Happy Malaysia Day to all of you who are from Malaysia!
On another and related note, those of you who know me probably know that I am a big fan of Lee Kuan Yew.
Well, that’s a bit of a small understatement. I mean, it would have to be for someone who was somehow so moved that he decided to write an entire book about Lee Kuan Yew, which is by the way exactly what I did.
This Malaysia Day, 16 September, I’m very happy to announce the release of “One Date, Two Destinies: Lee Kuan Yew and the Birth of Malaysia and Singapore”, at a (Malaysia Day) discount!
This was a fun project to engage in, writing about the entire track of Lee Kuan Yew’s history from his birth up until the end.
I think it is crucial to look back at the past to understand history better, and this is one of the first things that a person will understand, I think, if they look just a little bit beneath the surface of Malaysian history and that which we call Malaysia.
I don’t think that there is quite a project that is like this, but I think that it was an extremely fun one – It contains many of my own personal reflections about Mr. Lee and the role that he played in Malaysia and Singapore, and in our shared history together, one that was born from a time of what can rightfully be called trauma.
I hope that you will find it meaningful and valuable for your own personal development and growth even as you reflect on these stories.
Thank you for your support in advance if you would like to purchase the book!
THERE AREa few reasons that a person could want to make content – some people do it for the money, which is a very real aspect, some people do it for the fame and some for the validation (Tim Tiah’s position); I am a little bit different, though.
I do it because I can feel my mind changing, and I enjoy watching it happen.
The demand of content creation is that your mind understands what appeals to people, and the turns you must take for your desired guest; it also requires that you understand what is relevant to people and can catch on to the correct trends and the constellation-universe of possibilities that you may encounter along the way, whether it’s making better videos, engaging with your audience, dealing with undesirables (unfortunate but real), and generally looking at the world in a way that is valuable.
Of course, a spat of luck in being able to do exactly that is nice and everything and it might not necessarily indicate skill in some way (I could be irrelevant in five minutes – who knows?), but I do feel that in this whole process of making videos, doing research, understanding what Malaysia as a country and the world cares about in this collective experience we all have, little parts of me are changing in an interesting direction.
I’ve been called a range of things – let me share some of them.
…And also through the rest of my work, whereby I’ve been told on various occasions that maybe I should stand for parliament – and not in a small way, or just a single time.
Here’s an illustrative example.
I was unable to give this a heart emoji.
It’s not because I don’t like the comment. @RCRC-g9u, you receive the Order Of The Sepup 👑 but no, I cannot give you a heart emoji.
You know why?
It’s because I don’t know how to deal with that possibility.
For all you know, that could happen – I consider it a little unlikely, but you never know how the bell will toll and what exactly will transpire on the journey, but haha it’s interesting to see that there’s this demand out there.
But you know, I like to think that I’m self-aware, and with the little self-awareness that I have, I know that there are certain joys associated with doing what I do and restraints associated with being a Member of Parliament; I am certainly aware also that some people might just consider me a mere opinionated ruffian with nothing else to my name apart from an overly-opinionated personality.
To me, that is actually fine as generally I don’t care too much what people think about me and I am unable or even occasionally terminally unwilling to pander to people’s egoes – perhaps that’s not a great perspective if you want votes? Haha, who knows. Didn’t stop Trump, did it?
sup bro
Returning from the grandiose turn, I’m not a huge creator; 20,000 subscribers on YouTube is nearly nothing compared to the big boys – but it is not insignificant either. I thank each and every one of you new and old, wherever you are, in whatever capacity you’ve discovered me, whether by accident or by choice, and express deep gratitude for what you’ve chosen, even as I recognize that subscriptions correlate with but do not determine impact, and understand that each of you have equally deep, rich, and multilayered mental worlds within yourselves than that which I have chosen to showcase on the internet and that I have the privilege of bridging to your own.
I won’t put the link here – if you want to consider what I’ve done by an act of choice, I think you know where to go.
Whatever it is, it’s not the fame (which has manifested in some strange and interesting ways and that I have my own thoughts about) that most motivates me; it’s not the idea of being ‘influential’ in terms of shaping social outcomes, although that’s assuredly a part of my hopes though one constrained by self-confirmation biases and algorithms that seek profit in a polarized world; I am most enduringly fascinated by the way this process of creating content has shaped and continues to shape me as a human being.
It’s been interesting to watch myself engage with the world, speak a little more clearly each day, and pretty much just vibe with the world and everything it’s given; the world is deeply and almost infinitely interesting to me, and it has become more so in these days that one day I will imagine ring as the halcyon days.
There is something special about riding on the wave of the thoughts of a generation, to exercise your agency – to shape others in the ways that you can, to shape yourself in the way you deem ideal; to articulate what you have known and shall actively come to know as the way the world is, has been, and must be.
If there is something good that may come from this and that you, the (human!) reader, consider meaningful, I would love to engage further with you whether on this platform or on the others – please don’t be shy to write to me, whether on YT or here (I will respond if I see genuine comments, though I’ve had to block the comments from bots), or on Instagram, where I tend to yak a bit when I’m not making videos or meeting people 🙂
Each person in this world has different things which they may want to remember as part of life’s journey. Certain conversations, a few interactions, small but varied and different things, each person to his own.
It’s probably no secret to most of you who are reading this at the moment that the array of interactions that I have personally experienced is somewhat anomalous relative to… Most people, but even I would not have expected the one that I took part in just yesterday.
I am officially one of the only people who can say that they have corrected Cambridge University.
Many of you are doubtless aware that I have a deep interest in history.
In particular, you likely know that I was motivated enough to write an entire book about the late Mr. Lee Kuan Yew – and interestingly, that is also what this interaction centers on.
Seen: Not on the Celebrating Lee Kuan Yew webpage as of October 18th, 2025.
Yesterday, while I was making a video, I tried to access a link commemorating the late Mr Lee. It was indexed on Google and it was titled “Celebrating Lee Kuan Yew”.
On opening the page, I noticed something odd. There was no content.
Of course, the fact that there was no content is explainable on account of a number of different possible reasons. Perhaps it is an issue of technology, maybe it was the device, or perhaps on a different operating system I would get a different result. On this day though, thinking it out, I decided to confirm my suspicions only to realize that the page was blank on every possible iteration of it.
Under ordinary circumstances, I suppose most people would let the matter rest, but on this day, something possessed me to drive directly to Fitzwilliam College.
By consequence, you will be able to access the Celebrating Lee Kuan Yew link right over here after the college makes the changes.
Thank you, Fitzwilliam College, for responding to the email that I sent within just an hour after I had sent it on a Sunday afternoon UK time. It was surely not a workday, but you answered to the call of duty nonetheless. Of course, it might have been a matter of a little less urgency had I not tagged Singapore’s Prime Minister’s office in the chain of correspondence as well as SM Lee, with whom I had corresponded a few times before – now if we consider how I could have approached this interaction differently, I suppose I could have just waited for Fitzwilliam to respond the very first time rather than just immediately cc-ing everybody in an email chain.
But I guess that in my mind, I wanted the fastest possible solution and didn’t think that it would be the easiest way.
Now, how do we process that?
Is that ruthless behavior or is it pragmatic behavior?
Is it perhaps a measured combination of both?
And whatever it might reflect, is that good or is that bad?
I suppose that’s an open question – not for me to decide, but rather for historians to interpret if they consider it relevant or consider me relevant.
For what it’s worth, if people were to try to unravel the thread of everything that had come to pass, I imagine that an interesting narrative would come about – I suppose it is for other people who are not me to decide upon the meaning of these events and to then narrate them, in part or in whole, if they consider them worthy for presentation or learning, to the next generation.
Of late, I’ve come to realize that I have a certain skillset that has made it not always easy to oppose what I do.
I think most people would be aware of it, and it would be independently true regardless of whatever my opinion of it happens to be – in other words, if you were here to just think well, that’s not really correct is it? Surely he is delusional.
That’s totally fine and I’m ok with that – in fact, I would invite you to think in exactly that fashion, because it would then be easier for me to internally return to a time when that was not really the case or to bring myself back to a baseline where I would consider myself a bit more normal and more calibrated – not different in a statistically significant way from anyone else of my age or class, not different from other human beings in general.
But it is not always easy to do that anymore, even if I am constantly conscious that I should touch grass and keep my feet on the ground.
In fact, I’m going to just deliberately choose not to highlight some of the things that happened of late and note that if you want to learn about them, you will have to do the legwork and come to your own conclusions; is he correct, or is he wrong? Is he delusional?
I am totally ok if you decide that I am delusional, incidentally – that could be for the better and in some small ways, once again, I might actually prefer that.
But now, speaking just generally though and without any reference to my personal circumstances, I thought I would highlight a clip that I remember from (love him or hate him) Jordan Peterson’s podcast interview with Joe Rogan, in which he discusses “The meek shall inherit the earth”, from Matthew 5:5.
It is a wonderful interview, made more wonderful by the fact that he observes that there is a problem with the translation.
And there we are, one of the iconic lines I look to when I think about life, the universe, and everything.
I think that it is good to become strong and everything – yet that it would be delusional to the height of folly to imagine that as weak human beings we have control over the vast majority of our lives, and even so defeatistly foolish to consider that we have no agency when it is there, staring us constantly in the face.
In the small span of control that I have over the domain of what I can see, understand, and influence, I hope for something small and I would imagine relatively simple – to be able to master the universe that I am to master peacefully, putting in effort, gaining its reward, encountering and living in and breathing in the world’s complexity without needing to use the powers that allow me to do so to crush, oppress, tyrannize, or otherwise impede the progress of others, understanding that people may go ahead of me, before me, or with me – each person on their own journey.
The Bible’s translation of “Meek” may not have been the very best way to understand it – but I understand the spirit in which the phrasing had come to pass, recognizing the context a little better than I did before.
And thus, I will endeavor to be ‘meek’, in that broader way.
