Get Anand Mahindra on WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Two of India's loudest voices have somehow never sat across a microphone together. Anand Mahindra runs an 80-year industrial conglomerate spanning auto, aerospace, IT, and agribusiness across 100+ countries — and tweets like a founder, with over 10 million followers. Nikhil Kamath has spent the last three years quietly building India's most consequential long-form podcast: WTF is with Nikhil Kamath and People by WTF, with a guest list that reads PM Modi → Bill Gates → Elon Musk → Chamath Palihapitiya. He's done global tech titans. He's done India's prime minister. But he hasn't done India's most online industrialist.

That's the gap.

What makes the pairing combustible is style. Most business interviewers ask Anand about Mahindra. Nikhil's pattern, across 55+ episodes, is to start there and then pivot — to mortality, to legacy, to whatever is underneath the surface. He asked Sam Altman why he had a kid. He asked Carl Pei whether nothing has meaning. He asked Modi what he reads when nobody's watching.

Anand is 71 now. He's handing pieces off. He's never had that conversation in long-form.

The timing matters too. The forces moving through India right now are exactly the ones Anand has spent fifty years navigating — and the ones Nikhil has spent the last three years interrogating in everyone else:

• AI is starting to do to white-collar work what factories did to farms. India is on track to add a million graduates a year into a market that no longer needs them the same way.

• Anand's counter-thesis: AI can turn blue collar into gold. He's institutionalized it by chairing Telangana's Young India Skills University. Nobody has pressed him on what that actually looks like.

• Global supply chains are rewiring out of China in real time. Mahindra ships into 100+ countries and just acquired SML Isuzu to go deeper on commercial vehicles.

• Geopolitics is now product strategy. Tariffs, export controls, sovereign AI mandates, energy realignment. Indian founders are betting on which way these break — Anand is one of the few who has to bet across all of them at once.

And Nikhil is the interviewer absorbing this entire moment in real time. He just wrapped Modi, Gates, Altman, Musk, and Chamath. Howard Marks is on deck. Anand is the conversation he hasn't had yet.

This is the conversation India is missing. Not because nobody's thought of it, but because nobody's organized around it. The window where Anand is still actively running things, where Nikhil is still hungry enough to go three hours deep, where AI and geopolitics are simultaneously rewriting what Indian industry even is — that window is now. Six months from now this is a different conversation. A year from now somebody else gets the question we wanted asked.

So we're collecting the audience that wants this in one place, before the moment passes.

Add your name to the people asking for it. Drop the question you'd actually want Nikhil to put to Anand — the one nobody's asked yet. Share this with the founder, the operator, the policy wonk, the skeptic in your group chat who'd say "finally, someone's pushing for this."

Suggestions on social media disappear into reply threads. Votes on this page don't.