Transcription
Well, you know, the funny thing is, I've actually said to my friends that if you want to get somebody to actually appreciate you, just make sure they travel more abroad. You look at every Asian country, you look at, in fact, most of the developed world countries, um, then you're actually grateful for the PAP. And I say that unapologetically.
What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Yala, your thrice-weekly podcast where we talk about the hottest news with a touch of what? Terren, good old humor. Good old humor, man. Yeah. So today is a very special episode, very, very special, where we have someone very special, uh, in front of us. Uh, we wish we could talk to him for the whole day, but we have a limited time. He's much busier than we are.
Correct. Correct. You say that to everybody. I'm sure it's like a guy dating a girl, "Oh, you're so special." It's our generic intro for important people. Twice, twice weekly. Very special. I get it. I get it. No, but not every day we get, you know, people who are doing badass things, uh, in, have done bad, yeah, in life and their careers to come and talk about it and share with the Yala audience about, you know, uh, their journey. Like, right? Can you tell my kids I'm badass? I mean, that would really be cool. They think I'm really like the most boring person around. I can say, "Wow, Yala caught me badass." That gives me real street cred, you know? We can take out this excerpt and send it to you so you can, every time before you walk out, at you can be part of my bio when I, when people introduce me in the future. I mean, Mr. Hing is the chairman of Bantry Resort. Mr. Hoking is your badass. Exactly. Wow. Yeah.
But we will, we will dig into why we say badass, you know? And I mean, I didn't even need to introduce you. You just introduced yourself as badass, bad, the badass, Mr. The whole thing. Okay. Um, yeah, so, so thanks for, thanks for joining us. Yeah. Uh, I mean, like, um, remember the first time that, uh, I saw your name, uh, in the, in the corporate setting was when I was working at SIA, and I saw the board of directors, and I saw your name there. I was like, "Oh, that's, uh, that's interesting." And over the years, there's been so much that you have done, and, uh, a lot of views that that you have shared. Yeah. So at this point, like right now, before we go into the history, like, what, what's your, what's your time spent on these days?
My time is spent on trying to avoid increasingly frequent Biden moments. Biden moments? Yeah. But everybody in my generation knows what a Biden moment is, and we're pretty cool that you guys don't know. What is a Biden moment? A Biden moment is when you suddenly trying to, you, you freeze and you forgot what you were about to say or what you want to say. See, see, I got one up on you there. We all know what a Biden moment is. It's something that even I grapple with these days, even just freezing in the middle of a sentence or something. Yeah.
But you're saying that that's something that, uh, you actually think about, like how to, how to make sure that you can focus in the moments? Well, no, actually. I mean, I meant that half jokingly. I mean, I think I'm halfway to a Biden moment. But, you know, there's a, there was a famous visionary thinker called Buckminster Fuller. Um, he was an architect. He was the one who designed the geodesic dome. Oh, really? Really. And a real polymath in terms of being a real, um, Renaissance thinker. And he was still writing books at the age of 90-plus. And people used to interview him about that. And he was very honest about it. He said, "You know, I still have a lot of views. Mmm. I think I have a lot of things to say, but I'm very forgetful about things. So all I do now is I just write down everything on Post-it notes whenever I need to, and I just stick it all over my house." Yeah. So I do that now. I have a WhatsApp, you know, there's a WhatsApp thing where you can actually, um, WhatsApp yourself. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think WhatsApp yourself. So anytime I want to, uh, if I have something I forgot to do, like, actually, I was thinking of maybe buying you guys an espresso machine because I've never had Nescafe for a long time. I was going to write down there afterwards. Then I saw you actually have a broken espresso machine. Yeah. So I was, I was going to note down by you guys. You a whole list of things. Yeah. You can, if you want. But the point was, I was going to write it down because I'll forget it. I see. I see. Okay.
But I spend most of my time now, um, thinking about the things, the things I want to do with my life, um, whatever time is left of that. And I don't mean that in any morbid way. In fact, I've spoken to groups very recently when they asked me what do I think is the, the most important, um, self-awareness you should have. And I've said it should be the idea of mortality. Not morbid at all. But if you didn't think that there's a limited time to your life, then you're probably quite content to street walk through life, which I think is the saddest thing somebody can do. But, you know, if life was eternal, then you won't make the most of it. Yeah. And of course, I'm not thinking about when am I going to die. But obviously, being at 72 years old, the time left is a lot less than a 25-year-old kid. So my awareness of mortality is what gives me daily pleasure, give me, um, a sense of purpose, and makes me want to do a lot more things before that day finally comes. So I'm actually very busy right now. Mmm. Because there's so many things I want to do still before I kick the bucket.
Is that part of the reason, uh, one of the motivations behind you distilling a lot of these thoughts into your, your recent book that was launched, uh, I think two months ago, "Behind the Banana"? Well, the thing is, I, I didn't distill the thought. I'm not the author. I just go on and on and I talk rubbish. And it's the author, Aaron, who's got the job to distill it and make it sound reasonable. Yeah. Uh, he, his very difficult job is to make me sound wise, sound intelligent. And my only job, since most of it was done during COVID and through other interviews, I just rattle on like I'm doing with you guys now.
But, but to clarify for those people who are think trying to understand what we're saying, is like, I think he calls it Gonzo journalism or something where, where he interviews you. Is it? He interviews you. He originally wanted to make it Gonzo journalism, but we, you know, Gonzo journalism is supposed to be the fly on the wall where you, you project yourself, uh, as a journalist. So you are in there as much as the, uh, the person you're writing about. Yeah. It didn't work out in the end, although he did continue having his own views. So he would say, "I," and "I am." He. Okay. So it's not a book by me. It's a book by him. Yeah. But it was a little bit, a bit confusing at times when he would use the "I" and give a little anecdote about himself, and then it would seem as if the "I" was Heping. So that would be you. You have to. Gonzo journalism has to be done in a particular style so that you don't confuse, uh, the reader. Um, so this book still is written by Aaron, and it's supposed to be a book with business lessons and so on for other people. So you'll see in the book, he makes references to other business leaders and so on, well-known people. I mean, the Steve Jobs and War Buffets of the world, and he makes allusions to these to make certain points, and that's definitely him speaking. Yeah. And then he, he would talk to me and then he would quote me, and that would be my voice speaking. So it's probably, in terms of, um, percentage of content, it's probably still about 85% about Banyan Tree group and about me. But he does have interspersed in it anecdotes from businesses that he sort of culled together. Yeah.
But I mean, the interesting thing is, the, I think the first 25% he really delves into, at least, is really talking about your history and your background, how you got to where you are today. And I, even for, for us, you know, we, we know a little bit about your background having heard about it, news of people talking about it, but a lot of the details, I think, were quite shocking to both of us in reading it. I mean, shocking. Yeah. By, by any measure. It wasn't, it wasn't illuminating. It was, of course, I was not indicted for rape or incest, child molestation, that would be shocking. I was jailed for what I considered to still be quite proper, but in the Singapore context, Singapore context. That's why we said badass. We said badass because there are things that you did in your youth and all that, you know, even for us, we're like, "Wow, you know, we went to US university." And to hear that you did this and what, what happened and the ramifications of that is shocking, right? Yeah.
What was the most shocking thing, or at least like the most, uh, surprising thing? You guys, you should have said inspiring. Shocking. The inspiring. Inspiring came after, after the shock. There's a shock and awe, and then the inspiration. Even when you see, like, you know, the Northern Lights, there's shock, and then inspire. You're just covering your own ass. It's not bad. You're covering your own ass. Oh, gosh, no. But, but I mean, like, yeah, we, we attended, uh, US university, uh, UPenn. And, yeah, there's just, you know, the climate of what US universities are today, you know, with like protests going on campus, uh, and then, you know, the, the things that we're reading about Singaporean parents afraid to send their kids to US universities because of all the unrest there. Then I'm like, "Wow." But this has been going on in the US universities for the longest time ever, you know? Um, when you, I mean, when you think back on those days of your youth in the US university and all, tell us a little bit about, like, what, what the climate was back then that, you know, like, um, that there would, would be like, like what we say, a bit shocking to people today, like how, how would it lead to, um, students feeling very motivated and ready to, you know, take to the streets and act?
Okay. On the Syria side, and I think it is true that US campuses have not seen anything, um, since, since the Vietnam War period. And, and basically, it's the whole, it's largely what's happening in Gaza, yeah, right? That has infuriated so many people because of the gross injustices and, and also the hypocrisy of the US itself. Mmm. But this is just a, a shadow of what happened because no American kid is getting killed because of Gaza. It's just the American support of something that even the international, uh, courts have actually said is a war crime. And the, you, the American hypocrisy that everybody has seen that's infuriating a lot of younger people. But if you go back, and this has to take you back in history a little bit, um, I'm a member of this aging or increasingly aging baby boomer generation, right? But if you look at it, baby boomers were born just after the war. We were the largest cohort, and we came about at a time when, um, after the war, with the sexual revolution, so to speak, people coming out in the hippies on one end and political activists on the other end. But they were young people who finally came of age after the World War II period, which their parents experienced severe austerity and so on. So the baby boomer generation, I think around the world, was united by ideas of, by idealism about democracy, justice, and so on. So if you look back, you had the, the, um, quasi revolution, uh, 1956 in Hungary, you had the, the Prague Spring in 1968, you had a lot of student riots and revolutions in France and elsewhere, all in the late '60s because that's when my generation came of age. We were in our late teens to early 20s. Mmm. Then in the US itself, the Vietnam War was raging. It was getting worse and worse. I arrived in, in, in Stanford University on the same day that the so-called incident, Kent State occurred. And that was when students were actually killed on campus. So you could imagine the campus uproar, and it was many times more than today because Americans would get getting killed in, in the Vietnam War. And I arrived there. If I were a good young Singaporean in a very safe place in Singapore, where the leadership had had basically said that, um, if we did not support South Vietnam, uh, the whole idea of the Domino Theory, right? Everybody in Southeast Asia believed that, um, if they did not support America and if Vietnam, North Vietnam was not vanquished, you would have a domino theory, mmm, of course, having been educated in Thailand, uh, most people in Thailand realized that domino theory wouldn't work because Vietnamese troops would just get stopped by the Bangkok traffic, and they would be able to get anywhere. But leaving that aside, I spent my high school years in Bangkok. And when I arrived in the US, I suddenly realized that I had been leading a very sheltered life. I did not realize to an extent Thailand was being used as a base for the Vietnam War. And I didn't realize because I went to, to an international school, and very much, much mostly Americans there. And I had friends, one very good friend in particular, who committed suicide because his father was an Air Force officer who died in Vietnam. And in my last year in high school, we had the infamous fame of being the school, only the, the one high school in the world with the highest overdose rates. Oh, because of there was so much drug abuse going on because kids' parents were being killed in Vietnam. These are the kids of officers, uh, because, you know, children of only officers are an age where they have children. And so, so I grew up in a very tumultuous period. And when I went to, and I imbibed all the American military propaganda, but when I went to, to America and saw that things were actually quite different, and I began to truly believe that the, the war between North and South was a war of nationalism and a war of reunification, rather than the Vietnamese Communist Party wanting to take over South Vietnam and then take over Thailand and so on. The whole domino theory, I didn't believe anymore. And that led me to start thinking that I should not be in favor of this war. Um, I had been, I was much more leftist at that time. Um, I told my parents that if they ever gave, if I ever got any inheritance from them, I'd just donate it away, and I didn't want any wealth, which thankfully they were, they were smart enough to not give me anything. But, but yeah, that was the context in which, uh, I, I took part in, in anti-war demonstrations. But the real irony is, I didn't get thrown out of jail at all because of, um, anti-war activities. That's the supreme irony.
So, so, so, you know, when you look back at that, um, basically, like, from, from what I heard you say, you grew up in a very tumultuous period. You went to the US, and you had your own opinions that you wanted to stand for, that, you know, you joined this protest. So, you know, this day and age, when the protest word in Singapore, and, you know, I mean, it's always been a very taboo topic. Do you think looking back, like, that was an important chapter in your life, that that really shaped you, like, you know, standing up for something you believed in at that point in time, which even now, you look back, maybe yes? Yeah. Like, how did that shape you? I know one thing you said about being thrown into detainment, it made you appreciate the ability to study, you know, it gave you, Well, that's more like a joke than anything else. I, I was a terrible student. I mean, I'm no, I was really, um, a good student in Stanford when I came back here. Yeah. Um, I, I didn't study at all because I had to repeat from year one, which is kind of stupid. Um, and in those days, before LKY said that if he had a choice, he would send his kids to American universities, you know, if you, if you went to Harvard or Yale or Stanford, and I went to Stanford, and you transferred, there's no such thing as a transfer. You could only transfer if you were from an Oxbridge or UK university. There was absolutely no recognition of US universities, even though the textbooks, uh, I had been studying in NUS were actually written by many of my professors at Stanford. But there was no such thing. So I had to start all over as year one. And I was so burnt out of my life. I started writing as a journalist, and that got me into trouble. So I'd never been a good student in NUS. But since I went to jail, and since after I confessed, they allowed me to have textbooks, then I sat for the second year, although I was 25 years old already. I sat for the second year, and I, and I basically aced it. I got the top of my class. Yeah. Simply because, you know, the moral of the story is very simple. If you're a parent, and you want your kid to do well, send the kid to detention. Getting me arrested by the, but like going back to my original question, like, um, how, how did that shape you as you look back onto your life? You know, like standing for what you believed in. It did get you. I have always, maybe because of my parents, who were both in their own younger selves, were very politically active in China, um, and they've always had a strong sense of social justice. And interestingly, even after I was detained, and my father knew LKY because he was ambassador to Bangkok and then to the EU, and he knew Goh Keng Swee, Rajaratnam, all personally. So you would have thought that they would have been very ashamed of me, that typical parents, "You bring shame to me." Uh, they never, they never basically scolded me. They, they simply said, "You have to do in life what you believe in, uh, and we always support you." So my, I have never been ashamed for why I was detained. I would, I would be ashamed if I was arrested for anything that had to do with moral turpitude. But I had my views. I don't think, um, I was a danger to Singapore, and I do not think I should have been arrested. But I've never borne, and I've said this many times, I've never borne LKY any grudge because I think he did it for what he thought was for the best of Singapore, and I think he was wrong. But many of us as CEOs have done things in retrospect, like firing somebody, then you realize, "Oh, maybe you shouldn't have fired that person." But in the moment, how do you know what is right and wrong? If, as long as you are completely selfless, Mmm. And that's where I think I think LKY was always totally selfless. His grip on power was, and he was pretty authoritarian, was always not for the propagation of his own personal wealth. It was for what he thought Singapore needed. So I've never borne him a grudge. But if I ask, if I look back on my own life now, I would say I have, I bear no shame for every, anything I've done. Mmm. But I think I did not need to necessarily have been been that headstrong. I could have done things. I could have still stood up for what I believed without it having get, without getting thrown out of Stanford, without being jailed. I could have done some new businesses rather than go into the business I went to when I was really green after I came back and joined my father's company, which was to build a jack-up drilling rig in China. That led to a near bankruptcy. So I think I've never been ashamed of what I've done, but I think I'm sometimes too headstrong a person. And at least now, I haven't yet brought the company to near bankruptcy because I am finally, at the young age of 72, a little bit more, um, considered in my behavior.
So, so when you see what, uh, young people on US college campuses are doing, or even, you know, somewhere in Singapore, going, taking the streets and protesting on campus and all, like, do you feel that that's a phase that they'll get over at some point, or what do you feel when you, when you see them being so fervent about their belief? Do you think they shouldn't be too headstrong? Yeah, I think there shouldn't be. I think, well, you know, I don't know who, who was it who said, I think it's, I, I don't know who was it who said that, um, uh, you know, everyone should be a communist when you're under 25 years old, but if you are still a communist after 25 years old, then you're pretty stupid. Meaning, the essential point is, you can afford to be relatively, um, naively idealistic up to a certain age, and you should maintain that idealism, but not the naivety anymore. And my sense of all this is that many things, I think of young people today anywhere in the, in the world, um, that idealism should always be there, and not just idealism, but the call to action should always be there. But I've seen too many cases where, in fact, young people are manipulated. Um, I was actually partly manipulated too, by, by organizations bigger than me and so on. And I actually think, very sadly, for many of the, the young people pushing for democracy and even, um, independence for Hong Kong, which has gotten them very severe jail sentences, and which prompted the Chinese government essentially to crack down on Hong Kong when they had not cracked down on Hong Kong for so many years after 1987. I think they were put up to it. I, we don't need to go into the theories as to who did it. That goes into a long geopolitical discussion. But I think it was clearly a campaign to try to get young people in Hong Kong to declare independence so that China has no choice but to clamp down. And I think those young people, I feel, feel sorry for, because I think they did not realize what they were being led into. But the idealism was so great. So I admire them for their idealism, but I actually feel sorry for the naivety to even think you could promote independence for Hong Kong without knowing the consequences that would happen, and probably not knowing that you're being used.
But, but how are young people supposed to guard against that? Because, I mean, now there's social media, there's so much news online, and the fact that you yourself said you were kind of partly manipulated when you were younger, how, how would a young person kind of guard against that? Or is it just something that is unavoidable? No, it's, it's unavoidable that people will make use of you. But it does boil down to why I named the, the my my second book, which is a collection of all my, uh, articles, features, and essays. I, I used the title was called "Asking Why." Because I have actually argued that asking why is at the source of all thought leadership. Uh, thought leadership can range from Nelson Mandela saying, "Why should black people be inferior?" It's led to why Mahatma Gandhi is saying, "Why should however hundreds of millions of Indians be ruled by a few thousand white people from the UK?" Asking, they asked why. Martin Luther asked a religious why. You've got scientists from Galileo to Isaac Newton asking scientific whys. So unless you question not just the status quo, unless you question everything and decide to think for yourself, I think that's where all of us can be led astray. Not just young people, all of us. Who see social media today with deep fakes and, and so on, a lot of people are not thinking for themselves. And I think, of course, young people more so because not that they're not intelligent, it's because perhaps they haven't experienced deception so that enough. They haven't been embittered enough like older people that you become skeptical of things. So I don't think my idealism has shifted. I've always said that Claire and I are so proud of what we're doing in Banyan Tree, not because we want to be billionaires, we want to be having an empire with over hotels, but because Banyan Tree is today the vehicle by which we are doing all the things we wanted to do when we first got married, even as, as a development economist, and she was a sociological development sociologist. All the things we wanted to do. But today, I'm much more savvy. I'm much more skeptical of everything. On the business side, I'm much more skeptical of banks. I'm much more skeptical of PE funds. I'm much more skeptical of politicians. So I hope that with age and wisdom, one becomes far more skeptical, but not cynical. And there's a big difference between the two.
And, and what is that difference? The difference is, someone had said before that cynicism is the last refuge of the idealist. And it means it's a refuge. You don't do things anymore. You become so cynical that you don't do anything anymore because everything is not worth doing. That's cynicism. Skepticism implies the fact that you question everything. You're skeptical about everything, but that does not impede you from action. You can be a very skeptical activist. But a cynic is one where the borderline has been passed. You become so skeptical about things, you become such a cynic that you basically believe, don't do anything because whatever you do, it's not going to change anything. And I don't believe that. I believe that there's a lot of badness out there in the world, and you must always not be led into things, whether in business or anything else. But that doesn't prevent me from going out and every day trying to change what I think are the bad things in the world. I think that's an important difference here that I tried to tell people, young people also. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of overly old-in-mind cynics among young people. And I've criticized that, saying, I call that sleepwalking through life. There's, there's so many young people who are far too young to be cynical, but they sleepwalk through life, not meeting every day with joy and happiness and purpose, uh, but just kind of like, like in China, "tang ping," you know, just kind of lie down and let life go on because you're just cynical. Anything, nothing I do matters. That's, I think, is really sad.
But, but how do you think that has come about? Because, I mean, you, you have a very big role in Singapore's education as well, you know, have, have helping set up SMU and all. Like, what do you think has been pushing, you know, younger people to have that kind of "tang ping" kind of attitude towards life? My, my experience of the Singapore system has got advantages and disadvantages. It's got the advantage that because I'm a complete outsider to it, except for a short stint in NUS, I'm not blinded by the fact that I'm, I'm part of the system who grew within it. I'd never studied here. I suffer from the disadvantage of not knowing perhaps the constraints of what one can do in Singapore. But I have always maintained that self-confidence is more important than anything else for a young person, and even a much older person. And I think, uh, Singapore's highly competitive system, not just competition, but a system which already is improving very much now, but a system which during my time, even though I was not a product of the system, I was close enough to the system to actually understand it at a very young age, you can lose complete self-confidence because of streaming. Right now, all the great elites who've done well, become President Scholars, and then Permanent Secretaries, and then they become ministers. Great for them. But what about the guys who don't make it in that system? The high flyers are great. But the people who are not successful products of their system, you feel such a complete lack of confidence. Lack of confidence leads to a lack of self-agency. So you go with the flow. You don't think, um, things can change. And I've spoken also, even recently, at the Civil Service College, because I think it deals with civil servants, that there's been a book out called "The Tyranny of the Majority," and that's no, "The Tyranny of Meritocracy." And I've long argued that meritocracy, which is obviously like a motherhood and apple pie statement, right? I mean, of course, we should be meritocratic. But the insidiousness of meritocracy, because there is no such thing as total meritocracy, and we've seen that too in Singapore. The large, the bulk of university graduates in Singapore have parents who are university graduates. The large bulk of people who are lawyers and doctors have parents and so on. So this, the meritocracy that we have, the insidiousness goes two ways. The people who are successful products of the system think that because it's meritocratic, they really deserve it. And the people who don't succeed, this is the worst part, the insidious part, they really believe they should not succeed because meritocracy is fair. I didn't succeed, it means I am dumb, I'm worth nothing. Whereas if you are in an autocracy or in a dictatorship or an aristocracy, neither the privileged or the underprivileged believe in the heart of hearts that this is what it should be, right? The, the aristocrat basically facing himself with, "No, I am where I am because of connections." Yeah. The guy who's a serf in a, in a feudal society knows, "I am where I am because I was born this way, and I don't have the advantages." So it's unjust. So sometimes growing up in an unjust world is good for you because you do not think you got there by yourself either. You were oppressed and you didn't get there, which then gives you a sense of righting that oppression. Or if you are privileged, you know you don't really deserve it. The insidiousness of meritocracy is the people who don't get it, don't, who don't succeed, actually lose a lot of self-confidence because they think, unlike the serf who knows he's not inferior to the lord in the manner it's just that he was born this way and the system is unfair. People under so-called meritocracy believe they failed because they really deserve to fail.
But, but what would be the alternative? Because, you know, growing up in Singapore, that's all you hear, that, you know, there, we need to be very efficient with whatever we do. Meritocracy is the, the only way for a country this size of ours. And we keep hearing this. So what would be an alternative? An alternative, I think, is to, is to believe that we must always have structural meritocracy. Now, structural meritocracy means, for example, you can't, and we do have that very well, right? You can't buy your way into a, a good Singapore school. I've always totally believed that we should never have private schools in Singapore, which is good. We have no some degree of disparity already with the SAP schools, Independent Schools. But I have always believed very strongly that the best Singapore students should go to the best Singapore schools. And there's already a bit of elitism, but not to go to private schools. We do not have the equivalent of Eton's and Harrow's, and we do not have private universities here. So we have a structured system of egalitarianism. We have a structural system of meritocracy, which I would defend to the death. However, we should always realize, and to give the government and our leadership today the credit, they realize that we now have no longer a dynamic meritocracy. We have a kind of entrenched meritocracy where the system is meritocratic. You take exams, you go to, you can never buy your way into any university in Singapore. You can't buy your way into anything. We can get a bit of influence, maybe, but not beyond the bounds of what is normal. But we need to recognize that in actual fact, a lot of the meritocracy that we have isn't really meritocratic. And we must introduce more, a higher rate of dynamic meritocracy, which also means more pathways to success at every level of life. That definitely helps a lot more in terms of meritocracy. Right now, your life, your career, your future is laid out pretty much in your pre-teens, teens, and young adulthood. Yeah. And the way to get back up again when you haven't done so well isn't there. So we need to be meritocratic in as a system, but we must recognize that meritocracy as a buzzword is not the only solution for Singapore. It is a system better than any other. Like capitalism is better than any other system, but that doesn't make the, it shouldn't make us believe that capitalism is the godsend of everything. It's not. There's so many flaws with capitalism, but it's the only, it's the best of all other systems. Meritocracy is a system which is the best of all systems, but it's got a lot of faults to it, and we must consciously be aware of it so that we can change it to develop a more fair and dynamic meritocracy.
But do you, I mean, um, people have spoken up against streaming, especially for young children before. But sometimes the counter argument is that, um, from the par, some the parents, even want the streaming because it's a way for them to understand where their child is at in life and compared to his peers and all. Do you think there's an element of, it's already been so long since we've been doing this that it's already ingrained in our culture, our system, Singaporean gunas, to want to be measured against your, your peers and know where you are? Well, if you just look at it, um, it's kind of like a NIMBY effect. The, those families who've got kids who are bright would love to have streaming. Those parents whose kids are late developers probably don't want to have streaming, right? I mean, the minute you have streaming, as in, in a very inherent concept of streaming, is some people get ahead, some people don't, right? I mean, that's what streaming is all about, otherwise you don't stream. So the obvious point also is that those kids who are streamed downwards are definitely not happy about it. Those kids who are streamed upwards are very happy about it. So the parents who don't want streaming to end are largely going to be your upper middle class kids, parents who are already very successful, who can afford a lot of tuition, uh, and many other things. So the kids all, uh, get ahead. So streaming is good for them because it reduces less competition early on in life. So, yeah, you, you respond to your own selfish needs. So that's why, of course, education is a difficult thing because in any educational system change, there will be the people who are on the top don't want more fairness, Mmm. Because then their kid will have more competition.
So, so, you know, like, one thing you mentioned in the book is that, uh, because your business spans many countries, there's a lot of understanding the local cultures, the local customs. So when it comes to education, or even just Singapore society as a whole, I think now any young person, even, even like, for, for us, we are millennials, and like, when we look at news every day, there's so many things, so many challenges that our country is facing. But on one hand, I also hear from people abroad, there's no country that's perfect, right? So from all your work, is there anything that you see that is uniquely Singaporean, for better or worse, compared to other countries, or their challenges that are consistent amongst younger folk all around the world? Well, you know, the, the funny thing is, I've actually said to my friends that if you want to get somebody to actually appreciate you, just make sure they travel more abroad. When we live in Singapore, we criticize the PAP because everything they do is wrong, wrong, wrong, blah, blah. And much of what we do, they do is wrong. The minute you go outside, you just travel within Asia. You go to Thailand, you see how, how incredibly screwed up their politics are. You look at every Asian country. You look at, in fact, most of the developed world countries, um, then you're actually grateful for the PAP. And I say that unapologetically. Because even though there are many things that they do that is wrong, you look at it fundamentally. We say that our leadership is boring, they're technocrats. But yeah, better to have a boring technocrat run your country than to have a bunch of absolute idiots. And you, you look at the, you look at the two countries which are the two Anglo-Saxon countries which we follow the most because of our colonial heritage. You look at the UK and the US. Can anybody reasonably say today that their system is better than what we have now? I don't think our system is perfect. But, and that's why I really resented from when people in the UK or the US actually dare to preach to us about what we should be doing. And I say, look back. And I say, damn right that LKY basically threw things back at them. And those were the days when, in fact, they were already more functional than today. But their politics is so totally dysfunctional today. And, and I actually, I'm hardly a pro-Trump, pro-right-wing guy. But I think this, the political systems are so screwed up. The liberal elite has essentially lost the plot. And why the liberal elites are now losing way completely to the, to the far right is because they got it all wrong. And even now, when they're all ridiculing Donald Trump and ridiculing the far right, I think they have no understanding that the situation today is a lot of their own doing. So I guess back to your point about Singapore, yeah, I would say, I think it's useful to look at what we are doing right. It's also quite useful to see what I think we're not doing right. And I, and I have long argued that because we are relatively harmonious, we're relatively egalitarian, and, and we're relatively in many ways better as a harmonious society, our type of governance is better, and so on, uh, it also tends to make Singaporeans very smug with a lot of hubris and quite arrogant. Mmm. So, and have long cautioned that you can be proud of what you have, as I am proud of what I've done in my company, yeah. But the minute I say that, I think we've arrived. The minute I say that, I'm better than so-and-so, is the beginning of the downfall. And I think young Singaporeans, on one hand, are critical of their government, and when they go overseas, they criticize other people rather than just quietly learn from it. And you get the picture of the ugly Singaporean who thinks that every other, the society is screwed up. No, not the West. They are still very, young Singaporeans, many of them, still have what I would call a quasi-colonial mentality, which I really tried to work against at SMU, so that we tried to get our, our overseas exchange students to go to Asian countries. And, and there's another thing, a lot of stuff about what I've used, tried to use SMU to do, like I've tried to get Banyan Tree to do, um, which reflects my view of what Singapore would be like. And I'm very proud that SMU students are quite, less, quite different than before, because NUS and NTU have caught up. But I think we definitely, uh, produced a whole, well, succeeding generations of students whom I would be very proud of as a Singaporean, whereas, and that was why one of my major motivations on taking on the challenge of of helming SMU for 25 years was to create a generation of young Singaporeans I could be proud of, when the typical foreign stereotype of young Singaporeans were very insulting.
So, so I mean, you know, like both of us have been following your work, uh, and and reading, um, what you've done in the past. But what would you say to maybe a younger person who is not aware of what you've done, and they just hear what you say and they just reply, you know, with that, that, um, phrase, you know, "Okay, Boomer"? You know, have you heard that phrase before? Yeah. So, so what, what would, what would you say to that? Because, like, even when I talk to, to younger folks or I look at what's online, I think there is this, like, I can't fully empathize with what they're going through because I'm not them, you know? I can try and empathize. And I think, even when I look at older generations, part of me is, "Okay, you don't understand what I'm going through." But for someone who was listening to what you just said, who might agree fundamentally, but all they hear is an older person preaching to me. He doesn't know what I'm going through. Well, fortunately, I think I've been able to engage with younger people, but younger people about past the teens, because it's very hard to really be able to relate to somebody who's in their teens, 15, 16 years. I really don't know what they're going through. But being at 72 years old, being able to relate to people who are in their early 20s is really not so bad. Yeah. Who can have a serious conversation with you, who's not just going through, um, lifestyle issues and so on, but really thinking about the, the world and so on. Um, I, I think I can understand where they're coming from. But I also say to them that if you're going to, uh, say "Okay, Boomer" and write me off and practice ageism, it's not any different than somebody of my generation writing you off and saying, you know, "You have absolutely, you're just a youngster who knows nothing." I think if we try hard enough, and there is goodwill on both sides, meaning a younger person not stereotyping an older person into any kind of stereotypes, and an older person also doing the same, and if both sides recognize that there's a lot of commonality, uh, between what the younger person is going through and what an older person has gone through, and there's no preaching, which I definitely am against. I think preaching is, um, is horrible because it, it indicates a false sense of arrogance. Why should a younger person? Why, how can an older person be more arrogant simply by simply saying, "I've been there, I know more than you," and so on. But if you can communicate as equals, you being a younger person has certainly definitely more vigor, more insight into certain things than I have. But I, as an older person, have my point of view also. And I think communication is so critical that both age groups respect each other. And I also, honestly believe that history always repeats itself. When you say younger people today have challenges, fine. But don't think that a previous generation didn't have challenges, or my father's generation didn't, didn't have their own challenges. So every generation has their own challenges, their own solutions, their own joys, their own disappointments. And there's no reason why you cannot put be a good counsel or somebody else. And that's why you see the really good grandparents can actually counsel grandchildren even on affairs of the heart, even though you may be 85 years old, you have also once had a girlfriend or boyfriend, you've broken up, you've had sadness, so you can always empathize. And in fact, that is at the core of Banyan Tree's own service culture. "I am with you" is at the bedrock of our service culture. And empathy, then, is so critical to an understanding between generations. So my reply to somebody who says, "Okay, Boomer," I'd say, you know, you haven't even heard me out. You haven't even heard what I have to say to you. Then you're as bad as me who doesn't want to hear you out because I write you off because you're a kid. That's not fair either. Yeah.
That is true. I mean, we, we've spoken quite a bit about, you know, young Singaporeans needing to go out and see the world to appreciate what they have in Singapore as well. But, you know, in your book, it's a lot of, uh, business lessons that you want to impart to entrepreneurs. So when you think about Singapore businesses, or Singapore businessmen, like, is there that similar thing where you feel that maybe Singaporean businesses, are maybe we haven't seen...
Enough outside of Singapore that that prepares us for for the challenges of, you know, being a a big trying to go Global like Bantry has. Is there anything that Singaporean businesses and businessmen should be doing more of, or in in order to better prepare for the world outside?
Um, yes, but not in exactly the way you put it. I don't see it the way you put it, is almost like saying there's something at fault with them, and I don't think there is. I guess my point, if I were to talk to any young Singapore entrepreneur, is that unless you are happy for that business to remain very small and very and protected by its very nature, um, then you have to, if you start a business, you have to think of being Global not as a reward for success, um, but as an imperative for survival. That's the mindset that I think you have to have.
So that's why for Bantry, even though we haven't had a hotel here all these years for various reasons, and now we will be having one in Mandai, and even though we're so-called based in Singapore from the very beginning, my view was that if we're even to survive, much less succeed, we have to be Global because the industry I'm in is a global one. Travelers are global. They go from Phuket to Prague in one season, they go Barcelona to Bangkok. So if you're not global, eventually you cannot compete.
So I guess my advice to young Singaporeans when their startups are, what business are you in? If you want to make some patisseries for the Singapore market and that can sustain you and you're happy with it, go for it. There's nothing wrong for that. But if you are, if you want to be going into fintech, for example, or anything to do with tech or larger consumer business which would not be able to survive in Singapore unless you had scale, then you better think from day one, going global or regional is not something you do when you've become successful in the Singapore market. It is something you have to have as front of mind, even though it may take you time to execute it. It has to be front of mind.
And the same thing I say to people about brands, that you don't develop a, you don't get a brand once you become successful in what you do. You have to start with thinking that if I don't have a strong brand, I'm also dead. So if there's any reason for our relative success internationally is because we've taken the notion of a strong brand and globalization as a prerequisite for survival.
So, so those sort of things, you know, what you said very early on, you already knew that, you know, the industry you were in was global and you're, you had very strong thoughts about branding. But you've also said that, you know, you, you didn't, uh, aspire to, or what I understand, you didn't aspire to be a businessman. No. But then how did you have such clear thought about that, uh, right from the start? Because that's something that, uh, I mean, even when we run, run our business, there's a lot of thoughts, right? You know, going global and and scaling up. But, uh, from what you're saying, early on, you had that clear thought.
No, no. I had the clear thought only when I decided that I would want to spend the rest of my life with Bantry. Before that, it was like I was a journalist, then I was going to be an academic. I had gotten a job at INSEAD as a research fellow. I only got into business because my father had a stroke and I went back into the family business. Older than the one I founded, Bantry, but I didn't find, I was not the founder of Taiwa Company, which has just had its 76th or 77th anniversary, in which my oldest son is now running, and which I used to run also after my father retired.
And I suppose it was more chronologically, it was more like this. I took over the family business without even having an idea what business was like. I was more an economist. So I learned by doing. I never got an MBA, so I don't know about the fundamentals of business as such. So I kind of went along doing it, but I learned along the way very difficult lessons about what I did not want to do. For example, I decided that if I were to ever start a business, it had to have a strong brand. That I knew from the very beginning because we were contract manufacturers. We assembled products for everybody else, like with like a small version of Foxconn and so on. You don't ever own your brand. We had trading companies. Um, so in those days, in the '80s and the '70s, nobody in Asia thought about having their own brand. We were basically cheap labor. And you think back now, Singapore was then cheap labor. Now Singapore's passed that now and got into high-tech. But we were cheap labor.
And then I learned through, through, through hard lessons. And my Eureka moment came when I just started a canvas shoes, uh, subcontracting company to make shoes for Adidas, Nike, and so on. And within one year of opening it, we closed it because Indonesia became cheaper than Thailand. And this was even before China became the world's factory and lowest cost producer. So during those years with my father's business, which I was running, I knew that if I were ever to start a business, I had to have a strong brand. But I had no notion of what that would be. Um, but I did know that it wasn't going to be technology because I have nothing above the next guy in technology. Um, I had a theory that you have to have a proprietary advantage in business. And in my mind, there's only two types of proprietary advantages: technology, which you can own, or a brand, which you can own. So since I'm obviously not a tech guy, I cannot own the IP for something, so I can only own a brand. So that decision was pretty early in life, but it was a theoretical decision.
Then by accident, we got into Laguna Phuket. And by other accidents and so on, purely by accident, we started a brand, Banyan Tree, because nobody else wanted to actually manage our hotel. And there's a whole bunch of other lessons about what innovation means and so on. But, but when we finally did one or two Banyan Trees, I mean, they could have failed, right? Because I did a much bigger venture with a jack-up oil rig, and it failed, and it really made us almost bankrupt. So I was searching for new things to do. So when we did the first, second Banyan Tree, it wasn't that much money. It was still, those people responded to what we were coming out with as a product, which is now a dime a dozen, the all-pool tropical spa hotel. But at that time, we were totally unique.
Then it slowly came about when the third Banyan Tree, fourth Banyan Tree started succeeding, and we owned them. And then people started wanting to come to us to manage their hotels. Then I had to make a difficult decision as to whether I would want to spend the rest of my life doing this or not. And then that's what I said, if we're going to do this, it's going to be a serious effort to be global, and it's going to be a serious effort to build the brand into a global brand. Otherwise, don't do it. So it's not as if I knew all along what I wanted to do. But there are inflection points when you decide you go for this or you don't go for this. And when you decide to go for it, then you must know what you're in for. And that's what I mean about knowing what I, knowing that I had to be global and I had to have a strong brand.
Mmm. You know, in your history as a business leader, you've also, you know, stood up for social causes and spoken up very, uh, very strongly for them, like the LGBTQ causes and and that, right? Uh, and you talk about, you know, building a brand, it's that's part of survival of your, of your company and everything. But, you know, in Singapore, sometimes we feel like, oh, you know, if you talk about, uh, social issues or things that are very contentious, that's actually risky for business, right? Like, why, why do you, why have you taken the track of like being very vocal about what you believe in? And, and how do you see that, you know, square off with your role as the leader of a business as well, and the responsibility it has for people?
I can talk about myself secondly, sure. But I think there's a fundamental disconnect when you say talking about social issues, how do you square that off with being a business leader? Yeah. My fundamental point always in life, and I even have told people in SMU, if you're going to be a business graduate and so on, the fundamental business of business is to help create a better world. It's not to make the most money for shareholders. If you think the fundamental business of business or a CEO is to make money for shareholders, then shut up about about everything else and just go and make money, which is what people think. But when you look at it, what is a fundamental driver of change in the world today? Besides politicians and sometimes religious leaders, but economic growth and prosperity is what drives a lot of positive change or negative change. If the economy tanks, and if you're a business leader, you must have a sense of responsibility of what you want the society to be. A big, a good business leader must also be a societal leader, otherwise you're just a manager of a business.
So now, whether you want to be, and in the US, they do believe that's why you've got all these super high, you know, right-wing, um, business people who are very vocal, and you've got super left people. But of course, the richer you are, you tend to be more right-wing. But I think the, the first point I would take objection to that, you, you should even think that business leaders should just shut up and do their business, because I don't think that should be the case. I think perhaps, but then you can also go deeper into say, a business leader should perhaps not be involved so much in partisan politics, but should be involved with more fundamental social issues.
Now, I don't, I, I don't, uh, how should I put it? I don't want to be a loudmouth commenting on Singapore politics. The only time I commented on anything seriously was when I had to do these five lectures as the SRN thing, and that I had time to develop my ideas and so that it be more nuanced than just commenting on everything, which some people are prone to do. Um, and the LGBT issue, um, I've never really been trying to grab a lot about it and so on. But when Pink Dot asked me to write a, a comment, I'm very happy to write it. Why should? Because this is a fundamental belief of mine. Um, fundamental belief of my parents. My brother is gay, perfectly lovely man. So I experienced in my own family and experience with my friends. And I do believe it is fundamentally wrong for someone to make life difficult for someone else simply because of your own personal beliefs. And maybe that's because I grew up in Thailand, which is a Buddhist society where, you know, they, the tolerance for LGBT is really super deep-rooted. Even among the super conservative military powers, they were the ones who also passed the same-sex marriage. Because Buddhism really teaches you to be tolerant. And it's not just tolerant. Tolerant means that somebody is deviant and you're tolerant of that deviancy. But true tolerance means everybody's equal, and you should not have the right to impose your views on someone else. If that person is not hurting you, you, you, you're pushing your view if you're from the Christian right, or you're from the Muslim right, or whatever it is. It's no, it's no, I don't think you have the right to to destroy the identity of someone else because of your religious beliefs.
And I've always believed, and I wrote this in in my articles, that I believe that the choice of of your gender identity is a fundamental human right. And I've also well argued that I think the section, uh, what is it, 377? Yeah, 377A makes a mockery of the rule of law. You have something in the law, enforce it. If you either enforce it or you repeal it. Yeah. And well, government has finally done something with it to remove the problem for the next generation of 4G leaders, which I think is good because this issue would become big and bigger. But, um, my, my whole view is that you have to stand up for something. I don't protest in the streets for repeal of 377A. I've always supported Pink Dot. And I haven't gone simply because at my age, I'm not particularly keen on crowds. So I don't go to a crowded movie theater, I don't go. But my views are known, and you have to stand by your views. You don't go and stand on a soapbox and beat your chest and give out your views as if you're a politician. But if, if you don't stand for your views, then who is going to stand for their own views? You, you get, you get a vacuum. Then the big danger is if you get a big vacuum, then other people fill that vacuum. And that's why I've always argued that a strong civil society is so important in Singapore if we want to be a cohesive and resilient society.
That's a, it's a very poetic way to to sum up the discussion. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I, I only asking because, yeah, we went to, it's getting hot and heavy. Is it a bit too serious? We went to business school, and, you know, like thinking about business ethics and all that, always like was an extra class that you had to take as a separate module. So it's actually like, for me, super refreshing when someone who's running a successful brand is at the same time saying that that is imperative as as part of like your role as a business leader. And, and we've been on the receiving end of a business decision that treated our company like a line item during COVID when a network liquidated. And it, we almost had to almost close down our business because it was the more profit-driven thing to do, not realizing the impact on producers like us in Singapore. So to hear someone kind of say very firmly that running a business is about making the world a better place is very refreshing. Cuz I, I don't think that is a, some, you hear that a lot, but don't know how many people actually practice it.
Yeah, that, but that's a very good point. The two things about, you touched upon, if I may comment on. Yeah. Uh, I'm not a softy in business. Business world is a cutthroat world. People don't do things because they think their mission is to be a, make this world a better place. Most executives do things partly because they find they're compensated for it. So I've long held that if you believe, if the starting point is that you think the role of business leaders is to make the world a better place, fine. Then the next logical decision is this is just, if it's just left as platitudes, it's like a preacher saying this on a Sunday morning, it's just platitudes. How do you then make this come true? I'm not a, you know, bleeding heart liberal who just says things and doesn't want to move into action. So the next step about about, um, uh, fundamental mission of business to create a better world and so on, is to then make sure the next step is to say, basically, you should replace shareholder primacy by stakeholder primacy. Right? So that also sounds good. Oh, we believe in stakeholder capitalism. I've written in my book about communitarian capitalism as a system of capitalism that we should be moving toward more towards. And that Wall Street capitalism that we seem to think is the normal type of capitalism is not normal. Japanese capitalism, Norwegian capitalism, French capitalism are all very different. Okay. So I believed in communitarian capitalism. So if you believe in communitarian capitalism, it's saying the same thing as stakeholder capitalism. Now, if you believe in stakeholder capitalism, you can go one step further. You can basically, at your own company, and every company, I think, should be free to decide what weightage they want to give to each stakeholder group. And once you give that weightage, you then tie it to CEOs and senior management's compensation. Now, in our company, I don't know the exactly what it is now, but financial profits, shareholder, shareholder rights ranks very high, probably number one, because after all, they're the people who put money in the company. And then, but there are also associates, your employees, they're your customers, there's a community at large, which also deals with sustainability and climate change, they're your suppliers. So how important is your relationship with each of these stakeholders? Some will be 10%, some will be 50%, some will be 20%. But then you, you bring it all together, you have a balanced scorecard, then you have metrics by which you measure the CEO's achievement on achieving the goals that are linked to various stakeholders. Like associate satisfaction is to us, we can easily measure. We have lots of measures for associate satisfaction. Every, every quarter, we have measures of these, and it's measurable. And senior management will be compensated through a balanced scorecard. So, so when you say it's refreshing to hear what I'm saying, I want to emphasize, I'm not a bleeding heart liberal. I do believe that what is not measurable cannot be managed. So I don't just want to spew off a lot of, you know, nice things to hear and so on. That, that would, to me, be the equivalent of greenwashing. I'm not out here to [ __ ] people. I'm too old to [ __ ] people anymore. I used to try to [ __ ] a lot more. I only [ __ ] about how great our resorts are. But, but other than that, you get the real thing.
About, you talked about business school and ethics. I think it ties into very much about how business schools teach leadership, which is also just very theoretical. And I was so, I've, I've long felt that leadership is very critical, but it's not being taught properly. And that's why I spent a number of years doing an annual course at West Point in the US, the military school. Yeah. Because to me, not that I'm a great militarist, but it's just kind of like logical that in business, the idea of leadership is kind of part of your curriculum. But in, in a military school, the difference between having good leadership and not good leadership is not success of the business, is whether your men are not in the field. So I thought, well, I must try to find out what does a military school teach about leadership. So that takes us down another direction altogether. But my point here is that a lot of these things can be taught, and they should not just be like your, your mandatory course that you take off, because then that's a failure. That's a failure of schools and the failures of education if we just give lip service to to certain ideas like leadership.
Very true. True. That's awesome. So, so maybe to to wrap up, I know we would love to ask you so many other things, but, uh, to to wrap up, is there like one book that you would recommend that really shaped your thoughts on life or business for any of our listeners? I mean, we will do the one shoke thing later, but this one is just, um, uh, anything you that was very influential in your thought process? I mean, aside from your own book. Yeah. From your own. Do you also disqualify books that my family has written? My, my younger son has come out with a book of poetry a few years ago, it's published, and he's coming out another. One can be a one shook thing is actually watching watching Netflix. Okay. Okay. Yeah, sure. But my, my, I would say books have been very influential to me, but at different periods of my life, different things, right? So, so at my younger age, uh, my rebellious, my idealistic age, I would be, I read, I don't think you even remember any of these books, but, uh, Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, who was a radical economist. Um, I read quite a lot in Che Guevara's works and all those kind of super radical stuff. And then later on, and then at the same time, a lot of just pure literature. Uh, I like history. I've never read a business book. Oh, really? No. Never. Because frankly, um, yeah, I shouldn't be saying this if, if anybody from SMU or elsewhere is going to hear, so I won't say anything about business books. Okay. Okay. But, um, in particular, I do not read, um, business books supposedly for the layman, where they're padded, they have a few anecdotes, and they're padded with a lot of stuff like my book. Whoops, whoops. You should read a lot of business books that you find at airports, how to do this, how to be a millionaire in 12 easy ways. Okay. I don't really read that. And at my age now, actually read quite a lot of very interesting books about, um, the science of things that actually affects myself, like a book on breathe. It's called Breathe. Book on sleep. And there are a lot of things you learn that science has actually, um, found to be the basis of of health. So I read a bit of that. But I'm still kidding you because most of the time I'm watching Netflix or I'm reading our own business works, right? I mean, reports and and all that kind of stuff. Okay. I mean, yeah, okay. But just no, no business books. No. Okay. Can I take it back? You edit that out, please.
But I think that that's the perfect segue into the one shook thing, uh, which is what, uh, we told you about. We can go first to give you some breathing room. Teren, you have your one shook thing.
Um, yeah, actually, there's just a recent video. I think ESPN, the sports network, has been doing a sort of a retrospective of like, uh, uh, tennis players in, in Wimbledon's history. So they recently did a video talking about Roger Federer, tennis, his serve, like his serve placement, and how his serve placement evolved over time when from when he started out as a young, uh, petulant player, you know, who who couldn't really control his temperament. But over time, he managed to use the fact that his serve wasn't the most powerful in the game, but just the placement of it, and how his body, his body language, belied the direction of the serve, bamboozled his opponents into thinking where he was going to.
Are you a tennis player? I'm not a player fan. I watch a lot of. I watch a lot more than I I play. But it was just fascinating to see how, you know, you just think of Roger Federer, like he's just been great his whole career, but actually he was pretty bad, you know, in initial years. And it's somehow he managed to adjust it. Or across the years, and even when he had a slump in his later years, he found a way to bring it all back, just by adjusting his serve. Oh, so it breaks down his, his serve. It breaks it down across the years of his career as a player. So I thought that was really fascinating.
I see. Does one shook thing have to be books or things? It's a YouTube video. Yeah. As long as it's something that, uh, one of our listeners can experience. If it's like your son's cooking or something, unless your son is going to be cooking for our fans, be a bit hard. So something they can experience. Yeah. Uh, so M is also something related to, uh, exercise or or athletics. Is another video by Kat, the YouTube channel, Science Channel. Yeah. So it's the Science Channel that does very nice animations about questions like, you know, what would happen if the sun burnt out? Second, the few seconds after. Uh, the latest one is about the myth of exercise. And it talks about, uh, how, you know, there's this, uh, belief that if you work out, if you work out hard, you would lose weight. And they kind of dis explain why, uh, exercising is good, but it's not going to be something that will help you lose weight. Of course, you should to eat less. Exactly. So everybody knows that it takes you one hour of running to burn the calories you get from one banana. No, if you see Instagram and TikTok, there's so much about the five exercises that would get you a bubble butt, you know, like your abs. Um, and I mean, they had certain anecdotes like, I think they com, some, they quoted some research that showed that even the people who are hunter-gatherer tribes, uh, in in certain parts of the world, they burn the same amount of calories walking 9 kilometers a day compared to someone who sits in the office. The calorie burn rate is the same. Um, and there are physiological, evolutionary, uh, reasons for that. But they, it all boils down to the diet that you eat, which is the next, the next video, which I haven't watched yet, but they just talked about how right now, the way we think about exercise, of course, in large parts thanks to social media, kind of misses the point. A lot of benefits, but it's not going to help you lose weight like you would imagine. So yeah, that's my, that's my one shook thing. Got it.
All right. To you. Well, going along your genre of things where we watch and so on, or read, and then the other one is about what you actually do in your life. There would be two things. Like, one would be that I watch, um, I, you know, Netflix, Amazon Prime, all these more than I read, unfortunately. Although I'm honest enough to admit to that. Yeah. And of course, there have been many things I've watched which are pretty good. I mean, from crazy things like Succession to Yellowstone and all that kind of stuff. And right now, I'm just happen to, I'm only mentioning because it's just the third episode is what I'm watching right now, and it's called The Bear. It's about, um, and where it, where it's kind of funny for me, because it's quite humorous, but also because kitchens are something I'm very familiar with because of our hotels. Yeah. But it's the whole idea of how a dysfunctional bunch of people, having pride in what they do, and having teamwork, uh, can actually create something very beautiful. Of course, there's a lot of humor in it, the dialogue is cute. But what I, what resonates with me in particular is that we have a very multinational team of people who generally have a pretty, at the working level, a relatively low level of self-respect. And you can see in The Bear, all these characters had very low self-esteem, right? They were just a bunch of of lost guys who are not exactly great chefs or cooks, whatever. But the resp, they're given by the hero who calls them chefs, and how they themselves discover things that they are proud of doing, like the baker who's really keen, uh, in in the pride he has in making donuts and so on. It resonates with me because because it is within my industry, and it does teach you about how, uh, res, self-respect and self-confidence and the idea of being in it together to create something magical, which just, I hope by the last episode, I'll see something great about what they produced. But you know, they're going to go that way. So it's, it's quite fun to see.
The other thing, though, that shock, in terms of shock, in terms of being later to me, is that I completely tore my tendon, uh, about six months ago, and I had to screw it back on. And you don't get much mobility at all. You can't even raise your arm. I couldn't even raise my arm to brush my teeth. I couldn't raise it to touch my hair. Now it's getting better. And I used to be a very avid swimmer, doing freestyle, do about half a kilometer every day and so on, every time I'm able to, which is every few days. And I could not swim at all. So I've had to adapt completely to a frog style, to to a breaststroke. And although I used to swim that before, it wasn't my best style. But what is shock is that over the last six months, I have really improved myself on this swimming style, and I really love it now. Although I know I'll go back to swimming freestyle, um, I have learned so much of how by being forced by circumstances, I've developed the stroke which I have real pleasure in doing when I'm swimming now, because I swim pretty well now, where before it wasn't so. It's the idea that when you, when you're forced to do, you cannot do something, you do that same thing that you love in a different way, and you find new sources of joy and pride. So, you know, it, it's for me has been great. I, I love swimming still. I don't see the fact that I can't do freestyle now as a disadvantage, and I see that I've discovered a new form of enjoyment, of physical enjoyment, where I'm proud of the strokes I'm able to do, I perfect it all the time by myself. And that's, I think something that the lesson to anybody there would be, there's always something new to learn every day. And whenever you have something go wrong with you, there's another way to compensate and still find pleasure, enjoy. So that's why I really like my breaststroke now.
But your shoulder doing better as well? This shoulder is doing better. My left shoulder is doing worse. I got two screwed up shoulders. So butterfly still have to wait a bit long. Yeah. Jet skiing is safe. I'm going to buy a sea scooter. You know, you just, it's true. It's true. But I think it's cool. Like all everyone here is big fans of The Bear as well. But we always wonder if people in the industry or in hospitality, how, what do they think about the show? You know, beyond its, the more entertaining aspects of the drama? Now we have a stamp of approval. Now we have a stamp. Of course, it's dramatized. Yeah. Right. Of course, it's dramatized as anything would be dramatized. Yeah. Uh, and of course, you don't usually have the advantage of a rundown place that becomes, I guess, essentially a Michelin-star restaurant. Everything is dramatized. But I think the learning points there, whether it's in a hospital or whether it is in, um, in a restaurant, there's probably that not that much true to life, except there is true to life in terms of the actual cooking. Much of the actual cooking is not faked. I mean, it's what you need to do and so on. And much of the way the restaurant is run, not the super chaotic way, but the, the, the French brigade style, the, the different names and positions, the things you have to do, it's all pretty true to life. But I think it's a theme that they're talking about that is worthwhile watching. Yeah. Yeah. It is awesome. Yeah.
Thank you so much, uh, for joining us. Uh, I mean, hopefully, we'll have you back again at some point. Um, but I mean, yeah, me, well, when, when the whiskey is in place, whiskey set the corner. Can I tell you what brand I want? Which brands I don't want? I'll give you an espresso machine. Then then you get whiskey, espresso, and whiskey. But yeah, for anyone listening, like, yeah, really check out Behind the Banyan, KP's latest book, and just really, I mean, even for both of us, reading it, it's just a very fascinating read, you know, understanding the nuances of being a Singaporean business out there in the world, being a global brand. Yeah, inspiring, inspiring. What is your new descriptor of yourself? You are [Music] a oh, yeah, man. Hey, you can't, you can't forget that. No, no, no, no. Better than that. I'm a badass grandfather. Badass grandfather. Badass Grandad. Badass grandfather. If, do they make mugs that you can put things on? Because this year, it's my big birthday. It's my sixth cycle, my dragon. This is my dragon year. Could actually have a present my kids could give me. Yeah. Biggest badass grandfather. I'm sure the Gen Alphas have a different way of saying badass, you know, that we don't really know. But yeah, badass grandpa. I mean, these are not Gen X or anything. This, my grandkids are five and seven years old. Alpha. Alpha. Gen Alpha. Oh, that's Gen Alpha. Yeah. They have a different term for badass, I'm sure. Like, like the genes will tell us something. El Grand. I don't think my, my daughter would want her kids to even know the word badass. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. That's true. That's true. Age-appropriate. That's true. But cool. Thank you so much for joining us. And, yeah, uh, thanks everyone for listening. Hope you enjoyed it.