LIFT: Limpeh Is Foreign Talent

TAR S39 E4: Let me be the first to admit I was wrong.

2026-10-17T16:44:29.002+01:00

Merhaba and bonjour, let me be the first to admit, I was wrong in my previous post about which team got eliminated on leg 3. I had followed the discussions on Reddit, went down that rabbit hole with Google maps and we all came to the same conclusion but somehow, Doug & Dylan beat Jody & Jenn to the pit stop mat by seconds. And the second team that got eliminated in this leg shocked me as they really messed up so badly with directions, that was their downfall. So we have much to get into but first, the average ranking statistics to see where the teams stand after leg 4 in Marrakech.

Average rankings after leg 4 in Marrakech

Michelle & Matthew 3
Anuar & Andrea 4.5
Ann-Marie & Riley =4.75
Erin & Javi =4.75
Conner & Garrett 5
Ali & Joanna 5.5
Cody & Jaime 7.25 (eliminated after leg 4 in Marrakech)
Daisha & Dalton 7.75
Jody & Jenn 8 (eliminated after leg 3 in Marrakech)
Doug & Dylan =8.25
Dafina & Saran =8.25

Now we have done 4 legs of the season, I think it is time for me to reflect on the statistics as I think we have enough data to analyze. Firstly, it does look like Michelle & Matthew are the strongest team by quite a margin, especially after having won this latest leg. They are clearly the favourite to win. None of the teams I picked as my favourites are anywhere near the top - Ali & Jonna and Conner & Garrett are in the middle of the pack and Cody & Jaime managed to get themselves eliminated in Marrakech. Well, I guess I am not that good at picking winners here. I would have never predicted the top four teams to be doing so well at the starting line, butt then again, I'm going to stick to my guns and bet on a final with Conner & Garrett and Ali & Joanna there. They just strike me as classic TAR winners but hey that is just my gut feeling.

How did Doug & Dylan beat Jody & Jenn to the pit stop mat?

From what we could see from the little bit of footage at the end of episode 3, it did appear that Jody & Jenn and Doug & Dylan took different paths. According to the discussions on Reddit and Google maps, Jody & Jenn had picked a shorter route than Doug & Dylan, however, it is not that straightforward as that park has many trees that can obscure your view of Phil and the film crew. So one can only logically conclude that Jody & Jenn wasted a few moments looking around for Phil in the wrong places, despite having picked a slightly shorter route. That was the lucky break that allowed Doug & Dylan to clinch this victory as Jody & Jenn would have beat them in a foot race to the pit stop - but no, they were literally playing hide and seek amongst the trees. Hence when you factor that in, then the outcome was much harder to predict.

I bet Jody & Jenn are gonna regret using that express pass in Madrid huh?

Well I said it before and I'll say it again. I know they gave in to blind panic when they used it on a detour they could have easily completed. A lot of people on social media were like, oh don't be so harsh judging them and I'm like dude, when you sign up to do reality TV, you have agreed to be judged by the viewers and some are gonna like you, some are gonna support you whilst others are going to judge you very harshly for the dumb mistakes you have made. It's all part of the package. Why am I judging them so harshly for that stupid mistake? It is to help other future racers doing research on this topic. I am so incredibly lucky to have had the chance to go on one of these types of programmes (note I'm British, so I can't take part in TAR US but we have similar programmes in the UK too). You don't get to make a stupid mistake and recover from it, no matter how kind and forgiving the viewers may be. I've been there, done that myself and I too have made dumb mistakes when I was on 007: RTAM S2. One can only hope that incidents are not taken out of context.

The scramble returns in Marrakech

The scramble has been done before four times (S29, 34, 35, 37) and this is the fifth time we have seen it. To be honest, I think the order to do these tasks can be determined quite logically by looking at a map and working out what the most direct, logical route to take would be. That would involve finding a local willing to help you work that out, but it is well worth spending a few minutes to do that and have a good plan in hand. All teams started with the slipper and then some did the dyeing task next and others did the rug delivery task next. I had a good study of Google maps and quite frankly, either of the options are fine. The key difference boiled down to whether teams took the most efficient routes from point A to B or did they spend ages taking a much longer route. We saw Ali & Joanna, Ann-Marie & Riley, Cody & Jaime and Doug & Dylan get so lost but as I studied the map, I realized Daisha & Dalton got lost too. They had chosen to deliver the rug as their second task on the scramble but somehow walked into the courtyard where the dyeing challenging was being carried out. If they had taken a much more direct route, they would not only have missed the dyeing challenge but saved themselves a lot of time as that was a big detour they took. I do feel rather bad for the winners of the previous leg Ann-Marie & Riley though - they won the previous leg with a huge margin and that advantage was slashed as teams departed from the fountains in intervals of just 2 minutes; as a result, Ann-Marie & Riley finished down in 7th in this leg.

How I would improve the scramble.

I would add a new twist to it - limited stations. Take the dyeing task for example, I would have limited stations, like if only four teams at a time can complete the task. That would force the team that arrives too late to make an agonizing choice: do you wait a while for a team to complete the task and free up a station for you or do you go do something else first?

Is the medina of Marrakech really that hard to navigate?

Having been to the medina of Marrakech and other such souks/bazaars in North Africa and the Middle East, I can honestly say no, they're not hard to navigate. In Marrakech, everything is clearly signposted in Arabic and French. Since I can't read Arabic, naturally my eyes would focus on the street names in French. You don't need to be able to speak French to read a road name in French. I am going to use the example of Doug & Dylan: we see them stop and ask some foreign tourists for help with directions - the tourists take out their phones, show them the exact route they have to take and they write down all the instructions carefully before going on their way - yet somehow, a few minutes later, they are completely lost again. This is when I slap my forehead and shake my head in disbelief. You had all the information, you even wrote it down so how could you fail to follow such clear instructions? Well, I can actually relate to that feeling - on one leg in the Bahamas, I had been given several pieces of information and when I was under pressure and panicking, I conveniently forgot one of the most important pieces of information I had been given earlier. And honestly, I still can't tell you why I forgot that vital piece of information. In hindsight, of course it seems evident what I ought to have done but it is a very high price to pay for cracking under pressure. So the teams who were able to keep their cool and follow instructions were the ones who completed this leg a lot more efficiently. Oh and just a friendly reminder that this is just one part of the old town of Marrakech, there are other parts of Marrakech which are very modern and would resemble any city in southern Europe. So please don't imagine that all of Morocco is just like the medina you see in this episode.

The slippers task - luck or skill?

There is a bit of both. Yes you need great attention to detail to be able to find the matching slippers in all those shops but there has got to be a huge element of luck with tasks like that especially. when some of the designs are so similar but still subtly different. So the element of luck did change the order somewhat as some teams took a lot longer than others.

What were the locals speaking to the racers?

The old man at the slipper task spoke mostly Darija - Moroccan Arabic. The man who accepted the rug deliveries spoke mostly French. Whilst the people giving the instructions at the dyeing task spoke English actually. Moroccan Arabic is the local language, French is the former colonial language that is still widely spoken and used in Morocco whilst English is what they use with the tourists. Mind you, this is the kind of place where you get charged a different price depending on the language you speak. The local shopkeepers always speak to me in English since I look East Asian and that's when they would hit me with a ridiculous price, I would then switch to French to force the price down and if I am still not happy, I'll switch to modern standard Arabic and drop in some local Moroccan Arabic to get the price I want. I speak some Arabic and know enough Moroccan dialect convince them that I am a regular visitor to Morocco. One just accepts that this kind of aggressive multilingual bargaining is all part of the journey in Morocco, even if you want to just buy a bottle of water.

Do the locals speak English in Marrakech?

Actually you'll be amazed. Yes actually, you're not going to encounter the same standard of English as you might in a country like Iceland, Denmark or the Netherlands, but this is one of the most touristy places in all of Morocco and most of the people working there will know enough English to make money from the hoards of tourists who visit the medina. Their English won't be good enough to have a discussion with you about politics but they can most certainly help you with directions. Having said that though, this is an extremely touristy venue. Outside the medina, in the real Morocco, the standard of English falls rapidly and you really need to speak at least some French to get around. I remember being on a bus on one of my trips to Morocco - the driver spoke only a little English but was perfectly happy conversing with me in French. This was because the French language had been a part of his formal education in Morocco whilst English was something he had tried to teach himself as an adult to help with his work. I did notice that Andrea was the only one who tried to use some French with the locals - I like her but I can't help but feel that her dad Anuar is really slowing her down.

I am sad that Cody & Jaime are eliminated.

Oh man, Cody & Jaime. What a shame. I really liked them and thought they could have done so much better, but they succumbed to the pressure in the end when they got so incredibly lost delivering the rug. Even after Doug & Dylan fell so far back, I am sure you must have been as surprised as me when Doug & Dylan finished ahead of Cody & Jaime. I'm sorry but I think Doug & Dylan are living on borrowed time in this season. They really struggled to navigate - like even after they get clear instructions off Google maps, they still somehow manage to get lost. Doug is 72, he is from the generation before we had smartphones so surely he can read a map and navigate without technology? Apparently not. They started quite strong on the first leg because they had used their express pass then but have really struggled in the last few legs. Dafina & Saran on the other hand have shown improvements in their performance over the last three legs.

Michelle & Matthew claim their first win.

Statistically, they are the strongest team and they had performed very well until now and they still have their express pass on them which they must use on leg 5 or 6. I don't like them as much as some of the other teams as they don't have a particularly compelling backstory but hey, we are not judging them on that. TAR is not a popularity contest and their results speak for themselves - they are a strong team. All teams are probably going to be on the same flight from Marrakech to Tirana via a major European city like Rome or Paris but from the previews, we can see that they get to the driver's seat board first, so maybe they are released from the airport in the order they finished in leg 4 in Marrakech.

The race goes to Albania next.

Ooh a new country for TAR! This will be TAR's first ever visit to Albania - it is a country I have been to twice before. The first time was when I crossed over from Greece into Southern Albania in the region around Sarande. The second time was when I based myself in the capital Tirana and took some day trips out of Tirana. This will bring TAR's country count up to 98 - so close to 100, but that number is not going to be reached this season as we know the rest of the countries in Asia and Oceania planned have already been visited in past seasons already. Once again, just like Morocco, I think they may try to present Albania as this exotic country that few people have visited but please - that might have been the case 20 years ago but tourism is big business in Albania now with plenty of budget airlines flying into Albania from every corner of Europe with loads of tourists looking for a cheap holiday, just like in Morocco. Albania is a very budget friendly destination, a nice dinner in Tirana will cost about half of what you can expect to pay in Vienna or Amsterdam. What you pay for a very basic hotel room in Geneva or Barcelona will get you 5-star luxury in Tirana. The food is delicious, the capital city is vibrant, the beaches are stunning and there's so much culture and history there, so yes, many Europeans have been to Albania on holiday already so it really isn't that exotic. At least not to the majority of the viewers in Europe!

Where can TAR go to hit that magic 100th country?

You have to consider that this is a reality TV competition so the safety of the cast and crew are most important, so you have to be able to film in a relatively safe country where you know you won't run into any kind of trouble. So they must avoid war zones along with other generally unsafe countries but there are plenty of safe options like that including European countries Andorra, Luxembourg, North Macedonia, Serbia, Latvia, Bosnia, Montenegro, San Marino, Cyprus and Moldova and these are all in Europe. I have not even gotten started with the low hanging fruit in places like Asia, Central America or Oceania. Mind you, TAR is not trying to visit as many countries as possible on this series, they often go back to the same country many times. They have been to France 16 times, China 15 times, India 13 times, Germany 12 times and Italy 11 times. So they could have easily visited a lot more countries but have actually chosen not to do so.

Who will win the next leg in Albania? Who will be eliminated next?

Oh I am sure Michelle & Matthew will win again in Albania, since we have seen them at the driver's seat board so they would be quite foolish not to use that power to their advantage by slowing down their strongest opponents and help the weaker teams out. As for who will go home next, I am wondering how much of a factor the driver's seat would play. Would Doug & Dylan simply get lost and waste precious time driving around in circles in Tirana or would one of the stronger teams get hit with a much heavier workload by the driver's seat and be sent home as a result? Here's my prediction: even if a team does get hit with a heavier workload, it may take them an extra 15 to 30 minutes to complete that - it will slow you down for sure, but it is by no means a death sentence. But if a team does get hopelessly lost by driving a long way in the wrong direction, that can create a far bigger problem. Don't forget, apart from Michelle & Matthew, two other teams still have their express passes so if you hit Ali & Joanna or Connor & Garrett with a massive workload at the driver's seat, they can always just use their express passes to bypass the challenge altogether. I am just going to go with the statistics and predict that Doug & Dylan would be the next to go especially since they have shown they really struggle with navigation and the teams will have to drive themselves in this next leg. We do see Anuar & Andrea struggle with directions as well in the previews, but I hardly think they are going to give away a spoiler like that.

Next week's post will be late, sorry!

I will be away in Prague and Kutna Hora next week and yes, I know they visited those places in S38 quite recently. I normally watch each episode on a Thursday, write my review over the Friday and Saturday and post it by Saturday. But I will be only get back from Prague on Sunday night so I'll probably only get to watch the episode sometime on Monday and then rush out a review by late Monday or early Tuesday. So you see, I do travel quite a lot anyway and it is no coincidence that I have been to all of these places in this season already, this does put me in a unique position to judge these racers fairly. So for example, it is not like the streets of the medina in Marrakech are so confusing it is impossible to navigate them even with Google maps, but rather I understand what it is like for the racers to crack under pressure and fail to follow simply instructions when they are panicking. This is the kind of perspective I can bring you and why I think my reviews do offer rather useful insights. I hope you have enjoyed my review this week and many thanks for reading.

TAR 39 E3: I know which team finished last in this leg.

2026-10-10T17:56:00.176+01:00

Bonjour and لاباس! In this latest leg of TAR, the racers go to Marrakech in Morocco. This is a city I have been to before and I know for some of you Americans, it may look exotic to you but for Europeans, it has been a city that has been full of European tourists for decades. The proximity to Europe and the massive boom in budget airlines has meant that millions of Europeans have flocked to Marrakech for their holidays (including myself). This place is interesting, vibrant, exotic - everything you'd expect from Morocco. This is the fifth time TAR US has visited Morocco and they have visited Marrakech twice before: back in S3 and S25. But first, as always, here's the average rankings after leg 3 in Marrakech.

Average rankings after leg 3 in Marrakech

Michelle & Matthew 3.67
Ali & Joanna 4.67
Ann-Marie & Riley 4
Conner & Garrett 5
Erin & Javi 5.33
Jody & Jenn 6.5 (not confirmed yet - cliffhanger)
Anuar & Andrea 5.33
Cody & Jaime 6.33
Doug & Dylan = 7 (not confirmed yet - cliffhanger)
Daisha & Dalton 9
Dafina & Saran 9

Why is it pronounced Marra-keSH and not keCH?

This is because the name of the city written in French and a CH in French produces a 'sh' sound. In some English translations, it is spelt Marrakesh instead of Marrakech. But since this part of Morocco was a former French colony, the locals use the French name for the city and everyone just follows how the locals choose to spell the name of their city.

They tried to make Marrakech look a lot more exotic than it really is!

Aah, we have the desert, camels, bedouin men in traditional costumes serving tea in tents, the the colourful bazaar but that's just what tourists want to see when on holiday in Morocco. Marrakech is in fact a big, modern city - it is the fifth largest city of Morocco with just over a million inhabitants. There are parts of the old town where the tourists love exploring but there are also sprawling suburbs with modern apartment blocks and posh upper class neighbourhoods with a very French feel. I remember walking down one of these streets in Marrakech thinking, I could easily be in any major French city here and forget that I'm actually in Africa. But it is a fascinating place to visit and I do recommend a visit.

Talk about bad luck for Jody & Jenn.

The first task at the pottery factory depended a little on stamina but mostly on luck. The racer had to find a clue hidden in a pot marked for recycling and there's no skill involved, you just had to hope to stumble upon the clue sooner rather than later. I don't like tasks like that - I'd rather see a team be punished for making some kind of tactical error or for their lack of skill in completing the task but Jody & Jenn were simply unlucky in this case. There was nothing they could have really done that differently apart from using their express pass which they had wasted in Madrid. See? I told you this would come back to haunt them. The express pass is for such occasions when you need it to deal with plain old bad luck.

The roadside assist - a new twist (inspired by Desjardins?)

Well the roadside assist certainly went to the right team - Dafina & Saran given that Dafina had pulled her hamstring running out of the airport in Marrakech. Yes it does remind me of The Assist from TAR Canada where a random team will get 'the Assist' during a task and have to complete an easier version of the task and this has been sponsored by Canadian garden centre Desjardins for many seasons. Now what this means is that even if Dafina can barely walk, Saran can effectively do most of the roadblock on Dafina's behal and whilst this may save them once, how long would Dafina's injury hold her back? We shall see, but she did manage to finish this leg in a rather respectable 7th place.

Walk or Talk - the detour in the desert

I was really surprised that so few teams oped for the memorization detour, opting for hard labour instead. Look if you are super strong like Ali & Joanna, then sure, by all means, do the hard labour but it was painful too watch Daisha struggle so much with the big tyres and Dalton insisting that she must somehow do it - that was foolish of them. So they ought to have switched at once or at least pushed each tyre together and accept that she just was never going to be able to do it on her own. By being so stubborn, they wasted so much time.I didn't understand why the racers were so afraid of a memory challenge as the phrases were relatively easy and doing hard labour in the hot desert was not an easier option. I would have gladly chosen the memory challenge - not that I speak Amazigh language at all but those three phrases were actually quite easy. Mind you, driving across desert sand dunes in those dune buggies is a very popular activity for tourists and it can be very fun, certainly it would be a lot more fun than doing hard labour in the very hot desert sun!

The alliance between Cody & Jaime and Daisha & Dalton.

When Cody & Jaime struggled at the memory detour, Daisha & Dalton helped them out and later at the bazaar when Daisha & Dalton struggled with the fruit stacking task, Cody & Jaime returned the favour, cementing the friendship in this alliance. Why does this alliance anger Erin of all people? Putting aside our messy human emotions, let's just look at the statistics. Cody & Jaime are statistically much stronger than Daisha & Dalton. Erin could have been annoyed at the fact that Daisha & Dalton are working to keep a stronger team in the race when they could have simply left Cody & Jaime behind in the desert, unable to complete the memory detour and possibly get eliminated as a result. There's nothing wrong with helping a weaker team as you want to keep weaker teams around in this process, but helping a stronger team can come back to bite you later when they easily beat you in a later leg. Ultimately, whilst I can see why Erin might have evaluated the situation like that, it was still not her decision to make whether or not Daisha & Dalton helped Cody & Jaime out in the desert - that decision proved to be a good one as that kindness was returned within the same leg! This begs the question: should teams make a greater effort to form more alliances on the race? My simple answer to this is "yes of course, but only if that relationship benefits you". With a million dollars on the line, this is not a popularity contest.

Jemaa El-Fnaa square - one of the most touristy places in Morocco.

This is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Morocco, do a google image search for the word Marrakech and chances are the images you will see would be of this bazaar. It is massive, it is vibrant and it is full of tourists who love it. There are sections selling you non-food items, especially souvenirs for the tourists but mosts people go there for a meal and just walking through the bazaar is really quite an experience because the hawkers are usually young men who are desperate for you to spend some money with them. They know that if you walk away, you'll likely not return so they will try to establish some kind of rapport with you through language and culture. They will ask you in English where you are from, then if you said something like "I'm Dutch, I'm from Amsterdam", the young man will switch to fluent Dutch and engage you in a chat about their favourite Dutch TV programmes are or start singing Dutch pop songs to you in a hope that you'll be so amazed that you'll stop and eat there. Like these guys work in the bazaar selling street food - they don't have the money to travel, yet they learn so much about every country from the internet just to engage the customers. I tried the same thing, I wanted to really see just how far they would go - I'm British Chinese from London, English is my first language but I do speak Mandarin. So I said to the young man there, "I'm from China, I speak Chinese." And sure enough, this Moroccan man switched to Mandarin to engage me and started singing a folk song in Mandarin, getting all the lyrics right. I'm not usually easily impressed but my jaw did hit the floor at that very moment (and yeah I ended up getting a snack there). It might sound very friendly but it can also be very predatory for some tourists. We befriended two older British ladies - Grace and Nadia - because they just couldn't say no to the friendly English-speaking locals and ended up spending an insane amount of money on their first day because they friended a English speaking guide who was taking them to expensive restaurants and cultural shows. I was like, ladies, we're going to explore Marrakech together and you have got to learn to say no to the locals no matter how friendly they are. I speak French and a little Arabic and I'll make sure we say no to most things, we'll plan exactly what we want to do before we leave the hotel so we have a very clear plan. Look, Morocco is a truly fascinating country but you must plan your trip properly before you go.

Was the fruit stacking task too hard?

I liked hat task. It was hard enough to scramble the order of the teams and these fruit juice stands are very popular all over Morocco, so it is showcasing an element of the local culture. Though a display like that was deliberately engineered for TAR and not every fruit juice seller would set up something so delicate - imagine if a customer accidentally bumps against a pineapple, sending everything crashing to the ground whilst you're in the middle of a busy day. Such a display may be beautiful but it just isn't practical in the world of catering. It looked like it was a simple matter of more haste less speed, the teams that kept their cool and didn't rush through the task were the ones who got through it a lot faster.

Two more express passes were used this leg.

I think Anuar & Andrea would regret wasting their express pass on the detour. Firstly, they picked the wrong side of the detour by opting for the very physical task, struggled with it and instead of switching to the memory challenge, they simply used their express pass but only after having wasted so much time on it. I'm sorry but that does just sound like incredibly poor judgment. They really should have just avoided the physical hard labour altogether and opted for the memory challenge in the first place and kept their express pass. Or at the very least if they were going to use it, use it immediately once they realized just how hard the physical detour was - I hate to point out the obvious but Anuar is 58 and not in great shape, so when offered a choice between a physical and a mental detour the choice ought to be obvious. At least when Ann-Marie & Riley used their express pass, they were rewarded with a very nice prize - they're off to Singapore for a trip of a lifetime so even if they don't win this season, they are at least walking away with a nice prize.

So what happened at the very end of this episode?

Having been to Marrakech before and I am familiar with that whole area, I analyzed what happened and here's my analysis. Both teams left the bazaar within seconds of each other, with Doug & Dylan having a small lead over Jody & Jennn. Doug couldn't run as fast as Jody & Jenn, so they fell behind slightly in the run between the bazaar and the Koutoubia gardens. According to Google maps, we're talking about a distance of approximately 180 meters which would be roughly a 3 minute walk, not far at all. The clue only tells the teams to head to the Koutoubia gardens, with mention of exactly where in the gardens they may find Phil. Upon entering the gardens, there are many paths to choose from and trees obscuring your view, so it is not at all obvious which way to go. Both teams pass by the main Koutoubia mosque, then Dylan then decides to ask two tourists for help with directions (in a location very close to the mosque) and we see a shot of Jody & Jenn running by, overtaking Doug & Dylan - at that point, Jody & Jenn had taken the lead especially since you have to bear in mind the fact that the crew will have to ask those two tourists to sign a release form, this would not be shown in the episode but it is a process that can take a few minutes at what is a very tight foot race to the pit stop mat. We can see then from the footage that the two teams take different paths - Jody & Jenn turn right whilst Doug & Dylan continue down the main path. Ironically, both paths are possible routes to the pit stop (disclaimer: this is based on Google maps). Jody & Jenn turned right into the park and would then have to turn left to the fountains whilst Doug & Dylan would simply have to turn right into fountains a little further on. The episode ends with Doug & Dylan looking lost and quite dejected as they fail to find Phil - it doesn't bode well for them. As the crow flies, the pit stop mat was only 150 meters away from the mosque so that's like a 2 to 3 minute walk/run if you knew were you were going, but neither of the teams knew and also because of the very dense vegetation in the park, it wasn't easy to spot Phil and/or the film crew.

This was edited to look ambiguous to stage a cliffhanger

Having been in a competitive reality TV programme before, I know how they can deliberately create drama when there is none. Forgive me if you have heard this example before - I won my leg in Vienna with a margin of 11 minutes 38 seconds (with that margin I could have gone for an ice cream and still won that leg) yet in the final edit, they deliberately made it look very close, like we were seconds apart. Why? For more drama I guess? My point is simple, these edits are not there to be objective but to maximize the viewer experience by creating drama and tension when there might be none at all. Footage can be edited together out of sequence, out of context to create the narrative that these two teams were so close it was impossible to tell who was going to win but based on what I have seen and what the internet has been discussing, my calculated guess is that Jody & Jenn did beat Doug & Douglas for the following reasons: they did take a correct turn after the mosque whilst the production crew would have had to get the two tourists who helped Doug & Douglas to sign a release form. In my analysis of Google maps, the route Jody & Jenn had taken would give them a higher chance of spotting Phil and the pit stop but all that may be a moot point as I am also guessing that this would be a non-elimination leg since we have not had one yet and the next leg still continues in Marrakech. And this is not just my personal opinion, I have been through some other discussions on Reddit where people have gone to great lengths producing step by step analysis backed up by Google maps on the routes that were taken by the two teams and I filtered out the useless comments (by people who like a team but have never been to Marrakech) and focused on the comments by people who have actually been to the Koutoubia gardens (and that includes me, I've been there) so the overall conclusion is that with 99% certainty, I can say that Jody & Jenn took a more direct route to the pit stop mat when the two teams diverged and Doug & Dylan went the longer way when they had already fallen behind, thus sealing their fate.

If they really wanted to make it ambiguous, why would they have left us any clues then?

If they have left us enough clues, that increases audience engagement as people fire up their Google maps and start analysing every frame, sharing their findings on social media. We are talking, debating, discussing - that's exactly what the producers want. But if we have absolutely no reliable evidence, then there's nothing to analyze, nothing to talk about, nothing to base our guesses on - that means no engagement. Remember, the producers want us to be engaged, they want us to talk about what will happen next so they have to leave us a trail of breadcrumbs. To be fair, unless you know those gardens really well, it is not really obvious what will happen next. But I have been through enough threads on Reddit to know that the kind of analysis that has reliably predicted the outcome is exactly the kind of engagement the producers wanted to engineer. They have got to get that balance right: if they give us nothing at all, we can't even have a discussion about what may happen. If they tell us everything by showing us the outcome, we know exactly what happened. By making us play the guessing game, they wanted to stimulate maximum interaction and engagement.

What did I say about squandering your express pass huh?

I was challenged (choosing my words carefully) that I had been too harsh in judging the teams who had used their express passes in the first two legs of the race and now we have a situation where two teams are desperately fighting for their survival in the last few moments of this leg. Now if either teams had an express pass to use at the fruit stacking task, they would have easily saved themselves. Instead both teams in question had foolishly squandered their express pass on a relatively easy task instead of saving it for a rainy day when they really needed it. I stand by what I said, both teams mad errors of judgment when it came to using their express passses. And this is not just me being a bitch, cruel or harsh - look, I have been through this process myself okay? The producers really, really, really want you all to get involved this way by thinking, "what would I have done if I had been on the race? When would I want to use the express pass?" This is called audience engagement. If you're watching the episode and that question never ever pops into your head or if you think "nah I don't have the right to judge these racers" then the producers have failed in engaging you emotionally. Part of this reality TV formula is to draw the viewers in emotionally like that and yes, at times, even if it means the viewer judging the racers very harshly and thinking things like, "what an idiot, what a dumb decision, I'd never have done that!" Then the producers have succeeded in soliciting an emotional response to what you have watched - so this is not me being nasty, this is just me acknowledging the formula and the emotional response I had been prompted to give in this case. I too have been on the other side of that formula, I made a really dumb mistake on the leg in Bahamas and wasted a lot of time - and yeah, I knew people were going to judge me for that mistake I made, I knew exactly what I had signed up for. I took part in a reality TV type competition knowing that every stupid mistake I made will be judged.

There can really be two practical uses for the express pass.

If I may be pragmatic on this issue, the use of the express pass should really only be justified in two circumstances. Firstly, you're in last place, facing elimination and you use it to bypass a task, overtake a team ahead of you and avoid finishing last. Secondly, you're not in first place but you know that if you use it, you could overtake the team(s) ahead of you and win the leg, claiming a really nice prize. A waste of the express pass would be to finish in the middle of the pack as a result, because using it didn't help you win a prize and you weren't really in danger of elimination if you were in the middle of the pack, so you could have saved the express pass for another occasion. By that token, only Erin & Javi and Ann-Marie & Riley have cashed in their express pass for a win that came with a lovely holiday and arguably Daina & Saran used it wisely to avoid elimination on the first leg - therefore all the other teams who used their wasted it foolishly.

Can we talk about Michelle & Matthew - the strongest team right now? Will they win in leg 4?

I'm not keen on them, but then again, this is not a popularity contest. They are statistically the strongest team right now and they still have their express pass with them, which they have to use before leg 6. I am no doubt they'll do well and probably get to the finals but my favourite team right now is Joanna & Ali as well as Conner & Garrett. These three teams still have their express passes going into leg 4 and they might not use it yet. Of course they could use it to win this next leg but if they don't, then that leaves Ann-Marie & Riley with a substantial lead going into this next leg, allowing them to win this next leg with ease since there will be no 'equalizer' like all teams waiting at the airport for the very same flight.

Who will be eliminated next?

Based on the analysis above, Doug & Dylan will be eliminated next - either at the fountains in Koutoubia Gardens or in the next leg if it is a non-elimination leg. Because the teams are still in the same city, those teams at the front of the pack will keep their lead and thus the teams at the back will struggle to catch up with that time deficit. Even if Doug & Dylan are thrown a lifeline in the form of a non-elimination, they will still have to do a speed bump and I just don't see how they will recover from that. The other team at the back of the pack is Jody & Jenn and I definitely think that Jody & Jenn have the edge over Doug & Dylan. Like I know the whole grandfather-grandson dynamic is cute and all that but I'm sorry, they have not been performing well in the first three legs and I think there's just no way they are going to survive this next leg.

And if you wanna judge me, here's a 5 minute clip I have put on Youtube.

I've talked so much about how I've been through the same process on 007: Road to a Million S2 and I have put together a 5 minute montage. Geez, I started with a clip that was like 20-something minutes long and thought, no one is going to have the patience to wanna watch that. Then I edited it down to just 5 minutes and put it on Youtube - but I will also create a 2 minute or 90 second version for social media as well. Given how long it took me to create the 5-minute edit, you'll have to be patient for the even shorter version, but here is the 5 minute version below so you too can judge me.

Okay guys, that's it from me for this episode, I really hope you have enjoyed my analysis here, many thanks for reading.

TAR S39 E1 & 2: 25 years of racing around the world

2026-10-03T19:33:47.262+01:00

Hello and hola! In case you're new to my blog reviews of TAR, my name is Alex, I live in London in the UK. And if you're wondering what gives me the right to judge these racers - then I'm proud to tell you that I have done something very similar here in the UK called 007 Road to a Million (Season 2) in 2025 and it is not quite a British version of TAR but it's very similar. So yes, I've been there, I've done that and it does give me a perspective that may make me judge some teams more harshly or make me more empathetic and forgiving to other teams. I also monitor what is being discussed online in social media so I'll also try to address some of the issues that you guys have talked about. I've been doing this for many seasons now: given that I've travelled to 82 countries around the world (including every single one featured S39) and have competed in such a format, I hope to share with you some of my perspectives as a TAR hardcore fan. We are covering two cities in this post: Vancouver and Madrid. For the record, I've been to both cities. It has been many years since I have been to Vancouver but I am a frequent visitor to Madrid. But first let's start with our average rankings.

Average rankings after leg 2 in Madrid

Michelle & Matthew 2.5
Erin & Javi 4
Ali & Joanna = 5.5
Ann-Marie & Riley = 5.5
Conner & Garrett = 5.5
Jody & Jenn 6.5
Anuar & Andrea = 7
Cody & Jaime = 7
Doug & Dylan = 7
Katie & Charlotte 8.5 (eliminated in Madrid)
Daisha & Dalton 9
Dafina & Saran 10
Zach & Nate 13 (eliminated in Vancouver)

Why are we starting in Vancouver and not in the US?

Well this has been a trend in the last few seasons already. S38 started in the Netherlands, S36 started in Mexico and S34 started in Germany; so this is only the fourth time that it has happened but the first episode of every season is so vital. TAR can count on hardcore fans like me who will always watch the entire season of course, but there is so much competition out there on streaming platforms and if the action doesn't get underway at once within the first few minutes, some viewers may get bored quickly and find something else to watch. If they don't even finish watching the first episode, they are not going to watch the rest of the season. The first five to ten minutes of episode 1 of the new season has to get the action started really quickly for that reason and thus if the first ten minutes showed the teams doing something fairly mundane like getting to know each at the airport departure longue whilst waiting for their first flight then you risk losing a significant chunk of your audience. This is why starting in their first city is a good way to get the episode off to a flying start and we see the seaplanes, we have the colourful performance by the local Squamish people and the first roadblock is an adrenaline filled heights challenge - these producers know what they have to deliver in this crucial first episode.

Has TAR visited Canada before?

Yes but only twice before - it was quite a long time ago in S5 and S8. I suppose American viewers prefer to watch the racers go to far more exotic places far, far away and therefore Canada is just a little too close to home by that token.

What's the big deal about giving every team an express pass?

Like many of you, I watched TAR Canada S12 and that was already done then. So the only dynamic that creates is if you're going to have teams who get eliminated with an express pass in their bag and that whole sense of "darn we should have used it!" And sure enough, both Zach & Nate and Katie & Charlotte got eliminated and went home with an express pass as a TAR souvenir. It does throw teams a lifeline if they find themselves near the back of the pack but also, the teams who do use their express pass can boost their chances of winning a leg and claiming a really nice prize.

Is this a relatively easy leg?

Oh yes, we started out in beginner's mode here in Vancouver. We're right across the border from Washington state and we're in an English speaking city with no language barrier at all. The teams can easily talk to their taxi drivers, ask locals for directions and read all the road signs with ease. I do tend to roll my eyes when it is that easy. They also visit three English speaking countries in this season: Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Personally I really prefer to send these racers to a country where there is a massive language barrier and watch them struggle - now that's just classic TAR.

How hard was the first roadblock at the BC Place? Do we like it?

I love all heights related tasks on TAR - I did three heights related challenges in my season (and nailed every single one of them flawlessly, if I may add). I liked the fact that there was an element of skill involved, so you had to grab the salmon in order to complete the task and those who just grabbed the wires were made to try again. I didn't like the fact that only one team could attempt it at a time so there was no way you could overtake a team in front of you by doing this task especially well. So much of this leg essentially boiled down to how quickly the teams made their way from the starting line to BC Place, it was just a 7 minute taxi ride. So this is why I really didn't like this task, compare that to the detour where multiple teams could all attempt it at the same time and potentially overtake others if they do it really well.

Run it up or paddle it out?

Actually I think both sides of the detour looked relatively doable. None of the teams really struggled that badly on either side of the detour even if some teams did fall into the water whilst doing the canoeing. This was filmed about one year ago in late September 2025, so the water wouldn't have been that cold. Either way, this was a simple choice between a memory task and a physical task. I would have chosen the memory task but then I would gladly go canoeing as well.

Wait, it took them a whole year between filming it and showing this on TV?

Yup, this was pretty typical. I had to wait like 10 months between wrapping the last episode and my season finally getting released. Some teams had to wait even longer. It's not just the large amount of post-production that needs to be done in the editing suite it is often a matter of scheduling. Yes it can feel like an agonizingly long wait to finally see it at long last!

Are we surprised with Zach & Nate being eliminated?

Well it really could have been any of the weaker teams at the back of the pack. But unfortunately these guys couldn't even have used their express pass to save themselves! It looks like they actually jogged/ran from the starting line to BC Place (when the other teams used taxis), so they arrived in last place and by that point Erin & Javi had already used their express pass. They were so slow out of that roadblock that by the time they got to the detour, two other teams had already used their express passes and remember, only one express pass could be used per task. At this point, their only hope was for one of the other teams to really mess up on the detour but that never happened. It all boiled down to one bad decision right at the start that dropped them to last place and they just never recovered. Why didn't they try to get a taxi or were there none available? In any case, they never came across as a particularly strong team so it wasn't a big surprise. I do feel bad for them though - they must have experienced all that excitement throughout the casting process only for it to all end like that on day 1. So yeah, by that token, you have got to feel some sympathy for these two.

Are we surprised to see Erin & Javi win leg 1?

Not really, actually playing their express pass on that first roadblock was a brilliant move because of the queueing system as only one team could attempt the challenge at a time, so they would have been stuck there waiting for a long time. Using the express pass allowed them to jump to first place. I am not sure if they realized what a great strategic decision that was, but well done to them! It shall be interesting to see if they can win another leg without an express pass.

Let's talk about Doug, the oldest racer at 72.

Well, there has been a lot of you on social media writing him off for his age and I want to analyze the issue. Firstly, there is the assumption that he would be less fit and slower than a lot of the younger racers and whilst that is true, TAR is not a straight up athletic contest about running. As we have seen in just this leg, there is a mix of navigation, strategy, attempting challenges which can be either physical or mental and keeping calm under pressure. That first roadblock at BC Place required no physical strength at all, the racer was swung towards the fish and the act of grabbing the salmon wasn't difficult per se, it was more a case of keeping calm under pressure, suppressing your fears and staying focused. What I found somewhat disappointing with Doug though is that he was too keen to use his express pass and whilst they finished a strong 4th in the first leg, they didn't really need to have used their express pass at all since they were in no danger of elimination. So they might have finished further down the pack like 8th or 9th but they could have held onto that precious express pass for a much harder task. Perhaps it was the way it was edited but it looked like they didn't even attempt the detour at all and for me, that is a sign of poor planning and a lack of strategy. So I want to point out that it isn't his age per se that makes him a weaker racer, it was that terrible decision to use that express pass at the detour - like I'm sure they could have done the memory challenge with the flags. Erin & Javi won a lovely holiday to Turkey, Dafina & Sarah were in danger of elimination at the back of the pack - those two other teams used their express pass wisely. Doug & Dylan wasted theirs and thus mark my words, this poor decision will come back to haunt them later.

Onto E2 in Madrid, TAR likes Spain a lot right?

Well actually, you'll be surprised - this is only their 6th visit to Spain (previously in S3, S10, S21, S24 and S34). Compare that to France where they have visited 16 times and Germany where they have visited 12 times. I have been asked to make a correction here between previous seasons where they simply passed through Madrid as a transit hub and point out that this was the first time they actually did challenges in Madrid - so yes that's a fair enough distinction to make.

A switchback - La Tomatina festival.

Yes this task was first done back in S10 where a racer had a look for a clue in a pile of tomatoes whilst being pelted by - yup, you've guessed it - even more tomatoes. So this is your classic needle in a haystack challenge where you will need a huge dose of luck as luck would matter far more than skill. Now this was a true reset as all teams got there at the same time Do I like challenges like this? No, not at all. I believe that a task should involve a much higher level of skill or effort and the outcome ought not depend on luck. So the reason why the producers put tasks like this in the race is really to level the playing field and randomize the order of the teams, so a weaker team could get ahead whilst a stronger team may fall behind if they are unlucky. At least at this early stage of the race with still so many teams around, even if a strong team gets very unlucky with this challenge, they can still count on a weaker team falling behind during the detour so it was still highly unlikely for a strong team to be eliminated. It is a messy and colourful part of the local culture so I can see why the producers wanted to include it. Showcasing vibrant interesting local culture like this is a vital part of TAR.

Let's talk about public transport in Madrid.

I am a huge fan of the public transport system in Madrid and this is a city I know well having visited many times, so I'm speaking from experience. Practically all signs are in English as well as Spanish, all maps are bilingual as well and it is only the announcements which will only be in Spanish. But the information is always there in English, some teams were just utterly hopeless in reading a map, navigating public transport and I was rolling my eyes so hard each time yet another team got lost. Oh please, this is a modern European city with clearly signposted streets. Is this younger generation so totally dependent on their phones for directions? When Katie & Charlotte didn't notice the difference between Sol and Sur, I was thinking, you two deserve to be eliminated just for that mistake. Even if you don't speak Spanish, surely you can't possibly assume that the difference in spelling doesn't matter. Sur means south and Sol means sun in Spanish. And as for Doug & Dylan walking around central Madrid getting hopelessly lost, one wonders just how many times they asked for help. If you are not sure where you are going, the golden rule is to always ask for help and there is absolutely nothing in the rules against approaching some locals for help! In fact Dafina & Saran got a lot of help from some kind locals completing their history detour. Was it just the way it was edited? Or did Doug & Dylan forget to ask for help? Or did they ask for help then promptly forgot the directions they were given and still got lost regardless?

Do people in Madrid speak English?

Not fluently but yes, most of them do! They might not be able to have a complex debate with you about politics in English but they will certainly be able to give you directions to the place you are looking for. Besides, people are genuinely friendly and will always have a translation app on their phones. Most younger Spanish people have to do English for many years at school, so most of the younger people under the age of 30 will speak English remarkably well so if you need to ask for help in Madrid, try approaching someone between the age of 18 to 30 whilst avoiding anyone who looks over 50. I know that will come across as ageist but it is true - older Spanish people grew up in an era where learning English simply wasn't considered that vital. Thus with this in mind, may I remind you that they were racing through central Madrid so the teams could have and should have asked for help all the time the moment they felt somewhat unsure.

Oh wait, don't the locals have to spend ages signing a release form if they appeared on camera?

So this is how it works: if a team asked a local for directions and gets some help, the local would then be approached by a member of production to explain what this is all about. The local would be given the option: we can blur your face to mask your identity or you can be in the shot and appear for a few moments on this popular TV programme, what will it be? If they choose the latter, then they will have to fill up and sign a release form and that may take a few minutes if they want to read the form slowly but it can be done quite quickly. Yes it will slow you down a bit, but it is definitely worth it if you're getting good directions. What is the alternative to not asking for help then? Well, Katie & Charlotte and Doug & Dylan demonstrated it in this episode - you end up wasting even more time getting terribly lost and so it is very clear: ask for help. Pay the price by sacrificing a few minutes waiting for the paperwork to be sorted, it is definitely worth it.

Slice of ham or slice of history?

The ham side of the detour seems like the safer bet, there is far less that can go wrong whereas if you are confident about your Spanish history, then the history side of the challenge could be a lot faster. I was glad to see high standards being enforced on the ham side of the detour as the history detour wasn't easy at all, though the fact that one could ask the locals for help does seem like cheating to me. I would have opted for the history detour only because I speak Spanish and have a firm grasp of Spanish history and I think that would have been the faster of the two, but if you don't feel confident about your knowledge of Spanish history then opting for the food preparation option would be wiser. This is why I am sure so many of you were shaking your head when Jody & Jenn used their express pass at that deour despite the fact that Jody is a history teacher! Oh, this bad decision will come back to haunt them for a long time to come.

How do we feel about Katie & Charlotte's elimination?

Sorry but it was no surprise at all. Oh the moment they were the very last ones out of the La Tomatina challenge and then ended up on the wrong train, I knew they were done for. Mind you, they also went home with their express pass - just like Zach & Nate. They did try to use their express pass at the detour and if Jody & Jenn hadn't done so, that would have easily kept them in the race ahead of Dafina & Saran who had already used their express pass in Vancouver. Thus this does show that Daisha & Dalton using their express pass at a challenge which depended on luck was a great decision - I just think that they ought to have done it a lot sooner to maximize the benefit of bypassing a task. After all, we have already seen two teams go home with an express pass because the other teams were very willing to use theirs.

How close were the last two teams in both the first and second legs?

The producers don't show us how close they were but I just wanted to share my own experience on the matter. When I was on my show and I won my leg in Vienna, they were very strict on the timekeeping so I knew we had won by a comfortable margin of 11 minutes 38 seconds. Yet in the final edit, they made it seem like we won with a difference of mere seconds. Why? I suppose for the viewers, it seems a lot more exciting if the teams were close to each other in he race. If there was a massive gap of over 10, 11 minutes as it was in my case, then there is little or no drama at all and manufacturing drama when there isn't any is all part of the reality TV formula. I get the feeling that the gap between the teams were significant but you were never going to be told that as a viewer. They can't go as far as to change the results but in the edi, they will artificially make teams seem a lot closer than they are to create drama for the viewer.

Which are the strongest teams on this season who will go all the way?

I like Conner & Garrett, Cody & Jaime and Ali & Joanna. I feel I need to make a disclaimer though as we have had a nice and easy start and the teams have not been pushed to their limits yet, not by a long way so I guess these are just my first impressions and I may change my mind after a few more legs. As the teams weren't really tested yet on the first two legs, I will reserve my judgement for now. What I do like about this season is that there isn't a clear winner right from the start - in TAR Canada S12, I picked the winning team within the first 15 minutes of the first episode, like it was so clear which team was the absolute strongest and was going to win. In this season, I can certainly say which teams I like but I find it a lot harder to accurately pick a winner at this stage. If I had to, I'd say Ali & Joanna but that's more because I like them, they have a professional sports background rather than any other reason. Right now, five teams still have their express passes and so the outcome of the following legs will still be determined or at least greatly influenced by that.

Where are they going next?

They're off to Marrakech, Morocco. Perhaps to someone watching this in Iowa or North Dakota, it might sound exotic but oh please, Marrakech has been connected to Europe through a huge network of budget airlines bringing so many tourists looking for bargains and adventure for the last few decades. It is an extremely touristy destination and not off the beaten path at all. Quite the opposite. And yes, I have been to Morocco a couple of times, including to Marrakech.

Which will be the next team to go? Who will win?

Statistically, Dafina & Saran are the weakest and they no longer have an express pass so logic would say that they are next to go. However, I can't ignore the fact that Doug & Dylan got awfully lost in Madrid and really suck at navigation. If they can get lost in a modern European city like Madrid, they stand no chance in a place like Marrakech's old town. If any of the teams speak French or Arabic, that would be a huge advantage in Marrakech. Might Anuar, Andrea or Javi be able to speak some French if they are already fluent in Spanish? If not, then I'd place my bet on Ali & Joanna to win again. All we get from the previews is Erin being angry with Javi for helping another team and a small mishap with fruits for Conner & Garrett. Not much is given away at all. Will we see another team go home with an unused express pass in leg 3?

Okay so that's it from me on these first two episodes of S39. I tried my best to rush them out and I hope I have done them justice. I can share so much more about my experiences as well having done a very similar programme but I hope you have found my perspectives interesting and I had fun sharing all this with you guys. Many thanks for reading.

Using AI as your personal mental health therapist

2026-08-31T19:21:28.156+01:00

Hi guys, I'm going to try to do this where by I leave you a a link and a short summary of my latest podcast so it is to tempt you to listen to it but I'm not going to leave you a transcript here for a simple reason: I write down short bullet points for my podcast before recording but I would not write a full script. So, the summary here is in fact the short bullet points.

Have you used AI as your personal therapist/shrink/psychiatrist? Professional mental health support can be expensive and unavailable at time but more to the point, most people think meh I'm fine I'll get through this. I've recently starting using AI as a source of mental health support and it has been truly magical. What is interesting is that I have had the chance to have very expensive mental health support when I took part in a reality TV show and so I am in a position to compare and contrast the quality of the experience between a very highly qualified professional and AI - thus I am so amazed at the quality of my experience. #mentalhealth #usingAI #AI #mentalhealthsupport #mentalhealthmatters

So why would some seemingly intelligent people make stupid assumptions?

2026-07-18T00:38:29.828+01:00

Hi guys, this is the script to my latest podcast so please click here if you prefer to listen to it. Now I'm sure most of you would have heard about Europe having these insane heatwaves this summer and London isn't spared. Whilst we have not broken records for the highest temperature recorded in the UK yet this summer, we have had days hitting 35 degrees as early as May. I have been living in the UK since the 1990s and in the past, getting 30 degrees in summer was rare but now, it feels pretty normal now to get this kind of weather during the summer months. But I'm not here to talk about the heatwave today, I'm here to talk about something else that bothers me as much as the hot weather. Whenever we get weather like this, I will have white people tell me, "but Alex, you're from Singapore, it is so hot in Singapore so you must love this kind of weather, right?" It is the assumption that I resent, I don't like it when people make assumptions and I especially hate it when they get it wrong - we hate the hot weather in Singapore and millions are spent every year on elaborate air-conditioning systems in Singapore so the locals don't have to suffer from the tropical heat. These people could have so easily engaged me in a more respectful exchange about my feelings about the heatwave, on climate change and on how European countries have to now learn to cope with much hotter summers now, but instead of treating me like a very intelligent man who has studied geography at two of Europe's top universities on a scholarship, a man who has a wealth of experience having traveled around the world and worked in many different countries, no - my opinion is not relevant, this person is just going to take one look at my skin colour or the country I was born in and make an assumption. And that is highly offensive and so disrespectful, I would never let anyone get away with crap like that.

But why do people do stupid things like that? They think they can impress me, they are making it all about themselves. They know I'm from Singapore, they know Singapore is a hot, tropical country and perhaps they have even been to Singapore before and felt just hot it is all the time. But to go from, "Singapore is a hot country", to "Alex must like the hot weather because he is from Singapore" is like trying to add 1 + 2 and getting 17. It is by no means a logical conclusion. But allow me to turn this into a lesson on social skills and how to handle such a situation: my friend Cindy is now pregnant and obviously, I'm a man and whilst I have female friends and family members who have gone through pregnancy, can you imagine how offended Cindy would be if I started making assumptions about what Cindy must be experiencing as a pregnant woman, in this misguided effort to try to show her just how much I know about the pregnancy process? No, that would be a painfully autistic thing to do. Instead, if I wanted to talk to Cindy about what it is like being pregnant, I would respectfully ask open ended questions and show genuine interest in her responses, whilst letting on just enough to convince her that this is a topic that I actually know enough about to have a well-informed conversation with her. I would never make any assumptions about what Cindy is going through because that would just be such a stupid thing to do, in fact only very young children and highly autistic people do that. They just don't have the social skills to navigate such social situations and they actually believe that they can impress the other person by making such assumptions, whether the topic is "pregnant women" or "the hot weather in tropical countries". No, don't even go there.

But where does this kind of behaviour come from? Well I'd like to take you back to my primary school, I remember how the science teacher Mrs Lee was always trying to get children interested in science. After all, the class size was really quite big, we had between 35 to 40 students per class and there was just no way she could give each child the kind of individual attention we needed. Instead, she tried her best to foster curiosity in the children to learn more about science, about the world around us. So if a student were to randomly run up to Mrs Lee the science teacher and say, "there are seven colours in the rainbow", her default reaction would be, "yes there are, very good - can you name all of them?" As a teacher, it is obvious why she would react like that. There are also some parents who will indulge their young children the same way Mrs Lee did, because they want their children to be always learning and anything that is educational would be encouraged in this context. But the problem is that some children never ever grow out of this kind of mindset, they become adults and still treat everyone else around them like Mrs Lee the science teacher - they will try to impress people around them with information and facts as if they were in the classroom with Mrs Lee and of course, that usually has the complete opposite effect. As adults, as we grow up, most of us develop social skills to help us navigate more complex social environment, many of us will develop a skills that will allow us to read the room, that means taking note of the person or the people we are with, evaluating what the best way to build social rapport with them and then managing our interactions with them accordingly with that goal in mind. It means taking a moment to carefully observe the other party and understanding them before even opening our mouths to say a single word. Now this may sound obvious to many of you with pretty good social skills, but you would be amazed how many adults are seemingly clueless in this aspect.

The fact is Cindy is not a primary school teacher giving out gold stars to people who know some facts about the pregnancy process - if you are a mother who has had a few children, she might be interested in hearing from you what your personal experiences have been. But if you've not done that and if you are a man, then trying to impress her with your knowledge in this field is a really bad idea. Likewise, if you have lived in a very hot country, I would be interested to trade stories with you about how people have different ways and means to cope with the very hot weather in different parts of the world. But if it is evident that I know a lot more about this topic than you do, then once again, I'm not some primary school teacher who will reward you for trying to impress me by making this kind of assumption. The thing which annoys me is that people who make this mistake are not stupid per se, it is not like they are totally uneducated and illiterate, but they have poor social skills and behave like young children. The best thing to do in this situation is to respectfully ask questions and allow the other person to voice their opinion on the topic, this is to show that you are humbling yourself before them and you're happy to learn from them on this topic, that you're acknowledging that they know more than you on this topic. I am not going to make any new friends by trying to impress them with my knowledge - I would only annoy people if I tried that. But I can certainly make them feel very comfortable with me if they feel respected when I am engaging them in conversations about such topics. After all, we have Wikipedia at our fingertips, just reach for your phone and you can access all kinds of information you want on any topic under the sun. Hence in this context, iIt is not information that we lack, but it is this sense of respect that we offer our friends that is badly needed in this kind of situation. So in the case of Cindy, I would gladly ask her some questions that I may know the answer to already, not because I need that information from her, but I'm keen to hear her perspective and learn about her experiences. Hence in showing this kind of interest in her, Cindy will feel cherished and respected in this relationship.

There is one other aspect about assuming that upsets me and I'm going to use a very British example this time to make my point. There is the British royal family and the public opinion here can be split roughly into three categories: there are those who view them as part of what makes us British and are fiercely loyal to the king. After all, our national anthem is literally "God save the King", so they do believe that the King was put there by God so of course all good British citizens must pledge their undying allegiance to not just the King, but to all the institutions of government associated with the entire royal family. Then there are those who hate the royal family and want it abolished, there have been so many scandals and of course the most obvious one to talk about is Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew who has been arrested. The public opinion is that he is indeed a paedophile closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein and that he should have been arrested a long time ago, but because of his royal status, he has been able to get away with some really hideous crimes and this is good enough reason to get rid of the whole monarchy because it is rotten to the core with very rich people using their privilege for heinous crimes whilst doing nothing for the public good. Then you have the people who are somewhere between the two extremes: they're not fans of the royal family but hey don't hate them either; they don't have a particularly strong opinion about the royal family and would view them simply as yet another very rich family in the UK. And even if you were to abolish the whole system of monarchy here in the UK, the royal family will still remain one of the richest families in the UK and so on the basis of that immense wealth, still retain a huge amount of privilege. After all, there are plenty of very rich families in that position without having that royal status, so it really doesn't make that much difference whether or not they have that official title. So how would a British person feel if someone said to them, "oh you're British, you MUST love the King, God save the King!" Imagine if that British person was an anti-royalist, or even someone just who doesn't have any strong feelings on the monarchy - their reaction would be, how dare you make such an assumption about me based on my nationality, why don't you just ask me what I think?

And even if you were to speak to someone who does support the King, a true royalist would have a lot of opinions about the royal family and the state of the monarchy. This royalist would have opinions that they would want to express, such as what the King ought to do to improve his public image, to connect with the younger generation, to make the royal family relevant to the lives of ordinary British people and even on controversial topics like Andrew, I'm sure they would have opinions on how the palace ought to deal with this matter. The bottom line is when you have someone who is passionate about a certain topic they want to talk about it, they want to express their opinions, they want to show off how much they do know about this topic - what they don't want is the complete opposite, what they don't want is for you to come and tell them what you think they think or feel about the topic. So even if you do assume correctly that this British person is a royalist and likes the King, you will still cause offence in the process. This royalist would be like, how dare you assume to know what I think about the royal family when I know so much more about the King than you do? So let me make it very clear, under no circumstances should you ever make any assumptions about anyone - it will never lead to a good outcome, So let's apply this theory back to my pregnant friend Cindy - looking at how pregnant she is, one can probably guess that she would experience morning sickness which is quite common but it varies. This name is somewhat misleading as well because pregnant women can experience nausea and throw up at any time of the day and not just the morning. But if I want to talk to Cindy about the topic of morning sickness, I would phrase it as an open ended question and allow her to direct the conversation, to enable her to talk about her experiences and how it is affecting her. The aim of that conversation would be for her to realize that I care about her and I am concerned how she is coping, it should never be, "what a jerk, he thinks he can mansplain morning sickness to a woman." So now you know how I feel when white people make these really dumb assumptions about how I feel about the heatwave in London. You can talk about the hot weather with me of course, but you need to do so in a respectful manner and avoid making any kind of assumptions about how I would feel about the topic. I hope I've explained this clearly. Thank you very much for reading.

I am learning to back myself after all these years.

2026-07-13T17:09:29.366+01:00

Hi guys, this is a draft for my latest podcast so if you prefer to listen to it, please click on this link. I am going to share with you two stories from the 1990s, two separate events that happened in two different countries, a few years apart but they share the same theme and point to the same moral of the story, one which I am trying to apply to my life today. So for the first story, let's go all the way back to 1991, in my secondary school, there was an annual event called the Drama Fest where all the five houses would present an original play at a theatre, the plays would be judged by a jury of teachers and there will be awards given out. I played one of the leads in the play presented by Buckley House, it was a controversial play about coming out - it got everyone talking about it, remember this was 1991 in Singapore and for us to present a gay play, well some even thought we were going to be banned and not allowed to even take part or at least be subject to a lot of censorship. But no, the big day came, we presented the play, we felt like we made a massive statement and we were proud of what we had achieved. I then sat back and watched the other four plays, two of the plays were mediocre, one was dreadful - then came the play by Hullett house which was something really abstract about the theme of birth. I remember watching it and thinking, oh damn they're really good. It was bold, original, experimental and even I had to admit, I really liked it. I wish I had been able to come up with something that interesting. So what usually happens is that after all the plays have been presented, there's a long interval - the audience will go and get some drinks, some refreshments, have a toilet break as we await the judges' verdict. At that point, I had already conceded defeat, I knew we were good but I just didn't think we matched the brilliance of Hullet's play about birth. I was positively sulking, thinking we came so close but we just weren't good enough to win. I remember my friend coming round. he saw my expression, he asked if I was okay, I just shook my head and buried my face in my hands. He put his hand on my shoulder and just sat with me for a while as we awaited the results. Oh I was totally inconsolable at that stage, I just wanted to go home.

Then finally, it was time for the results. There were six judges that year and the jury was split 3-3, so there was a long discussion and finally they decided to award a joint first place to Buckley and Hullett that year which was why they had kept us waiting that long for the results. Suddenly, I went from dejection to such joy, we all ran up on stage to collect our award together and my friend who had consoled me told me, I told you not to worry, I told you to believe in yourself. Yeah, luckily for me, even though I didn't believe in myself, the judges liked me. The second story is from 1998 - this time, I was already in London at university and I took part in a university gymnastics competition. There was this other gymnast there, is name was Sam. I thought he was such a brilliant gymnast, his routines were very different from mine and when I saw him warm up, immediately I was intimidated and I already conceded defeat, I thought, the silver medal is good enough, this was my first competition in the UK and getting a medal of any colour would be an achievement. Anyway, we did the competition and to my surprise, we tied for the gold medal. Sam was the first to come over and congratulate me and I was shocked - I had already accepted in my head that I was never going to beat him unless he fell on his face or made some kind of major error; ironically that never happened. He was perfect and so was I, hence we tied for the gold medal. In both cases, we see a similar theme, I didn't believe in myself, I didn't back myself. Why did I behave like that though despite the fact in both cases, I was good enough to win? Why didn't I believe in myself?

I suppose it had a lot to do with my upbringing and my culture - I had always been afraid of getting my hopes up because there was nobody there to comfort me when I ended up disappointed. My parents are so Chinese that they have no social skills, no empathy, they don't know how to express any kind of sympathy or say something kind. I know a lot of you might say, oh that's completely normal - it's so common for Chinese parents to be like that. But I want to point out that two wrongs don't make a right and even a million, a billion wrongs don't make a right. Yes this is a common problem amongst Chinese people but it doesn't stop being a problem just because it has become common. I have a memory from my childhood to illustrate this point. This was during my sister's university application process - her first choice was to study law but you needed excellent grades and get through a very rigorous interview process to even stand a chance. She didn't make it, she fell at the final hurdle and had to settle for her second choice. Was she disappointed? Yes she was, but she brushed it off as if it was no big deal - like she wasn't that interested in law at the end of the day and it didn't bother her that much so she was totally okay with that outcome. That kind of reaction is very Chinese because I knew deep down inside, yes she was deeply disappointed by that outcome but unfortunately she simply didn't have the support mechanism in place for her to express that kind of profound disappointment. So to avoid being left in the lurch, she simply pretended that it was no big deal, that she wasn't that disappointed and she was ready to move on. Now in hindsight, I don't feel that was fair on her at all. She deserved to be emotionally supported at that point in her life.

I want to now talk about something I saw on Instagram to help put things in perspective for you. There is a Korean-American doctor called Dr Michael Park who posted a two-part series, in the first part he described an incident where he was racially abused by another passenger when getting off a United flight and the staff stood by and just let it happen, did nothing. In the second part, he assured us that he followed up with United, they did respond and they are launching a full investigation. What I found most disappointing and disturbing about this whole story though was what I stumbled upon in the comments section. A lot of other Asians said they also suffered this kind of racist abuse but just didn't respond, they sat there like dummies taking the abuse as if they deserved to be racially abused. Dr Park described these comments as "welcome to the club, you think you got it bad, wait till you hear what I had to suffer." This isn't a competition as it is a race to the bottom. I got upset about this because two wrongs don't make a right, a million wrongs still don't make a right - just because these Asian people didn't know how to stand up for themselves doesn't justify their reaction to the abuse. These people should say, I reacted wrongly, I was wrong, I should have spoken up like Dr Park and followed through, I now realized that I should have stood up for myself like Dr Park. Dr Park is right, I was wrong and I need to change my ways, I need to stop doing what I have been doing and be like Dr Park. Why is it so incredibly hard for some people to say the words "I was wrong"? After all, what do we have to lose when we admit that we are wrong? A bit of humility goes a long way as it allows us to grow as human beings, to learn from our mistakes. But if you adamantly refuse to admit that what you did was wrong, then that kind of arrogance means that you are not even willing to try to give yourself the chance to reflect on what you could have done better, if you go down that road then you will never ever grow. I'm afraid some Asian people are very much like that, they will never admit that they are wrong because they think it would mean losing face, losing status and losing respect when really, I see that as a hideously stupid mistake on their part and hence they are just making fools of themselves in the process by insisting on defending the indefensible.

So let me be the first to admit that the way I conceded defeat in advance to avoid disappointment was wrong, I was wrong and I can do so much better. I am not giving any excuses, I'm using my cultural background to explain why it happened this way but it is not an excuse, I was wrong and I know I can do so much better. It does feel immensely liberating and empowering to say that actually. Anyway, so I have resolved to want to back myself, believe in myself and become my own best friend - so here's the situation. Some of you may know that I've done an Austrian film this year - it is called The Train and it will be released in September this year in cinemas across Europe. Is it a good film? Well, I think it has its moments and it is entertaining enough, it has an interesting cast and it is shot in 9 countries, so it is a visual feast for the eyes. Is it perfect? No, but then again, is any film perfect? Of course not. I suppose I did just this film rather harshly because as an actor, I get a script and I try my best with my scenes, but I don't have any control over anything beyond that. No, that's down to the director and the producer. So here we are, I have seen an early edit of the film, I have made some several suggestions about what I liked and didn't like about the film and that's all I can do. There is certainly one scene which I think is absolutely brilliant and my favourite in the whole film - and yes, I'm the star in that scene of course, I'm oh so totally biased. But I am not going to do what I did in the past by admitting defeating and conceding even before anyone has seen this film. To be fair, yes there are other film and TV programmes that I do like very much but none of them are such masterpieces that they are 100% perfect. Even if you were to give me any one of the James Bond films and say, how would you edit it to make it better? Oh I would savagely edit them, I totally would and I don't think such films should be treated like the Mona Lisa, to be preserved in a museum in Paris behind a protective, alarmed glass wall surrounded by security guards. Such is the nature of art. Some people may like the film, some may hate it, but I do believe it has enough merits to appeal to enough people out there when it does get released this autumn.

So allow me to compare this back to the situation at Drama Fest in 1991 or that gymnastics competition in 1998, was I perfect in this film? No, there was one scene where I really didn't like the way I said one of the lines and I nervously hope no one else picks up on that when they watch the film, but so what? Is my nature to be a perfectionist stopping me from appreciating the fact that I have achieved so much that I can genuinely be proud of as I step out onto the red carpets all over Europe this autumn? There's a part of me that craves fame and success of course, I want that validation but I'm also scared when I don't get it. Just last year, when my last big project came out, I was immortalized in a James Bond production when I took part in 007: Road to a Million S2, there was a part of me that wanted to become famous overnight as a result of that. But that never happened, the show wasn't a hit and it was forgotten pretty quickly as the world moved on. I was disappointed of course but I took it on the chin, my attitude was, I don't want to be the guy who did this one programme and wants to be remembered for it for the rest of his life. Look, I'm already busy with my next project and like the rest of the world, I've moved on. There is a difference though between giving up on yourself before even trying and making the best of an outcome that is not ideal - the moral of the story is that I don't believe we have anything to lose by backing ourselves, by believing in ourselves and being our own cheerleaders. Of course it would be nice if we had people cheering for us but if not, no worries - I'll gladly cheer for myself. So there you go, what do you think? Are you prepared to be your own best friend? Are you willing to be your own cheerleader in life? Thank you so much for reading.

Is Crystal funded by the CCP to gaslight you or is she just after attention online?

2026-06-20T15:18:14.909+01:00

Hi everyone.This is a draft for my latest podcast which you can listen to by clicking here. I came across this post on Instagram made by a Chinese American influencer called Crystal and the title of her video is 'The Asia your parents escaped from is gone." I really disagreed with what she proposed in her post. But since I know she had crafted that piece for an audience who were going to agree wholeheartedly with everything she said, I'm going to offer my response here instead. Crystal talked about how she feels robbed of a better future in Asia because her parents had moved to America - Asian migrants who were of her parents' generation moved to the West, in search of better opportunities, in hopes of giving their children a brighter future in the West. She then compiles a montage of the most futuristic skyline from Asian cities like Shenzhen, Seoul, Taipei, Singapore, Tokyo and Shanghai, claiming that if our parents had just toughed it out for about 10 more years in Asia, they too would have been part of this Asian success story and she even claims that white people who visit China today will be so impressed that they think "this place might even be better than the US.". She also claims that if Asian Americans visited China today, then they would realize that they needn't have left in the first place if they were looking for a brighter future. She talks about visiting relatives back in China who have benefited from China's economic miracle and was jealous of them. Of course, her audience are other Asian people who want to believe that Asia is booming and the West is struggling today. It almost feels like the Chinese government is paying her directly to create content to fuel the narrative that China has overtaken the West and this is the kind of content on social media they need to brainwash people on Instagram. Look, I'm not trying to pick a fight with her or her supporters, such arguments are often ugly and best avoided really, so I am offering my take on the issue here and I have just six points to make.

1. It doesn't matter where you are, it's your family, your upbringing and your education.

China's economy may have experienced quite a boom in recent decades, but if you want to be a part of that success story, first you have to be born into the right family that can pay for you to have the best education money can buy in China's highly competitive education system. Then you really need to ace your gaokao to get into one of China's top tier universities in order to graduate with a degree that will even give you a fighting chance to apply for a job with one of China's most successful companies like BYD, Xiaomi or Tencent. And there are only so many graduate jobs every year, so you need your parents to be able to call in a favour or two to bump you to the front of that queue so you can even get that job interview at all. And even if you do get a job in a respectable company, it is no walk in the park as competition is extremely fierce to rise to the top. All I can say is good luck to all Chinese people who are trying to achieve success in such a harshly competitive system. But wait, what if you're from an ordinary working class family? What are your odds in this system then? Well, there's no way I can put it politely - you're fucked. If your Chinese parents are not rich, then you're fucked in China because your parents can't afford to pay for you to get a decent education, so you no matter how hard you study, you just can't get get the scores you need in the gaokao to even apply for a top university because the playing field is just not level - you are competing against very rich students who have had a completely different quality of education. Thus you're limited to either a lower tier university in China or like many, you don't even go to university at all. You enter the work force and try to look for a job, but realize very quickly that the best, well-paid jobs are reserved for have the right degrees, connections and work experience - working class people like you will never ever be considered. So you take on a low-paying job just to earn some money, then months turn into years, years turn into decades and before you know it, you look in the mirror and you are already old, but you're still stuck in a very poorly paid working class job. China's economic miracle didn't help you at all, like so many working class Chinese people, you're not part of that success story at all. So whilst some people in China may be getting a lot richer, but you're not part of that group..

But if it makes you feel any better, I could be telling you the exact same story about a working class American student who realizes that the odds are simply stacked against them. They are never going to perform well enough to get into one of the elite Ivy League universities and even if they do earn a place there, their parents will never be able to afford the tuition. But when these people try to apply for good jobs out there, they realize they're never ever going to be able to compete with the rich kids who have the right degrees from the best universities and their parents have all the right connections to get them the best internships and job interviews. Hence you have yet another generation of working class people stuck in poverty, doing poorly paid jobs just like their parents. So what is the running theme here? The rich elite in both China and America can use their wealth to ensure that their children will have a very bright future but if you're working class, if you're not part of that rich elite, then the odds are stacked against you. Thus if you really want a better future, if you want to have a successful career and earn a lot more money than your parents, what you need is a system that will allow you to attain this kind of social mobility, a system whereby if you're a bright, talented, intelligent student from a very poor family, then there are scholarships and bursary programmes in place to give you even half a chance in this very competitive system. Sure such programmes do exist in both China and America, but good luck proving to them that you're not just average, but you're actually an exceptional genius who has been held back by very difficult circumstances at home and that you're more deserving of help than the next applicant who probably has an equally sad story about poverty, abuse and neglect. So despite the fact that China and America may seem so different on the surface, they do share one common characteristic: the rich will always get richer, whilst the poor stay poor or will keep getting poorer. So if you are born into a poor working class family, you're fucked whether you are in China or America.

2. There are plenty of poor people in China who didn't succeed and become super rich.

In Crystal's video, she talked about visiting relatives in China who have captured the opportunities of China's economic boom and are doing so well - I just rolled my eyes and thought, are you related to people working in the upper echelons of the CCP? Let's look at what is happening in China today: simply being in citizen in a country that is experiencing economic growth doesn't mean that this wealth will automatically make its way into your bank account, that money is never distributed equally, there is huge income disparity in China today. Not everyone in China will become rich if they just can't access the better paid professional jobs, many are stuck in lowly skilled jobs, unable to get the education and training they desperately need.. So whilst some in China are very rich today, some are poor and most are somewhere between the two extremes of rich and poor. Let's look at some of the statistics from China today: if we were to talk about a very basic middle class lifestyle whereby your annual income is US$30,000 then that would be the top 10% of China's population today or about 140 million people. But wait, in Crystal's video, she talked about relatives who are a lot more successful than that, who have become super rich, so even if we were to add one more zero to that and make it an annual income of US$300,000 a year, then only about 0.1% of China's population meets that criteria or about 1.4 million people. So Crystal is taking the success stories of the top 0.1% and talking about it as if the other 99.9% of China is enjoying the same level of success in modern China, now that's when the figures just don't add up and she has lost all credibility. If I were to mark this as an economics essay about the state of modern China's wealth distribution, she would get an F instantly on this assignment as she has presented a very misleading and inaccurate picture of the situation in China today. China's propaganda machine would like you to focus on their top 0.1% and come away with the impression that China is extremely rich today and that is exactly what Crystal is doing in this video, but what about the other 99.9%? What kind of lives do they have in China and more importantly, what are their chances of becoming rich in China today if they don't already have rich and powerful parents? Crystal refuses to even acknowledge that such people exist in China.

3. The supply and demand problem in China today.

Let's look at the situation in China today where the economy is growing very strongly, sustaining an average of between 9 to 10% annual growth in the last three decades. So should Chinese people just tough it out and wait for their turn to get rich, at home, in China? No, instead Chinese people have been leaving China in their millions to work abroad - in the West, in the Middle East and also in places like Singapore. Why? Because there is a massive problem in China today: China is very good at educating their students, they have so many great Chinese universities pumping out very highly qualified, highly skilled graduates ready to enter the workforce. But this creates a brand new problem: there just aren't enough graduate level jobs for these highly skilled graduates and whilst there are of course some well-paid professional jobs, there is simply a huge over-supply of graduates in China today. The economy of China simply hasn't innovated fast enough to provide the right kinds of jobs for that many graduates joining the Chinese job market at this rate. So many Chinese graduates face a difficult decision: they have to either settle for a non-graduate working class job which they could have easily done without a degree, which means they have wasted a lot of their time and money getting that degree in the first place, or they could take their degrees and go seek work abroad, in a country where their qualifications can get them a professional job that pays well. It may not be the first choice for many Chinese people, but between settling for a very poorly paid non-graduate working class job and seeking their fortunes by moving abroad, the latter will usually be the more attractive option. There are other countries where they don't have this problem, there isn't an oversupply of highly skilled professionals and they have gaps in their labour markets, so if you're an unemployed young Chinese person with a degree and a lot of skills, then it's not a question of just toughing it out for ten years by doing a lowly paid working class job - you have to pick the path that will allow you to develop your career and that will mean going to work abroad rather than becoming a delivery driver with a degree in engineering. That is the harsh reality for many young people in China today, a basic fact that Crystal has conveniently chosen to sweep under the carpet.

4. Shenzhen at 5 am, before the sun even rises.

The rich people in big cities like Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai can enjoy a standard of living on par with the West, but these rich people only represent less ten percent of China's population. Over 90% of the people live in smaller towns and rural areas in the interior of China where the standard of living is painfully low. If you look at the GDP per capita at a province level, the poorest province in China today is Gansu and they have a GDP per capita that is similar to that of Botswana in Africa. That is the harsh reality for a lot of real Chinese people who are not part of the elite top 10% living in the big cities. For your average Chinese working class farmer or factory worker, looking at pictures of the most modern skyscrapers in Beijing might inspire a sense of civic pride, but even that doesn't translate to money in their bank account. I would like to share with you this memory on my last business trip to Shenzhen when I was incredibly jet lagged and I couldn't sleep, so I got up at the crack of dawn to have a walk whilst waiting for the hotel breakfast. It was not even 5 am but already, there were already workers on construction sites starting their day, there were gardeners already hard at work in the city parks and an army of cleaners on the streets and in the office buildings. And there were the security guards who have been up all night, along with the workers who were about to open their food stalls for the breakfast shift. These are all migrant workers from impoverished, rural provinces of China, willing to do backbreaking hard work in Shenzhen because there are just no jobs back home for them. Sure they are toughing it out by being hard at work at 5 am, but how much are they earning in Shenzhen? Let's be clear: these people are paid so little, there's no light at the end of the tunnel for them - they are never going to get rich doing this kind of very poorly paid jobs - they have a painfully bleak future in China. Yet China's economic success for the top elite relies on the bottom 90% working under such harsh conditions for very little money. There is something very wrong with a country when the rich are crazy rich and the poor barely have enough to eat; but what is even more disturbing is when someone like Crystal tries to make you believe through a montage of China's city skylines that the vast majority of Chinese people today are crazy rich Asians.

5. There's another important factor to consider!

I have to point out another important factor: your intelligence matters, now forgive me if I am stating the obvious but some people are a lot more intelligent than others and if you are more intelligent than most people out there, then you're going to figure out a way to make money and do well in life no matter where you live. But if you're stupid, you're dumb and you're just not that smart, then it doesn't matter where in the world you live, you're never going to access the well paid jobs that will go to the most intelligent people in your society and so you're always going to be poor. This is the genetic lottery that has far less to do with your parents and it is just down to luck. So if you're a stupid person in China, then your options are very limited. You would struggle to move abroad because most countries only offer work permits for skilled labour; you might be able to get construction work on a project in the desert in the Middle East, but that is a brutally hard life in horrifically harsh conditions in the desert for not that much money at all. But if you stay in China, your options are equally grim: you will probably end up as a delivery driver working very long hours for a pathetic amount of money and no amount of 'toughing it out' would lead to a better paid job. So for those who are blessed enough to be born intelligent - it really doesn't matter if they choose to live in one country or another, they have what it takes to find success wherever they are. But if you are unlucky enough to be born stupid, then I'm afraid no amount of "toughing it out" is going to make the slightest bit of difference. Thus Crystal's video is misleading to say the least because for a lot of people who are just not that intelligent, they are already "toughing it out" and there is simply no light at the end of that tunnel for them. Crystal is implying that those who have failed to rise to the top in a system like China's are lazy, that they weren't tough enough to see things through when that is hardly a fair and accurate evaluation of the options that a lot of Chinese people face. The reason why they are still poor is not because they aren't tough enough or that they are lazy, but because they are just not as intelligent as their peers and that's not their fault at all - that's just the genetic lottery.

6. Actually Chinese people working abroad have done really well for themselves!

Let me remind you that it is not that the streets of New York or London are paved with gold, but the immigration system in the West would only grant work permits to highly skilled migrants from China. So if you are a brain surgeon or a nuclear physicist, then great - you'll have no problem moving to the West. But if you're a working class person without a degree, then no, you are never going to be granted a work permit. The system is set up this way because the governments in the West have two clear objective: firstly, it needs to fill certain gaps in their economies when it comes to certain skilled individuals. A good example of this are doctors as most governments want their hospitals to be well staffed in order to keep waiting lists to a minimum. But at the same time, the governments in the West would want to make sure that their own poorly educated, unskilled working class people have enough jobs, so bringing in a huge amount of cheap foreign labour is only going to upset working class voters and so it is mostly well-educated, highly skilled professionals from China who get to move to places like America to take up well-paid, professional jobs. Thus the filter built into this system has created a situation whereby the Chinese migrants in America are actually doing rather well for themselves, earning quite a lot of money in professional jobs, living rather comfortable lives. So it is not like these Chinese Americans are looking jealousy at how well their counterparts in China are doing much better financially - no, that's not the case at all as Chinese Americans are a lot richer than not just the average person in China but also the average person in America! It is actually really hard to imagine a situation whereby a Chinese American person would genuinely be jealous of someone in China. Sure things in America are far from perfect and America has many problems, but in comparison, China offers just a different set of problems altogether. It is absolutely nothing like the utopia that Crystal is trying to sell you.

So who is her target audience then?

The question I want to leave you with is this: who is the target audience of this video then? Chinese Americans will probably think she is the mouthpiece of the CPP. But what about Chinese people in China? I'm not convinced either because a real Chinese will be equally cynical about her vision of a China where everyone can get super rich as long as they 'tough it out'. in China. This piece was posted on Instagram and in English, so it is hardly aimed at your average Chinese person behind the great firewall of China since they can't easily access Instagram without a VPN. As a British Chinese person in London, I'm not her target audience as well because I have just recorded this podcast to tell you exactly why I think she is totally wrong. So I dived into the comments section of her post and it was interesting what I found. Firstly, I found a lot of anti-Western rhetoric like "America only got rich from slavery whilst countries like France and the UK exploited their colonies, so the West is evil!" It is a thinly veiled form of racism by these Asian people who really hate white people - oh yeah, racism can work both ways, there are Asian people who can be extremely racist towards white people and some of these Chinese people in the comments section really hate white people. In any case, I call this the strawman argument. No one is denying the facts about slavery or the colonial empire but what has this got to do with what Crystal's argument here about 'toughing it out' in China? It is not related, it doesn't support or prove her point at all. Does Crystal have a captive audience of racist Chinese people who really hate white people? Then why is she posting this in English and not in Mandarin then, as she would be far more likely to get a bigger audience if she had done this video in Mandarin instead of English? The irony is that she is not actually racist towards white people in this video - she is pro-China but these Asian racists have been looking for some kind of bandwagon to jump on and this was it. Thankfully there are also a lot of Asian people telling her that she has been totally brainwashed and that she is wrong, but these posts are in the minority and they get attacked mostly by these extremely racist Asian people as well. If engagement gets you more attention on these social media platforms, then that was Crystal chose to be provocative. It was a very polarizing video: some used it as an opportunity to spew their extreme racist hatred of white people whilst others were accusing her gaslighting her viewers. But given the poor quality of her argument, I wonder if the CCP would actually invest in someone like that, like surely the CCP could find better social media influencers to spread their message, so it is quite clear that she was just deliberately being offensive to get attention and sadly, it has worked.

Why are some Singaporeans so afraid of criticizing white people?

2026-06-12T18:14:36.000+01:00

Hi guys, this is my draft for my latest podcast which you can always listen to if you click on this link. So for my podcast today, I want to address something I have observed something strange about Singaporeans on social media. For those of you not familiar with me, hello my name is Alex, I was born in Singapore and I grew up there, but I have spent the last 29 years of my life living in Europe. So let me give you the context: on a social media platform like Youtube or Instagram, a white travel vlogger will go to Singapore and do a post about an aspect of the local experience and this white person would inevitably butcher some of the local names which are often in Mandarin, Hokkien or Malay. This could be the name of a local neighbourhood like Bukit Timah or Ang Mo Kio or even the name of a local dish like nasi padang or chai tau kway. If the mispronunciation is really bad and this white person keeps doing it, then I would leave a comment to point it out to them because often, these social influencers would spend a lot of time, money and effort to put these videos together whether it may be going all the way to Singapore or spending a lot of time putting together some amazing graphics in post-production but it seems odd that they have this lack of attention to detail when it comes to pronouncing local names. Take the neighbourhood of Bedok, that's two syllables and just five letters - just ask a local how it is pronounced or look it up on the internet. It's not rocket science. So it's not like these people really don't care and have made no effort with these videos, but they do care and they still made that mistake and so I'm just trying to be helpful when I point out in a respectful and polite way that these are the kinds of mistakes they ought to avoid in the future.

Whilst this has happened quite a few times, allow me focus on one specific instance when this happened - there was a British food influencer who traveled to Singapore to track down hawker food with Michelin stars and of course, he really struggled pronouncing anything that wasn't in English. And I left him a polite comment about verifying the pronunciations and the kind of response I got him was very typical - these social influencers would always be like, "oh I am so sorry I got that wrong, thanks for letting me know, I'll be mindful in the future." But I have also received a lot of hate from Singaporeans - yeah, the local Singaporeans got really angry with me and most said that they really didn't have a problem with a foreigner struggling with some of the local names, in fact they didn't expect non-Singaporeans to know how to pronounce names like Bukit Gombak, Yishun and Bedok. But it often went beyond simply expressing the opinion that as local Singaporeans, they weren't that fussed when foreigners mispronounced certain local names of neighbourhoods or dishes. These insults were loaded with venom, they reacted so angrily as if I had just punched their mother or kicked their new born baby - all because I dared to politely correct the white guy on a mistake he made. The extent of their anger shocked me, after all, I didn't attack or insult any Singaporean; yet they had sharpened their knives and attacked me with such rage for what I had done and the biggest irony of it all is that the white guy in question - this white British influencer - was both very apologetic and grateful when I had corrected him. So what is going on here?

After all, from my perspective, I don't feel like skin colour should have anything to do with it. I post a lot of travel content on my Instagram and I would be worried about coming across as ignorant, disrespectful and stupid if I couldn't even pronounce the name of the place I was visiting. I'm off to Poland later this month and often in Polish, nothing is pronounced the way it is spelt - like you simply cannot read Polish as if you're reading English, they have a completely different set of rules. I would apply these high standards to myself when I am posting content on social media, so at least I can say I'm not a hypocrite. But why are these Singaporeans so angry with me for daring to point out these mistakes to social influencers who want to make content about Singapore? Is it because I am Asian or is there some other factor at play? So, I have a few theories about why I am experiencing all this rage and anger from those Singaporeans online.

Theory 1: it's normal to get things wrong with foreign languages, so why are you criticizing?

I watched a video of Malaysian food blogger review a French restaurant in Penang, she was served French dishes with French names and of course, this food blogger doesn't speak any French and so she butchered every single word in French. It was so bad it was funny, but I hesitated - the video is already out there, it was not like I was being shown a draft that she could still edit and correct. She clearly had no idea just how bad her pronunciation was. I had a look at the comments and nobody seemed to have noticed her mistakes, clearly her audience were mostly local Malaysians who also didn't speak French. For the record, I speak French fluently, I have lived in France when I've studied at a top French university, I've also worked in Paris for Google. So I decided not to post a comment as I didn't want to embarrass her, it was not my intention to try to insult or offend her for her mistake, though I did think that it was a mistake on her part. One that she could have dealt with by at least acknowledging the problem. Allow me to compare this to a news report I saw on Canadian news where they got presenter Andrew Chang to do a piece of news about China which involved him reading out a few names in Chinese. Despite having a Chinese surname and obviously being of Chinese descent, Andrew doesn't speak any Chinese and he struggled with the pronunciation of the names in Mandarin. But he doesn't avoid the elephant in the room, he apologized to his viewers and took ownership, admitting that he doesn't speak Chinese and his pronunciation is going to make Mandarin speakers feel uncomfortable. In criticizing himself before anyone else could have the chance to do so, there was something refreshing honest about his approach, he wasn't trying to wing it and hoped that no one would notice his mistakes the way that Malaysian food blogger reviewing the French restaurant did. He pointed out the elephant in the room and dealt with it. Yet somehow, I seemed to be the only one who noticed the problem and I did fear a backlash if I spoke up as none of her other viewers had a problem with it. So let me ask you this question: is it simply normal and acceptable for Singaporeans and Malaysians to struggle pronouncing anything in a foreign language like French or German? So is the logic, if the people allow themselves and their peers to make mistakes like that, then they will allow foreigners to make the same kind of mistakes when they are in town?

Theory 2: it is a bit too personal to criticize someone like that.

This was quite a few years ago but I remember it well, I was in a meeting with a woman and she must have had a terrible day because she didn't even check her own appearance in the mirror. You see, this woman had a mustache - yup, some women do have facial hair and have to go through great lengths everyday to remove it before it grows back. It is just genetics. If they don't do anything about it, that facial hair will become more and more prominent. So this lady must have missed a spot shaving or waxing her mustache as there was clearly quite a significant chunk of facial hair still on her face. What do you do in this situation? Pointing it out to her would embarrass her and cause a lot of awkwardness, I felt like it ought to be a close friend who mentioned it to her, not me. I barely knew this woman and it wasn't my place to do it even if I believe she would be mortified if she had realized what was going on. And so if anyone did ask me about it later, I would just pretend that I didn't notice it at all even if I clearly did. So yes, there are times when you would want to pretend not to notice someone else's mistake out of kindness, because you don't want them to feel bad about the situation. After all, pointing out the mistake isn't going to make the situation any better in this case and simply pretending that nothing is wrong was the best course of action open to me. Thus in this case, was it simply a case of these Singaporeans feeling like I had been too critical, too personal when it came to attacking these Youtubers for their poor pronunciation of certain words, have I overlooked all the other merits of the video and simply focused on the mistakes in order to make the Youtuber feel bad? Perhaps in some cultures, the social norm is to avoid overtly criticizing others the way I did in order to minimize social conflict and that this kind of harsh criticism should be left to close friends and family rather than complete strangers on the internet. And so these Singaporeans were merely telling me, you're not a close friend of this Youtuber, you are a stranger - it is not your place to criticize him in this manner, so you should back off.

Theory 3: a good host will never criticize the guest

Many Singaporeans want to give visitors a really good impression of Singapore. This is just part of the local culture where we have always been very welcoming, since tourism is is an important part of the economy and Singaporeans are genuinely keen to show foreign visitors just how amazing their country is. So this is a natural reaction when you are proud of your country, so imagine if an American tourist was asking for directions to Bay-dock instead of Buh-dohk, the Singaporean will probably be too polite to react to that mistake in order to avoid making the American guest feel awkward about that mistake. So if a Singaporean were to witness me correcting a foreigner by finding fault with their pronunciation, they would probably step in and say, oh don't worry it's no big deal. Thus it is in that spirit that these Singaporeans might have felt that I have ruined the welcome they wanted to offer all foreigners visiting Singapore including anyone interested enough to watch a video about Singapore on Youtube. This is where I would like to make a distinction though - there is quite a big difference between a tourist visiting Singapore and mispronouncing a place name and a social media influencer trying to create content about Singapore. I would hold the latter to much higher standards than the former, if you want to create content for social media, then you need to know what you're talking about in order to have some credibility. The internet is already full of content by some of these influencers who create misleading content littered with lies and half-truths, thus I would like to think that any serious Youtuber would react positively to someone with useful information about the subject matter making a constructive criticism. Yet in the eyes of the local Singaporeans, a good host should never criticize the guest, even if this guest is a Youtuber or a social media influencer.

Theory 4: this is a very autistic response.

The funny thing about social media is that you get to participate in it no matter how poor your social skills are. I postulate that it is possible that some of these people who attacked me did so because I had a different response from them. They are so autistic that they fail to realize that someone else can watch the same video and come up with a totally different response to them - that somehow, their response is the only valid one and anyone else who dares to respond differently is wrong. Allow me to give you a rather extreme example of this to illustrate my point. I once watched a Youtube video comparing two versions of the song 'Higher Love' - the original was by Steve Winwood way back in 1986 and there was a 2019 remix of the Whitney Houston cover version of the same song which introduced this to a whole new generation so many years later. The two versions are remarkably different, the original is a 1980s classic whereas the 2019 remix made it fresh, contemporary and turned a rock classic into a modern dance anthem. In fact the 2019 version was so popular it reached no. 2 in the UK charts, much to the delight of Whitney Houston fans like me. So you could express a preference as to which version you preferred but to put a value judgment as to say which version was definitely better? No, you can't do that. But you should have seen the comments section of that video, this guy clearly felt that the original Steve Winwood version was better and he would go through the comments section and pick a fight with every single person who expressed a liking for the 2019 Whitney Houston remix. What was wrong with this guy? He genuinely believed that only his opinion was correct and anyone who disagreed with him was wrong so he was literally picking fights in the comments section that way. If this is the way he behaves on social media, I can only imagine he is some kind of loner with no friends in real life as nobody would want to put up with that kind of behaviour in real life. So yes, I may have encountered the equivalent in Singapore in this case. This is not racism we're dealing with but it is actually just autism.

Theory 5: it is a type of internalized racism, a post-colonial hangover

You might be shocked at this suggestion but it is very true that some Singaporeans have this notion, this perception, that white people will always look down on Asian people, that this is just the way things are, that white people will always be the colonial master long after the era of colonial rule. These Singaporeans will be the first to judge an Asian tourist in New York or London struggling with English, yet if a white tourist comes to Singapore and struggles with place names - that's perfectly okay with them. Thus in their eyes, I don't have the right to criticize the white person because I'm Asian, I should just shut up and not say a word when a white person does this because they wouldn't dare to criticize a white person. I have this memory from around 1990, when I was in a car park with my father when a white American person asked us for directions. My father panicked as he couldn't understand the American and he looked as if he was going to just run out of the car park to get out of that situation; my father's reaction in that moment reminded me of a student being asked a question by the teacher and guiltily admitting with shame, "sorry I don't know the answer." Whereas I had grown up with American English, like the guy just wanted to know how to get to the nearby tennis courts. So I gave him the directions he needed and that was when my father gave me that look of, "how did you manage to do that?" I would associate that kind of mentality with people from my parents' generation but it seems that old habits die hard - many of these younger Singaporeans still have this mentality that they are racially inferior to white people, that even on social media, an Asian person doesn't have the right to challenge a white person like that. I can see something similar at work in another facet of the Singaporean mindset, it is this unwillingness, this reluctance to challenge or criticize anyone in authority. I remember an incident from 2010 when Singapore held the Youth Olympics and I criticized the two commentators selected for the live streaming of the gymnastics event as neither of them knew much about gymnastics. In fact one of them was merely selected because he was an American who spoke with a strong American accent.

My criticism was that Singapore had a thriving gymnastics community, our gymnasts have been achieving so much in recent years. Why not pick someone from the local Singapore gymnastics community who is an expert on the subject instead of a random American guy who has an American accent? So are we prioritizing having an American accent over having real technical knowledge of the sport? What is the rationale behind justifying the choice of hiring this useful American idiot? And let me be clear: this American guy was an idiot who knew nothing about gymnastics, he mostly talked rubbish. It can only be a deep-seated sense of internalized racism that made the Singaporean organizers pick a white, American idiot over a local who is a lot more qualified but doesn't have the right skin colour or accent. Oh I got so much hate from Singaporeans as a result of what I had said - why? Because these Singaporeans were genuinely proud of how Singapore had hosted such a major international sports event, so if anyone were to respond with anything but praise for the organization of the event, then that's ruining the illusion, the rather simple message that Singapore was successful as a host. Most of the people who attacked me and gave me so much grief online didn't even watch the gymnastics event - in fact they probably didn't even have a clue what particular aspect of the event I had been critical of; no, they attacked me for daring to criticize the organization. When I look at this kind of herd mentality, this brand of blind loyalty, I wonder if we're dealing with North Korea or Singapore. Thus whether we're talking about what happened at the Youth Olympics or even when I leave a critical comment on Youtube, I do think the people who attack me when I dare to challenge another white person on a topic relating to Singapore are experiencing this kind of internalized racism and it is easier for them to attack me because I'm Asian, rather than for them to take a long hard look in the mirror and question why they still have this mentality that we don't have the right as Asian people to challenge or criticize white people.

That's it from me. So what do you guys think about this rather controversial theories then? Many thanks for reading.

Coming out to your Chinese parents (or not)

2026-06-04T13:21:46.990+01:00

Hi guys, this is a draft for my latest podcast which you can choose to listen to by clicking here, or you can read on as always. Recently, I watched a piece on social media about a gay guy in Singapore called Eric Feng who chose not to come out to his Chinese parents - I don't want to criticize him since that's his personal choice of course but I want to discuss the topic and share with you my perspective. So let's start with this piece that I saw: this is an openly gay 45 year old Singaporean guy talking about how he is totally out to the world by having a presence on social media to talk about LGBTQ issues, he is showing his face and not hiding in the closet. A reason why he didn't want to burden them by coming out is because he claims, 'they wouldn't know what to do with that information'. His father has expressed a worry and chose the words 'who will take care of you when you are old', referring to the fact that in Chinese culture, children are supposed to take care of their parents when they are elderly and gay people tend not to have children. Eric could have used that opportunity to point out the obvious and come out to his father then, but he chose not to. The key reason why Eric feels that he doesn't want to come out to his parents is that he doesn't need any kind of emotional support or acceptance from them in his coming out journey - he is perfectly content with his identity as a gay man and often, for a lot of other gay men, coming out to their means receiving that sense of acceptance from their parents which can be a huge source of emotional support for a young gay person struggling to accept themselves. Furthermore, Eric already has a very supportive, gay-friendly sister whom he is out to already and she is a great source of strength and emotional support. I guess Eric doesn't expect his aged Chinese parents to behave like those in the West who are gay-friendly and know how to say the right things to a son coming out of the closet, so he didn't go down that route. So that's kind of it in Eric's rather short video and allow me to offer my own response to that and spoiler alert - no, I didn't agree with Eric.

I want to make it clear - this is in no way any kind of criticism of Eric, his story intrigued me as I'm only 5 years older than him and we're both from Singapore. So it is fair to say, we actually do share a lot in common actually. Now let's focus on the differences - he has shown loads of pictures and videos of his parents on his social media feed obviously without their consent, since he is not out to them and these are videos about being gay, but regardless, that's between him and his parents. I have chosen to keep my parents out of my social media content because I know they are not happy at all when it comes to letting the public know that they have a gay son. In film and TV production, we always ask participants to sign a release form to indicate that they consent to being a part of the production, to show their faces otherwise we either have to mask their faces in the show or not use that footage at all. I'm somewhat uncomfortable with what Eric has done with his parents but like I said, that's between him and them. In showing their faces so openly like that on his social media posts, surely someone is going to go up to them and say, "eh I saw your gay son use your photos in his videos talking about being gay". And yet at the same time, he said he doesn't want to come out to his parents - I just can't quite get my head around that. But perhaps this is where we have the shades of grey, where life isn't this simple dichotomy of black and white, left or right, up or down. It seems his mother has a pretty good idea that he is gay, she just doesn't want to have the conversations about it. He pointed out that his parents, like most of our parents of that generation, are simply not that well educated and thus wouldn't have the same information, knowledge and understanding about LGBT issues. Yet somehow, in their own way, they are comfortable enough with the situation. Likewise with my parents, I'm totally out to them - I never got any kind of acceptance yet at the same time, I never got any rejection either. I suppose both Eric and I are in the same situation, there's a sliding scale between 0 to 10, with 0 being homophobic parents kicking their children out of the front door and disowning them; and 10 being this kind of ideal situation where they are totally gay-friendly and say, "I knew you were gay since you were 3 years old, I knew you were gay before you knew what it meant to be gay, you're my child, of course I know I created a gay child and I have always loved my gay child." Thus Eric's parents are probably somewhere like on a 7 or 8 on that scale, whilst I feel like mine are at about 5 (on a good day).

But there's one thing that Eric said that really resonated with me. He talked about his parents spending years always worried about people looking down on them and that is something my parents went through as well. I always tell this story to illustrate just how poor my parents were when they got married. My mother was a young mother with a baby - my eldest sister and so my mother wanted to cook a nourishing meal for her baby and herself. She went to the butcher and wanted to buy some pork, but when she saw the price of meat that day, she realized she couldn't afford it. Nonetheless, she tried her luck and asked for the butcher to give her just a very small slice of pork. When the butcher cut a tiny slice of pork and weighed it, my mother realized that she still couldn't afford it and so she asked the butcher if he could cut it any smaller so she could afford it. The butcher laughed at my mother, if I cut this piece of meat any smaller I would have slicing into my own fingers. Get out of here, if you don't have any money to buy meat, why do you come here? Come back when you have money to pay for it. All the customers in the shop reacted by laughing at my mother and that was when my mother left the shop in tears, consumed by so much shame as she had been laughed out of the butcher's shop. You know what the irony is? The butcher wasn't exactly rich, neither were the other customers in the queue - yet they chose to heap judgement on someone slightly poorer than them and mock my mother. Really rich people would probably react with a lot more compassion in such a situation. You might assume rather incorrectly that poor people might have more compassion for other poor people, but from experience I can tell you that a poor person has two choices in that situation which my mother encountered at the butcher': they can either express empathy and kindness or they can use it to feel superior to this person, like "hey I may be poor, I know I am not rich but I'm not as pathetic as that woman I ran into that the butcher who was told to leave because she couldn't afford anything - she was practically begging the butcher for free meat, she has some nerve to even show her face in there." This was just one example of how my mother was routinely humiliated by her peers and her community for being poor and this wasn't a one off - this happened regularly, almost daily for her. Thus such bad experiences have scarred my mother for life and she so is always paranoid.

Let me compare and contrast my coming out to my husband's coming out - when I came out to my parents around 1996 at the age of 20, they didn't have a clue what it meant. Their only concern was if they would lose face, ah yes, that old Asian concept of losing face, losing the respect of others. They didn't once think what it meant for me being a young gay person, it was like my welfare wasn't at all of concern to them at all. No, it was all about them - it was all about how they would be humiliated if other people found out, how they would be judged for having been not good enough parents and how they have given others yet another reason to look down on them. So at the time, I could have been very angry and disappointed at their complete lack of interest in my welfare but I think what Eric is suggesting is to look at it from their point of view: if they had been traumatized by a lifetime of humiliation, then they are not likely to know how to deal with this kind of situation. This is no excuse of course for the type of reaction I got, but perhaps I can compare this to my husband's coming out years ago to his family. Their first concern was that of sexual health - a lot of gay people got AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was a major issue for the gay community. HIV/AIDS has since become a manageable long term illness with modern medicine, but back then, it was a death sentence that could seriously impact the quality of your adult life. So at least his family's first reaction was, okay are you protecting yourself from HIV and do you know what to do to have safer sex, so as to minimize your risk of infection? Once that was out of the way, then there was all that about "who is going to take care of you when you are old?" Even if that conversation was awkward and difficult, at least they were concerned about him - that conversation was about his welfare. With my parents, they had absolutely zero interest in my welfare, it was all about blaming me for being such a bad son for once again making them lose face, for subjecting them to even more humiliation and disgrace. But once that conversation was over, they hardly ever brought up the topic again. They dealt with it the same way my father dealt with his cancer diagnosis - they don't have the social skills nor the vocabulary to have an intelligent conversation about such a complex, sensitive topic and thus they simply don't talk about it at all, if they do talk, it would just be about very mundane things like what they want to eat for dinner.

I think it is ironic that my parents are so obsessed with this whole concept about losing face and people looking down on them because there are plenty of things that they can be proud of. Despite being very working class, I am working in the upper echelons of the financial services industry in Europe and if I may be blunt, making a lot of money. Yet they are not interested in all that - I remember this moment from a few years ago when I was visiting my aunt with my mother, so my aunt quite innocently asked my mother (and not me, for some reason) what I was doing in London. I thought it was my mother's opportunity to boast how well I was doing, given that this was one opportunity for her to gain that much wanted respect from her own sister. But the answer that she had given was so wide of the mark, she had described me as if I was some kind of uneducated labourer doing a totally unskilled job. At that moment I realized that my mother was so stupid that she didn't understand the difference between a skilled job and an unskilled job - that highly educated, highly skilled, highly intelligent people did very different kinds of jobs which paid a lot more, that these jobs weren't accessible to people who were not as highly educated, skilled or intelligent. Believe you me, I have tried to explain the difference to my parents but as they are uneducated and very working class, the concept of highly skilled individuals earning a lot more money doing more specialist professional roles is just somehow beyond their comprehension. Furthermore my mother was so totally disinterested in me that she really could not give a fuck whether or not I was a brain surgeon or a beggar on the streets of London. I can tell you that both statements are true: that my mother is woefully ignorant about skilled jobs as she is totally uneducated and she has also totally lost interest in me decades ago. Thus within this context, if that is just the nature of my relationship with my parents, then I can't be held responsible for them feeling this paranoia about people looking down on them.- it's like if they are thirsty, then I have put water in front of them for them to drink, to quench that thirst, to take care of that need. But as the saying goes, you can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink. If they choose to continue to be consumed by this paranoia of people looking down on them for being poor instead of taking pride in their children's achievements, then no, I didn't create this problem and this is not a problem I can fix.

So allow me to analyze it as a businessman being very rational: I am shown business opportunities on a regular basis and I would have to evaluate if it the opportunity I am shown is worth pursuing or not. If a deal is fraught with risk and difficulty, I would usually just pass on it, especially if I know my time can be a lot better spent on easier projects. Thus if coming out to my parents would be presented to me as a project in this context, my evaluation would be, "you have everything to lose and nothing to gain, your parents are only going to fuck this up by reacting poorly to your coming out, you know they would say a lot of very stupid things that are completely inappropriate and everyone would be worse off as a result of you coming out. Alternatively, you could maintain the status quo by avoiding the topic, in the same way Taiwan's independence isn't recognized by China but China isn't invading Taiwan yet - it is a kind of stalemate status quo that has maintained the peace and this might be the best case scenario." Maybe this is why Eric didn't want to come out to his parents all this time as he could probably predict that his parents simply wouldn't know how to say the right things - it would simply be incredibly awkward and there would be nothing to be gained by any of the parties involved. When you realize that there's little potential gain from doing something, you have little incentive to do it. Putting aside any kind of moral judgment on whether or not we ought to be honest with our parents about our sexuality, Eric's choices may have simply been guided by a simple cost-benefit analysis of the situation based on what his own standards and expectations.

Eric also talked about his father being completely clueless. I think there is an element of that in my family as well and I shall focus this discussion on my own family since I clearly don't know Eric and his father, so I don't want to judge them. Eric guessed that it was a combination of his father being way too busy working, providing for his family so he never noticed that his son was gay; as well as him being of a different generation where they really didn't have an understanding of gay culture. Well, based on my own parents, I can offer another dimension to this: my parents got married out of a sense of duty rather than love per se. For them, it was a lot more important to fulfil their duty to their families and society to get married and have children - the concept of marriage and parenthood was never ever about love, it was viewed in the context of responsibility and duty. There is a big difference between doing an activity out of duty and out of love. For example, I brush my teeth every night and take good care of my teeth not because I actually enjoy the process, but I do so out of a sense of duty. I need to take care of my teeth properly or I will pay a high price if I start losing my teeth. I believe that love and marriage ought to be treated more like visiting our favourite roller coaster - it must be an experience that we embrace simply because it brings us great joy, rather than something like the way we routinely brush our teeth. But for my parents' generation, they had a completely different set of values and times have changed of course, our culture has evolved a lot. Back in the day, it was far more important for them to get married than to find genuine love, so in that context, if spouses didn't really love each other, then they are not that likely to love their children or even take much interest in their own children. When I complained to my sister about this situation, she simply rolled her eyes and said that all her friends face exactly the same situation and that this is just the norm in Singapore. I pointed out to her that two wrongs don't make a right - even if this is a common problem in Singapore, it still remains a problematic situation for those involved. I get the feeling that her reaction is pretty normal in Singapore, as long as she isn't the only one facing the problem, she accepts it all as normal as there's nothing she can do to change things.

So whilst I don't want to assume anything about Eric's father, but I am saying in the case of my father, it isn't all that unusual for Asian parents of that generation to be totally disinterested in their own children, especially once they become adults. If your children are a result of a loving marriage, then you are far more likely to have a meaningful relationship with your children over the years. But if you got married out of a sense of duty and find yourself trapped in a loveless, vapid relationship with a spouse who feels the same way about you, then whilst you might accept that this is your fate in life, it would be hard for you to have the same kind of motivation to get to know your children. In fact, it isn't uncommon for some Asian parents to guilt trip their children for the sacrifices they have made to bring them up, but they often dance around the issue of the lack of love, affection and joy. The blunt, uncensored version of this narrative would be, "you realize I had to marry someone clearly don't love, someone I can barely tolerate on a good day and the sex was just unspeakably awful, it was the worst experience of my life - I went through all that, just to have children to fulfil this duty of becoming a parent. You are the product of all those sacrifices that I had to go through, all the suffering I had to endure in that process to fulfil my duty." Sex should be a fun, pleasurable physical experience that you partake in with someone you are physically attracted to, but if you are forced to have sex with someone you don't like, whom you might even find repulsive, then how is that any different from what a prostitute does for a living as a prostitute has sex with customers for money, it is purely an economic transaction. It is unpleasant, hard labour performed in exchange for money, done by those who have no other choice, no other way to earn a living. So in the case of couples like my parents, the best case scenario would be for the sex to have been boring, uninteresting and my mother would simply daydream about something else until my father was done. But in the worst case scenario, one or both parties may end up feeling violated and disgusted by the whole experience. If that is the kind of context for the notion of 'sacrifices' that our parents have made for us, then what do they expect in return? And would they expect their gay children to stay in the closet then?

Bur let's take Eric at face value - let's imagine that his father really is clueless and has no real concept of what it means to have a gay son. Well, allow me to use an analogy to share with you how I feel about this situation. So I was in Greece on holiday many years ago, this wasn't in a big city but in the rural north and we were trying to get a bus from one town to our next destination - I checked on the internet and it seems like there was a bus service between the two locations, it just wasn't frequent as this was a small countryside town in Greece. However we waited a long time at the bus stop and the bus just didn't come and we didn't know what to do. Was it running late? Was it ever going to come? Quite by chance, we saw a young man come along and I asked him for help - as this was Greece, finding bus time tables could be tricky as websites are often only in Greek, I was relying on Google translate and these websites may not be updated regularly. Sure you could try to use AI to try to plan your trip but if AI can only use the information that is already out there on the internet, if that info is wrong or out of date, then you are fed incorrect information as I found out. The helpful local pointed out to me that the info I had found on the net was out of date and there wouldn't be another bus that day in that direction, the only way for us to realistically get to our destination would be to get a bus in the wrong direction to the nearest big town for a connecting bus (and so making the journey much longer), or to get a taxi to go directly to our destination. So if Eric's father is still clueless and believes that his son is straight and might just be waiting for the right woman to come along, shouldn't someone play the part of the very helpful Greek local whom I met and offer Eric's father some useful, accurate information about what the current situation actually is? After all, how did you think I felt waiting at that bus stop in Greece for a bus that didn't exist, that was never going to come that day? I felt so very grateful to that helpful Greek local who helped me get to my next destination - after all, he was under no obligation at all to render any help, but he did so anyway. Likewise, if Eric's father is somehow naively waiting for his son to just meet the right woman to get married because he hasn't realized his son is gay, wouldn't it be the kind thing for Eric (or his sister or mother) to offer this clueless old man some useful information the same way this helpful Greek local did with me with the bus?

So like all complex issues, there are two sides to every story and whilst Eric is free to share his experience and opinions on the matter, I worry that Eric's video is going to push some people deeper and deeper into the closet because it signals that it can be okay to stay in the closet. I don't even think that is Eric's intention, given that he is out to everyone on the internet. Hence this is why I am hoping to do my part in balancing out the argument here, by putting one piece on the internet that disagree with Eric's stance. Like I said at the very beginning, just because I don't agree with Eric and I've explained why I feel the way I do, it doesn't mean I am making this any kind of personal attack - it is not persona at all. He has used the internet to express his opinion on the matter and I'm simply doing the same. So guys, what do you think? Am I being way too harsh on Eric? Why do you think his father is so clueless about the whole situation then? Do you think that the analogy with the bus time table in rural Greece is a fair comparison to this situation with Eric's clueless father? Would you be tempted to tell Eric's father the truth about his gay son? Thank you very much for reading.

Am I wrong to assume that siblings might be alike?

2026-05-11T17:36:00.002+01:00

Hi guys. This is the transcript of a recent podcast that I have made, if you prefer to listen to it, please click on this link here to access it on Spotify.

0:06 Unpacking a Dream: My Uncle, Father, and Dabomu
Hello everyone and welcome back to check in with Alex.
Sorry I've been so incredibly busy.
Work has taken off and it's kind of good because if you are self-employed, then if you don't work, you don't earn.
So I've been busy making hay walls at the sunshine.

0:22
So let's get right back into today's podcast.
So I recently had a weird dream, and it was one of those conversations that never happened in real life and could never happen in real life, but somehow it manifested itself in my dream.

0:41
Now I have this dear aunt, I suppose you, I'll call her my aunt in English.
It's it's a lot easier in English where everyone's just aunt to your uncle.
But you know, in Chinese families, we have these rather specific terms about your father's sister or your mother's brother.

1:02
And it's, it's quite complicated.
But this lady, I call her Dabomu, and that literally translates to big aunt.
And she is in fact the ex-wife of my father's older brother.

1:17
But she maintained a close relationship with the whole extended family after the divorce.
Yes, they got divorced and she was married to my uncle for quite a while and they had two kids together.
So she was the mother of my 2 cousins and she's passed away several years ago.

1:39
OK, but being in that position meant that she got to know both my father and his brother, my uncle, rather well.
That's something which I never ever got to do since my uncle has passed away as well many years ago.

1:59
And I've been always quite fascinated by my uncle because he was so radically different from my father and my father never had a particularly good or close relationship with my uncle.

2:16
He was seen as the bad boy of the family, despite the fact that he made a lot of money like he was one of those crazy rich Asians.
He started quite a few businesses and made a lot of money, lost a fortune or three, but each time he would bounce back and make even more money the next time.

2:37
So obviously I know I have this uncle but my parents didn't like the idea of me getting to know him because they thought he would be a bad influence on me and my siblings.
Anyway, so both Bob Wamu and my uncle have since passed away.

2:57
So this conversation that I had in my dreams would have never been possible.
But somehow in that dream, I was with Dabomu.
We were sitting in the house in Johor Bahru.

3:12
She had this huge garden.
I always wondered if she could have done more with that garden.
But you know what, how this is like in Malaysia, they're huge.
So we were sitting in her garden and I asked Dab Wamu why my father and my uncle were so different despite being brothers.

3:34
And they weren't just brothers, they were of quite similar age and if I do recall correctly, my uncle was only a few years older than my father.
Yet somehow they were like chalk and cheese.

3:50
My father became a crazy rich Asian, super successful businessman and ran a huge business empire.
Whilst my father opted for a rather working class job.
He only had one job his entire life.
He was a primary school teacher and that's what he did until the day he retired.

4:09
My uncle got through wives, quite a few marriages, mistresses, and more lovers than we care to count, whereas my father was trapped in a loveless, vapid marriage but never ever strayed.

4:28
And in fact, my father's still alive and still married to my mother today.
Happily married.
I would never use that term.
But nonetheless, they're of a different generation where different things are important to them, and being married in relationship like that was important for them.

4:47
It's still very important for them, I'm sure.
It would be quite hard to believe that these two men were even related in the 1st place, but there you go.
So in my dream, sitting in Tapwa MU's huge beautiful garden in Jehobaru in Malaysia, I got to ask her this question.

5:10
So why is my father nothing at all like my far more exciting and interesting uncle?
And of course, this is just an imaginary conversation that took place in my dreams, and I'm invoking poetic licence here to make my point.

5:30
I've always been fascinated by the fact that my father was not only nothing like his older brother, but they never got along.
Despite the fact that I had minimal contact with my late uncle, I actually turned out a lot more like my uncle and I do not resemble my father at all.

5:52
And it is interesting that the fact that I am still by blood related to my uncle that suggests that some of those traits might have been buried quite deep in my DNA that runs in the family.
But somehow this is more a question of nurture versus nature.

6:14
After all, my father did go out of his way to convince me and my siblings that my uncle was a bad person, that he'll be a bad influence on us because he had been unfaithful to his wife to Tapwamu.
And of course, Tapwamu was seen as the victim.

6:33
She was this righteous woman, a loving mother, a Good Wife and yet my uncle somehow chose to betray her by having numerous affairs with younger women.
So with that in mind, let me jump right in and tell you about this conversation that happened in my dream.

6:53
And let me get this out of the way.
OK?
Being Singaporeans and Malaysians, we speak in the multitude of languages, obviously English, Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, Malay, and for the sake of simplicity, for storytelling purposes, I'm going to keep this just in English so that you can understand because I'm not here to try to show off the linguistic diversity of that part of the world, but rather just to explore this theme with you.

7:23
So in my dream, there we were sitting in her garden.
I asked that Bormu why my father was so different.
They're brothers, but nothing alike.
She takes this long look at me and without breaking eye contact she looked as if she was about to answer my question.

7:44
But she then asks me, remind me, you're not an only child right?
You have siblings too, two sisters.
And I said yes, I do have two sisters older than me.
And she then goes on and asks me how similar are you to your two sisters?

8:01
I paused for a moment and thought, well, well, I'm nothing like my two sisters, but I believe that's mostly because I've spent most of my adult life outside Singapore.
I chose to leave Singapore the moment I could, the moment the opportunity presented itself, and as a result, I'm a product of the environment which has shaped me as an adult.

8:26
She then looked at me as if I had answered my own question, but I wasn't satisfied.
I then pointed out to her that both my father and my uncle left their hometown in Malaysia, this little town called Kotatingi.

8:45
Look it up.
And they both left at about the age of 12 to go study in Singapore.
So that was actually fairly unusual for most people from small towns in Malaysia.
So it's not like my uncle was sent abroad for studies whilst my father was somehow deprived of that precious opportunity.

9:09
No, actually the both of them went through that same experience, yet still they turned out totally different.
Dabomu then said to me, do you think you're going to find a simple answer to your question?

9:26
Because you do realise that complex questions do not have simple answers.
She then asked me to think about my two sisters back in Singapore and just how different they were despite being sisters.

9:42
They share the same parents, the same upbringing, and somehow that just never translated into them having similar characters.
And that's totally true.
My two sisters are like Chuck and Cheese, kind of like my father and his brother being like Chuck and Cheese.

10:01
I guess I've just always accepted the way my two sisters have always been different and that's just the way it is.
And part of the reason why I'm asking these questions is because I never got to know my uncle whilst he was still alive.
My father made sure of that.

10:18
He thought he'll be a very bad influence on me.
So I never got close to my uncle.
So I took this opportunity.
I asked Bab Wamu please auntie, tell me about my uncle.

10:34
I never got to know him, and honestly, most of the things my father said about him were really quite.
Most of the things were very scathing.
They were all criticisms.
I don't think my father ever had anything good to say about his brother and it's fair to say that there was certainly some bad blood between my father and my uncle.

10:58
So I would hardly consider my father to be a reliable character witness when it comes to teaching me about my late uncle.

11:10The Uncle's Secret: Social Skills and Risk-Taking
That one who said well, whatever you do, don't put your uncle on a pedestal.
Unlike your father, your uncle was a risk taker.
He just got lucky because Singapore back in the 1960s and 1970s was a totally different place.

11:29
Nobody was going to tell your uncle to just get a job where he had to keep his head down, be polite to the boss, and do as he was told.
No, your uncle was always going to be the boss man himself.
It was a role he assumed nobody gave him the permission to do so or tried to encourage him to pursue a certain career.

11:51
People like him never waited for others to tell him what he ought to do.
He made money, he lost money, he made more money, and he wasn't afraid to try new things, embrace new technology, and he loved attention.

12:07
You know that your father and your brother, sorry, your father and his brother barely got any attention from their parents.

12:23
That was just the way it was for that generation.
Things have changed of course with time, but you've got to understand the social context of that time now.
Just because they didn't get any love or even attention from their parents doesn't mean they didn't want it or crave it.

12:45
Some people, like your father, simply tried to normalise that whole situation by accepting that he didn't deserve any kind of affection or even attention from his own parents.
And that was just the norm for Chinese families.

13:01
It was our culture.
But your uncle was different.
He was so different.
He didn't get any attention from his parents either.
But did you know he was extremely popular at school?

13:16
He had loads of friends and he was so well liked.
He had a neck.
He knew how to get along with everyone.
How he did that I can't even try to begin to explain.
He was charming, he knew how to talk to people, his teachers liked him, his peers liked him, he didn't even have to try to find a girlfriend, the girls were chatting him up and asking him out.

13:45
And when he was younger of course he was good looking when he got his first job or his Co workers liked him, his boss adored him.
He just had a way with people.
He knew how to look into your eyes and give you his undivided attention.

14:01
When you were talking to him, he knew how to make you feel like you were the most important person in the world, even if you were just discussing what you had for lunch.
You know, that was a subject they never taught us at school, but that's the primary reason why your uncle was so incredibly successful.

14:27
It wasn't just his business acumen, although to be fair, he was a great businessman.
But it was the way he managed to charm people into giving him what he wanted every single time and in the context of business that served him extremely well.

14:51
Your uncle could sell anything to anyone.
He wasn't natural.
So I then told Dabomu that I also started my career in sales and just like my uncle, I did really quite well.

15:12
And she listened to that and she said she wasn't surprised.
And she actually pointed out to me that, you know, your uncle did try to get your father a better job so many times.
Why are you happy working in the primary school?

15:29
How much money do you earn as a primary school teacher?
I'll get you a better job.
He tried, OK?
Believe you me, he tried.
And despite your uncle's best intentions, it was never, ever going to work out for your father because your father just didn't have the right kind of social skills in order to be great at sales.

15:54
Stop 1 moon side and just said, let's face it, you know, your father actually picked the right career path by going into teaching because he would have been terrible at most other things and he would have been especially terrible at sales.

16:09
It was just his character.
That was something they were never going to try to shape in school.
You know, in school, it's part of the education.
They teach you subjects like English, mathematics, physics, chemistry, geography, history, but they never tried to shape your character or teach you how to make friends.

16:33 Embracing Risk: Lessons from a Gymnastics Prodigy
She then put her hand on my shoulder and said, you know, I'm going to ask you for a favour.
Please don't be so harsh on your father and by the same token, don't idolise your uncle.
Your father did the best he could.

16:49
I saw so many other men in his position end up with so much less in life.
And As for your uncle, well, a lot of what he achieved was down to being in the right place at the right time.
There was a lot of good luck involved.

17:08
But I then pointed out to Dabomu that if you don't even dare to try but then you can't get lucky with your attempts.
After all, in just this month, I started working on a brand new project in an industry I have absolutely no experience in.

17:29
But I was invited to solve a problem for a client as this client somehow believes that I'm smart and resourceful enough to find a solution where others have failed before.
Now, I could have just said no, I'm sorry, I don't have experience with this at all.

17:44
Or I could say, yeah, let me give it a go and I'll try my best.
Call it beginner's luck, but I've managed to call him a few favours and now we have a solution for my client and he is happy with what I've managed to cobble together.

18:01
I'm simplifying things a lot.
It was really difficult.
I'll spare you the technical details, but the bottom line is that I wasn't afraid to give it a go, and if I haven't even allowed myself to try, I would have never succeeded.

18:17
By that token, I think I share that trait with my uncle.
Tabuamu smiled and told me that my uncle would have been so proud of me.
She then said.
I have a question for you then.

18:33
Where do you think you got that trait from?
Because it certainly wasn't from your father, and I wasn't close enough to see my uncle in action to see him pull off something like that.
Now, to answer her question, I told her about a gymnastics lesson I had in 1989.

18:54
When my friend Mark turned up with his mother.
He was late, as usual.
His mother apologised to the gymnastics coach and asked for a favour.
Could Mark's younger brother just sit and watch the boys train?
She'd had an appointment and she couldn't bring Matthew along.

19:10
That's the younger brother and so she was hoping to just leave the younger brother Matthew at the gymnastics class and pick them both up after the class.
The coach was just say yes as I remember her leaving in a hurry.
So on that day we were learning how to do a back handspring.

19:32
It was a skill that we had been working on for a few weeks already and it's not begin a skill.
I suppose Matthew just got bored sitting in the corner and he came round to see what his brother was doing, was wandering around the gym.
We mostly just ignored him, and then the next thing I knew someone yelled out.

19:49
Hey Mark, look, your brother's doing it.
Sure enough, little Matthew was doing a backhand spring.
And just to make it clear, nobody tried to give Matthew any instructions or tried to teach him how to do it.
This kid was just doing a monkey see, monkey do kind of copycat routine and nobody stopped him.

20:08
Nobody said to him, no no no, this is too difficult for you, you need to start with the basics.
Nobody tries to do this on their first gymnastics lesson.
Mind you.
If Matthew had been a part of a far more formal gymnastics lesson, then he would have never been allowed to even try to do this skill on his first lesson.

20:32
Now there were a whole bunch of boys in the gym when this happened, and we all witnessed what Matthew did, but not everyone reacted in the same way.
I remember one of the boys getting upset.
He was saying that Matthew was misbehaving, that he was being naughty, this was so dangerous and Matthew could have hurt himself.

20:50
That this should have never been allowed to happen in the gym.
That Mark's mother shouldn't use the gymnastics coach as a free babysitter if she was too busy to arrange her own childcare.
Whereas I stood back and thought, well, if we had subjected Matthew to all of these rules, then we wouldn't have found out just how brilliant this kid was when it came to gymnastics.

21:17
Perhaps you are all just jealous that this young kid could walk into the gym and teach himself how to do a rather advanced skill like a back handspring and just 10-15 minutes.
Perhaps whilst you all have been struggling with this skill for the last two months, you wanted Matthew to struggle like you.

21:37
That's why you are flatly refusing to acknowledge his success in that moment.
I think life can try to teach you valuable lessons along the way, but are you willing to learn?

21:54
The way I see it, we should all adopt that innocent, childlike naivety that Matthew had.
He wasn't one of those arrogant gymnasts who thought that he was so talented that he could learn any skill faster than everyone else.

22:09
No, he simply had no idea that he was trying, attempting a skill that was considered quite advanced, quite difficult.
But since he was bored, he thought he had nothing to lose by trying.
Dabomu who looked at me and pointed out to me that young Matthew was at least given the opportunity to try.

22:30
Nobody stopped him.
Some people like my father never ever got that chance at all.
So is it fair to judge someone like my father that harshly?
I said to her.

22:43Perfect 10: How Society Limits Ambition
Well, since we are talking about gymnastics from all the way back, then allow me to talk about another concept from gymnastics, the perfect 10.
Back in the day, gymnastics routines were scored out of 10.

23:02
A perfect routine will get you a 10 and gymnasts were given the list of requirements before the competition.
Fulfil all that difficulty and you would potentially be able to score 10 if you do not have any deductions.

23:20
So a gymnast who may not have all the difficulty requirements requirements may compete A simpler routine with only 8.5 star value.
So the maximum score that they could get with that routine would be an 8.5.

23:36
However, if you artificially put a ceiling like that in the scoring system, then you had a situation whereby some of the top gymnasts were not even doing everything they were potentially capable of because they were doing simply enough to create a routine to put together a routine that would be scored out of 10.

24:02
This created a level playing field somewhat artificially by refusing to reward those gymnasts who were capable of so much more.
Thankfully, things changed when the Perfect 10 scoring system was abolished in 2006 and replaced with an open-ended scoring system.

24:26
So with this system, there was no limit on how much difficulty gymnasts can choose to perform in their routine and this rule change allowed a whole new generation of gymnasts to take the sport to brand new heights in terms of difficulty, originality and innovation.

24:47
This would have never happened under the the old rules and it was evident that this change in the scoring system had such a massive impact on the development of the sport.

25:04
You need a system that rewards people who are willing to take risks and outperform the rest of the competition because under their own rules.
You often had a case in the finals where everyone had exactly the same amount of difficulty, just enough to score out of a perfect ten, and then it was down to execution.

25:28
And the winner was the gymnast who made the fewest mistakes rather than the one who had the guts to do something far more difficult than everyone else.
This is a change for the better, of course, and quite frankly I wish they had made this change so many years ago.

25:49
They waited way too long for this to happen.
But hey, at least in 2006 they got round to it finally.
So by the same token, people of my father's generation had the same mindset of those competing under the old perfect 10 gymnastics scoring system.

26:09
This might shock you but I remember back in the day the girls in my class were told things like don't study too hard, what's the point?
You need to get married and become a mother.
One day you should be preparing for motherhood rather than a career.

26:25
You may get a degree, but it's not going to serve you in the long run.
Now that it was far more important for these women to learn how to put on makeup, to look pretty in order to attract a good husband, that they needed to learn how to cook and so to fulfil their roles as wives and mothers rather than to pursue any kind of higher education or career.

26:53
And if these women did work, then it was limited.
Do something part time so it will not compromise on their primary roles and responsibilities as wives and mothers.
And even for the men, there was this perfect 10 mentality.

27:13
I remember this conversation I had with my parents when we were talking about teachers in Singapore.
I pointed out to my parents that teaching was often seen as a last resort for people of my generation, with most of them opting to go into medicine, law, finance, perhaps running their own businesses, engineering, and if absolutely nothing else works out, then there's always teaching as a last resort.

27:40
My parents then said this thing which explained their mindset from that era.
They say that whilst teaching was never going to make you exceptionally rich, it was enough.
That's the keyword enough.

27:56
The pay was enough for you to start a family, enough for you to support that family, enough for you to eventually afford your own modest home.
And for most people in out there, being able to achieve all of those goals meant it was enough.

28:13
It was enough because it fulfilled all their needs.
What more could you possibly want?
You can see why I compared this to the perfect Ted scoring system.
As long as your routine contained enough difficulty to score a perfect Ted, it made no sense trying to do something extra.

28:39
And we have a Chinese saying that describes this really well.
I look it up.
If you, if you speak Chinese, great.
I'm sure you ring a bell.
But it's a saying that basically translates to if you have enough, if you've done enough, there's absolutely no point, no reward in doing anything extra to go beyond what is actually enough.

29:12
Some people, like my parents, would arbitrarily set a standard at their head, this benchmark that they declared to be enough.
I I argued that perhaps if you're not that highly educated, as if I may be blunt, if you're not that intelligent, if you're kind of stupid, then setting the bar pretty low like this would probably be a logical thing to do.

29:40
But what about those of us who are a lot more ambitious to achieve a lot more in life than what if our aims would be?
Our ambitions would be to excel and be the best at what we do, rather than simply do enough to get by in life.

29:59
My parents shook their heads and said to me, why are you so greedy?
Why are you so vain and materialistic?
Why can't you be grateful for what you already have?
Why can't you appreciate how lucky you are to have all the things in life that you already have?

30:16
Why do you need all these other material things and achievements?
Why isn't what you already have enough for you to lead a perfectly good life?
What I had presented as ambition to achieve more with my life, my parents interpreted as greed and vanity.

30:40
And that's why I don't see eye to eye with them on so many issues.
And somehow, magically, in this conversation with Dabomu, she didn't take my parents side.
She nodded as if she understood me perfectly and clearly, to the point where she almost hinted that she agreed with me, or at least that she understood exactly why I am the way I am.

31:12
I explained to Dabomu that there is a big difference whether you go through life with this perfect 10 mindset to do just enough or if you decide that the difficulty level in your life should be open-ended.

31:28
Tab Wamu said that every generation will be different from the one before.
She urged me, please don't judge your parents as flawed people for the way they behaved in this aspect.

31:44
They were simply products of a certain time in history that shaped their mindsets to think a certain way.
I suppose I'm vastly different from my parents in this aspect because I was lucky enough to have accessed so many opportunities that they never did.

32:03 Why Assume Siblings Must Be Alike? A Dream's Conclusion
But this still somehow brings me back to the original question.
But why is my father so different from my uncle?
Why am I like my uncle and nothing like my father?
Nobody told my uncle that making his first million was enough or that having one wife was enough.

32:24
No, he was the kind of guy who chased his next million, and after having one wife, he wanted a string of mistresses and levers and the next lever and more attention and more love, Tabuomo said.

32:41
You're looking for some kind of answer that doesn't exist.
I think you're hoping for some kind of convenient explanation when there isn't one.
Your father was simply a typical man of his generation who believed that what he had in life was more than enough.

33:01
Whilst your uncle had a rebellious streak in him, he wasn't the kind of person who would follow rules.
Your father simply did what everyone else did and followed what was the norm for his society.

33:17
That doesn't make him a bad person, it simply means that he's just like the vast majority of his peers.
He was average, he wasn't special.
And for most people in the world, actually, that's enough for them.

33:39
There's nothing inherently wrong with the word enough.
Think about the number of people in the world who are hungry, who don't have enough, whose lives are insecure, and for someone to have enough to be grateful for having enough, is that such a bad thing?

34:06
But As for your uncle, he took a lot of chances.
He gambled, he took risks in the world of business, whilst nobody taught him how to do any of that.
It was just his instinct to do so.
He wouldn't have it any other way.

34:23
Your father sought solace and took comfort in being grateful for having enough in life, enough food to eat a decent roof over his head, for being financially stable enough to bring up a family, to make sure that his children were educated and could go to university.

34:43
And whilst for your uncle, he would only be happy if he could score yet another win, in the world of business or romance, people like your uncle are often admired for succeeding where others haven't even dared to try.

35:03
But As for why your uncle and your father are just so different, who knows?
Perhaps we have to go back to why you have decided to ask this question in the 1st place.

35:20
Why do we even assume that siblings must be alike, even identical or very similar when it comes to their characters?
Why can't we just accept that siblings can be totally different, like choc and cheese?

35:40
So remember what we said at the beginning of this conversation about how different you are from your own two sisters?
I looked back at Dabomu and I concluded that she's right.

35:56
There's just no basis to make any kind of assumptions about siblings being similar.
So at the very end of this discussion, we ended up with the conclusion that my question, the original question that I asked about why my father and my uncle are so different.

36:21
Well, I've made some assumptions that were essentially flawed.
I made an assumption about siblings being likely to share certain personality traits.

36:37
And of course, the only conclusion I am left with after that conversation with Tabuamu in her beautiful garden is that my assumption is flawed.

36:55
Where does that leave me?
The dream kind of ended there.
I got up, I walked around the garden.
I looked at she had this swing, this very old fashioned swing in the garden.

37:12
She was still sitting on the swing.
But I got up and walked around and we didn't say anything anymore.
She just sat there gently swaying on the swing and I just walked around the garden and the dream faded out with me walking around the garden that way.

37:36
Where does that leave us, my friends?
Do you have any siblings?
Are you similar to them?
Am I so ridiculous and unreasonable in hoping to get some answers about why my father and my uncle are so incredibly different?

37:58
About why I've turned out so much more like my uncle than my own father?
I suppose having had that dream, having written the draft for this podcast and having recorded this, it just leaves me with a fascination about my uncle, my late uncle who's passed away since.

38:22
I wish I've had the chance to get to know him and learn more about him.
But anyway, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you in the next podcast.

What happens if there's no one to force you to make the right decisions?

2026-04-05T18:25:00.004+01:00

Hi guys. This is the draft of a podcast and if you prefer to listen to this piece rather than read it, please click on the link here. I want to start a series on my podcast exploring my journey and addressing an elephant in the room that so many people choose to ignore: the working class mindset. Why? Because I was raised in a poor, working class family but have somehow managed to escape being trapped in poverty - was it luck? Was there a formula to my success that can be replicated? It is often considered very bad taste if one were to boast about making money, so people who have made a lot of money often keep quiet about it and it is only scammers online who are offering you fake get rich quick schemes. But why is this such a taboo topic then? Can we try to talk about why some people stay poor whilst others manage to make a lot of money? So today, I'm going to focus on just one small but important aspect of the working class mindset. There's this guy in my gymnastics club - let's call him John, not his real name. In fact, I've chosen the most boring, generic name to avoid identifying him because I'm not making this a personal attack on him but I just want to discuss his mindset. John used to do gymnastics when he was a child so he has been taught all the basics but trying to get him to try anything new, anything that he can't do already is like trying to squeeze juice from a rock. He would just plain refuse to try - he has absolutely no interest at all in improving himself. Let me be clear: I'm not trying to force him to do something dangerous, but I see him doing the same skill over and over again, my natural reaction is, aren't you bored with that already? Could we try to build on it and do something a little bit more difficult, for you to improve as a gymnast? Without any kind of improvement, wouldn't your gymnastics sessions become really boring if you are doing the same thing over and over again? But no, each time I do that, he reacts very negatively and I have learnt to just leave him alone. I don't mean to antagonize or upset anyone at the gym. I would rather spend my time and energy helping others who want to improve. You know the saying, you can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink - now that's John's attitude. He just wants to do the same thing over and over again and he has zero interest in trying to become a better gymnast.

Now you might say, that's just an example from sports - as long as John is willing to improve himself in his studies and work, then that's what really matters. Well, there is something scarily familiar about John's behaviour when I look at my parents who happen to be very working class, no make that stereotypically working class. They had a very working class job which really didn't evolve with time - my parents' first day at work wasn't really that different from their last day at work, even if 40 years had passed. Why? Well sorry for stating the obvious but a lot of low-skilled working class jobs are just like that. It is not a highly skilled job so anyone can do it without much training but by the same token, it is usually poorly paid. Let me give you a simple example: on the street where I live there is a pizza restaurant, they mostly do take-away so there would often be a number of delivery couriers standing outside waiting to pick up their orders - they get the order, deliver the pizza and that's it. It sounds easy, but it can be hard work - these delivery couriers make so little with each delivery that they have to be delivering all day just to scrape a decent day's wage. The job is tedious, repetitive, tiring and they don't get paid more if the weather is bad, like if it is one of those rainy days or if we have a spell of particularly cold winter weather. If they decide not to work because of the bad weather, they don't earn any money - yeah, it's a tough life for them. But are there any positive features to this job? I suppose the entry level is very low: all you need is your mobile phone and a bike. The app on your phone will tell you which restaurant needs couriers to deliver orders, you accept the order, turn up at the restaurant and then use your phone to find your way to the customer's address - this is often done on a bicycle, motorcycle or an e-bike. You only have to speak very little English and thus this kind of job is popular with migrant workers who don't speak much English nor do they have any other skills. They can start working and earning almost immediately if they are willing to accept the low pay. This is pretty typical of many working class jobs.

A problem with a lot of these low-skilled working class jobs is the boredom factor - you're going to to be doing the same tasks over and over again; that just isn't fun at all. Whilst I mentioned John from my gymnastics class, allow me to mention another person from the sports centre and I'll call him Jim. As I walked into the gymnastics club today, I saw Jim mopping the corridors. Now Jim is like a junior centre manager, I don't know what his job title is but his job is repetitive and simple. He would empty the bins, make sure there is enough toilet paper in the toilets, clean the windows, mop the floors and he is really a glorified cleaner. There was a time when he used to do handle some payments at the front desk but now the sports centre is fully automated - you book your session on an app, it gives you a QR code for the session, you scan that QR code at the front door and it lets you into the building - so Jim doesn't even have to deal with customers anymore. If you tried to book for a session with him at the front desk, he would tell you, "please book it on the app, we don't do this anymore in person here, that whole booking system is entirely online now." I'm glad Jim still has a job at the sports centre as he has worked there for an awfully long time and he is a rather nice guy, but all he does these days is mostly just cleaning. Is he bored? I think he is, Jim is usually quite happy when I say hello to him as he is hungry for some kind of human interaction after having been cleaning for hours. Is this boredom a problem for Jim and if so, just how big a problem is it? Well, that depends; you see, there are people like John who clearly don't mind doing the same thing over and over again, John really doesn't want to learn anything new and if Jim happens to share that trait in common with John, then Jim could be perfectly content doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again, every single time he comes into work at the sports centre. But if you asked me to do Jim's job, then I would get so bored very quickly, it would be totally unbearable for me. The boredom would be too much for me to take, never mind the very low pay.

Allow me to share with you what I've been very busy with these days - as you know, America is now at war with Iran and that has led to the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. This has caused major shocks to the economy with oil prices shooting up, causing an energy crisis. We're in uncharted territories here so I am trying to help some of my clients which include governments and private companies solve some major problems caused by this energy crisis. There's no textbook I can turn to in order to find the right answer to solve these problems, there is no expert or boss I can ask for help to solve these problems - I would love to talk more about this but I'm not allowed to disclose specifics of the cases I'm currently working on for my clients. This is in sharp contrast to the kind of working class jobs where you never have to use your brain to try to solve a problem, as you're supposed to just ask your manager for instructions rather than take any kind of initiative. I saw this scene at my local supermarket recently - an old lady wanted a refund or an exchange on an item she had purchased but she didn't have a receipt on her. So the cashier simply said, "sorry, I'm afraid you would need to speak to the duty manager, I'm not allowed to make a decision if you don't have your receipt." This cashier always has a manager, a boss that she can run to if she doesn't know what to do but in my case, if I have no one to run to and I'm supposed to be the one who comes up with a solution when none exists. Sometimes my clients will come up with a solution they think will work and I'd have to say, no actually, I have a much better idea - try things my way, I promise you the results will be better. My parents are very working class, they would look at jobs like mine and think that's so stressful, what if you come up with the wrong answer? What if the solution you come up with fails to solve the problem, then what? Will you be able to earn any money this month in a worst case scenario? Isn't this all quite scary? This is why my parents prefer to do a job like Jim's which is so much easier - you can't mess up, you can't make big mistakes, there is a lot less stress if you know the task at hand is really simple and straightforward. Yes but I prefer to do what I do because I have a lot more fun, I earn a lot more money and quite simply, because I am great at what I do.

I'll like to use my mother tongue Hokkien to try to explain why working class people like Jim end up in this situation of holding a lowly skilled job. There are times when some phrases just don't translate very well into English. In English, you might describe someone like Jim as 'uneducated' but in Hokkien, we are a lot more precise about this particular situation. Firstly, we have the word "takchek" which means "to study". So if we say, "boh takchek" which translates to "hasn't studied" it refers to someone who hasn't finished their formal education but this could be due to circumstances beyond their control - like a war broke out, or in the case of my late uncle, his family was just too poor so he was forced to drop out of school and get a job to support his family despite the fact that he was a good student who had been doing very well in his studies. So when you describe someone as "boh takhek", there is no judgment or indication that they are stupid. Then you have the term "bueh takchek" referring to someone who "can't study", we're saying outright that this person is stupid. So I've heard a family friend in Singapore say that his son is useless at school, they have tried everything, they've engaged the best tuition teachers in the land but still the boy is failing all his exams and they've just accepted that he is plain stupid. Then you have "mai takchek" which translates to "don't want to study" - this refers to a naughty child who refuses to study for their tests and exams, but it suggests a major character flaw rather than stupidity per se. But whether it is a case of boh takchek, bueh takchek or even mai takchek, you end up with the same end result of someone being forced into a lowly skilled, lowly paid working class job like Jim. As for the case of Jim, I don't actually know him well enough to know why he is doing this job, whether he is a case of boh takchek, bueh takchek or mai takchek but I suppose it is a moot point. Aftr all, some of you might argue that he is a case of mai takchek - like the guy is actually super intelligent but he just hasn't applied himself yet to prove himself, that's why he is where he is today. Then that begs the question, why hasn't he done something about the situation then and found himself a much better job? Why is he still mopping the floors and cleaning the toilets at the sports centre then if he is really capable of so much more? But just to show you how important one's mindset is, I would like to share with you a real story of a guy called David.

Now David is dead so I really don't care about masking his identity - that's his real name. He died a few years back of heart disease brought on by his obesity. I kid you not when I say that David was morbidly obese. So I have known David for many years through work and this part of his logic kinda explains why he was so fat and that ultimately led to his death - David was once quite thin when he was younger. Then he got old, through years of a sedentary lifestyle and a near complete lack of exercise, David became really fat. Then when he was about 50 years old, he got a divorce, went through a messy break up and decided to hit the reset button. He met a young woman and decided he wanted to look better, so he went on a diet and exercised a lot - it worked, he actually lost a lot of the weight and began to look a lot more like his younger, thinner self, proving to himself that yes, he could lose the weight if he wanted to. Life was good, he was in love again, his business was doing well and he was happy. Then after David got married to this younger woman, who became his second wife and sure enough, he slowly became fat again. But by then he was already married to his second wife, so he didn't really feel the need to lose weight just to make himself more attractive to her. However, each time he was cautioned by his doctor that he really needed to lose a lot of weight, he would just say, "I know I could lose all this weight if I wanted to, but let me just get through Christmas first, or the summer holidays first, or the new product launch etc." David would find an excuse to just kick that can down the road and confidently say, oh yeah I just need to set aside a period of like six week or two months, I'll be thin again - don't you worry about it. I'll just fast forward to the part where David got so morbidly obese that he had a heart attack and died a few weeks later. So it is no point saying, "yeah of course I could do it" if you never actually do it - in David's case, it was going on a diet to lose all that weight and in the case of the mai takchek student who thinks that they are just waiting for the right opportunity to prove to the world just how smart they are, unless they actually get on with it and do just that, I refer them to David's gravestone in the cemetery as a cautionary tale about people who procrastinate when it comes to doing something that must be done with haste.

So now, let's look at how David's behaviour relates to the behaviour we have observed in John and Jim. Firstly, we saw two versions of David - a motivated one and an unmotivated one. When David met his second wife and fell in love with her - he was very much motivated to become a better version of himself so she would fall in love with him as well. He didn't think that she would take a second look at him if he was this fat, bald, middle-aged divorced guy - no, he was motivated to improve every aspect of his life to make himself more attractive to her. But also, we have also seen the opposite of that - in the case of David, we saw him in a downward spiral when he lacked the motivation to help himself and that led to his early death. Same person, different attitude and it really does show how we control our own destiny at the end of the day. Hence it is not good enough for someone like John to say, "I can always learn more difficult skills one day if I wanted to, but I don't want to do it for now". I confess I don't know Jim well enough to have that awkward conversation with him about why he doesn't try to get a better job, but I can imagine someone like him saying, "I know I can always get a better job if I really want to, but just not for now." But that's what my parents have done all their lives - they had very working class jobs and they put off any thought of trying to pursue a better job with excuses. My mother had three children so it was always a case of, let's wait till the children get a bit older, then they simply got too old to contemplate a career change so they were then in a position to just look forward to retirement. Therein lies the difference between people who stay working class all their lives and those who manage to attain social mobility - it is that willingness to try. Simply trying is no guarantee of success and many who try do fail, but if you never ever give yourself the chance to try, or if you somehow come up with excuses not to try, then you are dooming yourself to failure in the very way David simply gave in to obesity later in his life and just wasn't willing to try to save his own life. Yes I realize that is a very bleak story but I don't think the image of Jim scrubbing the toilets or mopping the floors every day is any less bleak.

Yet for millions of working class people out there like my parents, that was the kind of jobs they had to do. I suppose they often turned it into some kind of noble sacrifice - I remember a friend from school telling me how her father actually tried to guilt trip her and her sister. I'll call this friend Julie, that's not her real name, I don't mean to name and shame her, but this story is just so bizarre that you can't make it up. Julie's father had a job very similar to Jim's - he was like a janitor in a factory and so that is really a very working class job: it is lowly skilled, involves a lot of cleaning and is very poorly paid. He felt like Julie and her sister didn't appreciate just how hard he had to work to support the family so one public holiday when Julie was about 10 years old, when there was nobody working in the factory, he took Julie and her sister to the factory to show them where he worked. But no, it didn't stop there - he punished the two girls by making them scrub the toilets, clean nasty grease stains off the machinery and this went on for hours. The girls protested, Julie's younger sister even cried but her father felt that it was absolutely necessary to torment the girls, to make the experience as horrific as possible so they would then learn to appreciate just how hard he had to work and feel a sense of gratitude with that new knowledge. Did it work? Did Julie respect her father more s a result of what happened? No, she felt a sense of disgust and resolved to study hard, get into a university in order to secure a job where she could use her brains to earn a living instead of doing what her father did. And of course, Julie often wondered why her father never tried to get a better job, why he was content working as a janitor in that factory. He made it clear that he hated that job but he was forced to do it in order to support his family, to make sure his two daughters could get an education. The way I see it, Julie's father made a mistake, he started a family before he had secured a decent career he was happy with but then he turned around and blamed his two daughters for putting him in that situation when really, it was him to created his own problem in the first place by impregnating his wife. Needless to say, Julie didn't just blindly accept her father's point of view on the matter - she barely speaks to him anymore even though he is still alive and I suppose that's a very similar situation with my own parents. I don't agree with them, I think they're totally wrong but I still want to avoid any unnecessary conflict.

So there you go, I'm sure you might know someone like John and Jim in your life, but if they are adults you're mostly likely to react like me by taking a step back and not get involved when they make bad decisions because you want to avoid conflict. But this is the message I want to leave you with - a lot of working class people think that they don't deserve social mobility, like it is their destiny to be doomed to do a lowly skilled, poorly paid job just because that's what their parents did and the well paid jobs are for kids who have rich, well-educated parents. However, a lot of people focus way too much on the kind of help they get from their parents and don't consider how they help themselves - people like John can often be their own worst enemy with their bad attitudes. Through the example of David, we have seen what a profound impact one's attitude can have on one's life and a lot of it boils down to motivation. So what do you think? Are we defined by our social class or by our attitudes? Does one impact the other? Perhaps I'm not the best judge of this because I know I'm biased, I come from a very working class family but I refuse to give up on myself and evidently, that got me to where I am today. This is why I wish to hear what others have to say on this topic. Thank you for reading.

Our biggest surprise in Busan, Korea

2026-02-19T20:11:00.001+00:00

Hello everyone, may I invite you to listen to the latest episode of my podcast where I talk about how my husband and I ended up going out for dinner in a Pojangmacha (포장마차) in Busan with two complete strangers - a Pojangmacha is one of these street side restaurants in Korea which is literally a covered tent at the side of the road. No walls, no toilets, nowhere to charge your phone, just literally a kitchen on the pavement serving up authentic Korean food. I didn't write a draft for this podcast as I remember everything clearly so this is only just a teaser. Why did we end up having dinner with two strangers? What did we talk about? What bizarre plot twist happened at the end of the dinner? And what did I learn about Korean people through this experience? It was like I had stepped into my own episode of a K-drama and seriously, you can't make this up - it was such a bizarre experience. Have a listen, I promise you this story will take you by surprise. Many thanks in advance for listening!

The latest chapter in the Amos Yee saga

2026-02-07T13:07:00.005+00:00

Hello everyone, this is the draft to my latest podcast which you can listen to by clicking on this link here. I do recommend listening to it even if you are reading it here as I often just add more thoughts that come to me whilst recording the podcast, so there will be certain points that are not written down here in the draft. This is a hot topic and I'd like to share my point of view here. I am sure many of you have read excerpts from Amos Yee's latest post on the 4th February where he openly baited PM Lawrence Wong. Yee wrote on his blog: "You think I'm just going to quietly accept my punishment and agree to serve in the military? Hah! I'm going to continue to swerve the military. There will be numerous court dates, me coming in and out of prison, each time I'll maybe write a blogpost here, make a video there, condemning the military, condemning the government. All the attentions (sic) and negative press you and I will receive, it'll be amazing."

Let me respond to what he wrote. Firstly, there is no absolutely bargaining when it comes to the Singaporean military system, the rules are clear: either you serve your time as you are obliged to or you will be jailed. Allow me to use the case study of Jehovah's Witnesses who are conscientious objectors, that means they refuse to serve military service because of their religious beliefs. In 2021, the BBC did a story on one such young man Yeo Zhengye who served 3 years in jail and there was no swerving the jail sentence, or trying to offer the system some kind of alternative. There is already a clear precedent when it comes to those who refuse to serve their military service in Singapore. There is no trial by jury like in an American legal drama - the sentencing will be swift and harsh, Yee will feel the full brunt of the Singaporean legal system and the worst part of it all, it is clear from what he has written that he doesn't even know what awaits him in Singapore. Threatening the prime minister by making posts on social media and making videos critical of the government and the military really isn't going to change the system at all. Amos Yee has overestimated the power of his influence on social media because he is never going to be able to get the media and the public on his side - now that's an important lesson about social media that Amos Yee doesn't seem to understand. Sure you can shout all you want on social media and express your point of view about the Singaporean system, but if you want people to take you seriously, you need to produce content that is interesting, engaging, entertaining and of high quality. If you are just an angry person ranting on the internet but your content is ultimately poorly produced and of low quality, then you're not going to get much attention - at best, you will be ignored and at worst, you will be condemned, mocked and insulted for having the gall to believe that anyone would listen to you when you present content like that. So if you are going to make a threat, then it has got to be a credible one whereby non-compliance would result in serious consequences. Otherwise, this is what is known as an empty threat, where there are in fact no real consequences if you do not comply. So let's look at a hypothetical situation.

In this hypothetical situation, Amos Yee gets deported to Singapore, he follows up with a bunch of social media posts condemning everything from the PAP to the military system. But what happens next? Well, he will be condemned by the Singaporean public as it is clear that he already a social pariah and a convicted sex offender. People from the rest of the world will take a look at that reaction and think, if that's how the locals in Singapore feel about Amos Yee, then we're not going to voice an opinion. No, even human rights advocates in the West will choose to keep quiet even if Amos Yee does make some valid points about the military system in Singapore. After all, it would seem extremely arrogant of someone in Europe to judge what is happening in Singapore whilst ignoring the views of the locals there. Amos Yee would have to learn the hard way that he no longer commands any kind of attention on social media even if he tries to put out more and more provocative content. The world has moved on - it was 2015 when his first controversial video came out a few days after the death of Lee Kuan Yew and yes there was an element of using shock tactics to gain media attention at a time of national mourning. But 11 years have passed and it is 2026, you can't use the same trick again and expect the same kind of response from the Singaporean public. More to the point, back then in 2015, he was a precocious 17 year old and many were willing to be forgiving, chalkin up his actions to his immaturity. Like many at the time, I was sympathetic too towards Amos Yee as I empathised with the kind of frustration he felt, that drove him to make that video. However today, he is not just an adult at 27 but a convicted sex offender who has served time in jail for those crimes and nobody out there is going to be forgiving or empathetic towards him. In fact, people in Singapore are going to be extremely hostile towards him and that has already been covered in my last podcast. So for Amos Yee to think that he can influence any kind of government policy when he is already in such a desperate situation, he is clearly oblivious to his predicament.

Look, I'm not here to defend the military system in Singapore - allow me to state for the record, I did serve 2 years 4 months of national service back from 1995 to 1997. I did not have a good time there and yes, I wish I didn't have to serve it so I could've gotten on with my life as a young man and I saw that period of time as a total waste of my youth. It was one aspect of my time in Singapore I really didn't like - yet I accepted the fact that there was just no way to dodge it as my very working class parents were never going to emigrate to another country. I have mentioned this in my podcast before, I have a former classmate from secondary school Chris whose family moved to Canada and he subsequently obtained Canadian citizenship. He chose not to return to Singapore to serve national service and so can never ever set foot in Singapore again as he would be arrested on arrival even as a Canadian citizen, but guess what? Chris is a rich and successful businessman in Toronto today and he is very happy never to set foot in Singapore ever again. It is a small price to pay for not having to serve NS and as a businessman, he would say that is a very good deal. In life, you have to play the hands you are dealt and Chris clearly got dealt much better cards than I did. I could only move away from Singapore after I had served my NS obligations and there was no alternative. My point is that there are many Singaporean men who clearly feel the same way as I do about NS - they really hate it but accept that they have no other choice but to do what is required of them whilst resenting every moment of it whilst trying to make the best of a bad situation. Did you think all these millions of Singaporean men who have gone through NS were just waiting for someone like Amos Yee to come along and condemn the system on social media? No, Amos Yee has no credibility as someone who has not even been through the system - he's just an immature young person who doesn't want to serve NS and even if he makes some valid points about the inherent unfairness of the system, the very people who are most affected by the system - Singaporean men - will not be give Amos Yee any kind of support and are more than likely to mock, condemn and dismiss him as just an immature dumb kid who hasn't yet earned the right to have an opinion on NS.

Allow me to give you an analogy - I've just come back from a holiday in South Korea and there's a popular fast food restaurant chain called Mom's Touch. They serve burgers, fried chicken and a range of Korean side dishes - so imagine someone trying to have an opinion on Mom's Touch or judge their food - well, first you have to go to South Korea or one of the other countries where they happen to have a restaurant and have a meal there, before you have the right to have that judgment. If you're simply judging it based on pictures you have seen on the internet or Youtube videos you have watched, then no - that does not give you the right to pass judgment on the issue given that you've not actually tasted their food. The same thing applies to NS, Amos Yee has gone out of his way to avoid serving NS by fleeing the country and whilst that doesn't stop him from voicing an opinion on the issue, people in Singapore would not take any of his opinions on the matter seriously - it'll be like someone passing judgment on Mom's Touch without having actually eaten a meal there. If I were to be generous and kind, I'd advice Amos Yee to simply do his time in NS as it can't be any worse than the alternative of spending even more time in jail and it would definitely be the better of the two options. In any case, I need to point out as well that Amos Yee has been out of Singapore since 2016 - he has been away for nearly ten years and a lot has changed in Singapore since he was last there. If you want to make any kind of criticism of the system or the government of Singapore, you need to have credibility - you need to demonstrate that you do have a very good understanding of the subject matter and it is not like Amos Yee has been a super successful professional in the West for the last decade and is now able to compare the system in Singapore to that of America. Instead Amos Yee has spent most of the last ten years in either detention facilities or jails; neither offer much opportunity to broaden his mind or nurture him as a young adult - going to jail is not an alternative to going to university or getting a job. The prison service is there to punish you for crimes that you have committed, not educate or nurture you. By that token, Amos Yee has zero credibility - he can shout all he wants online about it, nobody is going to give him any credence or take him seriously.

In his post, which was addressed to PM Lawrence Wong, Yee urged the Singapore government to "refuse to issue travel documents for me to return". Yee claimed that he could then be deported to another country or remain in America.

I have already discussed this point in my last podcast on Amos Yee - basically, that's not going to happen. After all, Yee is still a citizen of Singapore whilst the US is very keen on deporting him, just look at the stance of the current government and the activities of ICE there, trying to meet their daily quotas of arrests and deportations of illegal immigrants. Under the previous president, Amos Yee might have stood a better chance of staying on in the US but with Trump in charge, there's just no chance that can happen. Do they allow inmates in American prisons access to the news? It seems like Amos Yee is completely oblivious to the current political climate in the US. So, what Amos Yee has conveniently forgotten is that if Singapore refuses to take him back, that would anger the American authorities and would potentially sour the relationship between the two countries at this time. Trump is known for throwing tariffs at countries that displease him and therefore Singapore wouldn't want to take such a risk at this time over Amos Yee. After all, Singapore has nothing to gain by upsetting the American authorities on the issue of Amos Yee. Quite simply, Singapore has absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose by giving Amos Yee what he wants, so not surprisingly, we can expect him to be deported back to Singapore very soon. That would be the rational decision by the Singaporean government, mostly because they just don't want to displease the American government over this issue. As for this talk about being deported to another country - Amos Yee is once again totally oblivious to the fact that he is not a political dissident but a convicted sex offender at this stage, so there isn't a single country in the world that would accept him under these circumstances.

This could "risk jeopardising that comfortable political position". He wrote: "There's a possibility that I get arrested and barely anyone cares. But why even take the chance? Call me naive but I think if I really put my mind to it, I can topple Singapore 60 years dictatorship (sic)." "You can choose to underestimate me and I think after a dozen public protests and a lost election later, it'll dawn on you... why did we let him back into Singapore and resurrect his popularity again?"

I can only shake my head at what Amos Yee wrote there - he writes like a angry teenager, not a well-educated, reasonable, rational adult whom one can take seriously. After all, he dropped out of school at the age of 17 and hasn't done any real work or training since, having spent most of the last ten years in jail. It is no wonder that he doesn't sound like a professional adult at the age of 27 but more like a teenager. He is more intent on venting his anger and frustration without once thinking how people reading this would interpret his choice of words and as someone who has forged a career in sales & marketing, I am aghast at just how totally oblivious he is to the way he is coming across to others. There is such a huge gap between how Amos Yee imagines he will be perceived by people like me and reality. I'd like to see him try to topple the PAP and fail miserably - after all, we have seen regime change in some countries in the last few decades but history will tell you that they really only happen under two circumstances. Firstly, you need a popular uprising backed by the vast majority of the population - this happened in four countries during the period of 2010 to 2011 known as the Arab Spring, in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Secondly, you need foreign intervention, such as in the case of Iraq in 2003 when the US troops captured president Saddam Hussein. Well Amos, I have news for you: neither are going to happen in Singapore during your lifetime. The fact is life in Singapore isn't perfect, but it is good enough for most people not to want to rock the boat and change things too much. There are people like myself, who weren't happy with the way things were in Singapore but instead of trying to start a revolution, most of us left for greener pastures elsewhere and pursued a future abroad in countries more aligned with our values. It is the path of least resistance: start a revolution that is unlikely to succeed or move abroad - I opted for the latter. Look at what is happening in Iran at the moment, thousands have been killed in protests just this year and the government is still in charge there. Amos Yee has clearly underestimated just how hard it is to persuade Singaporeans that it is time for a revolution and regime change.

Amos Yee talked about resurrecting his popularity in Singapore - really? How delusional is that? There was a short period of 2011 to 2012 when Yee enjoyed some success as a child actor in Singapore but please, let's put that in context. It was not like he was immortalized in the Harry Potter films and found worldwide stardom at that age. He was a full time student then so the projects he was involved in were either short films or a few short scenes in local films. His success was limited at best within that context and more to the point, it was during a time when actors had much fewer routes to success. Thus we are talking about a period that is about 15 years ago when Amos Yee last achieved some limited level of local popularity as an actor within that very limited context all those years ago. However, times have changed. Nowadays, anyone can become a star on social media - all they need is their phone and loads of creativity. They don't need a casting director to give them their big break in a feature length film or TV show, they can create new opportunities for themselves with each post they do on TikTok or Instagram. If Amos Yee thinks he can compete with a whole new generation of Singaporean social media influencers, he is wrong - he can't. There's just no way. There was a time when Amos Yee had a limited amount of popularity as a child actor, then he achieved infamy and notoriety with his Youtube videos - Singapore is not the kind of place to give people second chances. Case in point, let's look at what happened to actor Ian Fang. He is a disgraced former actor who was jailed for having sex with a minor in Singapore, upon the completion of his jail sentence, his PR status was revoked and he is in the process of being deported from Singapore; on top of that, he will be barred from ever re-entering Singapore. Ian Fang doesn't have any fans or supporters at this stage given the severity of his crimes - there aren't any societies in the world where the public is forgiving towards those who commit sex offences involving minors. There was no way Ian Fang was going to relaunch his acting career in Singapore or China after he became a convicted sex offender - whilst we don't expect actors to live like nuns and monks, but we certainly won't tolerate convicted sex offenders. There is a minimum standard for most professions and as a convicted sex offender of crimes involving minors, Amos Yee has fallen so far below any of those standards for any and every industry and profession. It is ironic that he seems totally oblivious to this fact or perhaps he is still in complete denial.

But I'd like to finish by talking about the elephant in the room - if you want to become the leading figure to start a revolution in a country, you need to be committed to that country. I'd imagine the classic figure for such a cause would be a highly educated doctor who has turned out lucrative opportunities abroad only to return to Singapore to work in a local hospital, serving the poorest in society and spending every free moment doing charity work. After decades of sacrifice, people would look at this doctor with such gratitude and admiration -that is how you earn the kind of social capital and credibility to become a figure like Ghandi, Trotsky and Zapata. Amos Yee has done absolutely nothing to win the hearts and minds of Singaporeans - he ran away from Singapore only to become a convicted sex offender in America and ended up being deported in disgrace to face another long jail sentence in Singapore. Politics is one huge popularity contest and Amos Yee just doesn't understand what it takes to become popular - indeed, even as a child in Singapore, he was isolated with very few friends and struggled connecting with his peers. Has Amos Yee underestimated just how hard it is to start a political movement in Singapore to challenge the PAP? Even when very credible opposition candidates like Jamus Lim of the Workers Party enter politics, he is really only focused on local issues, to try to improve the lives of the people he represents rather than trying to start a revolution to get rid of the PAP. Sidenote: I went to school with Jamus Lim, we were both at RI together from 1989 to 1992. You can't just expect to start a revolution by making Youtube videos in your bedroom - no, that's not how politics works. Amos Yee is just so oblivious to just how little he understands about how politics actually works and at this point, it just looks like self-harm - he is going to keep getting into trouble and spend most if not all of his adult life in jail if he keeps this up. He doesn't understand that you need to start by earning the respect of the public to have some credibility in politics and Amos Yee has done none of that, nor does he intend to do any of it. He is also oblivious to the fact that almost all Singaporeans really hate him at this point and want to see him rot in jail for a very long time. Oh and even if Amos Yee tried to join an opposition party in Singapore, he would be rejected by every single one of them given how he is a convicted sex offender. He is a social outcast with no future in Singapore.

You know, there's a saying: don't kick a man when he is down and Amos Yee is definitely down. The future looks very bleak for him - he's about to leave a grim American prison for an even grimmer Singaporean prison, life is definitely going to be harder for him in Singapore and the only visitors he gets would be his parents and possibly other close family members. And if he still refuses to serve NS after his initial prison sentence, that's another 3 years of jail time for him and he would be in his 30s by the time he gets out at last. Most people would have spent the most productive time of their youth in further education and establishing a career, Amos Yee has done none of that and has instead spent most of it in various prisons. How is he ever going to get a decent job to support himself as an adult after all this? That is sad, but you have got to hold him responsible for the mistakes he has made that has led up to this point. He had a chance to start a new life in America when he was granted asylum but he just couldn't stay out of trouble and ended up back in jail - let's look at the case of Malaysian dissident Alvin Tan who was in the same position and was also granted asylum in the USA. Well, Tan is having a great time living in California and finally in 2025, he naturalized as a US citizen. He is making good money, he is living the American dream and he has not squandered this second chance he has been given, if only Amos Yee could have followed Alvin Tan's example. There is little to suggest that any kind of punishment in prison has reformed Amos Yee's character and he doesn't seem to understand that there are consequences to his actions when he breaks the law. Whilst he may have gotten away with a lot as a teenager in the past in Singapore but that leniency is no longer extended to him as an adult. Like many of you, I shall be monitoring this story over the next few days and I'll be very interested to see what kind of jail sentence he gets upon arrival in Singapore. Thank you very much for listening.

Why is growing a thicker skin so difficult for older people?

2026-01-03T17:04:00.004+00:00

Hi guys, I want to delve into a topic that I covered on my Instagram channel that I feel I cannot really do justice to in an Instagram reels format as that's limited to three minutes - it is about older people like myself taking ourselves out of our comfort zones and trying something new. As always this has also been recorded as a podcast so please click here if you want to listen to it. This is because of society's expectations of older people, we have been around for a lot longer by virtue of our age, so we have had a lot more time to learn whatever we want to do. This applies to everything from our professional careers to our hobbies to skills in our personal lives. So imagine if you're in a shopping mall and you see an older staff member training a younger lady how to process a refund for a customer, that feels totally normal. But what if we were to turn that around, if a member of staff in their 20s was doing the training and it was an older man in his 50s learning how to process that refund - you might be too polite to say anything, but you might be like, "Hang on a minute, what is going on here? Why is it this way around? Why is the young lady training the old man how to do his job?" We make so many assumptions based on age and this is not something that is unique to one particular culture. Let's take a step back and we shall try to work out why this assumption exists in the first place and try to understand the origins of it.

Our cultural beliefs and value systems are founded over centuries and the problem is that our world has changed so much in the last 100 years or so. If we go back a few centuries, then the average lifespan was a lot shorter, more like 40 instead of the 80 today. But it was not like all the people died around 40 years old, most would due to illnesses and accidents, but a small number would be able to live until their 80s, 90s and even over 100. Back then longevity was a lot more rare but not unheard of - if you were able to live that long, that was probably because you were very wise, rich, privileged and a combination of those factors. Conversely, if you were just plain average, poor and of the working classes, you were never going to survive into old age - the odds were stacked against you and remember, we're talking about a time when a simple cut could lead to a deadly infection, gangrene and a nasty death; you couldn't just run to the hospital to get a course of antibiotics like we do today. Thus simply being old was a status symbol in those days - it wasn't easy surviving into your 70s and 80s, so if you managed to succeed in doing so, all due respect to you. However, in these modern times, with the help of government subsidies in healthcare and modern medicine, it really isn't that hard to survive into your 90s and even past 100. The whole modern healthcare system is there to just keep old people alive and the uneducated, poorer, working class people are enjoying longevity in a way that only the rich, well-educated and privileged could over a hundred years ago. So our traditional assumption about older people being wiser, smarter or better at what they do is based on a fact that no longer is true, yet we have yet to discard this outdated belief system.

I am about to turn 50 in 2026, so I am placing myself in the category of an older person. I'm reflecting on my own experience as well as what I have observed of other older people. Firstly, I consider myself and my generation very lucky in that we have had access to a much better education and we have had a lot more opportunities than my parents' generation, so it is hardly surprising that my generation is usually a lot more educated and enlightened than my parents' generation. So we already know that in this modern day and age, you cannot use age as a reliable indication of a person's ability or status, instead it would boil down to each individual's circumstances. Nonetheless, in some industries, there is a strong correlation between your pay and your tenure - that means the longer you have worked there, the more senior you will become in that industry and the more you will earn. Good examples of these are train drivers, nurses and teachers - the reasoning behind this is simple. The employer has to invest a lot in training these train drivers and nurses to be good at their jobs, so they want to reward loyalty and prevent these people from thinking of leaving the profession even if they are having a hard time and facing some problems. Thus in these professions, seniority and age go hand in hand whilst younger entrants to the profession are frustrated that they cannot earn more and increase the amount they earn by performing their jobs better However, this kind of age-based prejudice also works in the private sector as well.

Let me give you an example - there is this company I deal with at work and they are one of my business partners. They recently hired someone whom we shall call Anna, not her real name and when I first met Anna on a Teams call, I was taken aback as she looked rather young. I was wondering, oh no, have they asked me to deal with some young person fresh out of college with no experience? Hence to get to the bottom of this, I quickly read her Linkedin and worked out her age, I realized that she looked a lot younger than she actually was and she has actually quite an impressive CV. So in this case, I was a lot more relieved once I realized that Anna wasn't as young as I had initially thought and perhaps I was guilty of a form of ageism, where I didn't want to deal with young people in business on the basis that they wouldn't know enough to deal with someone like me. Anna then introduced me to two experts she has been dealing with - let's just call them Mr G and Mr M. Once again, I had a quick look at their Linkedin profiles and I was very relieved to note that they are indeed older than me. So yes, I realize I am just as guilty of assuming that older people are going to be more experienced, knowledgeable and competent than younger people, even in the world of finance where we are not constrained by strict pay scales. Have I been wrong before? Yes of course I have - I have met people who are older than me but are a lot less competent and capable than I am once we actually start talking about the details of the projects we are working on. Hence I do know that I ought not make any assumptions based on age per se but it is hard to fight against that instinct and I always catch myself making such assumptions even though I know I'm not supposed to.

So with all this weight of expectation on older people to be good at what they do, it can have a very negative effect on some aspects of their lives. For example, they are far more reluctant to try to learn anything new later in life - let's use myself as an example. I'm currently learning Korean because I am going to Korea and I started like 2 weeks ago. It has been a struggle as Korean is a language isolate, it is not related to any other language hence my knowledge of Chinese is not really that useful, apart from when there are some loanwords from Mandarin or Hokkien. Whilst I speak quite a number of foreign languages, Korean has never been one of them and I'm using the opportunity to test myself, push myself to rise to the challenge and see how much I can learn in this short period. After all, I have spent years listening to K-pop and watching Korean dramas and films without actually understanding more than just a few words of Korean. I can't expect to master Korean to any decent standard in this short period of time but what I can do is 'baby talk' - so the difficult part about Korean is the very complex grammar structure which is so different from English and it will take learners years to be able to speak Korean to a fluent standard. Nonetheless, I can still get myself understood in what I call broken Korean or baby talk Korean whereby I throw together a bunch of words to communicate what I want to say. Hence an example of that would be the sentence "excuse me, do you mind if I charge my phone here please?" I would just use the key words like "sorry, I here charge phone okay?" It's not elegant, it's not articulate, it's certainly not grammatically correct but it will suffice when it comes to communicating. And I'd like to think that the other party would appreciate the fact that I really trying hard to speak Korean rather than just expecting them to speak English to me.

A lot of people wouldn't even try to do that if they were to visit Korea on holiday - they would imagine some kind of worst case scenario whereby the local would either react angrily at them or get offended if they spoke Korean badly. Some might even accuse the locals of mocking them if they spoke Korean badly, because you would come across as an inarticulate child talking like a baby if you spoke like someone who only knows a little Korean. Now this kind of worst case scenario is highly unlikely of course because Korean people simply don't expect foreigners to be fluent in Korean. In most cases, they are just relieved that you are trying to speak Korean instead of forcing them to switch to English and this is especially true with older Koreans who mostly don't speak much English at all. However, instead of dismissing this theory altogether, I am going to share with you a childhood memory to address the other side of the story. My father doesn't speak much English because he has always avoided speaking English for this very reason. I remember once when I was a kid, he encountered two Indian kids in Singapore and let me explain that my father would speak to the Chinese kids in Mandarin, the Malay kids in Malay but with the Indian kids, since he didn't speak Tamil he had no choice but to speak to them in English and on this occasion, he reluctantly did so and the two Indian kids laughed at the way he struggled with English. It was slapstick humour for them to hear my father speak English and of course, my father felt like that incident made him looked like a fool and he was embarrassed - so his reaction to that was to avoid speaking English if he could, but that also meant that his English would just never ever improve if he refused to even try to use it.

But if you think that my father had somehow found a cheat code to avoid embarrassing situations, well guess what? In refusing to speak English, he didn't maintain his dignity, people just assumed that he couldn't speak English (which was a fair assumption) and judged him for not being able to speak English despite living in an English speaking country. Nobody was going to reach the conclusion that this man is speak Mandarin out of choice but his English is perfect - no, everyone knew that he was speaking Mandarin because he couldn't speak English and thus there was judgment about his inability to speak English regardless. There is no cheat code - he was still being judged harshly by others. There is no 'better option' apart from actually making the effort to improve his English. Now staying with that case study, the two Indian kids probably mocked my father for not having made any effort to improve his English because he has had plenty of time to do so but he has not bothered whilst these two kids probably had an English teacher at school who would rebuke them every time they made a mistake in class, so if these kids were having to make an effort, they expected the adults to lead by example and when the adults don't, they get mocked and belittled. Yes, older adults don't get a free pass when it comes to this kind of judgment by children. It is interesting that these Indian kids were making a like for like comparison between their own ability to speak English and my father's - thus if I was struggling in Korean in Seoul, it would be unreasonable to compare me to how well the locals speak their mother tongue. Rather, a far more reasonable comparison would be to see how well the locals cope in a foreign language when they are on holiday. And if someone still insists on making a very unfair, unreasonable comparison, then the problem lies with them and definitely not me.

The fact is you can't stop people from being unreasonable but one would hope at least that if there are unreasonable people out there, they are in the minority and most people will be reasonable. But should you let your fear of unreasonable people stop you from improving yourself and growing by embracing new experiences? Of course not. Sure, I am more than willing to accept the possibility of a few Korean people laughing at the way I struggle on in Korean when I am there, but what I gain from exercising my mind this way and embracing a difficult new language benefits me so much that it is a risk well worth taking. After all, if you don't try to do anything new, you may think you're sparing yourself the possible embarrassment of failure but you will never be rewarded with the triumph of success. Those who have the guts to try and risk failure are the only ones who will ever taste the sweetness of success. In short, you need to have a thick skin in order to take these risks in life, especially when you get older. After all, what is the alternative? We have a Chinese phrase that I use amongst my siblings: 等死 dengsi - it means waiting to die in Mandarin. I use it to describe a situation where a person no longer cares to invest any more effort into their life and is thus just waiting for death to come. Now this attitude may arise if someone was actually going to die, like if they had been given a diagnosis for a terminal illness or if they had simply given up on life for any other reason. If an older person is paralyzed by the fear of failing that they give up trying to learn anything new, then they have effectively entered this dengsi phase of their lives and I have seen many older adults do that as early as their 40s and 50s. They stop trying, there is no effort whatsoever on their part to learn anything new and they want to pretend that time can just stand still, so they don't have to put any more effort into facing anything new in life. Of course, they don't have a machine to freeze time, so they are paralyzed in that condition whilst life goes on around them as time passes and they are effectively left behind by the rest of society.

Let's analyze this attitude in a bit more detail - imagine if you were told by the doctor that you have about 2 to 3 months left to live. This would really affect your decision making process when it comes to maximizing your time left on this earth. You would not plant a new cherry tree sapling in your garden knowing that you will be dead long before that tree can bear any fruit for you. Conversely, if you were offered a chance to do an experience with more short term gains like having a great meal in a really nice restaurant, you might be a lot more amenable to that as the satisfaction from that meal will come to an end the moment you finish eating and there is no long term benefits from that experience. So people who know that they will die imminently tend to be a lot more focused on short term goals and dismiss long term ones. But there is something desperately wrong if people who haven't been given a death sentence are taking on the same mindset, focusing only on short term goals that bring them immediate satisfaction whilst giving up on long term plans that may bring a much larger gain further down the line. I look back at the way my parents were behaving when they reached my age all those years ago and I realized that they had completely given up on any kind of long term plans by then - they were totally content with just doing the same job over and over again just to pay the bills and they had no concept whatsoever of any self-improvement that involved investing in themselves. Whether it was a decision they had actually taken or if they had just somehow sleep walked into that state, they had entered into that 等死 phase of their life very early, mostly because a lot of their peers were doing exactly just that. And this is when I'm going to repeat something I said in my last podcast but it is so true: two wrongs don't make a right. A thousands wrongs don't make a right. A million wrongs still don't make a right. This is actually a very serious problem affecting our society today and pretending this will somehow just become the new norm will not make it okay. No, we need a real solution instead and we need it fast.

The fact is we have an ageing population in the world today, there are many countries in the world from Japan to France to Australia to Canada where there will be a heck of a lot of old people around. Now what kind of life do you want all these old people to have after 50, if you know that they are going to hang around for a few more decades? Do you want them to constantly live in fear of embarrassment and be under constant pressure to appear good at anything they do in public? Or do you want them to be free of this fear, enjoy their later years in life and try out new experiences that may bring them a lot of joy? Can we fundamentally change the way we view the elderly amongst us in 2026? There needs to be a fundamental change in the way older people approach this issue and I think it starts with letting go of out of date perceptions from another era that no longer apply in the context of our modern societies. There needs to be a paradigm shift on a large enough scale that creates a new norm for older people to continue having this mindset focused on growth that doesn't end with them reaching a certain milestone in their lives. This change couldn't come fast enough in light of our rapidly ageing population situation and I remain cautiously optimistic about this situation. But what do you think? Who do you blame for the current situation and what needs to change for this paradigm shift to happen? What do you think your life will be like after you turn 50 and are you worried about the weight of expectation by society to expect you to be good at the things you choose to do once you become older then? Many thanks for listening and reading as always.

Putting all your eggs in one basket?

2025-12-23T19:40:00.005+00:00

Hi guys, this is a draft and transcript of a podcast I have recorded so if you prefer to listen to this piece rather than to read it, please click here. A reader has asked me to comment on a piece he has seen on Youtube entitled Why Singapore's Success Is Becoming A Problem and it is on a Youtube Channel called Asian Boss. Now at first I was somewhat skeptical given that the presenter Stephen Park was a Korean guy with an American accent, will he actually know enough about Singapore to do this topic justice? I often have problems with foreigners judging Singapore as a society - they either put Singapore on a pedestal like it is some kind of miracle paradise on earth or they are way too harsh on Singaporean society without actually understanding the context of the underlying problems. Stephen Park seems to hit the nail on the head with his opening remark, why is it so hard to get rich in Singapore? That is against the backdrop of Singapore being 2nd richest country in the world according to latest 2025 figures from the IMF, young Singaporeans are being priced out of their own country as soaring property prices make home ownership further and further out of reach whilst salaries are simply not keeping pace with inflation. To be fair, I think Stephan Park actually did a pretty good job when it came to evaluating the current situation facing young Singaporeans and yes I would encourage you to watch that video despite it being 38 minutes long, but there is just one aspect of Singaporeans society that I don't think Stephen Park addressed and so I wanted to offer my insight. Think of this as an addendum or supplement to what Stephen Park has offered on his Youtube channel, please note I'm not disagreeing with him, I'm merely raising another point which I feel he hasn't covered but it is equally important and this is the kind of insight that I could offer as someone who was born in Singapore, grew up in Singapore and therefore I would understand Singaporean society a lot better.

So in his video, Stephen Park talked about how rigid the Singaporean education is and whilst that will create a workforce that is going to obediently follow instructions and do as they are told, these are just the worker ants in the factories as opposed to the senior leaders who will have the foresight to innovate, invent and lead. Furthermore, this is coupled with a system whereby law and order is maintained with an iron fist, even minor offences are punished severely and this creates an atmosphere where people are afraid to be different, afraid to stand out and prefer to conform with the crowd. I recently did a podcast about Singaporean dissident Amos Yee, so I would invite you to have a listen to that if this is a topic that you find interesting. But this is where I think Stephen Park doesn't quite understand the psyche of Singaporean folks, you see - this faith that Singaporeans place in the government isn't some kind of brainwashing that you might encounter in a place like China or North Korea, instead this is a reaction by many older Singaporeans who witnessed how the government managed to eradicate poverty over the decades. When Singapore gained independence in 1965, it had a GDP per capita on par with the poorest African nations at the time - fast forward to today where it is the second richest country in the world, you have to give the government credit where credit is due and that is what a lot of Singaporeans have done. However, the devil is always in the detail: whilst the Singaporean government has indeed performed really well when it came to delivering economic growth, it hasn't delivered the same miracle when it comes to the education system - far from it. This is where there is a serious issue, a major problem that some Singaporeans have managed to identify and solve, but it is the kind of situation whereby if you're smart enough to deal with this problem, then your child is fine and if you're oblivious to how serious this problem is, then the odds are set against your poor child.

The problem with the education system is the delivery mechanism - the poor quality of the teachers in Singapore is an issue. I have witnessed it first hand, at close quarters because both my parents were teachers (they are very old and are both retired now), but I have managed to see how the teaching profession has consistently failed to maintain standards and how terrible teachers get away with really poor performance. This is because of our Asian culture which blindly confers respect to people in certain positions of authority, such as teachers, politicians and community leaders. So if a teacher is lazy and the class performs badly in the exams as a result of the poor teaching, the teacher would get away with it and the students would instead be blamed for being lazy and ill-disciplined. This is further reinforced by the blind faith a lot of Singaporeans place in their government and thus the ministry of education is thus by extension an arm of the Singapore government. Whilst I have no doubt that the ministry of education in Singapore would hire the very best people to fill the positions at the top of their organization, when it comes to the ordinary teachers delivering the lessons in the school all over the country, the quality is a different story altogether. I don't want to condemn all teachers in Singapore just because I have had the misfortune of getting to know quite a lot of terrible ones, but it felt more like a lottery whether or not one would get a good teacher or not. There is no correlation between the quality of the school and the quality of the teachers - you see in Singapore, we have a streaming system to sort the intake of students. So the best schools would only admit the students with the best scores, kinda like how you need nothing short of straight As to even begin to consider applying to a top university like Oxford or Cambridge. Because of my excellent academic results, I went to some of the top schools in Singapore and still I somehow managed to encounter some truly dreadful teachers and there simply wasn't anything in the system to punish these teachers who did their jobs badly. There was absolutely no quality control when it came to their work performance and this was just the way things were there.

I was in Singapore in October this year and I managed to catch up with some old classmates and please note that for the context of this case study, I went to some of the top schools in Singapore and so my former classmates are mostly very successful. We did this whole thing about, "so, what's Mark doing these days? Are you still in touch with June? I heard that Wai is the CEO of a very successful company". And when I mentioned the name of a former classmate whom I shall call Maria (not her real name), the story was like, "oh Maria is a secondary school teacher today." And my reaction was, "really? What went wrong? I remembered her to be so brilliant - how did she end up like that?" The story with Maria was that she had a career after university but then she got married and had twins; so she decided to take a few years out to become a full time mother and when she tried to reenter the workforce, she really struggled to find a job after having been a full time mother for so long and hence she settled for teaching when nothing else worked out. I'm not trying to suggest for a moment that Maria is a bad teacher (actually I have no idea if she would be a good teacher or not) but my point is that I wouldn't expect someone whom I remember to be bright and intelligent to end up teaching in the context of Singapore. Maria was making the best of bad situation, settling for a teaching career wasn't her first choice.

You see, if you give a terrible teacher a class of really smart students in a top school in Singapore, the students would either just figure it all out for themselves or seek eternal help through the private tuition system, they would go onto perform really well and so the terrible teacher gets away with it - often they will claim credit for the great performance of the class despite the fact that the students performed well in spite of their terrible teacher and not because of their terrible teacher. Conversely, if you place a terrible teacher in a mediocre school with below average students, the students will perform very poorly at the exams and the teacher will blame the students, making excuses like, "if you give me a class of baboons and monkeys, how do you expect me to deliver miracles?" Now don't get me wrong, what I have described can happen in any country from Sweden to Senegal to Sri Lanka - it is not a problem that is unique to Singapore. The problem however is the way Singaporean parents and students alike react to this situation - I have been lucky enough to have travelled and worked around the world, so I have been able to compare and contrast the way different societies react to this problem. Thus in other countries, people often recognize the shortfalls and problems in the education system; thus they will go out of their way to seek other means to prepare themselves to enter the working world and find ways to seeks skills that will impress prospective employers. In Europe for example, it is common for teenagers to have part-time jobs once they turn about 14 or 15. We're not just talking about doing a few weeks of work during the school holidays, we're talking about teenagers holding down a part time job whilst studying at high school. This is not just normal but considered essential in terms of gaining valuable skills for the working world that are simply not taught in the classroom environment. However, most Singaporean parents would be horrified at that thought and would assume that this time could be much better spent studying for the exams and that the working experience isn't that valuable. Therein lies the problem, Singaporean parents are putting all their eggs in one basket without even considering how to prepare their children for the working world by seeking other useful experiences outside the education system. Now that would not be such a problem if one could actually depend on the education system in Singapore but as I've explained, no you really shouldn't and cannot depend on this system - one needs to be a lot more realistic.

Allow me to explain where this mindset comes from: I come from a poor, working class family and my parents knew they weren't able to provide everything I needed as a child. This was in sharp contrast to my friends and classmates from richer families who had access to all kinds of opportunities that I could have never accessed. My parents could have either accepted that they had failed as parents because of their poverty but that would have meant accepting some kind of personal responsibility - no, instead they had created this narrative that the Singaporean system was perfect, the government had built this foolproof system and that the government has provided everything we needed - all we had to do in this scenario was to simply follow the rules, obey the laws and be grateful to this government. This faith in the system is thus born out of a desire to create a benevolent big brother who will take care of us and provide us with everything we need. This may take the form of a caring government, a guardian angel or even some kind of god or deity who is on your side. So with that in mind, they sleep better at night in the belief that the government will take care of everything, that they have nothing to worry about. And if a student doesn't perform well within this perfect system, then they will always blame the individual for being lazy or ill-disciplined but they will never blame the system. Thus it is this very mindset that makes too many Singaporeans put all their eggs in the education basket in the firm belief that it is the best and only way for them to succeed and to become rich. Just to give you an idea about this mindset works in practice, when I was in secondary school, some of my friends at school were able to get some part time work at my classmate's father's company and I thought it would be a good idea to join them. My mother really hated the idea because she thought that a good student should spend every spare minute revising and preparing for the exams - that I was too young to pick up useful skills to enter the working world in any case and so she vehemently refused to let me do that job. Now as to whether or not my friends who did that job really benefited from it is a moot point as I think they weren't trusted to do much there, but my point is that whilst parents in the West would've encouraged me to have taken that job, my mother had well and truly placed all her eggs in the education basket in refusing to even acknowledge the possible benefits that a part time job could have yielded. She had a form of tunnel vision that is common in Singapore.

So if I didn't expect my future employers to care about the minute details about how I performed at school as a student, then I wouldn't bother trying to get full marks on every single assignment and I'd spend more of my time seeking a wide range of interesting experiences to broaden my horizons. But if I knew that I might be refused a dream job over a test I performed poorly in when I was in secondary school, then I would make a lot more sacrifices as a student to avoid that situation. Thus it is a question of whether or not employers in Singapore will actually put that much emphasis on your academic record or not when it comes to the recruitment process and there is a clear split. Some employers actually do that whilst others will focus on more important aspects like where you got your degree from and your work experience. I had this story online about a case in 2024 where an interview went badly wrong when an applicant was interrogated about why she had performed poorly in one exam during her O levels, presumably taken when she was 16 - it was a poor grade for her English. The interviewer used it as evidence to show that this candidate was too lazy to prepare for an important and thus possessed some kind of flaw in her character, whilst ignoring the fact that this candidate's English wasn't bad at all and that she was applying for a job as an accountant - thus her ability in English really wasn't all that relevant to the role she was applying for. So in this case, I'd tell the candidate to tell the interviewer to go fuck himself and walk out of the room with her head held high. It is a worst case scenario that can happen in Singapore yet Singaporeans seem to afraid of that worst case scenario that they haven't realized that the best response to that is to simply seek a far more reasonable employer instead. Thus I think the issue here is the way Singaporeans are unable and unwilling to stand up for themselves even when faced with a ludicrous situation like that - there is this acceptance of "well that's just the way things are here in Singapore so I can't change the system - why waste time even talking about it?" No one is asking you to start a revolution, I'm just asking you to stand up for yourself when you encounter injustice.

This is really one of my pet hates when it comes to Singaporeans - you know the saying "two wrongs don't make a right?" It is so obvious but somehow, most Singaporeans don't get it. Take for example the issue of very long working hours in Singapore and even though most Singaporeans would love to have a much better work-life balance and an understanding employer, they usually just sigh and say, "it is like that in Singapore, that's just the way things are. All my friends here also face the same problem - so that means that this is normal in the context of Singapore." It is not like Singaporeans don't have the ability to try to find solutions to their problems but it is this type of mindset which makes them simply accept their fate, that they have to live with the problem instead of trying to solve it. These problems like long working hours are hardly unique to Singapore, no they affect many different countries around the world but the problem that is unique to Singapore is the lack of willingness by the local Singaporeans to actually try to find a solution.

Finally, I want to address the question - is it hard to get rich in Singapore? This was one of the themes of the video that inspired this podcast and the simple answer I have for you is this: it is not any harder to get rich in Singapore compared to any big city in the world like London, San Francisco, Melbourne, Tokyo or Amsterdam. There isn't one magical place where money just grows on trees and you can get rich quickly. In fact getting rich is often down to mathematics: if you earn more than you spend, then you accumulate wealth and you can get rich. The more wealth you accumulate each month, the faster you become rich. But if you do something like have children, then it is going to cost you a lot of money every month to take care of those children and you will have to earn a lot more if you want to be both a parent and rich at the same time. So a single man with a modest income but has no children can become rich a lot faster than a father who earns a lot of money but has five children to bring up - you don't need to be an accountant to figure that one out. It is up to each individual to decide what brings them the most amount of happiness in life and what their priorities are, if they wish to start a family or not and how that would then impact on their quest to become rich. So by that token, it is no harder to get rich in Singapore than any other city in the world - that is down to the individual and not really the government. Okay that's it from me on this topic, thank you very much for reading and happy holidays everyone.