरह से किया. क्या वह बच्चा उसी तरीके से consider once he's there, once he's gotten the visa, now he's just as any other student who's graduating from ASU and now he's he has The US job market. The job would have lead led to a network. The network would have led eventually, potentially led me to कि भाई मैं relocate या मेरा, you know, process paperwork भी process हो जाता है. Compare this to The UK for example. A lot of kids do UK degrees या वह उनको बताइए जी convocation के लिए वहां चले जाएंगे, या आखिरी साल चले जाएंगे. But The UK is in a lot of ways वह as a as a as a country भी वह education को as a as a export use कर रहा है, right? So अब वह बहुत ज़्यादा tie up tie up करना शुरू गया वह कह रहे कि जी आओ पढ़ो और निकलो because हमारी economy में jobs ही नहीं है. So compared to that, what is there like transfer
में is this an exclusive category आओ पढ़ो वापस चले जाओगे या are they now students of the ASU just as any other? No, they are students just as any other. So they they graduate with an ASU degree and the whole point of doing that would be कि, you know, I want to get into The US job market, North America job market. They graduate with an ASU degree. They are now graduates of ASU. They are not graduates of NIT as I said. क्योंकि हमारे credit hours transfer हो गए हैं उनके पास. तो वह ASU के graduates हैं and they have the entire US market to work in and so, you know, if if then they find a job then they stay there. It's it's very much like that. Okay. So, now coming to the second part of the question कि जी जो global इनका
infrastructure है, जो global universities का talent है, जो experience है, how much of that is open to you? And, you know, are there potential partnerships? ठीक है, ASU है, US है, but दुनिया है. Right? So, पाकिस्तानी talent का एक बहुत बड़ा मसला यह भी है. It's not just कि भाई किताब क्या मिल गई और क्या आपको सिखा दिया. Exposure actually, in my opinion, real talent comes out of exposure. Does not come out of कि आपने किताब क्या पढ़ लिया, यह video कौन सी देखी? उसमें अगर आप हैं for some event in a partner university and so on and so forth. जी, so absolutely मज़ामिल. So, you know, that
being part of the Santana network is and you know, we're there on the on as part of their network now, is another key advantage, for our children, मतलब Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt. Abi, they're considering, they're they've signed an MOU with government of Saudi Arabia to set up American University of Riyadh, तो आपका एक बड़ा strong Middle East connection बनता है यहां से given how much Saudi is investing in AI as well. तो all of that network, those job market connections, the ability to do, as you rightly said, you know, joint conferences, collaborations. All of that is now a luxury, that we have, that our students will have. It's a massive advantage I think बच्चों को वह exposure और हमने as NIT भी उससे बहुत benefit किया है at an institutional level क्योंकि in designing NIT, ASU has brought to us those learnings saying कि देखो भाई Egypt में यह हो रहा था, हमें यह challenge आया था. देखो भाई Spain में this is what we ran into. Europe में this is what we're seeing in this particular country, etcetera, etcetera. Right? So all of that learning from the large team that they have क्या चाहे courses को design कैसे किया जाए? अच्छा यहां पर courses को tweak कैसे किया जाए, right? क्योंकि आपके एक अपने courses हैं ASU के एक अपने local market की needs को meet करना है, एक अपने HC की requirements को meet करना है, so you have there is a bit of triangulation that you have to do, वह कैसे किया जाए? So given that they've done that and they're able to customize and tailor fit a little bit to the domestic audience and market, so we as an institution have benefited from it and our students will have that opportunity then beyond ASU itself in The US to benefit from those that exposure. That makes sense.
AI वाले part पर आते हैं. मेरे लिए सबसे ज़्यादा interesting part है आजकल. मैं बहुत ज़्यादा उसके बारे में पढ़ भी रहा हूं, सोच भी रहा हूं. Quick thoughts मैं उसके बारे में, start में देना चाहूंगा. The way that I see it, it's जो आपका पिछले सौ साल का education system develop हुआ हुआ है, वह develop हुआ था for the fourth industry revolution जहां पर आपको agriculture से 80% population agriculture में थी. वहां से आपने उठाकर उनको cities में लेकर आना था और factoryओं में काम करवाना था. Factoryएं eventually, you know, businesses corporatize हुए और फिर eventually आपका वह corporate sectors में लोग जाना शुरू हो गए. But principles same थे कि यार बच्चे की critical thinking को kill करो और उसको make sure करो कि वो एक एक same repeated task again and again and again and again कर सके. And so, जो आपकी mass population थी वो आप largely factory workers बना रहे थे. उसकी जैसी भी evolution हो गई modern day के अंदर वो DNA वही था, right? Now you're about to enter the fifth industrial revolution जिसके अंदर आप यह कह रहे हैं कि यार जितना भी redundant task है ना वह automate कर दो और उसमें चाहे वह you know factory automation हो आपकी और जो कि Pakistan में अभी तो हम जो हम पच्चीस लाख out of school की बात कर रहे हैं और हम उनको कहते हैं कि यार हम उनको factoryओं में डाल देंगे और हम t shirtएं बना देंगे और यह कर देंगे. मेरे हिसाब से यह सब खत्म हो जाएगा. अगले दस साल के अंदर the the global economy and Pakistan's economy is going to look fundamentally different because what we expect and जो हमारे इस वक़्त even जो high performing areas हैं ना वह generally low value वाले हैं. वह जो दुनिया को उसकी requirement बिल्कुल ख़त्म हो चुकी होगी and in fact आज जब हम low cost में compete भी कर रहे हैं तो the way that I see it manufacturing के अंदर भी आपके पास robots आ चुके होंगे जो कि चौबीस घंटे काम कर रहे हैं उनकी कोई सिकलीव नहीं है and they'll be able to compete on price point with the, you know, the third world low quality talent And so there will not be any requirement for that talent anymore. On the contrary, आपके पास actually बहुत ज़्यादा demand बढ़ेगी. जो doomers हैं कि भाई जब तो job यहां खत्म हो जाएंगे. I don't believe that. Agriculture पूरी दुनिया कर रही थी एक ज़माने में. Agriculture खत्म हुआ तो industry और बहुत सारी नई innovation आई. People found, you know, new ways to to create value. उस context के अंदर the new value that I'm hearing, you know, even in The US and elsewhere as well is critical thinking is is is actually, you know, creativity. It's it's a lot of कि भाई redundancy से हटकर multiple domains को मिलाया जाए और उससे देखा जाए कि क्या नई चीज़ potentially निकाली जा सकती है and that requires a complete reimagination of how you approach education in my opinion and that's not just targeted towards you as a university but overall the industry globally, right? And and there are a lot of people I'm I'm मैं कोई magical बात नहीं कर रहा हूं. यह बहुत सारे बड़े बड़े जो लोग इस sector को देखते हैं, इसमें काम करते हैं. वह यह बातें कर रहे हैं कि we have to reimagine how we do all of this. जब हम education system Pakistan की बात करते हैं compared to, let's say, The US, एक चीज़ मैं यह देखता हूं मेरे जितने दोस्त हो US से graduate किए. उनके पास यह opportunity थी कि वह university में गए. उनके पास एक बड़ा सब यहां की universities बड़ी बड़ी होती हैं. You know, there's a lot of options that you have. आप वह different courses लेते रहते हैं और फिर eventually आप अपना major बनाते हैं, right? Rather than Pakistan में क्या होता था? क्या आपके पास वह चालीस courses हैं, जितने भी courses हैं वह defined हैं. Start में defined हैं. अब आपने आपको दूसरे semester में समझ आ गई कि भाई यह तो मेरे मतलब की चीज़ ही नहीं है. लेकिन अब आपने उसको complete करना है because you have committed and even a bigger problem was कि जी आप आजकल की दुनिया में जब चीज़ें इतना rapidly change कर रही हैं, आपने जब commit किया है versus चार साल बाद जो दुनिया होगी उसमें बहुत ज़्यादा फ़र्क़ है, right? And so there's not a lot of opportunity. Content तो एक अलग बात है ना कि content क्या modern है? क्या AI पढ़ाई जा रही है? क्या future की future proofing हो रही है? But even in terms of the structure, you need to empower your student. हमारा जो Pakistan का system है जो कि again बहुत सारी developing world का system है वह एक photocopy machine की तरह था historically. कि यार this thing this model works. जो India नहीं किया ना यार. BPO works चलो यार photocopy की तरह BPO वाले बनाओ. चलो जी एक IT का engineer works तो बहुत सारे वह बना दो and it works for that time. I think the next decade and the next few decades will be fundamentally different in that context and you'll you'll require a pool of students who are all individually gifted in a lot of different areas. They might not even feel the same and so उस context के अंदर and यह wider है. I understand it's an evolving thing. It's not, you know, it's something that everybody is sort of exploring right now. But what are your thoughts in that evolutionary change that the education sector might see and how do you think you are preparing for it?
सुमित सुमित, also my, one of my favorite topics जिस तरह आप कह रहे थे और जैसे you referred to in the beginning, you know, in the Charles Dickensky, The Tale of Two Cities, he begins with saying it was the best of times and it was the worst of times, right? And and and that's what it is for for both students and higher education and education institutions. अब education institutions में क्योंकि inertia traditionally बहुत ज़्यादा होता है and this is across. I have worked with some of the top tier K-twelve schools in New York. उनमें हम एक ज़माने में एक innovative program entrepreneurship का introduce कराना चाह रहे थे through a company that I had invested in. You you you saw the same level of inertia that you'll expect from any other school in any other part of the world, right, where school administration and management would dig their heels in the ground and say कि पचास साल, सौ साल से यही हो रहा है और यही होता रहेगा, right? And so while there would be time for a piano, for a piano or a guitar lesson, entrepreneurship or critical thinking would be something that, you know, like it's somehow it it'll be hard to fit into, the normal, school structure. So it is it is a very interesting time but and I particularly and I deliberately use the word interesting and not daunting or discouraging क्योंकि यह वह मौका है to actually set the foundation for what is to come. And when I say what is to come, let me just break, the role of education. So it's a little bit of a stepping back and one minute of sounding like a philosopher. But जो दो बड़े core components हैं, जो आप चाहते हैं आपका बच्चा graduate करे with, when I think of कि अच्छा, 2025 में अपना पहला batch लिया, 2029 में आपका बच्चा graduate किया. I don't know what 2029 looks like. If anybody knows, well, they'll they'll, you know, that's worth paying a trillion dollars to, right? I can't anticipate कि क्या होगा. तो जब uncertainty में what's the best response that you can have, right? That's the if you think about it in a structured way, the best that one can do is to say कि given what I know today, what decisions do I make today given that I'm going into a highly uncertain, unpredictable world? From an education institution perspective, as a student and as an educationist, what do I do? Education- now to the sounding philosopher part. I think there are two components that you want to look at when you are preparing your graduates. One is the easier part to understand, which is content curriculum The other is the mindset, or the thinking lens - and mindset is the word, actually, let me not dilute that - to the mindset that you instill or are able to develop in your students, in your children, in your kids. And I'll start with the mindset piece because content piece we have talked about it enough. That's obvious enough कि content क्या है? वह जो mindset है, that mindset जैसे आपने कहा, जो education system historically रहा है, which is, you know, like where schools were essentially, you know, weapons of mass destruction कि आपने लोगों को इस तमाई तौर पर किस तरीके से उनके mindset को तबाह करना है है या factory में मुझे यह assembly line पर खड़े होकर यह चार screws fit करने हैं and I have to just do that over and over again. उस context से जब मैं ऐसे context में आता हूं जहां uncertainty is an integral part of everyday life of my professional life. It will be an integral part of my professional life everyday और बनती जा रही है. What is the mindset that you want your children to graduate with? And that mindset can have either a set of positive features or it can have a set of negative features. It's very binary. Think that split and somewhat an obvious split. The set of winning features are growth mindset है कि मुझे learn करना है, मैं हमेशा learning और unlearning के mode में रहूंगा, मुझे सीखना भी होगा और कुछ unlearn भी करना होगा as I learn new things. So I am on a continuous mission to disrupt myself is a mindset that we will need to develop as an institution and that everybody would need to have to say कि यह मैं नहीं हूं कि अब मैं painter हूं और वह मेरी identity का हिसा है. I can have my professional identity might not be that clearly defined. It might be linked to these set of characteristics instead कि look, I have a growth mindset. I'm able to learn and unlearn new skills and I'm able to take up new challenges and able to define my role in those- in that evolving context क्योंकि as they are putting it right, everything that can be measured will be automated or will be AI'd if you like. जहां judgement require होगी अभी तक, you know, with some of the predictions that you read some experts saying, Things that would require subjectivity, some subjective perspective are things where people would need to become sharper in because everything that can be quantified, measured, pattern recognition है, pattern development है, can be mass data keeper, can be put into AIML kind of engine. तो उस case में जो mindset development है that becomes if it hasn't been and it hasn't been a focus for any- for not any, so let me not do a blanket statement but for at least the overwhelming majority of institutions. It hasn't been both at K-twelve level or at the higher IED level, has been a feature of the education system. This has been good to have, this has been great develop करना है और resilience आनी है. These words are all there but they are part of TED Talks, They are part of nice to have conversations. They have not been taken in by the education industry and put into the curriculum and made part of an education philosophy कि इस course का purpose mindset develop करना है. You see that, right? Because that's considered a waste of time. This is something that you kind of read a book on and you're supposed to have developed a mindset, right? So, therefore I think the uncertainty is real. उस uncertainty में the best that we can do, we can have, we can have two options. We can have an option of कि, you know, we don't know where the world is going so let's just sit down and go into a cave. That's one option. And the second option is कि जीना है, like, have still have a desire to be a, as I put it in accounting, a going concern. I want to I want to continue living. उस case में what do I do? I prepare for it and how do I prepare for it? I prepare for it by making sure कि मेरा वह mindset है as a student and as an educational institution I am inculcating in a structured way that mindset in children both in classroom, outside classroom and recreating those experiential learning moments whether that is I don't want I I I don't want to get into the details of कैसा होगा? There are multiple ways that can happen लेकिन वह अगर top agenda वन जाएगा आपका and that's the difference that you see across you know quick so if you allow me I'll just do a one minute quick double click on that. They did a study in The US at some point. Pardon me because I forget the name of the experiment. But they did this study, a control group and then they were testing a particular, very particular thing that they wanted to test on. वह यह था कि feedback का बच्चों के ऊपर क्या impact होता है, right? And so English के test आए and so there are control group and another group और उन्होंने half half of the जो वह cohort था, उसके end में teacher ने otherwise standard feedback she just added one extra line and that line was I believe in you, I think you can do better and that was the only additional differentiator between the feedback that was given to the lines. Lo and behold, many many years later - so longitudinal study - they've been following that cohort over the years - many many years later, the group that had been given that additional line did significantly better in academics and grades than the group that had not been given that additional line where the teacher had shown belief. मैं आपको mindset की बात कर रहा हूं. Teacher had shown belief कि I know you can do better, right? And so it was not some complicated algorithm that was designed to develop a mindset. It was how the teacher showed up in a class and said, Look, I believe you can go through this or you can improve. And the way that changed the mindset, capacity change नहीं हुई, it's a random group. You've done, you know, you've designed that experiment to be, you know, the right with the right fidelity, right? तो उसमें और कोई bias नहीं है but that one line made that much of a difference. So all of that to say कि the the the deliberate intention from an educational perspective, आज from a public policy perspective, whoever whoever is concerned about this and has is able to make an impact here, I think today it's a lot about that mindset. वह skill, वह capacity, वह सब कुछ तो होना ही है. Those are the obvious ones that you have to do and you have to, वह catch up game तो होती रहेगी. But to me that's a, that's a massive massive
agenda for us at least. Makes sense. Makes sense and, you know, since you're talking about education philosophy, मैं top downy, I want to understand. I don't want the nitty gritties of exactly how but दो major areas अगर मैं आपके ऊपर पेंकू, I want your thinking hat on. पहला तो जो मैंने already थोड़ी देर पहले बोला था कि एक interdisciplinary nature of, you know, multiple different industries कह लें, problem statements कह लें, जो कि आप convergence में आऐंगे और वहां से नई value generate हो, right? So, you don't need a a a hardcore software developer but you might require a a person who understands the the the medical industry and understands how technology can be used to solve problems for it. And so that person with that domain knowledge can then leverage AI to create solutions for that, right? So, lot of people are saying कि भाई हमें hardcore coder नहीं चाहिए. अब हमें domain knowledge expert चाहिए जो कि जाकर problem solving कर सके. अच्छा, problem solving in itself मैं computer science कहूं आप लोग भी जा रहे you have a it's called the National Institute of Technology. I saw the website. A lot of these courses are technology focused and obviously the degrees that will be principally there will be computer science and AI and you know क्या cyber security and data science Data science, yeah. But just having those degrees कि यार यह यह basic यह है और यह इस तरह से किया जाता है, I feel like will not cut it in the future, right? You need to give kids the ability और the the वह आपको वहां पर nurture करना पड़ेगा. जितना computer science के अंदर हमारे मैं fast का था. Fast was a hardcore engineer's university. उनको तो वह था ही नहीं. मैं थोड़ा artist type था तो, you know, there was like एक loser आ गया हालांकि आप art को भी nurture कर सकते थे. उसकी पूरी एक side field निकल आई UI UX वाली जो कि, you know, consumer behavior को समझती थी और सारा psychology उसके द्वारा लेकर आ सकते थे या दस चीज़ें लेकर आ सकते थे. Right? And so, that would have opened a whole new dimension for your students to walk into. And again, like I said कि जब मैं academics, hardcore academics, Pakistan के जो पुराने academics हैं उनसे बात करता उनको समझ नहीं आ रही. वह अभी भी उसी पर ही है कि नहीं नहीं यार यह ऐसे होता है पत्थर पर लकीर तो यह ऐसे ही आपने उसको आगे लेकर जाना है. And so I am curious first of all कि how do you encourage the the domain expertise or the interdisciplinary understanding of of the world and tie that down to problem solving as well if if you may. तो पहला तो आप मुझे इसका बता दें and then I'll ask you for the second one. जी.
Mister Mister, अगर आप, you know, to to corroborate what you were saying, right? If you look at the profiles of Nobel laureates, it'll be you'll find it interesting to see que जितने scientists हैं Nobel laureates, they're also the ones who actually went on to get Nobel prizes were also had a very strong side hobby of either being a musician, or an artist or a painter. And they're Nobel laureates, right, and and physicists and chemists and and and etcetera. जो एक चीज़ बहुत underappreciated रही है particularly in Pakistan and again I am fully agreeing with you. I think lessen The US because जो America में liberal arts four years undergraduate program का एक vision है जहां एक बच्चा पहले दो साल में and at NIT it's the same story. वह अगर engineering कर रहा है तो पहले दो साल में वह इतनी ज़्यादा engineering नहीं पढ़ रहा. पहली दो साल में वह math भी पढ़ रहा है, वह social sciences भी पढ़ रहा है, वह humanities भी देख रहा है, right? So there is a wider pyramid that gets developed before. Unlike the British education system where आपने A level से ही you've kind of, you know, started to Narrowed or no? Narrowed, narrowed. I thought, oh, फिर आप एक उसमें घुसे and then you kind of three years later you've graduated. बहुत underappreciated. Right here, the word that's used kind of in the industry that I like is range. And I think that range in experiences and exposures is going to become it's already a massive asset. There's a book that I recommend to everybody who's listening called The Range. That is a great book on the topic as well. But is a massive going to become a massive asset क्योंकि अब आप जो industry में देखते हैं ना a lot of great new businesses you know what to talk about जब अपने organizational structuring या model की बात करते हैं they talk about what is called a T and what is a T? It's a combination of somebody who has a range and somebody who is a deep expert, an SME, a subject matter expert, right? और इन दोनों का combination is what creates a very powerful combo क्योंकि एक वह जो range का perspective होता है जिसमें जैसे आप कह रहे हैं you know somebody you know again somewhat of a cliched example but Steve Jobs ने had with learning font design at university and that led to why Apple came up with जो documents में वह करते हैं right and so the ability to draw from a wide set of experiences, academic or professional and exposures to inform a particular problem at hand is a massive-massive key focus that you want your kids to develop. इसीलिए I think what's critical in a university experience is कि एक curriculum में एक content के नदी में जब सारे बहरे होते हैं and you know, you're going through your midterms and final exams and आप उस एक process में जा रहे हैं और आप में learning objectives meet करने हैं, उसको outside of classroom experiences से आप कैसे combine करते हैं? For instance, let me give you a very practical example of actually of how do you attract and get the top talent in the world to come in and be virtual speakers at your university, right? How do you get people who have done amazing things to come share their experiences? How do you let people today step into the worlds of other people and see कि across industries क्या हो रहा है? That I think is a is yes, absolutely. It's going to be very critical. Range develop करना, अपने lens के beyond देखना and that's why, you know, I had started right in the outset of the conversation in my quick bio. Said, I don't come from the education sector which I think is an advantage because it allows me to allows us both आयान शाहज़ेब because he doesn't come from a hardcore, you know, academic education sector. So we're not in it to say कि ऐसा ही होता है. You know that sentence when you get into a new job and they say कि this is how it's done here, my child, you know, this is so when we we were told, we were told by a lot of people कि ऐसा ही होता है, this is how it's done. And, you know, I let me actually tell you a quick quick anecdote on that कि Doug Becker who is the founder of Santana, जो ASU की यह global platform company है through which ASU is going global, set up the largest higher education company in the world who's our partner called Loriette and not an academic, right? Not from academia. And so for somebody who's not from academia to set up the largest higher education company in the world, owning some 70 universities across the globe and transforming those academic institutions can only happen when someone with a range comes in from a fresh perspective.
तो yeah, absolutely sir. Makes sense और इसके ऊपर अगर मैं अपने दो sense दे सकूं. आपने जो range वाली बात की ना वह बड़ी interesting है. Again, बहुत सारे लोग मुझे message करते हैं. You know, they are trying to figure out कि भाई, what's the right career choice? क्या वह? हमेशा सवाल यह आते हैं कि जी किस career में scope है और किस degree में scope है, right? And so, मुझे कभी भी इस सवाल का कि समझ नहीं आई. पहली बात तो मतलब मैंने मेरा जो pathway रहा है वह scope से बड़ा बरक्श रहा Alhamdulillah it has worked out. But even more than that मैंने एक एक quote पढ़ा था. एक बड़ी मशहूर comic है Dilbert के नाम से. Business comic है. पूरी दुनिया में you know nineteen eighties में शुरू हुई. Eventually छब्बीस सौ अखबारात में पूरी दुनिया में शाया हुई. 65 plus countries के नाम. It's a very very famous. For people who don't know, you can go and Google it Dilbert के नाम से. अच्छा, उसका जो cartoonist, the the gentleman who started that comics, he's written a bunch of books and उनकी एक, you know, इसी तरह की जो books हैं, इसमें a lot of people, like thousands of people say कि भाई आपने हमारी ज़िंदगी बदल दी. उसमें जो एक quote है, वह again, a lot of people hold it very close to their heart. मेरे लिए भी वह बड़ी useful रही है. उसमें भाई यह बात करते हैं वह कहते हैं कि यार मैं you know एक office में desk job कर रहा था और मैं scribbles करता था और मुझे jokes मारने का बहुत शौक था. ना तो मैं दुनिया का best comedian था, far from it. मैं एक बहुत average comedian था. Comedian भी क्या था? मैं तो घर में मसरा था office में बैठकर jokes मारता था और मुझे doodling करने का शौक था कि मैं उसमें बहुत मुश्किल save वह करता और अगर मैं jokes करके comedian full time वन जाता तब भी मैं you know I would be competing with people who are doing this full time. They're specialists of this. But when I created office based comics that were funny, I was the only person in the world doing it and so automatically मेरे लिए ना पूरा रास्ता खुल गया कि यार मैं जो भी बनाऊंगा वह अच्छा ही लगेगा because you know the bar is solo. So it was and that really opened up my mind कि यार बजाय इसके के उस पटरी पर चलो जिस पर सब चल रहे और उस पर एक पूरा pathway है. There is such a huge risk factor to it. अब तो खैर AI की दुनिया में वैसे ही वह crumble हो रहा है. But I've lived my life through it and and that's really helped me, right? कि आप अपनी niche बनाते जाते हो through multiple different things and so you're able to stand out much more easily because you have the the the range जिसके अंदर शायद आपके आपसे लोग compete ना कर सकें. You might not be the expert of one domain, but when you combine that together, success seemingly becomes much easier. जो मेरा सवाल था उसका दूसरा एक मैंने आपसे कहा था कि dimension for the for the way that you are driving the university in terms of your philosophy. Pakistan में जाहिर start में मैंने conversation का बोला कि भाई at the end of the day भी मेरा focus हमेशा economy पे रहता है, फ़लसफा अपनी जगह लेकिन you know we want actual outcomes. We want आपने खुद भी बोला कि भाई education से career में develop होना है और उसने eventually economic outcome generate करना है. उसमें ज़ाहिर है कि number one आप ही technology की बात कर रहे हैं, technology के अंदर principally services होती है और services के अंदर आपके पास Pakistan के अंदर. ज़ाहिर है उससे export की बड़ा potential भी है और बड़ा claim भी किया जाता है. जब मैंने बहुत सारे services की companies के लोगों से बात की, IT services की, exporter से, even Pakistan से बाहर लोगों से बात की, तो जो number one reason honestly मुझे पाक्स्तानियों के बारे में मिला ना, वह यह नहीं मिला कि उनकी skill set का मसला है. Far from it actually, people set पाक्स्तानीs have some of the best skills that they have found. The number one problem that I have found is कि उनकी work ethic का मसला है, उनके discipline का मसला है, उनकी globalization of thought का मसला है, उनकी communication का मसला है, उनकी so, you know, I mean, wide range of they're just not a good worker. They they know what they have to do but they're just not a good worker, right? And I really thought about it. मैं जब बाहर लोगों से बात कर रहा था जो पाकिस्तानी बाहर गए थे उन्होंने कहा यार पाकिस्तानी talent मैं मैं बड़ा passionate हूं. मैं कहता हूं यार हो सकता है. इतना बच्चा आ रहा है उसको आपने you know it's a it's a very basic problem. Shift यह आया कि आपका पिछले बीस साल के अंदर for, I don't know, real estate reasons or whatever Punjab ने uplift, Punjab पूरा overall uplift हुआ. Punjab is like 50% of your population, right? So now when you say Pakistan, a lot of पंजाबी show up and people from Punjab show up और वह जो आपके लोग हैं जब वह आपको एक एक एक set पर नज़र आ रहे हैं सौ में से आपको साठ सत्तर लोग Punjab के नज़र आ रहे हैं तो आपने फिर यह भी देखना है आपने फिर उनको समझना है ना कि वह कहां से आ रहे हैं उनका background क्या है? Automatically यह चीज़ें थी जो कि उस Punjab की mass market के पास नहीं थी. And so वहां पर idea लाया जो so जिसको आप कह लें soft skill education कह लें, leadership training कह लें, x y z कह लें जो कि हम historically हम बहुत, you know, हमने कभी consider ही नहीं किया ना. हमने कहा यार ठीक है क्योंकि जो top tier universities थी, जो agendas drive कर रही होती थी, उनके पास top tier cream आ रही होती थी, वह सारे के सारे पहले से बने बनाए आते थे. अब आपने conversation के start में बात की scale की. मैंने भी बात की scale की कि भाई ढाई लाख, तीन लाख, चार लाख बच्चे को हमने कितना system में लेकर आना है. अब वह चार लाख बच्चा जो है वह उसमें से mostly first generation university गोर होगा और mostly first generation corporate worker होगा या services worker होगा उस तरह का, उस dynamic का. उस बच्चे की ग़लती नहीं है कि अगर वह cut corners कर रहा है, अगर वह short wins की तरफ़ जा रहा है, वह freelancing की पचास dollar के gig से बड़ा excite हो रहा है क्योंकि, you know, वह है. उसको पता ही नहीं कि career बनाना क्या होता है? उसको पता ही नहीं है कि यार, you know, मैं ऐसा ऐसा skill building करके long term में compounding growth या compounding returns के साथ. यह बड़ी thoughts हैं, फ़ल सफा है. And so, I'm curious कि how do you expect and I know it's it's a wicked problem. It's not an easy solution कि मैं आपसे कहूं आप कौन सा ऐसा course डालेंगे जिससे वह हो जाएगा? But which is why I said it's a philosophical problem, right? You you have to somewhere plant a seed so that the generation then becomes more globalized, if I may use that cliche term as well, in the way that they work, in the way that they approach work, in the way that they, you know, overall drive their ethics and so on and so forth. What would your thoughts be around that?
वैमित, all excellent points, right? Really-really enjoying the conversation. It goes back in my view here to when I was talking about mindset now because work ethic to me, yes, it comes before work and it is part of the mindset that someone shows up with at a workplace. यह बिल्कुल valid बात है कि look, there there differences in how first generation university में जा रहा है कि, you know, seen parents go to a university and work at a corporate, work in a corporate context and वह उधर से training हम भाई उसने, बच्चे ने already कर लिए. लेकिन I think अगर this is exactly where I think education institutions have failed because जहां education और मैं particularly Pakistan की बात कर रहा without kind of making it too generic. हमारे यहां क्योंकि आप लोहौर की example ले लें, बच्चे Punjab की example ले लें, गांवों से लोग आते हैं, बच्चे आते हैं, universities में आते हैं, छोटे शहरों से आते हैं, second, third tier city से आते हैं. वह यहां आकर hostels में रहते हैं, universities आते हैं. This all their first time. They are the first generation who's taken this leap. एक local migration हुई है. They've come in, they've come into a large metropolis. विहाड़ी, मैलसी, बुरेवाला, कहीं और से लाकर, रहीम यार खान से आकर वह बैठे हैं. लोहौर में रह रहे हैं. Itself is a learning experience for them और फिर यहां पर वह एक university के through गुज़रते हैं. The job of the higher education institution, as I had said earlier, is to get that mindset right and to have the campus to career transition in their KPI. देखिए, education institution जब तक philosophy पर operate करता रहेगा और ownership नहीं लेगा, हमारे यहां one of the key KPI that we want to track is the job placement ratio of our alumni. If we can be, we don't have any claims to make but if we, if that is a single source of truth that we can follow और अगर हम उसको mindset बना के reverse engineering, engineer कर सकें into our campus to say कि if that is what we want the end product to be and you know, I don't like using the word product but if that's what we want the graduating student to be when they hit the job market, That's the mindset that I want them to graduate with. Then I would always as an education institution work backwards and ensure कि वह mindset, वह cultural training, वह soft skill training मैंने बच्चे के उस program में डाली हुई है वरना because you know what's happening right and you're seeing this in China जहां पर there is this talk about the great resignation whereas the Chinese work ethic is well known and, you know, farmers working very hard to educate their children who are then go to work in factories. जो traditional China growth story रही है and now you're seeing the new generation that is going through what you know the great resignation in in in in or the quiet quitting or however you know like to put it, जहां पर the allure of being a TikTok star and being able to make a certain amount of money through social media gigs, etcetera, etcetera is so much कि वह अपनी job से completely they just they are not willing to put in the work जो कि उनकी पिछली generation put in कर रही थी and that's a challenge that the Chinese government is grappling with. You know, do you ensure GDP growth where your labor chooses to step out, right? So, वह एक, एक, there is a global dimension to this I think which is, which, which is there. उसके साथ ही what I also want to juxtapose that to in my perspective as an equally important point, वह यह है कि our understanding of what it means to be productive and to add value will also perhaps need to evolve as corporates and as employers and as job creators across different मतलब large corporates, small corporates, etc. क्योंकि जो आपकी Gen Alpha, Gen Beta, I mean I forget the names now of how many Gen's, you know, what Gen we are in but जो जिस context में वह generation beyond parents, beyond institutions जिस content को देखकर वह बड़ी हो रही है और जिस content को देखकर अब वह market में आ रही है और society में आ रही है and they are, they are, they are growing and they are becoming, they are maturing in that context. उस context में what does it mean to be productive? What does it mean to be of value? What does it mean to create value? Right? और I think there is a, all I mean to say is कि एक single sided compromise नहीं होगा कि बच्चे तुम ही इसी तरह train कर के आओ. मैं तो वही institution रहूंगा जो मैं उन्नीस सौ बीस में था. There is going to be and you are seeing that हमारे parents के ज़माने में. You would, it would be very normal for someone to be at a company for thirty five years and then retire or forty years, right? और अमरीका में भी था, GMC में लगे और पिचालीस साल GMC में ही रहे and this is across the world. Now on average I think the time is four years, five years before a person switches job. Again good for developing the range लेकिन अब आप चार पांच साल में job change कर रहे हैं. There is a because आप एक line में नहीं खड़े हुए. Are very few people that are now in that ladder. एक ज़माने में जब, you know, when I was at HBS, एक ज़माने में HBS general managers produce करता था. I used to be proud of the fact कि आप एक company में घुसेंगे और corporate ladder को climb करेंगे. दो हज़ार दस में nobody wanted to be a general manager or very few people wanted or took on that path of कि मैं corporate को join करूंगा and I'll just have the patience to wait twenty five years to get up, right? तो वह एक systemic context change होगा, लेकिन that not withstanding जो mindset का point है that to me is an is an envelope point because it covers culture, it covers work ethic, it covers how you show up at work, it covers you know, I hear and not to name any university but I hear कि, you know, graduates of that university have an entitlement attitude कि मुझे पहले दिन ही मुझे या तो in charge लगाओ वरना you know, I I am not gonna put in the hard work to actually learn the, learn my way up. वो सब चीज़ें एक बड़ा conscious, deliberate decision है जो और focus area है जो education institutions को लेना है और लेना पड़ेगा because otherwise वह campus to career transition के लिए देखिए आप किसी बच्चे को job guarantee नहीं कर सकते लेकिन आप बच्चे को तैयार कर सकते हैं to the maximum level that they can so that your बच्चा when they are graduating are not saying, 'I don't know how to swim. You want them to be able to say, 'I know how to navigate this problem. This is how I would navigate it' and structured
तरीके say, this is how I'm going to go through it. That makes sense. We're at the one hour thirty minute mark. I'm going to sort of wrap this up as well. I'm going to ask you one last question. Generally, I ask all of my guests. ज़हर, आप I mean, Harvard से आपने graduate किया. You you I think you were outside of Pakistan for quite a while before you actually decided to come back. हां जी. And now you're investing big into Pakistan and Pakistan's future. Investment bankers बड़े interesting होते हैं. Interest मैंने भी word interesting use किया है. But मुझे हमेशा बड़े interesting लगे because their, yes, their jobs are numbers and finance and a lot of that. But in a lot of ways, you know, problem solving and parsightedness के अंदर ना investment bankers मैंने सबसे best देखे हैं कि वह घुस जाते एक problem के अंदर और वह सारा data देखने के बाद वह पूरी चीज़ को समझकर उसके हिसाब से extrapolation करके अपने आप को place करते कि यार हमने किस तरफ़ किस direction में जाना है. ज़ाहिर उसमें probability of success है, it is always there but. So they are generally better at answering this question. But I want to understand, you know, you decided to come back, you decided to double down on this, you decided to invest in Pakistan when like you mentioned, we're always in a नाज़ुक mode. There's always something bad potentially happening. एक तरफ़ आपको यह भी बताया जाता है कि दो हज़ार पिस्तर के अंदर Pakistan will be the top 20 economies of the world and you know, one of the biggest consumer markets in the world and so on and so forth. And that makes a lot of sense as well. If you look at the entire world, problems are right now everywhere. Every everything is growing up and, you know, they maybe we just need some patience and things will iron themselves out. Maybe not because of us, but because of the way the world is going. But then उस पर यह भी मसला आता है कि भाई, you know, लोग आते हैं, आकर कहते हैं youth population this and that, but हम कर क्या रहे हैं उसके लिए, right? And so I want to know without any ifs कि यार if government does this and if people do this, but I want just your extrapolation of based on what you see now, based on what you've experienced throughout your life. How do you see Pakistan of twenty fifty, twenty five years from now? Just, just an image, a glimpse of what that Pakistan looks like to you.
So one of the hardest questions. So what we have in our favor is the numbers, as everyone says. And what we have against us is the numbers, the two fifty that we are million, that odd million that we are right now and the pace at which we are growing. तो एक law of large numbers तो play करेगा कि if you just and that's across Asia, that's Africa. Africa is the next continent and where we are in Asia हमारे region को देख लें, you know, we're almost sitting at if you, you know, combine our region together, we're almost sitting at quarter of the population of the world. दो चार billion आराम से वन जाते हैं just, you know, within the radius of a few thousand miles from where we are today, right? Large consumer market, it's definitely there. But what brings optimism and hope and the reason we have done what we have done is कि जो fundamentals है मुझे अमिल in terms of having reached a certain inflection point जिसके बाद एक होता है ना कि at least my perspective is we will build momentum and it will move forward from there and I'll give you some simple anecdotal grandmotherly examples to that I that I tell myself, right? I come from South Of Punjab. जब बचपन में we would travel from Lahore to Maigao, we would go on the GT Road. It would take us six, seven, eight hours. The road would be bumpy as hell. You would have a few of ouch and, you know, different all sounds and सिर्फ़ सर्चत को लगता था. एक कड़े में एकदम घड़ी गिरती थी. When I travel now, it takes three and a half hours. I'm on the motorway for bulk of the journey and then an hour and a half and I'm into my गांव. My children would experience the across Pakistan travelling experience that I have experienced. Now someone might say कि यार यह तो बड़ी छोटी सी. यह क्या बेवकूफाना सी example है? यह तो एक सड़क वन गई तो क्या हुआ? Well, guess what? Infrastructure is one of the biggest enablers of economic growth. अगर infrastructure नहीं होगा तो आप grow नहीं कर पाएंगे. Farm to market roads नहीं होंगे, आपका agriculture नहीं उठा पाएगा. जब आप मेरे गांव में जब मैं छोटा था rural Punjab, south rural South Punjab, बिजली आती थी दो घंटे के लिए दिन में और बिजली नहीं होती थी अट्ठारह घंटे, बीस घंटे, बाइस घंटे, बिजली नहीं होती थी. वह रस्सी से खींचता था एक generator उसके अंदर तेल डाला जाता था. वह फिर थोड़ी देर चल जाता था, फिर बंद हो जाता था. आज everybody is solarized. I have 3G, 4G in my गांव. वहां से बैठकर दुनिया भर में WhatsApp हो रहा होता है. So, do you discount all of that and say कि वह तो बस by accident हो गया, यह तो होना ही था लेकिन हम बिल्कुल खराब हो चुके हैं या अब हम बिल्कुल एक गलत road पर हैं, right? ऐसा नहीं है, that's not this. Overall if one takes steps back and you know silences the background noise, we have been on an upward path both in terms of infrastructure, both in terms of the enabling factors that are there, आपकी digital payments, आपकी you know we have taken leaps that developed markets with existential that with existing infrastructure have not been able to take. वह सब कुछ हुआ है and that has been part of a building momentum that we have been on and by the way not every country has done that, right? You can pick up countries in Africa that if not, अब यह नहीं कह सकते कि just because we have lived through the last thirty years तो सब मुल्कों में यह हो गया है. ऐसा नहीं हुआ है, right? So we have been on an upward path and I believe कि एक point पर आकर एक momentum create हो जाता है. That momentum can take then its own force, can become its own force. I think where we are today in terms of, you know, where we have come as an economy, where we have come in terms of talent. So talent पर again, yes, everybody says Pakistan is great talent. Someone that I really really respect once said to me, so this is not my quote, but said to me कि हां raw material ज़रूर है बहुत ज़्यादा. Talent के लिए थोड़ा you know, you have to go through a process of तराशना पड़ता है then you become a talent. लेकिन raw material बहुत है और वह raw material just like any other raw material in rest of the world को conscious भी है, has great, you know role models locally, young people to look up to, एक vibrance है जो आप feel करते हैं in the society और वह vibrance अब trickle down हो रही है across Pakistan. अब चमच again it sounded like a छोटा होती की कहानी comparison to जब छोटा होता था but when I was really young I can remember कि गांव में काम करने के लिए बहुत labor, खेतों में there is a lot of labor that was available to work in the farms. अब गांव में सबसे बड़ा farming में problem यह है कि labour available नहीं है. क्यों? क्योंकि सारा label शहर में आ चुका है and they're, they've gone into the service. They're doing different things. They've come out of the agriculture sector. Separate issue के agriculture के लिए, what does that mean? तो what that means is you have one of the highest rural urban migrations in the world, right? And that is a testament to your your cities are sprawling, they're growing. What that means in terms of demands and infrastructure, etcetera, एक separate story है. But एक overall society में uplift आ रहा है, एक momentum create हो रहा है. Consumers create हो रहे हैं. अब आपने producers भी create करने हैं. But that momentum is what gives me a lot of hope कि that momentum, you are not a, Pakistan is not a and so therefore luckily we're not a 5,000,000 people country, 4,000,000 people country. We have a significant size economy. हां, we have a very low GDP per capita. There's a long way to go, all of that many, that's the hope that I have that by 2050, we will be in a better place from where we are today. I don't know what that better place would be, लेकिन वह जो वह math में delta होता ना there is going to be a delta and there is going to be a statistically significant delta. We're going to be better.
And do you think that post that delta, change of growth or the change of the the the shift will be faster in terms of growing?
Hopefully, yes, अमित क्योंकि जितना जितना momentum build होता जाता है, होता जाता है, होता जाता है, the hope is that it it becomes quicker, right? You're you're accelerating. So hopefully, क्योंकि उस momentum की force की वजह से hopefully you will also start to, you know, others moving pieces start to fit in और वह jigsaw puzzle की जो different pieces होते हैं, वह जो enabling environment है वह और ज़्यादा enable, ecosystem create होना शुरू हो जाता है if I were to put it simply, right? Because there are lot of individual things that are happening and that are happening good and happening well लेकिन जब वह when they start to speak to each other as different parts of a system और एक उसका ecosystem effect आता है, for instance general I'll give you a quick last example. The whole conversation on entrepreneurship in Pakistan, right? Entrepreneurship अब आज से आज दस साल पहले एकाध दुका incubators थे और you know एक incubation कम everybody was talking about it. You know we eventually got shark tank into Pakistan, right? And I said अच्छा there is a shark tank Urdu Pakistan Shark Tank version, right? And so all of them to me are steps up, right? Because आपका अच्छा पर, you know, you're now it's becoming a viable career that young graduates can do aspire towards, right? I know lots of despite what happened to the VC world and दो हज़ार इक्कीस पाईस का जो भी global VC वह freeze आया that's despite that Pakistan में you so all of that to say कि जिस तरह वह ecosystem mature होता जाता है that creates an add speed to the momentum.
Makes sense. I think a lot of the rails are being built right now and once those rails are built Yes, that's a very good way to put it out. The the trains will be faster. जीहांजेब भाई, I am going to wrap this up. Thank you so much for taking the time out. I am-I am-I am very excited to see where you guys take this university. Congratulations on your launch and good luck on whatever you hope to achieve. I hope कि जो फ़ल्सव आए, वह सिर्फ इस podcast के हद तक ना रहे बल्कि बच्चों से भी हमें मिले. आने वाले वक्त के अंदर चार साल बाद I assume आपकी पहला जो batch है, वह graduate करेगा. अच्छा लगा. तो हमें उस time पर देखने को मिलेगा. Thank you so much for taking the time out and sharing all that insight. Thank you so much जी. Pleasure with me. Thank you so much. And for all of you guys, thank you so much for watching. अगर आपको यह episode पसंद आई है तो दूसरे अन्यासार ज़रूर share करिएगा. Let me know in the comment section below what are your thoughts Whatever your thoughts are, let me know in the comment section below. But nonetheless, this was सैयद मज़ामिलासन जेरी for watching Thought Behind Things. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.
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