The Geography of Time
Programming Note: As a reminder, every Sunday, I write pieces that are predominantly based on personal experiences which may or may not be loosely connected with investing. If you are reading MBI Deep Dives everyday, I think it would be rather useful for my readers to understand my personal lens a bit better since that presumably affects (at least in some capacity) the way I analyze businesses as well.
After three and half years, I went to my home country: Bangladesh with my wife and son Nile. We were concerned how one and half year old Nile would cope with the grueling 20-hour flight from SFO to Dhaka (with six hour transit in Dubai), but thankfully it was uneventful. He was curious and tad bit excited at the first sight of Bangladesh.
While I spent my first two and half decades in Bangladesh, it’s been almost a decade since I visited Bangladesh during the summer. Most people living abroad tend to visit the country during winter as the summer heat can be quite punishing. We still decided to go for it because we wanted to celebrate Eid with our family.
However, right after landing, the humid, musty Bangladesh summer got us all drenched in sweat while rummaging for our luggage. I wasn’t bothered by the heat; if anything, I was almost nostalgic. The scent of hot, humid Bangladesh summer can be unpleasant to the unfamiliar but to someone who grew up there, it was a return to the familiar milieu that got lost for a decade. I was a little worried how Nile would handle the heat, but even he appeared to be nonchalant about it and was busy watching people. For the uninitiated, Bangladesh is the size of the New York state but has half the population of the US. So, if you are into peoplewatching, Bangladesh has plenty to offer!
As we headed from the airport to my brother’s place, I was pleasantly surprised by the elevated expressways which likely cut down the time to our destination by at least half (if not more). I often joke with my friends that perhaps half the people who leave Bangladesh decide to do so while being stuck in traffic as they wonder there must be more to life than spending two-three hours everyday in traffic.
I only learned to drive after moving to the US as we never had a car growing up in Bangladesh. But now that I know how to drive, it was quite a nerve wracking experience just sitting in the car in Bangladesh. There is traffic everywhere and hardly anyone is following any traffic rule. Frankly speaking, I felt if you are commuting in Bangladesh, you should consider everyday a little miracle that you made it back in one piece.
After spending just one night in Dhaka, we traveled the next day to Bogura, the small city in Northern Bangladesh where both my wife and I grew up. Nile received quite the reception from both sets of grandparents. Thankfully, since both grandparents’ place is literally two-minute walking distance from each other, Nile was busy hopping from one grandparent to another everyday.
My romanticism about Bangladesh started to fade the more time I spent in Bogura. The reality is even though I migrated to the Northern Hemisphere back in 2017, it was a long road of struggle to make it as a first generation of immigrant. But as things started to fall into places in the last couple of years, I discovered that I have become surprisingly used to certain amenities in life. It was almost impossible to maintain my daily 10k steps habit as the summer heat and dusty air reminded me that I was giving myself too much credit for being able to build a good habit. Perhaps California weather is simply nice enough to make it easier to stick to such habit. Moreover, as I was gaining weight after consuming copious amount of unhealthy Bangladeshi food every meal, I started googling about GLP-1. The worst was, of course, that my sleep schedule got completely destroyed and by the time I could get back to some normalcy, I had to hop onto my return flight to California.
It also didn’t help that I probably wasn’t in the greatest frame of mind while in Bangladesh. I was in the middle of two big work related stressors after discovering the myriad tax related complexities for owning a company incorporated in Canada but living in the US. I decided to move my business from Canada to the US which forced me to migrate all the subscriptions from Stripe Canada to Stripe US. This proved to be significantly more challenging than I expected going in and I was coordinating among Ghost, Substack, Stripe, and a developer I hired for the project. I know the payment stocks are getting killed in the market, but the whole experience reminded me that the last thing I want to change again is my payments infrastructure.
Anyways, I was particularly curious about how people in Bangladesh are using AI. The fact that AI is a big deal is not news to anyone I interacted in Bangladesh. Everyone is familiar with ChatGPT, but Gemini was also frequently mentioned. While almost everyone uses the free versions, there are a handful of people who mentioned they pay for the subscription. However, they don’t buy the subscription directly from ChatGPT. Apparently, there are some “Facebook Groups” which sell ChatGPT subscriptions. They will give you a specific email address and password with access to ChatGPT subscription for ~$3-5/month. Presumably, if they give the same email address to ten people, you can see these resellers are making handsome margin (ironically almost certainly far higher than OpenAI itself). Of course, the main downside for such “subscribers” is they have no privacy as their queries can be seen by ten other people who have the access to the same account. If large part of the world needs to make a trade-off between privacy and intelligence, it’s not particularly a difficult choice for many people. However, almost everyone I talked to seems to be still confined to the “chatbot” era of AI. I haven’t heard anyone mentioning “agent” once while discussing AI in Bangladesh.
Speaking of Facebook, I came across another story from a friend that is less than ideal for…Meta. My friend ordered some fish via a Facebook page. The payment went through but the products were never delivered. When he dug into see why he fell for a scam, it turns out someone cloned the Facebook page he was looking for and the scammer even managed to get thousands of likes (almost similar to the original page) presumably by promoting ads (or who knows maybe via “click farms”). What surprised my friend was that he actually spoke with the seller over the phone and confirmed the order only after speaking directly to the seller. You probably guessed where it’s going…the scammer used AI to clone the voice of the original seller! You can only imagine how much money will be lost to such sophisticated scams in the age of AI. Unfortunately, AI must be a godsend to the scammers all over the world and it’s going to be a long, difficult fight among the platforms, scammers, and users.
Even in the age of AI, there are some things that never seem to change. I visited my paternal grandparents village in Bogura. I still marvel thinking about the fact that my paternal grandparent was born in 1920 and died in 2000 in the same village and yet the very land beneath his feet belonged to three different nations in his lifetime. He was born at the time the British still ruled the subcontinent, then the village was part of Pakistan after the British left in 1947, and then it changed again to be part of Bangladesh when the country became independent in 1971. Whenever I want to imagine how dynamic the world around you can be, I just remind this personal anecdote to me. Anyways, this village got access to electricity only a decade ago and every time I go there, I am struck by how unevenly distributed time really is. If California represents the vanguard of 2026, walking through this village feels like stepping through a portal into a different century entirely. I captured the below with my Meta Glasses while strolling through the village:
Our summer trip to Bangladesh was sweaty, and logistically chaotic, but seeing Nile bounce between his grandparents made the expensive 20-hour flight worth it. The romanticism of my youth might have faded into the practical realities of adulthood, but the roots remain. As we settled back into our routine under the beautiful California sun, I realized time moves differently depending on where you stand and I’m grateful for the chance to have stood in both places this summer.
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