title: Steven Jasmin - Guyana’s Great Transformation and Opportunities (Frontier Markets Podcast #7)
author: Frontier Markets Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: Frontier Markets Podcast
published: 2023-03-24T04:00:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/c46cdbee-b515-414b-bf1a-45065daa1f68/Steven-Final-Interview-2-converted.mp3
word_count: 18306
Hello and welcome to the Frontier Markets podcast. I'm your host, Crescian Coupchand, and today's guest is Stephen Jasmine. Now I've learnt an immense amount from Stephen because he in our first conversation did something I really loved, which is he gave me some homework and that homework being looking into his kind of platter-out of interviews that he's done on on his work in Guyana and the kind of world he's kind of shaped in. So a bit of context here. Stephen's main focus today is oriented around shaping, capturing and accelerating the generational growth opportunity in Guyana. Before this call I was reading the 2000 and 22 budget speech by the Prime Minister over there and the projected growth of that year was actually 40% which is shocking in and out itself, but the actual growth statistics retroactively they found were 60%. So this is a, you know, one of these generational curves that he's kind of surfing and shaping. So a few more things here. Stephen's background contains some of my favorite patterns that lead to outsized performance in frontier markets. His backgrounds have intersected various fields wherein he now applies ideas like product market fit and crossing the chasm to understand a nation's development and the ways in which that can be shaped. Furthermore, he also understands how oil families have operated and built generational businesses alongside how institutions like 4500 companies tend to work as well and what it means to actually intersect those two things alongside international capital markets. In lieu of that, if you want to learn more about that background, I highly recommend listening to Stephen's other interviews. You can check that out on Spotify where you type in Stephen Jasmine and you'll find in particular the Rare Birds podcast series is just incredible in terms of, you know, going thoroughly into that. With that being said, however, the focus here today is one contextualizing the Guyana story and then two contextualizing how Stephen is operating within that and what that kind of means for the future and moving forward. So without further ado, I would like to say hello to Stephen and ask him to share, I guess, both in a different of the, you know, backstory and kind of how he came to it, but also what's what's kind of going on there historically? Where have they been? Where are they now? And later on I'll ask him about what's going in the future. Excellent. Kushan, so pleasure to meet you and appreciate you have me. It's exciting. I always love to talk about Guyana. Many of the listeners here may not have any kind of clue about Guyana despite it being one of the more exciting stories right now. So if you could, would you be able to kind of like give a yes, like a bit of a professional one or one on Guyana and the kind of thesis that exists there right now? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's funny. The world works in mysterious ways and, you know, when I started working in the oil and gas industry back in 2015, prior to going down to Ghana in 2017, I did not know where Guyana was even on a map. You know, and I didn't realize that it was the poorest country in South America, one of the poorest countries and had a very interesting history as the only English speaking country in South America, but also a former British colony sitting right next to Venezuela and then surname to the West and French Guyana to the further West and then Brazil beneath it. And so with that, you know, the country is essentially a member of Caracom. It's based in the Caribbean community. It is a amazing land of people. So it's a very ethnically diverse population. There's, you know, Indoginese, Afro-Ginese, Portuguese-Ginese, Amerindian-Ginese, which are the indigenous Amazonian tribes. And so with that, you know, they also, it's a very ethnically diverse country along with religiously diverse. It's one of the few places in the world where Muslims, Hindus, and Christians all coexist peacefully. And that's a pretty amazing statement just in a swell, especially after the past 30 years of global religious intolerance and wars that we faced. You know, it's a beautiful thing to be involved in a country that abraces its history and, you know, with the fact that it has a current Muslim president. You know, it's really one of the few countries in South America that has that kind of worldview and leadership. And I think that's really what's going to help Guyana grow. So why is Guyana? Why are we talking about Guyana? How did I find it? You know, what came of it? Well, in 2015, I started working as a chief or structuring officer for some of the families I've been involved with in Louisiana in the form of fractional family office management structure. And in doing that, we ended up, you know, as they went bankrupt during the war. As they went bankrupt during the cyclicality of the oil and gas industry in the United States, you know, I was actually working in the oil and gas sector in the US as it was essentially shutting down for lack of a better. And I know that's going to sound a bit paradoxical, seeing as, you know, tracking has become a big thing in the past decade in the United States. But what happened was the actual cost of production for the offshore industry was too hot before the tech run from 2015 to now. And so in doing that, that meant that all the long term supply contracts in the field had gotten to the end of its life cycle. And it didn't make sense under the historic cost structure to continue to expand the US offshore oil field services play, especially when you have patches like the bockins and you can do all the fracking. It was just more much more cost effective to do onshore exploration than offshore because historically offshore is the most expensive kind of exploration. But that being said, you know, in 2015, Exxon mobile from an original production sharing agreement that was signed back in the early 2000s was given the opportunity or actually finally struck oil right the middle of that down cycle. And it was a unique opportunity because when, you know, historically over the past decade, there's been a lot of under investment and bringing new supply on in the oil field sector and the oil gas exploration sector. And don't forget that business is a, you know, a good five to seven year lead time before you actually start seeing dividends or seeing rewards. And so in that when they were when they found oil in 2015 by the time 2017 came along, you know, the resource that have praised and grown to about two billion plus barrels. And that's when I actually found that I was brought to Guyana by very prominent businessman in the Caribbean and saw kind of what was there, what was what was happening and where it could go. And I decided to go all in because of my relationships up into, you know, Houston with the oil and gas sector, as well as my relationships up into New York and the banking sector being a former inter registered Wall Street banker. And then also because of my families, I work without them at least, I knew I could bring a lot of that talent expertise and wisdom to Guyana. And a lot of it comes back from my startup skill. And so I saw Guyana as a startup nation. And so in that process, I was really able to, to kind of saw that it was a great place where my disparate skills that I had grown over the course of my career could all be kind of interwoven together and could create a great opportunity for us to create a firm and a brand to help build literally a country. And so with that, it's been a wild ride. Guyana's got a lot to grow. It's still early innings. You know, I jokingly say, you know, building your countries like running a marathon. And a lot of people want to show up at the end of the race and get the trophy in the award. Most people don't realize by when you run a marathon, the first time you run a marathon is actually the hundredth time you run a marathon because in the training up to the marathon, you should have run five, six, ten marathons already preparing yourself for the actual race day. You know, if you're not a professional runner, you don't know that. You just think you show up and run a marathon one day. But that's, you know, no one appreciates the years of training and the years of, you know, the mental skills that you need to develop to be able to successfully run a marathon. And so, you know, what we've been doing with our team, you know, there's about 30 of us now that have banded together. And, you know, we are working to become the international asset manager to manage foreign investments in Guyana. There's no real capacity currently in the country to support international investors. We're helping to build it and develop it. That's not a bad thing or a good thing. It just means what the second poorest country is not the America for 50 years. You know, there was no reason to develop capital markets. You know, and so since that, since we got there in June of 2017, we've opened offices and I've lived in the country for three plus years and really got a chance to understand it and see it and meet all the people. It's a small country. You'll need 100,000 people. And now we're in a position where, you know, we're working more outside of the country to help build the platforms and find the right investments and the right investors to help channel and participate in this growth in a responsible way that aligns with, you know, the priorities of the nation of Guyana, the government of Guyana. The government of Guyana, the people of Guyana and helps to accelerate that process because there's enough to go around for everyone. And I think that's one thing that, you know, I see kind of coming from my worldview that a lot of, you know, the guy needs I speak with and the Caribbean people I speak with and a lot of Americans I speak with, you know, they don't appreciate that they're used to living in a country of scarcity. There's never enough food to go around. So if you're sitting at, you know, one table, you're taking food off of someone else's case. And so it's a different mindset and it's a different culture that's developing and we have to work together to educate and lead people and teach people and, you know, work with the powers that be to help bring more people so you get that forced multiplier effect because as we all know, you know, it's a, I think an old African proverb. If you want to go quickly, go alone if you want to go far, go with the group. But with that, you know, that's where our worldview is and we're trying to build out that team and build out that and we believe that Guyana is in a unique position globally to actually be able to participate in this growth and to lead the world. I mean, when this first started, you know, in this global macro economic contraction that's happening or recession or depression or inflation or stagnation or, you know, whatever theory of economics you want to buy into as to what's happening globally, we can all agree something is happening. I'd like to think. And so in that world, you know, we just had credit Swiss fail last week, two weeks ago, we had Silicon Valley bank over the past quarter, you know, the entire crypto industries blown up between FTX. It started. And then we talked to some people will say silver lake and SVB and signature banks were all fallouts as repercussions of the SBX fallout or the FTX fallout. Excuse me. And so with that, you know, Guyana has been thrust on to the world stage, whether or not it's ready. And so I liken it to. You know, I grew up doing bar and butt mitzvahs and caceres and all kinds of stuff, you know, for people coming of age. And so I feel like Guyana is sort of going through that same process right now. It's coming of age, it's been thrust on to the world circuit. It's got a lot of growing. It's got a lot of capacity building. But with that, there's a lot of opportunity to and this is where you know guys like us, Christian get to step on and kind of roll up our sleeves and and acting that, you know, asset manager, fiduciary and leader that comes with it. And there's a lot of responsibility and there's a lot of, you know, headaches that come with it, but there's also a lot of rewards and, you know, what people have to remember though, this is, you know, this will be my life soap magnum opus working on building the country. You know, one day I hope to be able to point to Ghana and say that hey, I helped build the skyline half of those towers or I had my hand in them one way or the other, whether it was just introducing someone that went on to build it or whether it was helping finance it or whether it was help build it, you know, I mean, we see. We've created our concept and our business in such a way that it can quickly scale and accordion to be able to take advantage of a lot of the things that are coming, but it can't happen overnight and it does take time, you know, it takes nine months to make a baby. You know, I mean, so because you want to have a baby tomorrow doesn't mean you can have one, but it's not going to actually be a functioning human being that's crying and it's, you know, it's diapers changed for at least nine months, you know, that's just the way it works. And Guy on is going through that same sort of system right now in process and growing parents and the growth process will be challenging, but there's a lot of opportunity. And so looking forward to talking to you today, I really appreciate again to know you and I'm excited on the platform that you're building and supporting it as best we can and, you know, love to answer some more questions and share my insight with you. Likewise, deep appreciated that kind of back story there. One thing you mentioned right at the beginning was the way in which the ethnic diversity works in this context, right, where there's a kind of mutual respect amongst the kind of groups. And one thing that I came across recently, you talk about kind of nation building was from a speech by Lee Kuan Yew, when you're talking about Singapore versus Sri Lanka and the kind of importance of in his case, the kind of matter policy around that such that, as you mentioned, ignoring that history and fostering those ties amongst groups makes such a big difference that underlying stability that enables a nation to kind of grow. And so I appreciate you kind of sharing that. I just want to kind of flag that. One question I have here is on that first trip, I'm curious, could you be able to share a bit more about that first trip when you kind of came here because I'm curious also like it in many respects, as you mentioned, it's not just the economic opportunity is also like an emotional kind of curiosity as well that kind of comes with shaping these regions and that, therefore, when Hans is the work that you do, this makes it your magnum opus if you were just working on say, you know, some sort of like middle market insurance company. You probably wouldn't be bringing as much versus here where you're kind of like again across so many sectors pushing things forward. What was the first trip like in Guyana? It was amazing. You know, it was the universe works from mysterious ways and I was, you know, like I said at the start of the conversation, I had not been to Guyana previously and couldn't even find it on a map. But, you know, when I got there, I just, I could sense opportunity and I talked about this and some of my other interviews that, you know, one of the big things that I saw was that, I was like, when you grow up, you learn from your elders, you learn from the people around you, it kind of helps shade your world be, right? And so I was fortunate enough, my best friend's father, you know, was one of the first Russian nationals that went back to Russia after the wall fell and developed the first Western style commercial in the real estate firm in Russia. And ended up playing monopoly with all the oligarchs and, you know, current relations with Russia aside, you know, what I learned in that business or watching him grow up because I was a kid, right? I'm best friends with the sun. We're still best friends. He lives in Barcelona. His dad was in London. You know, they don't even know how much time I spend in Russia, if any, you know, they're more like most of the Russians that are successfully go live in London. Which is your neck of the woods, Christian. And with that, you know, it taught me and I saw just opportunity and I said, look, you know, here I am. And it started from getting off the plane and us having trouble getting everyone in the same hotel. And so our party actually split into two hotels. And, you know, here I am getting off the plane and there's not enough hotel rooms. There's only two internationally flagged hotels being an outsider and being my first time to, you know, somewhere in South America and not having any idea what I was walking into. You know, I want to stay at an American hotel or an American flag hotel. So at least I knew kind of what that barometer of service and expectation would be. And, you know, I got there and I just, you know, met people and I, you know, I, the people I went with introduced me to some people. And then I also just met people on my own. And, you know, what I, what I realized is I fell in love with it. You know, I was fortunate to be introduced to one of the big IOCs in the country manager, who I had done a lot of work with that. I was a Seattle Houston. So we had a couple, you know, relationships in common and knew some people. And so it's actually funny that the, the, the, the gentleman I spoke with, he had a camp in Louisiana. And so if you're in the oil and gas sector in America, then, and you work out of Louisiana, everyone has a what they call camps, which are essentially hunting lodges or fishing lodges. And so the guy from one of the IOCs actually had a camp in Louisiana right here where I did all my business when I was in Louisiana. So we kind of hit it off and he took me under his wing. And he just showed me, you know, that this place isn't scary and that it's happening. It's growing and, you know, we talked about a couple of initial projects, which never came to pass. But, you know, it was sort of that welcome open arms. Hey, there's, there's someone else from Louisiana here, you know, it kind of made me comfortable that I could figure this out and kind of, you know, figure out which way is up and and see where the journey came or would take me. And, you know, it's part of my personality too. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I'm a hacker. I've done a lot in the cyber world over the years. You know, cyber security and things like that. And so with that, I looked at Guyana as a blank slate. It's tabularosa. You know, I mean, there's, there's, we could do whatever we want in this country. And so legitimately and legally, of course. But my point is is that when you have that kind of blank canvas, you know, the world is your oyster. And it's just it seemed like a really great way to combine my skill sets and to create value because I will admit my skills sets are a bit unique. And, you know, they're, you know, it's very hard to find the right opportunities that can leverage them appropriately. And so this is obviously become, you know, an amazing, you know, ride and journey. And it's still in the early and things. And so I'd say we're still in our first date to having a kid, you know, as to where Guyana is in the process. You know, if you want to try to compare it to something, you know, so it's, you know, I'm granted now I'm married and taking care of the baby mama, because that's what I got to do. Two guy on it, you know, and so it's a bit disingenuous to analogy, but, you know, it does make some sense. And if you're on the ground or you're working on it, it resonates. Definitely. So, so in lieu of that, I'm wondering, could you kind of contextualize, I guess, the Guyana story. To give other listeners kind of a bit of context here with regards to, you know, other regions that you think they can kind of use as metaphors here, or maybe as anti metaphors as well. Just like understand what is kind of Guyana going through as, you know, as a baby that's kind of like being birthed in some sense. No, absolutely. So, you know, you look at, there's some great pictures and stuff. You know, if you go look at Dubai 30 years ago, you look at Shanghai 30 years ago, you know, the countries that you look at today and what was there, you don't even recognize it. You know, there's some amazing pictures on the internet about it. You know, and then you look at countries, you know, so what happened in 30 years in China and Russia or in excuse me, China and Singapore and Dubai. You know, that's going to happen in 10 years in Guyana. You know, but to that point, there's still capacity that needs to be built. There's still rules and regulations like, I mean, up until this year you still couldn't sell condos in Guyana. You know, I mean, like the legislation's not there for that. You know, there still wasn't robust banking systems. So, you know, there's still, you know, PO financing and accounts receivable financing and equipment leasing are still pretty unheard of banking needs. And anywhere else in the world that's needed that, you know, that's been around forever and everyone uses it. You know, and this just goes to show the underdevelopment of the country and still how it has to get its legs under us. You know, just because you have a pile of money sitting in a bank account and you know, a pile of money's coming doesn't mean you have the capacity today to build everything. You know, one of the things that I love about this administration is that they've just, since they took office, literally road building equipment is running 24 hours a day and hasn't stopped. So, it took office in 2020. And that is such an important factor because when you have a country of, you know, 82 to 86,000 square miles, I always messed it up. That ultimately, you know, that amount of infrastructure that is just needs to be developed. You know, I mean, 95% of all the people in Guyana currently live within three miles of a major river or the ocean. You know, that's a lot of people and it's spread across, you know, 10 municipal DMAs, you know, or 10 cities across the country. But 90% of them all live in one city, Georgetown, in the suburbs. And so with that, you know, there's that infrastructure needs to be built so that you can have those roads so that you can quickly go out and, you know, if you're running a, if you're building a hotel, right. And, you know, the road that you're going on is a dirt road and your trucks are breaking down every week. Do you realize how one broken down truck and the implication that I'll have on a $25 million hotel project? I mean, that's, you know, and this is where we wear the hat of both an asset manager and an operator. Because we don't just monitor the money and manage the money. We actually know that those are some of the issues you have to be mindful of. And so this is why we've kind of pulled back a bit and having gone full out on our development projects and having gone full out on our real estate development yet because the infrastructure is not there. You know, when it already takes right now, if you build a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, that hotel, you have to buy the power equipment for that hotel. The day you sign the loan paperwork because right now there's an 18-month lead time on the power conditioners and all the power that you need to dump into the hotel. Now that 18 months is getting in Atlanta. You want to try to get that down in Ghana. You got the 18 months plus plus where you have to find it, do it, get it. And that's assuming that the rest of the project's on time. But, you know, when you have a country that could only do 50,000 TUs of shipping, which that's a container, one TU is one container for those that don't know. You know, historically the country's only been able to support 50,000 TUs. And that's nothing in the grand scheme of things. They don't have the import infrastructure to support it. And they don't have the deep border harbors. They don't have any of that. And so that's the kind of development that the country needs to see so that you can do it. You know, I look at Guyana and I'm a civilian. I don't work for any government agencies. I'm just Steve Jasm in the banker. Right. But I look at it as essentially the equivalence of a military battle plan for the development of the country. Anytime the military goes somewhere before the soldiers get dropped behind the lines or before anything happens, the actual infrastructure has to be developed. You have to know that you can get. It's not about getting the soldiers into the, you know, you can drive you can parachute someone out of a plane anywhere on the sir. You can put them in a rocket. You can get them up the space. But if you don't have the stuff up in space or you don't have the ability to quickly get them, the supplies, the food, the water, the fuel, everything, the power, the internet. You know, if you don't have all those things ready beforehand, you're just going to fall on your face. You guys are going to end up, you know, starving before they even can make any impact. And so this is where we're very mindful of that. And it's also about building the right capacity, given where the country is going. And so we spend a lot of time with our team studying frontier markets, studying the growth cycles, studying the good, the bad and the ugly. You know, and a lot of people come back and especially in the Caribbean say, oh, well, you know Guyana was always the, you know, the bad son of the caracombs, the Caribbean community. It's many EU and I joke and say, well, was the poorest country in caracombs up until, you know, five years ago and then or seven years ago now. And now it's the richest country in the Caribbean. You know, I mean, and it's it's it's trouncing, you know, Trinidad's oil industry. It's trouncing, you know, Jamaica. I mean, look at just the real GDP of the countries. I mean, it's pretty draw dropping. You know, I mean, but the GDP per capita in Jamaica, which is considered a developed nation. It's number two on the heritage index for Latin America last time I checked this is 5,000 US in 2021. Guyana was 10,000 US in 2021. And that's after it only skyrocketed since about 2005. So since 2005, it's gone below sub 2000 closer to about $1500 all the way up to 10,000 in 2021. It took Jamaica since 1985 to get to 5,000 GDP, the GDP per capita. You know, and the aggregate GDP for the country in Jamaica is 14 billion in Guyana. It's 8 billion this year and in Trinidad it's 25 billion. And that's because Trinidad is currently petrochemical producing nation. You know, I mean, they're already much further in their life cycle. They're at the other end of it. They're closer to where Louisiana was when Louisiana got involved. The difference is is that the section of Louisiana I worked in was purely for the offshore oil and gas, but in America, all the petrochemical industry is actually out in Lake Charles over on the Texas border. And so that section of the oil field services growth in the United States, not contract much like the oil field services in Louisiana did or in Southern Louisiana for the offshore servicing because all those petrochemical facilities are on shore in Trinidad. All those petrochemical facilities are still up and running and are producing. So you've got methanol plants, you've got methanol, you've got the area, you've got diesel plants, gas to liquid plants, all these things are running. But ultimately Trinidad has its own host of issues. It's got currency control issues. It's got, you know, they've been producing. I saw one point of statistic, $100 billion of oil has been produced out of Trinidad that the government seen. And so they've got 100 years that they've had oil wealth. They've utilized it. They've grown their economy. But even then they're still sitting at, you know, a real GDP of only $16,000 per person per capita. And so with that, you now have, when you look at the three GDP's together, you've got Jamaica, which is, you know, 5,000 per capita, you've got Guyano 10,000 and you've got Trinidad 16,000. Guyana inside of three years will blow Trinidad out of the water. I guarantee it'll be closer to $30,000. And there's going to have to see, you know, two to 300,000 people come into the country to help build the country. You know, the government of Guyana is still working on the technologies and the tools and the legislation, the capacity building to be able to produce that. And so let me stop there. But hopefully some of these stats help put things in perspective and kind of give you some more analysis of what's going on in the region. So we can have a great conversation. Oh, they definitely do add kind of color to the kind of leapfrogging that's kind of going on that. If we may just dig a bit deeper into the kind of capacity building, if we were to categorize some things, kind of give color to it in terms of, you know, sharing some fragments of examples, in case that these things that are in the pipeline right now when it comes to capacity building. So you mentioned, for example, the roads being built, right. Would you look like kind of site one or two things that you think are indicative of like the pace of capacity building is kind of happening in a positive sense. And also on top of that, would love to know what are some things that you think are yet to be done given that there is as mentioned this entire market map has always created yet when it comes to kind of co infrastructure. What are some things that haven't been prioritized right now because obviously you only have so much capacity to build capacity. So I'm curious about those two buckets of things, one being again things in the pipeline and things that you think should be in the pipeline in the future. Yeah, so I think, you know, it's amazing, you know, an indigenous group in Guyana of a partnership emerged energy and the Freedom Hoop short based project. So in 2020, in March of 2020, exactly three years ago now, there was a disputed election in Guyana. That was resolved in August of 2020, great in the middle of COVID. And so since then, there was three major families in Guyana teamed up together and are partnered with Exxon to build a massive short base. And they teamed up with a Dutch contractor that's going to have that's literally building an island in the middle of the Demarara River to put this on. And that is a perfect example of the pioneering or the first early stage capacity building that occurred is that, you know, we're less than three years from when the changing government occurred and there's already literally a small island that they're reclaiming that's going to be like the Palm Islands out and do by. Oh, wow, they're not turning into, you know, residential real estate or hotels, they're turning into an industrial zone to do all the way down yards and everything else. And so with that, what that's created is that they were smart enough, the country was smart enough. And I would like to think it's the current political party and give them props for it. But I know this was conversations with both political parties, but they came, they stepped forward and saw a need and they addressed it. And so by building that deep border harbor and that's short base because it's actually a short base. It's not a deep border harbor, but they're going to have a full container terminals and everything. You know, the roads is another example of, you know, early capacity building that's occurred. You know, one of the first things that was talked about, there's two other major marquee projects. I think that really highlight this is, you know, they've been trying to build a bridge across the Demarara River for the past 10 years now plus. And they're finally at the point where they've broken ground and they've started that they've awarded the contracts. They've gone to a Chinese EPC. And that bridge will now be the new bridge that connects the East Coast and West Coast of the Demarara River, which are where the two major populations sit right up the mouth of the Demarara River, which is where Georgetown is. And so that's another piece of massive capacity building that had to occur that is occurring. And the last one I would say is the one ID system that they're creating. So they're using technology to create essentially a single window or single card access that all guineas and all foreign nationals will be able to use for the development of the country much like they haven't do by. And so that single card will become a single card nap that will allow them much like they use in China, must like they use in the Middle East to make sure that people are paying their taxes that they're tracking who's coming and going. You know, the problem with guineas is it's such a massive country. It's got such a poorest border. You can't protect it. And when you're the only country, I think a guineas like a life raft that's emerged out of Latin America and the Caribbean because every other economy is sinking like a stone. You know, there's no growth. They're all struggling there. There's no place to actually invest your money to get a return because everything's so late in the cycle and hit a reach a play toe of stack. And so with that, Guyana is that growth, but in order to do that growth, the government needs to control it in some way or form. And so this one technology window that they're creating with this government ID is a perfect example of them pulling that together and creating the environment that will fuel the growth. So you need transportation, which are doing with the roads and the bridges and the, and there's actually a fifth one. So you got the transportation with the roads and the bridges that I highlighted. You've got the technology piece. And then you also have the power piece because the cost of power in Guyana is so expensive. It's 40 plus cents of kilowatt hour now, which is huge by the rest of the world standards. And so one of the first things the administration came in and focused on was leveraging all the produced gas, which was a very key term produced natural gas from the oil wells, because every time you drill oil well, they find gas. And so that gas is getting re injected into the well so that you can get the fluids out the will out faster. But at a certain point, you either have to flare it off or you have to pipe it to shore. And so that's what exon in the government, Guyana are working as the pipe of that natural gas to shore so they can create a processing plant. And then they can create also a power plant that's 300 megawatts. So Guyana is currently sitting at about 350 megawatts of power that they consume. And this power plant is going to double that and it's going lower the cost of gas from or the cost of power from 40 plus cents of kilowatt hour down to roughly six to nine cents of kilowatt hour. You know, it's still going to take another two or three years to come online. But exon is supporting it. The government's working on it. The vendors are going through the process. And so in that process, they're once again rolling up their sleeves and really focused on where are we going and let's create the enabling stuff. Have they hit everything? No. You know, there's you got to crawl before you walk and you got to walk before you run. And so what I see knowing everything that's going on, I don't know everything, but I've got a good read of kind of what's developing and what's not. You know, there's still needs to be additional investments made in the short basis. You know, personally, I'm not a big fan of oil and gas short basis. I don't think they're profitable long term from an asset management perspective. You know, they're they're word contracts. They're really done at the. The behest and the leverage of the international oil companies. And so you as a developer, you as the guy that runs it doesn't get the most favorable economics. You know, if there's only one or two, it works great. But as the market matures and everyone has them, then everyone, you know, everyone gets turned into condos. And so I guarantee you that, you know, over the next two decades, a lot of these short basis will be turned into condos. You know, but that's part of the development cycle. Like when you build a short base, you know that one day you're actually going to turn into condos, much like what they did in New York with Hell's Kitchen and Greenwich Village and all those other areas where they, you know, they go and turn an industrial zone into a dense urban living area that's highly profitable. You know, I think the other area that needs a lot of development still is in general, the financial services sector. I think is very underdeveloped in Guyana. You know, when I first got there, you know, five and a half years ago, six years ago now, you know, they couldn't take American Express anywhere, you know, Bank of America was had pulled out of the country and my visa card didn't work anywhere. You know, and I had a, I went to the bank and got an ATM card and it didn't have visa or master card on it. You know, and I didn't even know what that meant because I grew up in a world that, you know, every debit card you were ever given, you know, could be used at any visa or master card out. You know, so these kinds of things are where the capacity still needs to be built, but, you know, why would you focus on building the payments networks when you still don't have that single window that you can integrate with so that you can quickly get access to everyone. You know, so once again, it's a crawl walk run mentality. It doesn't mean we're not working on some of this things along the way and are involved in different projects to that degree, but that being said, we are so close to the ground and knowing what's going on that we know that it's not quite there yet. It's not that time yet. You know, and so these are just some of the issues and challenges that we see coming abroad, but, you know, hopefully the context helps give some insights as to where the country is on this journey and how we're participating in it. It's fantastic. If we were just to dig slightly deeper on the financial services, I think one thing you mentioned before was the equipment leasing frameworks and some other kind of sub frameworks. Not just on the FinTech side of things, but I'm curious are there other things within that within financial services that specifically kind of call out to you beyond just kind of payment reels that you kind of find exciting over the next, you know, couple of years as it kind of seeks to mature. It's mentioned something about kind of public markets as well, but yeah, yeah, so I mean, there's the whole financial services sectors completely underdeveloped or not developed at all, quite frankly. And so to that end, there's a lot of opportunities, you know, right now in Guyana, you can't separate a more as far as I know, I could be wrong, they could have changed it, but I don't think they have. You can't separate a mortgage from servicing. And so, you know, in America, you go to a you buy a house, that house loan is sent to one asset owner that owns the mortgage, it gets paid a dividend, and a third party that actually manages that asset on behalf of the institutions. And so those kinds of things, you don't really think of as a big issue, but if you're trying to scale home ownership, you can't have the guys that loan the money, rent them, you know, manage the payments of the money on the monthly basis. It's not efficient. You know, the guys that want to invest in that, just want to invest in yield, and they just want to get a check every month, they don't want to worry about having to collect it. Right now, though, the way the government of Guyana structured it is you have to be the guy that collects the money and seasons the paper. And so those kinds of little things end up having a pretty, you know, material effect on the ability for it to scale. And so, you know, in an area where the government and that's the government's done phenomenal job of going in and, you know, increasing home ownership and building a lot of low income housing, and, you know, it's been a priority of this government, and it's a pretty common thing in the Caribbean to focus on, you know, enabling home ownership for the underserved and the underbank, on the unbanked population. But now it's a situation where, okay, we have all that, but we've got to really roll up our sleeves because there's a lot of pieces missing to this equation. And so, you know, how do we start working on the second phase and the third phase when we're finally coming out of the first phase. And that's really where our focus is, is that managers are working with the power of the PETA to understand where the country's going so that we can be best positioned to support it. Awesome. So, I'll just contextualize the kind of housing thing because I found this interesting statistic from the budget speech here it says, last year, they distributed over 20,000 house lots, which is about three times the previous amount that have been distributed over the last five years. So, that just kind of shows that kind of increase in velocity not just again in production, but also in the way in which they're kind of reinvesting in their human capital and showing that the people, you know, have low cost of housing, the ability to kind of reinvest in other things as well, accordingly, which is incredibly exciting. One question I have here then is, and I guess this is where we kind of dig into, you know, the strategic mind of Stephen Jasmine. I'm curious, how is it that you've kind of gone about positioning your firm and your efforts and essentially the Stephen Jasmine portfolio that's moving towards building this iconic entity that helps shape and also capture some of the growth of Kaganar as well. Would you be able to kind of dig into that in terms of high level strategy, but also whatever you want to kind of share in terms of the kind of self components. So, no, our SC-3's investment thesis and Ghana is really straightforward. You know, we want to own the high margin professional services companies that help pull together this infrastructure. And so this is, you know, the investment banking side and the capital markets advisory. This is the commercial real estate development as a developer. This is the construction management as a GC and as, you know, working with the government to help oversee because people don't realize this, but when you build a road, generally speaking, the government also hires a third party or their spells to go and check to make sure that roads built. And to meet the specs and the quota and everything they're supposed to do. And so there's a lot of opportunities when you're building infrastructure to come in and advise and counsel and make sure that people are, you know, from an audit perspective, making sure that people are doing what they said to saying what they do and conforming. And when you have somewhere where the growth is happening so quickly, those are sometimes where things get dropped. But the counter argument to that is now those kinds of situations are where there's opportunity because with the infrastructure, technology nowadays, you can streamline approval processes so much quicker. You can really, you know, put the policies and procedures in place to track everything globally. And so we look at that as, you know, that's where we want to be in the high margins at the top. And then we also want to be at the operating companies at the base of. And so, you know, if they're going to be pouring cement every day for the next 20 years. Well, yeah, it makes sense to be involved in this men industry, either as a vendor or as a supplier or somewhere in that supply chain. You know, one of the big things is these petrochemical plants need staffing, you know, and there's going to be a under there's an under there's a scarcity of qualified engineers that are capable of actually operating these assets for the international oil companies. And because of the guy needs local content registration and the local content secretary it, you know, they have to be guinies based in guinies involved. And so we've identified some key assets that we're looking to acquire and reposition to be able to pursue some of those those needs. And so it's been a very opportunistic organic kind of following of where we see the needs. And then sometimes will be approached, you know, I mean, like a year ago, we were approached by one group and they had some interesting things they needed help with. And so we said sure and we took them under our wing and we saw, you know, that they had the right assets, they had the right mindset, they knew where they were going and we could help add value. And so, you know, this was something that, you know, if you had asked me three years ago if I had ever touched it, I probably would have laughed and you said, no, I don't see it, I don't see a way there for us to, you know, add value and to create value. You know, but that said, you know, the beautiful thing about where we are positioned sitting at that link between global asset managers and global markets and everyone that's been there and done it before that wants to go do it again. We now become a key part of that conversation. And so, you know, every week we've got investors and partners and people flying in and you know, we tell people, you know, we want you to go see the country yourself. You know, so come in, we'd like to be your first and your last meeting. So, you know, my partners on the ground are always around and they'll usually take a meeting with anyone that comes in, you know, early in their trip. And then usually by the end of the trip, they sit with us and you know, we talked to your stuff and we can either help that value or it's no thanks we're going to do it on our own. We wish them the best and let them know we're here or it's, you know, God is not for us. And so, which is fine because it's usually God is not for us right now. It will be tomorrow. We just don't have the testicular fortitude to see it through these phases of the cycle. We say, okay, well, next time you come in, hit us up, you know, keep track of us, watch us and let us, you know, execute and be successful and you can get on the bus anytime you want. You know, because that's why I tell people at the end of the day, you know, we're driving a bus. It's our bus. We focus on our race and our pace. You know, we're not out there trying to keep up with everyone. Everyone's story is different. You know, what we found historically in Guyana is it's not any one ethnic group or tribal group or religious group, but it's a country of a lot of talk and no action. It's everyone's got big dreams, but doesn't know how to execute. And we specialize in knowing how to execute. So we'd like to just talk 10% of the time and work 90% of the time. That's why I only do one of these interviews probably once every six months, if not longer, because ultimately me hitting the press so it doesn't accomplish anything. I do these more because I know when investment committees and global asset managers are, you know, looking to hand me money to manage on behalf of them, they have other people that have to know nothing about Guyana that needs to know about Guyana. And that's what I make these for. It's for the investment committees because, you know, I'm not allowed as an asset manager how this business works as you know, we're not ever allowed to talk to most of the people that decide whether we get the money because there's a firewall there. So it's a conflict of interest. And so they want to be insulated and protected and that's great. And I respect that. And it's not because we're working with the legitimate money. We're working with some of the most legitimate money in the world. It's the fact that, you know, it's corporate governance is what it's called. It's it's allows the people that don't allow the money to have to be held accountable to people behind the scenes that are able to underwrite and look at what needs to happen. And so in those kinds of instances, you know, we're focused on telling the story to them. And so with that, though, you know, SC3's real value prop is that, you know, we're not just an asset manager, but we're also an operating partner. And that's where, in my opinion, in frontier markets, you have to sit in both seats. You know, yes, you could be a Mark Mobyis and you can travel the world investing in frontier markets and emerging markets. But at the end of the day, you got a much money tied up in China. You got a bunch of money tied up in Brazil and you got a bunch of money tied up in India. You know, I mean, that's great. That's fine. But in my opinion, those aren't emerging markets. It's a misnomer. You know, I mean, there, there, there, you know, what we saw on the O8 to O9 recession is the bricks did come. There was a flight to quality. There was a flight to actual real growth. There was tangible growth. And in all those countries, the real growth did occur, but not the kind of growth that Diana's growing. You know, I mean, like it's a whole different ballgame. If you look at it from the orders and magnitude size. And so Diana going through that growth as a percentage of the size of its economy and where it's going, that's where there's excitement and that's where there's opportunity. And it's not for everyone. You know, and so our job is to go out there and be a resource and be a thought partner and, you know, we try to lead as best we can. And you always best to lead from the front. You know, we try to produce decent reports and quality content. You know, are slowly just fostering a following and fostering relationships with global asset managers and knowing that, you know, yeah, nine out of 10 people I talked to today aren't going to be happy with the guy on it today. But in three, five, seven years, they're going to come back and I see it happen every day. Like, you know, it's, it's funny over six years. You know, you forget the number of conversations you've had. You forget the people you run into, but they end up coming back wanting more information or wanting updates and seeing what's happening. And it's exciting to be able to show them how far you've come because when you're in your own echo chamber and you're focused on your race and your pace, you forget how much the stories change just over three years. And how far you've come in the quality of what you're working on has evolved. You know, I mean, because it's these aren't just ideas on a business plan anymore. They're the real businesses with real assets and real people involved and you know, real bankers wanting to fund them and grow them and everyone's looking to come in. So we just going to stay focused on position ourselves properly. Most definitely. I think one thing I appreciate there in particular is the kind of active approach of, you know, combined financial component has been also the operational component as well. It strikes me that, you know, one of the observations that a lot of folks who invest in front of an emerging market to make is the liquid markets, like say, for example, the MSCI kind of frontier index or you look at kind of liquid exposure to say publicly listed companies and Indonesia or other countries. And it doesn't correlate to the structural growth that actually takes place. A lot of the growth happens in private companies. And if one is an investor in that kind of like, you know, spring and pretty kind of way, only getting exposure to things that are always easy to come by versus like putting in the work on self. There's missed out alpha, so to speak in that context. But also I'd say in your case, it's also deeply meaningful as you kind of have seen the last five years of transition and you'll be able to shape the next two decades, two decades of country. So I think that's incredibly exciting. One question that I wanted to follow up on was we were talking about class the building, we were talking about timelines. I'm curious in terms of, you know, on a micro sense for your firm, what does the timeline kind of look like as you've kind of been building these different business units out. And I'm curious also about, you mentioned and this really struck me as incredibly smart and cogent here is, you know, how to wait for the kind of inflection point in infrastructure such that it makes sense to build X or Y. Right. And I think you know, an idea that came to mind there was Elon Musk, for example, when it came to building, building Tesla. Not him, but the actual original founders before building Tesla, they actually waited like five years for the cost of battery storage to go down to a certain point where they had enough confidence and said, okay, now this is economically feasible to build. And so that's how patients where you're aware of the curves, you've done the kind of intelligence work in terms of mapping things out in your case, mapping out infrastructure, et cetera. That kind of informs, okay, knowing when to pound, but it's just been misinformed and jumping into it because you know, being too early is equivalent to being wrong in some sense. So I'm curious, what is the timeline both backwards looking in the last five years look like for you guys? Like you know, main milestones and accomplishments or kind of things of kind of significance there. But then also what do you think the timeline will look like and say the next five years, you know, 10 years? I know no one can tell anything, but I'm just curious as to how you kind of see that story. Yeah, no, it's the reality is there's no one actually has the answer and it's all just conjecture and hopes and prayers. But ultimately, you know, I would have thought, if you'd asked me five years ago, maybe you know, if you asked me today, you know, would you have accomplished more than five years? I would have swore up and down that we'd be 10 miles further down the line than we are today. So that said, we have been very prudent about kind of staying out of the fray and letting the country get its legs under us, you know, for better or worse. And part of that's been because we had to, but all part of it's also just getting to know the business environment and the Caribbean. And so from that perspective, we've we've really kind of sat back and waited and patiently, you know, to your point, you know, if you're early, you missed it, you may as well have missed it. And that's that's Mark Cuban has a great quote on this and he says, you know, the key to winning in life is staying in the game long enough to win. And that's the biggest thing in Guyana is that my team and I have consciously made the decision, you know, I've self-financed this all out of my own balance sheet. And with some of our first clients and partners that have come in, but, you know, the bank is still ours. And so with that being said, and the platforms that we're building are still ours. And I've done that on purpose because, you know, when you take outside capital, it starts to put you on a cadence and a trajectory that if you're not, if you don't wait for the right time and you're too early, then you're just burning capital. And in my business, I'm only as good as my last deal and I'm only a steward of, you know, I'm a steward of capital. And so as an asset manager and so being a steward of capital and growth, you know, you only want to borrow or take the money that it's going to take to to pour gas on the fire. You don't want to figure it out. And this comes from my startup background when you look at startups doing product market fit and all that kind of stuff. You know, at the end of the day, we spent millions of dollars over the past five and a half years to get us where we are. But that's not anywhere near, you know, I'd raise $10 million of outside money and poured it on this fire. The fire would have burned right for a short amount of time, but I don't think we would necessarily be any further than we are today by any significant orders of magnitude other than I'd have some investor that was really pissed off at me. And I'd have a bunch of, you know, people that, you know, we're cranky over the fact that we're, you know, someone had their hand in the till and we had mismanaged, not mismanaged their funds. But the timing didn't match up. And so we have an obligation now in the future that we have to hit. That's not that the actual funds that came into it had no correlation to. And that's where people start getting irritated when you have to start paying people back when they had nothing they didn't contribute to where you are in the journey. And so I don't know if that makes sense, but it kind of is how we approach the problem and how we face the challenges is that we've kind of self-enhanced it ourselves so that we could stay in the game. And I didn't have someone trying to force me to make irresponsible decisions or, you know, go into a project to lose money because the market, you know, I couldn't get the boat, the equipment across the the the GRA deck, the, the tax authority in Guyana. You know, so when you bring something in it's going to be cleared by customs. It's going to get a pair of taxes on it if any are due. And without the infrastructure that I've supported, I'd just be burning money on a $20 million hotel that isn't ready. You know, and there's been one hotel that's been built and all the kudos in the world to, you know, the family that did it and the Pegasus sweets in Guyana. You know, they went out and they built it and, but Dal did a phenomenal job with it and he's, he's should be very proud. I wish more guy and he said to add the foresight and the leadership to do what he's done, but he's also, you know, when I got to Guyana, I thought everyone was like, but the reality is is that he's one of the few that actually knows how to work in the capital markets that has spends enough time and trend out to know how to tap into the capital markets. So he was able to go do the first hotel and got it and he got it up and running. It came in a year late and over budget and, you know, it was a stressful scary project. I'm sure for him. I wasn't in the room. I don't know. But I know enough about development to know how it works and, you know, when you lose money or when you make money. And, you know, but now at the same token, I've heard and this is pure hearsay, you know, that sometimes the pen house suite at the new hotel goes for $10,000 a night. You know, I mean like, do you realize that the the remata in I was paying for presidential suite. I was paying $120 a night in 2017. Like I stayed at the presidential seat for six months. I bought it out on one from lease. And so, you know, when I was there, that's that's a big discrepancy. One night versus a month for a third of that. You know, I mean, like that just goes to show how quickly things are changing. And even if that price is half of it, it's not being rented every day for that. But anytime there's a major conference, people use it, you know, people that need to use those things and are willing to pay for them. And so this is the opportunity where, you know, is every hotel that's built going to have a $10,000 a night pen house? No, that's not the case. First of all, most of them shouldn't because they're not expect to that. You know, he's got a high in property right on the water and it's beautiful. And he built a hundred million dollar to tell so he can charge, you know, $10,000 a night. But, you know, most hotels aren't going to price at that. They're not going to do that. And that's where, you know, once again, you've got to understand the environment and realize when it is the right time to build something when it's not and how you can throw your hat in the rain compete. But there's enough to go around. You know, if there were four more hotels right now, they'd all be booked out 24, seven years. You know, but they're coming up with other ideas. They're doing a lot with, you know, a VRBOs and the Airbnb's and stuff. There's Airbnb villages that are being created in Guyana, where you know, Canadian entrepreneurs are going out and building, you know, 20 houses. And they're, you know, they're going to put a security guard. They're going to build a fence around it. And they're essentially hotel rooms or extended stay hotel rooms. You know, I mean, like this is where, you know, us as Westerners have to kind of step out of our bubble and see what can work in Guyana because you may not need to go straight there. I know you spend some time in Africa. You know, it's a perfect example of, you know, there's an Africa telecom industry. There's no copper wire. There's no, you know, pots lines. It's all just digital. It went straight from no cell phone, no telephony or telecom infrastructure straight to, you know, 5G and cell phones. And, you know, everyone having a computer on their hand. And that's. And I've had, you know, a bunch of really good questions and concerns and challenges, but they've also really worked hard to, you know, see where the opportunities are and see where it's going. Is this making sense? I mean, oh, most definitely. I think the thing that stands out now kind of, you know, flag for listeners here is the playbook you've kind of deployed in terms of ensuring not such you're in the game, but that you've got kind of exposure to the region. So you can kind of watch and know when the time is right, so to speak. And a good kind of example of this is Brookfield asset management doesn't similar thing where when they kind of expanded into India and China in recent, you know, decade, they essentially have to all branches to their business, right. A is their balance sheet itself that they kind of deploy into hard assets and they need to kind of yield from that. And then branch B is the asset management side of things with a managed external money and deployed into the kind of your cremd that crime of the deals that they kind of come across. Now, they don't want to, as you mentioned, use investor money, external investor money or LP money on deals that they haven't really fully understood in ecosystems. They don't understand what do they do instead. Well, they, for example, when they went to India, they set up an office and spent four to five years getting to know the ecosystem. They spent four to five years getting to know which lawyers, which, you know, professional services do kind of fill it with. What does it mean to do deals here? How do the deals work and also building their internal model of what deals are the types of things they want to engage in and they don't right. And, you know, the ability to do that is something which is not something you've wanted at. You are using your balance here right now to build that that's a, in many respects, the capability and the mood that you have that many others do it right. And so I think that enables your firm, for example, to build that kind of durable edge that many others won't. And therefore, enables you to do things that others won't be able to do as well, which is an incredibly exciting thing, but also it's important because that's part of the kind of you excitement of the front of markets, right. It's like you have these spaces where you can do that if you want to do the hard thing to get there. So I do appreciate you sharing that with me. I do think that I was hoping for us to kind of get to before we kind of get to the end. In particular, I was hoping to run a few prompts in terms of industry verticals and get your thoughts on them. The first one being you mentioned the framework, the kind of user identity framework that the honest government is kind of coming up with in terms of the general ecosystem and kind of state of IT and Fintech and kind of tech infrastructure. Are there any other developments that kind of come to mind or what are your thoughts on that kind of ecosystem more broadly? Is it very much like bottleneck by that right now and then things will merge afterwards? I think it's a bit bottleneck. I think it's, you know, it's just there's only so many hours in the day and you can only choose to focus on so many things, especially when you have a country that is trying to understand and grow into itself. And a lot of different ways simultaneously, you can't put the carpet before the horse. You're going to crawl before you walk before you run. And I think that's one of the key things, you know, there's, it's funny. You know, you look at a country and it's, there's no right or wrong answer here. And there's a lot of things scattered all over the place, but you know, to your point, much like group field did when they went into India, you know, when I was here so early and working and studying and putting the first projects together and, you know, seeing everything. I noticed that believe it or not, one of the most developed pieces of legislation in Guyana is their credit reporting agency. And it's because it was actually done by a company sort of like Equifax out of Europe. And they came in and they helped provide the model legislation for Guyana so that they could quickly put up a credit reporting act. And so with that credit reporting act, here you have a very underdeveloped judiciary, a very underdeveloped legislative act as far as the country's concerned. But then there's this one piece of shining legislation that there's this one piece of shining legislation that all of a sudden makes it all makes sense. And you're like, how, and it's funny because I talked to people and they're like, the most prolific evolved piece of legislation is about credit reporting. Like, how do they have credit reporting? They don't have consumer credit. So the country doesn't like, huh? And so that disconnect, you know, but there is a big consumer lending market. You know, you look at courts home furniture, courts is essentially like a room to go style, you know, appliance center. It's a little more full service, but they have, you know, everything from appliances to contacts and everything. They're throughout the Caribbean Unicomers the Parent Company. You know, they have a whole, you know, buy here, pay here product that they offer. It's not through the banking industry, but that's part of what necessitated the need for the international credit reporting company to come in and put this infrastructure in place. So I say that to use that as an example of, you know, everything needs to be raised to that bar. But over time, there's already certain pieces that are and there's certain pieces missing. So everything else will start to rise rising tide raises all ships. And so, but it's yes, you can't, you can't start walking or crawling until you're born. You know, I mean, so they're going through the process and it's a slow process and it's deliberate. And it always takes 10 times longer than you expect and cost 5 times as much. But that's where, you know, there are some great opportunities and there's some great lessons, you know, but the resource coach that Ghana is questioned with or played with is real. You know, but at the same token, when you look at the Caribbean and Latin America and South America by all metrics, Guyana is just going to when you're already at the bottom, you know, of the ring, there's nowhere to go but up. And that's what we forget about. You know, I mean, and in this day and age, you know, when it's start talking about corruption or you know, is guy on the way the Norway Norway or Venezuela, you know, or Nigeria and Venezuela versus Norway. You know, I'll tell you right now, Guyana will never be fucking Norway. You know, I mean, it's just you know Guyana will be Guyana. And that means it has to find its own path to the market has to find its own unique brand and identity. And, but because of the world we live in now, where you can walk into any meeting and there's anyone in the room could have a recording device. And it's happened the scandals have been out there, not just in Guyana globally, you know, but with that, transparency has become such a key in this world that we live in. And we're shifting, especially as you know, the Middle East becomes kind of is going through a renaissance or a new dawn. And you're looking at, you know, the bricks of this financial meltdown, Guyana is a part of it, but Guyana is a footnote, the real people leading this evolution are going to be, you know, the GCC. And UAE, Saudi, you know, Qatar, these are the countries that are now coming into their own and these are the bricks 2.0. And they're trying to act themselves almost as a pincher between the bricks and the US petriot dollar. And they're sitting at the full term between the two. And that's a very unique position. And only time will tell where it goes. But in this world of post 2000s islamophobia and everything else. It's really refreshing to see these countries that hadn't changed in hundreds of years, going through some changes overnight. And through new leadership, through good leadership, much like Guyana, you know, is a perfect leadership? No, there's no perfect leader. There's not, you know, I mean, we all have strengths and weaknesses. You know, I'm not a CEO, I'm a chairman, you know, I mean, I'm not a details guy. I can't manage myself, let alone 1000 other people, you know, that's not what I do. My job is to create products, create value, manage the product, put the right teams in place, and be a steward of capital. That's what I get up every day working on. And that's, you know, but my job is to look over the bow and see what's coming in front of us. And that's where I feel like a lot of people get so caught up in running on the rat wheel. And I guess this is my years of being a consultant for Fortune 500 company and everything. I learned how to, you know, I don't work in today. I operate today, but I work three quarters ahead, six quarters ahead, two years ahead. Like I'm always, you know, there's what needs to get done today. But then there's what I'm working on for tomorrow. And I spend the majority of my time in what I'm working on for tomorrow, or I'm waiting for today to happen so that I can continue to plant more seeds for tomorrow. Because sometimes you have to stop focusing on tomorrow to babysit when he's to close today. But then once today closes, it creates, it's sort of like a charter graph where you got stair steps. You know, and so when you look at it, there's the days and it just goes up plateaus, goes up plateaus, goes up plateaus. And so as you're going through those plateaus, there's the spurts of growth, where, and that's where, you know, the balance of working on today and tomorrow come into play. And I think that's where, you know, people don't take that longer, kind of 10,000 foot view. They try to get in the weeds and focus. And this is where we really work to solidify that and bring it together closely. Brilliant. One thing I'll just get back on is you mentioned the model legislation from the credit company. And the project that I worked on, the main project worked on was working at this thing tank called the Charter's Institute, which is kind of dedicated towards improving legislative frameworks and the general kind of finance ecosystem around developing new cities was actually looking at, I forget the new institution, but there are a couple of institutions in the US that had a lot of model legislation out there and kind of like figuring out which ones we wanted to kind of pick and use as boilerplates for ourselves. And I think it's a totally underrated kind of lever for, as mentioned, unlocking growth when done in the right way. And so I'll tie that with the observation on the GCC, which is my friend, he's, he went to Saudi Arabia earlier this year to go to their minerals conference. And he came out of it in his family's kind of like now working on a junior mining company that's kind of dedicated towards that region and the reason why is because they've just set out this new agenda where they're aiming to be, you know, they need to gain exposure to the energy transition. And in doing so, they realize, oh, you know, lithium and you know, rare metals on the closest thing in terms of core competency with kind of extracting oil for them to do that. And so that aim is really to build like a tier one jurisdiction in that vein when it comes to the legislation, the financing, the investment laws, et cetera. And I'm, as mentioned, just very impressed with like a lot of the kind of activity that goes on there in terms of the combination of kind of like prudence and understanding of like what makes commercially viable ecosystem. So yeah, I appreciate you for writing that. No, absolutely, and it's it's true that you know, those ecosystems are developing, you know, you think of it, look at Saudi, it's got a population of 40 million people, the entire Caribbean doesn't have that many people. You know, I mean, and so when you look at it from that perspective, yeah, Saudi's always going to be a million miles ahead and you can't compare Guyana to Saudi. But that doesn't mean that Saudi investors and people in the GCC don't want access to Guyana because to your point, they're looking to explain. They've never gone through a period of colonialism globally, and I know that's kind of a weird thing to wrap your head around, but colonialism's always stemmed out of Europe. It's not stemmed out of China or the GCC historically or America, you know, you can say America went colonialism when I went to Panama and then and set up itself as a strategic leader of the world. But ultimately, you know, this is a new era. It's a new world that we're, you know, that we're coming into and the power dynamics are shifting and they're going to change and the best, the important thing is that Guyana is in the play as a part of that. It's not the story. It's a part of the story. It's a critical part of the story. And for where we're positioned, we're excited to take advantage of it, but that doesn't mean we're not going to do stuff in other markets as well. You know, I mean, there's opportunities in Venezuela, there's opportunities in Ukraine, there's opportunities out in the Middle East, there's opportunities in Africa. You know, the one thing I'll say is that because the democratization of information and the ability for guys like us to go anywhere in the world now in a way that we couldn't do 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago is creating that, you know, they always say sunshine is the best disinfectant. And so as you're building these systems and as you're, you know, there's opportunities for them to be taken advantage of if they're not done right. But when you have so many people looking at them and so many people focusing on them, it's hard to hide or sweep things under the rug and make them disappear. You know, I mean in a world where there's, you know, checks and balances occur as a result of people holding each other accountable. And sometimes the pendulum swings too far one way or the other, but you know, one of the things I like about where Guyana is sitting is that there's some certain inherent pieces of the story that will prevent it from becoming of Venezuela or a Nigerian. You know, it doesn't have the amount of population, it doesn't have, it's got a lot of headwinds that those countries have, the guy that doesn't have. And so as it goes through this process, despite it being just as tribal as some of these other countries, you know, I believe because of the technology, because of the information access, because of the 24 seven nature of things happening. You know, it's amazing. Even in cities like Atlanta, Georgia, we're based when I'm not on the road with my family, you know, towers are growing up in months now that used to take years. You know, I mean, like literally massive high-rise towers that are still going to take two years to build a similar property in Guyana, but the fact is it's happening so much quicker everything's happening quicker. We're in a, we're actually in a period of global deflation. And that's part of why we're having all these challenges globally is that this deflation that's occurring is affecting everyone. And the only place to counter deflation is with growth. And the only places that I personally see growth over the next 10 years are Guyana and the Middle East. That's really where my focus is, you know, and then your crane once you brush on your crane, you know, rebuilding Europe, if you will, will be a big place. But historically, you know, in America, where are you going to go see the growth? You know, as a developer, as a developer, do you need to build this fifth holiday in in Orlando? Yes, because prices in Orlando are through the roof right now. But at the end of the day, you're not sure if you need it. But in the country that's got more GDP growing at such a fast rate, they need more hotel. They don't have enough capacity. You know, it's the theory of constraints. You know, it's a great book I read in college where you got to look through the system and find all the spots of constraint because that's where there's opportunity to make money by widening that that pie. You know, if you think of the government, the country of Guyana as a circle and you draw a circle on a piece of paper. You know, that's how much capacity can go through it currently. But if you if you increase that circle by 5X 6X 10X, the percentages go down, but the quantity goes up. And that's what's happening in Guyana right now is that the quantity and the orders of magnitude are all increasing dramatically. And the pie is shrinking, but there's not enough that no one can gobble the whole pie. And that's what people don't realize. And that's what you know, some people are afraid the government of Guyana and the country and the businessmen of Guyana are trying to be very secular and not letting anyone else in. I would say that that's not the case at all. It's more no one wants to come in because the environment's not prime to start sprinting and running. And most money is based on returns that have to happen in this quarter and can't be patient. You know, I mean, when you're an asset manager, you need predictability and you need, you know, you need infrastructure there to support guaranteed returns. Yes. As one of the leading asset managers in Guyana, I still can't point to anything anywhere that shows what kind of returns an investor can make by investing in Guyana. And they found oils almost 10 years ago now. They've been producing well since 2019 and they still can't actually give this information to anyone. So one of my favorite papers is my Howard Marx and it's entitled you can't eat IRA and it talks about the constraints that surround like different wrappers of money. The thing the kind of green light that comes to mind here is that the ideal form of capital here is like some permanent capital vehicles like yours, for example, but also family officers seem to be firms that maybe would be interested in that kind of exposure. Or once I wanted to differentiate themselves could kind of take that perspective that's slightly less institutionally bound by what our liabilities next year will be if that's totally misinformed to tell me. That being said to kind of wrap this up, I was just thinking about hitting two more quick prompts and then any final notes you have that you want to kind of share with listeners would love to kind of like have you share those one was, you know, we were talking about stagnation just now talking about kind of periods of low growth high growth. One of the you know things that in my trip in Esoterini and talking to other folks who spend time in kind of developing nations is there is this aspiration very much to not just develop a commodity based boom and economy, but also one that really kind of goes hard on manufacturing as well. And I'm curious as you thoughts on whether there is any policy again I imagine this fits very much for the kind of you know crawling walking running framework, but I'm curious is there anything that's kind of been discussed right now as it relates to developing a stronger manufacturing sector are there any kind of like season planted on the front. What do you thoughts on kind of the manufacturing side of things in the country. Manufacturing is entirely predicated on your cost of power and so once again like crawl walk run crawl is get the 200 mile or the 100 mile deep water pipeline. The 300 mega power plant online so that you can start walking and building that manufacturing because anywhere in the world if you look at willing gas supply chains, you know, and I go to Saudi because it's I do a lot of business there and I know country rather well. You know if you look at say big and Saudi or amco those are two different companies say big is all petrochemicals that's the refineries they make the area they make water they make everything. Out of the comes once the oils out of the ground then they refine it and turn it into you know everything from plastics to you know energy and so with that you know once again we're going through this process now I believe you know once again technology is a great thing when the first partnerships were involved in. It's putting together with one of our partners in the UAE it's for construction technology that is these by actually avoided slapped so when you're calling cement everywhere what's the best thing to do if you can figure out a technology that decreases the amount of cement you use who cares if your power costs are high because if you're saving that much money on the technology you can offset it so one container of this product creates 200 square meters of. Slaps for their building stories or their you know just pure manufacturing buildings but doing that that technology then saves the equivalent of 60 transit mixed cement trucks. Wow and so you're now removing 60 trucks off of the roads in Guyana because you now have this technology so where our focus is to your point is how can we plant seeds and find investments that will and partnerships and technologies that guide. So if you're trying to use today you're regardless of the market mind because the economics of it just make that much sense and so even if I have to pay 60 cents a kilowatt hour to make this stuff reliably because I can't trust the grid so I'm going to bring in my own generation system and I'm going to buy my own fuel for it and that just increases your costs that's fine because the replacement of it is 60 transit mixed cement trucks which that's $100,000 so in what it costs normally like that product will cost you. So that's a net $40,000 so if I have to spend an extra five grand in technology I'm still net 35,000 in profit on that so it's that's where we're finding some of these technology things and some of these manufacturing opportunities that we can bring in earlier in the life cycle because it matches where the market is now you can't do a commoditized thing like if you want to create a plastic bottling plant to sell all the coal in the country that already exists and someone's already doing it and that's a mod of the technology that's already. I'm doing it and that's a moddy price and we're not going to be able to compete at that level so if we're asked to partner or do something there we say we'll take your money but that doesn't make sense it's not the right kind this is where you have to trust us as an asset manager to find the right things and so I don't know if that answers your question at all and I'm sorry to pontificate on it but it's. Oh definitely does I would say the particularly interesting thing there was you mentioned the when you go to the numbers. The kind of cherry on top is that if costs do go down as expected when the kind of power line goes up your margin just expands you know all the magnitude and that's that's where that moves beautiful because you get an early you've kind of saved your downsides to that margin of safety and then on top of that you know as you're there on the ground kind of helping. You know build the business community you'll be a participant in it but also like the infrastructure being developed that just out of it significantly so it's a very exciting venture like prospect or distress that almost you know like type of like a return profile that. Final thing then that I want to ask about before getting into the final kind of comments is the education side of things what do the educational institutions look like what does the you mentioned kind of your vocational training for Patrick chemicals I'm curious like what does it look like. I'm curious like what does kind of like Stevens market landscape look like right now on that front in terms of the development of the human capital which is like the cool thing you know it's a place of 80000 people curious about your thoughts on that. It's it's interesting because it's once again like everything in Ghana the educational markets of tabular rosa it's a blank tablet you know like all frontier markets you know the successful and wealthy normally figure out a way to send their kids outside the country to go get. Education and when they leave usually they don't come back you know that that's every country in the Caribbean that's every country in Latin America that's all the eight pack countries that's all of Africa you know it's the same story everywhere. That's why places like London and New York are the melting pots of the world and so you know when it comes to the guy in East diaspora the main places where they reside are Toronto New York Miami and London those are really the four main. And there's some others but you know South Florida kind of expands a bit but holistically those are the areas where you need to focus and and with that there's a lot of growth in East happen I was less to be able to lecture at the University of Guyana and an entrepreneurship class and it was it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot and you know I met some great people and you know what I've realized is that you know everyone in Guyana that wants to become a millionaire US dollar millionaire. And wants to do the work and put the effort in can figure out a way to become it you know I mean there's no one that can't participate in this you know education is a critical component but with the with the access to technology the access to information the you know you just got to want it and so what I find is that in a lot of times in these frontier markets there's just not a lack of appreciation for. Living outside of your comfort zone and for doing that kind of research and and rolling up your sleeves and doing that work you know you know and it's part of it is you don't know what you don't know and. If you didn't grow up in this environment and you don't know how to to search and look for things and with technology today and everything just being at your fingertips you know there's so much that people take for granted and that's one thing that I would say you know I'm turning 40 this year you know I was fortunate enough to grow up in that old world still we're most people. We're most people today you know don't realize you know couldn't understand how to do anything on a computer because back in the day like I couldn't get the internet working on my computer unless I knew how to set the colonel entries to have a modem on my Linux box you know and so that probably means nothing to most people at no tech that don't know tech but you know like those problem solving skills are why I sit where I sit and i'm lucky to be sitting where I sit you know and I think it's a challenge for people like yourself you never had to figure that stuff out. You know what I mean and it puts them in a disadvantage state because when everything's handed to you on a silver platter when it comes to information you're not used to having to dig it or you know I know you're like me and we're cut from the same cloth but how many people will read a research report and leave it at that when I open a research report you know the first thing I do is I read all the footnotes and I go and in Google I search for the referenced articles in the footnotes and I download all of them before even read the first report because and I read them all and I figure out which reports are pertinent to what I'm doing. I'm looking for an example of what I'm looking for and studying and this my analysis background and analysis background but by doing that I get a much bigger world view and I start to see where people pulled this stuff from and how they learned and I'm going to their source material. You know but once again that's an intellectual curiosity that you don't get in school you know I didn't learn at school how to do that I learned that if I want more information this is how I get more information and it's because of my thirst for knowledge. I think one of the big mistakes is yes education is the silver bullet it's how you create a middle class you know the two there's three ways to create a middle class education home ownership and stock market. And so those are the three things that I believe need to be cornerstones to guy is going for path and we want to participate in that and we want to help that you know I think there's a lot of opportunity for educational financing you know in the private sector to help pay for a lot of these you know on the job training and everything. Yes it's you know it has to be a relationship that makes sense for the owner of the school the financier of the school and the people attending the school it can't just be a one sided relationship but in those instances and you have to realize that you know out of ten students that come in three of the students may never pay their loan so the ones the students that did have to offset the students that didn't and so that's why the returns are so high. You know in people don't take a step back all they say is oh why am I going to pay you know $25,000 to learn how to weld well if you get guaranteed job placement and someone's financing that $25,000 for you because you could go pay for yourself for $7,500 but you don't want to so they'll charge you 25,000 but the way the contract works is that you only have to pay for it if you stay in the industry. If you don't use your card you turn it in and they forgive the debt you know I mean and that's the kind of situation where that's where you start to change the conversation change the world view in the mindset but you can't come in and start casting everyone that's doing this in a bad light because if they weren't there doing it who else is going to train these people to do what they need to do how do you build these how do you create productive members of society from all skills all backgrounds all levels of understanding and experience you know I mean and that doesn't mean to say that someone from a wealthy family doesn't want to go to that school and get training on it but vocational schools that's where you become that's where you learn just to trade they call them trade schools you know that's where you learn how to do this and so these are the opportunities where Guyana will continue to evolve has to focus on this you know there are there is a deep respect amongst the guy needs for education you know they do appreciate it they value it I think that is a credit to you know the diversity of the country and how everyone plays together you know but at the same day at the same token you know it's not you don't need to go to college I mean I'm a big follower of Gary V love what he does think he hits probably about 85% on target all the time with anything he says or comes out of his mouth and with that you know he says you don't need to go to school to be an entrepreneur if you've got that first to reknowledge and you want to roll up your sleeves do the work and you'll get there you know I mean like what I learned at Emory you know 20 years ago I remember and I studied but you know you're in school right now so you get it you know but when you're out in the real world it's the actual real world environment that really teaches you and trains you and so the biggest thing I can ever tell anyone is just get out there and do it you know find the right people learn mentors and all that kind of stuff are all part of it but and that goes for whether you're working in Guyana you're working in Timbuktu or you're working in London in the city you know I mean like the principles are the same there's fundamentals of every system all this is as a system that me and my team have figured out how to position ourselves to leverage and take advantage of and to help evolve and build and so that's where we feel we're creating the value and how we're doing it and we're looking forward to helping you know and at the end of the day it's not just Guyana it's the entire Caribbean is going to participate in us because that's one thing we haven't talked about but how the rest of caracom is going to participate and kind of ride the co-tales of Guyana is a critical story here that no one's really talking about it and you know the island politics that exists where you know everyone likes to throw shade and and and and kind of gossip and throw crap around this fine but that's not reality reality is as a rising tide raises all ships and so there's not enough you know when there's no part of the reason that our headquarters is in Jamaica is because there's no place in Guyana that has that capacity for us on a financial services side so if I want to hire auditors if I want to hire that that stuff has to come to Guyana and we're going to be one of the leading groups that brings it to Guyana through all the projects and all the investments that we have but ultimately that knowledge and mindset and world view isn't in Guyana yet so why am I going to set up an office that I can't hire any more to work at when I can hire them in Jamaica and in Trinidad to do the work and then transfer that knowledge down to Guyana and bring the people into Guyana and get them up to that level because of course it's always going to be cheaper to have someone in Guyana working on this than paying someone in Jamaica to work on it not just from a GDP standpoint or you know wages and salaries and everything but just from a knowledge and experience you want the people close to the source you know what I mean and yes there's some skills that can be you know run from afar and in this mobile world that we live in and in this virtual world and you know you can do a lot more but still you're actually building a country and the power goes out and Internet goes down you've got to be on the ground there solving these problems and working on it and that's where you know we're supporting it but you've got to get the whole capacity there lifted and so you know when 20 people graduate out of UG University of Guyana every year with a law degree and that's a class of 20 people well at the end of the day that's over five years that's a hundred new lawyers that are going to be producing Guyana 100 lawyers is nowhere near the amount of lawyers that are going to need to build the country of Guyana and that's five years worth of lawyers who also have to come out get trained learn their craft get the skill set learn how to build learn how to do all their work and that's not you know splitting it up between those that go work for the government those that go work for the financial services sector those that work for the insurance industry those that do the construction the M&A you know the business law the litigation I mean there's a lot of different buckets that those hundred people have to go sit it. Definitely I had that last part has triggered so many thoughts and I'm kind of frustrated that we kind of are coming to the time constraints here. I will share some of the show notes and I'll kind of like share them with you as well I think there's a fascinating kind of you know educational experiment we run in serendium right now when it comes to kind of crowding in new forms of financing to essentially performance based contracting amongst multiple parties to see who can kind of serve the student better right there's other kind of you know innovations as well when it comes to developing human capital on you mentioned kind of the trade school level like decomposing what do you like deep vocational kind of education is looking for. So I think that education is looking like yet there's a company called open skills X which is just kind of recently launched which focuses on far more like the kind of hard manufacturing and hard industry types of things versus what's typically on kind of like a case with 12 syllabus that being said I think it's best to for myself not to kind of get into that and I will just finally kind of leave this with a final kind of prompt to note is there anything you would like to share with our listeners Steven it's been incredible talking over the last half I don't know. Now I thank you for the time and I look forward to you know helping any way I can I'm really easy got to find online I'm you know you find my email it's s jasmine J S M I N at SC 3. L T D the websites SC 3. L T D and I'm on LinkedIn pretty heavily so most of our content distribution and stuff happens over on LinkedIn and excited for the journey and thank you for the time and just always looking to meet great asset managers and people playing in the frontier and emerging market space and congratulations on what you accomplish. Wonderful. Deep appreciated Steven wishing you the best and the speech. Cheers.