Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Jessica Tan: How She Leads Half A Million Employee

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

In this special episode of Endgame, we sit down with Jessica Tan, former Co-CEO of Ping An, one of the world’s largest and most innovative financial services groups. As part of our series on Southeast Asians who have risen to global prominence through meritocracy, Jessica shares her journey from growing up in Singapore to leading a tech-driven revolution in China’s insurance industry. Tune in to hear how her education at MIT, her career at McKinsey, and her relentless drive for innovation have shaped her into one of the most powerful women in business today.#Endgame #GitaWirjawan #JessicaTan ------------------ Other Endgame episodes you might also like:    • Theresia Gouw: Diverse Teams Make Bet...     • Kenapa Pemimpin Perempuan Masih Sedik...     • Maraton GoTo untuk Cetak 'Legacy' - A...   ------------------ Explore and discuss this episode further: https://endgame.id/ ------------------ Be our collaborator and partner: https://sgpp.me/contactus

Look, I'm not criticizing you as a person. We should be able to debate issues directly, right? Without, sometimes in some cultures, even in the developed markets, we've become too polite. I was Asian women, all the stereotypes you can think on. Asians generally, statistically, most of us do more than we sing. It's not, it's not that good or bad. So you need to be able to do well and you need to be able to speak well. Hi, I'm Jessica Tan.

Jessica Tan. Jessica Tan. Co-CEO of Pingan insurance. China's largest insurer and in the world's second biggest insurance market. With annual revenues of more than 14 billion US dollars and market cap of over 68 billion US dollars. Would you be willing to make decisions in the absence of the full truth? Yeah. You have to become more comfortable by what is the max you lose.

We shouldn't feel apologetic and we should be confident and even if we're really, I just keep asking for it. There's no harm. I mean, if I have to kiss 100 frogs before I get my friends, I will kiss 100 frogs. Last bit on AI. I fear that at the rate that there's only few that I can spend the money, it runs as a risk of further elitizing the narrative. If it continues to be controlled in a few handful of companies

with the purpose of making more money, then it's going to be it. more and more diverse. Hi, we're honored to have Jessica Tan, who is the former co-CEO of Pingan Group. Jessica, thank you so much for embracing our show. My pleasure. You've been in so many great places. You've traveled around the world.

You've done so much more than what many of us in Southeast Asia would have aspired to do. Talk about how you grew up. how you got educated to be as good as you have become. Please. Sure. My parents are from Malaysia. We come from humble working class family, and they came to Singapore to work.

So I was born and I grew up here. So a couple of things that might be a little bit different. So unlike the more typical Singaporean as a immigrant, we have to. to work extremely hard for education and move from one school to another school. So I think growing up here, I was a beneficiary of the meritocratic system. Basically, I've been told, as Asian parents would tell you, study hard and make a good living. So I think my first kind of 17-plus years of my life was quite relatively straightforward, and I managed to do quite well.

I think the second departure for me was then when I wanted to go to the U.S. So my dad's an engineer, he worked for Texas Instruments for I think 20 years. In Singapore? Was he more influential in shaping your education journey? Yes, I think so. I think he's very strong on education, on having a systemic engineering mindset. Problems that I remember when I was a kid, I have to justify if I ask for more pocket money every year.

He asked me, my sisters and I, to write essay, justifying why we need a race. So I think we've been brought up in a way that you have to work hard and earn your keep. And I think he had an opportunity to go to the U.S. He went there for some attachment in Texas. And then found that U.S. at that time, I think it's in late 80s, early 90s, was a very vibrant place. And you really can get exposed to a lot.

So he was very supportive when I wanted to go to MIT to study. Why MIT? It's not a bad school, but why? I think at that time, to be honest, we come from fairly traditional family. My dad is the eldest of 13 kids in Malaysia. And unfortunately, they always favor male versus female. and unfortunately we were all girls.

So I always wanted to kind of make him proud and do engineering, right? And the hardest core engineer I could think of at that time was electrical engineering. And so MIT naturally came up as one. But he had one condition. He didn't want me to take a Singapore scholarship, which is what typically people of my cohort in those days would do. And so because he wanted me to really get the benefit and the ability to work there if I want to and get exposed to different kind of thinking industries and sectors. That turned out, I mean, I was quite resistant at that time because actually it's a privilege to be given.

I had to turn down a scholarship. I realized later, actually he went through a lot. He actually borrowed money from his credit card. We are quite humble, the five-busts in one room when we were growing up, to pay for my school fees and later for my sisters. And in fact, had to dip into his early pensions. And it was, unfortunately, I only realized it the second year when I was there because it was a 97-A-N financial crisis. And I then realized that we all have money because he then quit his job in order to get his retirement. and then set up a consulting business,

which was a really bad time in financial crisis to do so. So I think I almost didn't make it. I almost had to come home. But I was very fortunate because that's when I also experienced, I think MIT, US, they were very kind and generous. They gave financial aid for part of my school B's. I had three jobs. I could work on campus to support it myself.

And so I managed to continue. And I think that taught me a lot, right? The MIT education, I'm extremely grateful. It's not just how they think about things, right? They don't have to do for an international student like myself, right? And it was needs blind. It was purely based on if you needed it. And they didn't look at your grades or anything.

And I was also impressed them whereby you can really do anything you want. So growing up in a Singapore education, system. We have a very good education, but there are tracks, right? You know you're in the system and you've got to do well in that particular track. And in the U.S., it was, you can do anything you want. Right. I met my advisor. And I remember in my second year, I was flipping through those days, they still have the paper cost catalogs. And I thought, oh, I want to do optical engineering. I thought all optical fiber was all the rage, it's going to be the new thing. And I just popped by this professor. Herman House is an Austrian-American, a graphie fellow.

And I said, look, I want to do some project with you, and I want to do my master's thesis. I was a second year of student. He looked at me and he was like, ask a few questions. And then he said, okay, come back tomorrow. Same time in my office hours. And then I realized later from my post-grade friends, he's actually very famous scientists.

There are theorem named after him. Oh, you didn't know. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, I didn't know that. It's no benefit of, oh, I thought it was interesting. I just went to him. And he said, and there's a theorem of it. The reason he needed one day to think is he had to think of a simpler problem.

He never take a master's student. And I was a sophomore more trying to do my master's as well. He only took post grads. So he had to think of a simpler enough problem, yet still challenging for me. And he did. He did. He was my thesis supervisor for the next three years. He hooked me up with Bell Labs.

We did a very interesting stuff that published and stuff. And I think those experience taught me that it's not just we work hard and do it. You could do anything you want to. It gave you the capabilities and the confidence you could. And then it then teaches you to ask for higher things, right? What is really impactful? What do I really want to do with my life? And not just because engineering something my dad lies.

And so it took a bit of a twist. So upon graduation, I think in the six months up to graduation, you have to think of what you want to do, right? I could either, I had an intern at Microsoft, and those were the great times. Those were late 90s where. Before the bus. Oh, yes, that's right.

Before the bus and went to Bill Gates' house, they give you nice things. You take helicopter right in Seattle. So I have an offer to either go there or to Silicon Valley. I could do my PhD in Bell Labs and be more accomplished, which my dad would have loved. And then I decided that Bev was not really appealing to me. Well, it took me true at the half years to figure that out. And by chance of luck, I went to a casino night.

It was at John Hancock Tower in Boston. one of the management consulting company, AMS, hosted a casino night there, and I went with my then-boyfriend, our husband, for fun. I like to go play games and stuff like that. And then this person kept telling me, oh, there's such a thing called management consulting, which at that time was completely new to me. I didn't even know people would pay you to do that.

And I thought, okay, maybe that's interesting. And I just applied. I said, which is the best? They told me, oh, McKinsey is one of the best. So I applied. And they had a special program then, whereby they take in master's student in the science and engineering background. And they said, we don't need you to learn business. We can teach you in the business.

It's a salarated program. If you do well, within one year, we'll promote you to associate without MBA. So I went in the new, okay, I haven't figured out what to do. I'm going to try different industries. And I had so much debt with me. That I thought, okay, this is pretty cool. And that's how I went. I went to Chicago, join McKinsey, and I loved it.

For three years, at first I thought I'll do three years to try different sectors, figure out what I find meaningful to do. And the first three years, I did Victoria Secrets, Retail, Best Buy. I did some airlines, e-commerce. We then went to a dot-com bus, which we save a couple of telecoms company from bankrupt. I even asked my office manager that I say, look, I would love to go to Europe.

In my 20s, I said, I want to go to Europe when the Germany worked for Docho Bozer Exchange. So we have very varied. I'm very thankful. I think McKinsey gives a white spectrum for you to learn and it has the belief that it's about impact and that solving problems is about asking the right questions. And you don't need, like, you can learn.

You don't have to be 30 years in the industry to be actually asked the right question, the structure way to solve it. And I think then I fell into financial services. I realized financial services is one whereby capital can be a huge enabler, if used properly, actually for the economy, for the people in certain sense. And I started to get into that sector, first in North America. and then in all three, I moved back. So my, then, to Chicago or Singapore? Okay.

Because my... Did you ever feel that you were not prepared for any of the stuff that you would have been exposed to? Well, being a consultant. It's just difficult also when we were, when I was younger, I was Asian, women, all the stereotypes you can think of. we Asians generally generally

statistically most of us do more than we sing right and we've been taught throughout that you know

if you do the best it will be recognized you don't have to be to show you right and I think getting into work

in North America and stuff you will see much more diverse culture you realize it's not it's not

about good or bad you have to be able to actually get the sponsorship as well. So you need to be able to do well and you need to be able to speak well as well. So it takes a lot of learning. I think the first few years I worked too hard, but I was just a busy bee in the back office. I remember fainting all the time. And I think my manager was a he was a micromanager.

He was very worried. So all kind of failing. that you would think that you do. And then you learn to be smart. Like project after project, you kind of tune in a little bit how you would not just do the content, but also it's quite important because it's client service work, right? It's about the teamwork, it's about clients. And then you gradually learn more and more.

And so I've always gone to philosophy. It's a bit like video games. I go by a year. Every year you get me three lives at the beginning. and then you kind of survive. Once you survive, you level up because you become better the fact that you survive.

If you fail, then you go back to the next level and you restart again. And that has served me well. Yeah. And then I think in 03, it was quite an unusual decision. I was doing quite well in the U.S. by then to come back to Asia.

I did that because my husband was tired of We were doing a long distance. He's a scholar. So at that time... He's a physics guy, right? Yes, he's a physics, political science guy. Political science? Yes, the political science.

He would have gone to MIT too? Yes, he was MIT. He was my dorm mate. We live next to each other in the Kuat dorm. He was my physics student. That's how we got to know each other. And then he came back because of my scholarship. Sure.

And then for two, three years, we were using calling cards those time and then we would in the weekend I would go to Tower Records ran the same DVD

so we would watch exactly the same time with the phone I think he was getting tired of that after three years so I came back and then got married

at 25 a fairly young age and I had to rebuild in Asia but I was quite fortunate because when I came back I think China

was 2003 was just beginning and then they look at me and say look you look Chinese and you must learn Chinese in school so you should go to China I remember Mike

the partner of the office Saro he's a Swiss Italian Swiss French he said no listen to me just go oh you'd be right so I went and in 03

was my first time entering China And the China van was 20 years ago, it was very different. You'd have the pirate to the... You would have seen bicycles still. That's right, that's right. But it ended up getting to know Peng-on, was my first client there. And it was a very ambitious, Peter Marr, the founder and the chairman and the institute chairman now. He was very ambitious.

At that time, they had operations scattered all over the country. And they wanted to centralize it and build a shared service operations, not just for cost, but for risk control, because people have those chops. And you could be defrauded, right, by anywhere. And we ended up a one and a half year project. We built the largest share services operation center in Shanghai. It's one of the proudest project. You can still see it today.

It hosts about 30,000 people in it. And that left a great impression in me, because I remember we were all arguing about, it's very difficult to do this. And we even share examples in the U.S. They went through first regionalization, then nationally. And the chairman said, I brought all of you here internally externally to discuss how we can do this, not if we do it.

And then he left the room. So then I was like 25, 26. I was like, wow, that's gutsy. And we managed to do that. And so it gave me further confidence. this is a country of opportunity promise. You know, you can overcome many, many challenges that you otherwise, if you can mobilize resources and et cetera to do that.

That was my first thing of Caucasian into Asia. And then I also, along the way, I always make these decisions that doesn't seem quite natural path. So when I was pregnant with my first girl, I called my partner, Saro, and I said, I want to come home. I don't want to work in China anymore because I want to be in Singapore. I want to be South East Asia.

I want to be able to go home, you know, fly within the area. And he was very supportive. He called another partner. And in the following month, I was on DBS as a client. Then I served DBS, CIMB, you know, MAS. You know, these are clients that I suddenly reset all my clients to South Asia. And for the next, I think, six, seven years, basically I just traveled and re-known every country. But it was fulfilling.

I had my two girls. And, you know, I was very glad because even though I'm Southeast Asian, you know, you are not really until you work there. And when you work there, then you realize, oh, each one is so different and so unique. It's not, you know, you got to be in the market to understand that. So I was very grateful for that. And then, so that's kind of the path of my journey. When you made a decision to go to Pingon in 2013, it sounds like you would have witnessed how China had evolved.

And I would have thought that it would have been a big plunge for you. But it doesn't sound like it. No, no question. Because you would have gotten so familiar with how it's a big plunge. involved in how it's likely to evolve, right? And you felt comfortable with that. Well, I think I took a chance because by then I had worked 13 years in McKinsey. Right.

Three in U.S. 10 in Asia. I realized two things that I was short of. One is I was tired of people telling me that, oh, yes, Jessica, you're very smart. But, you know, you've never done this before. So it's very difficult to do it. I'm like, okay, I don't think it's that difficult. So I really bawled you up. Yeah, I don't want to be, I don't want to be, I told that.

I remember going to a client, it's one of the countries, every month I'll visit him, right? He would agree with me intellectually that this is the right thing to do, but he would always be hesitant to make the changes. And so I thought, look, I can't live my life constantly telling people what I think. I have to do it myself and figure out. right, if it's difficult, I need to learn how to do it. So that was one motivation. And then the other motivation was by then I've worked maybe 10 countries in Asia. And everyone is so, it's very different.

There's no, it's not around around. There's just different stages, different consumer, different market. And I thought, and having been in the U.S., in the late 90s, early 2000s, you need a big home-o-chievous market. Yeah. And that's when you can really see everything. can get together. Yeah.

And I bet on China. Pengang then was quite small. Pengang then is probably one-fifth a size. To what extent do you think homogeneity was a big factor in making Pingano's success for it? I think the macro-intrinsics, that China is homogeneous, is at least half of the success. Wow. And so I thought you've got to be there to learn what it is. You can never learn as a consultant or as a foreign.

So between two offers, it was an MNC versus this. I thought, okay, let me just go. And I also have a bit of the mindset when you're young. It's okay, right? What could the worst be happened? Like I'm in my mid-30s. If I fail, I would have had two, three years, a really good experience in China.

And I'm still young enough. I'll start again. So it was with that mindset I went. So it's a lot more culture shock It's very different working for a Chinese company The first thing It would have been very I'm speculating a bit chauvinistic maybe

Oh ironically not Actually ironically Or China I guess Because not Pingham No China actually China It was already changing in a big way in that time Because of communism Actually women

During the communist time Women hold up half the sky, right? That was the slogan. And actually, as a women leader, I probably face more stereotypes in actually Southeast Asia than in China. So I think that was not so much. I think it was more cultural gap because although I'm ethnically Chinese, three, four generations. You talk about those three gaps, right? Yeah, that's right. age gap, language gap. It was just different.

I mean, I may speak the Chinese. But your Mandarin is pretty good. It's become better. I'm fortunate. My parents were a Chinese educator. They went to Taiwan. We spoke Chinese at home. But that's conversational Chinese.

That's not business. I used to tell my team, you have to bear with me. In English, I can probably communicate 10 different nuances of the same message. In Chinese, I may have one or two. like yes, no, maybe, maybe three. So it took a while and also managing large people, right? It's a large organization. My first role was the group CIO and the CEO of the tech company.

It was 3,000 people. Well, later on, I have half a million people. So I had 10 years to grow from learn how to manage 3,000 to half a million. But 3,000 was a total number of employees is 700,000, right? The whole employees have been about, yeah, 700,000, 800,000. And you manage five-sevenths of those. Yeah, that's right, that's right. You learn to be really good with people all walks of people.

You learn social skills. You learn to drink for a while. First week, I collapsed on stage because I didn't pace myself well enough. But these are, I think, important skills. And I get to love it. I enjoy getting to know people. And that's part of having worked in the first. countries. Talk about how you went about the transition as to attain a position

leadership. Yeah. And then talk about how you manage to stay grounded. Yeah. You know, it's so easy to give you a big head, right? Yeah. How did you stay humble while at the top? Yeah. But talk about the transition as to attain that position leadership. I think the transition the toughest is, well, I think in the McKinsey training gives me a very good analytical view of things, which is a strength. Because if you work in large companies, particularly, most of the people have grown up vertically.

They've taken certain things to be granted, right? Whereas I think analytically, you will see more macro, you look at the issues much more objectively, and then you can figure out what the Ryan is. As a leader, it's most important that you know where you're going because if you are wrong, you're causing problems to many people. And then the ability to execute involves the people. So the biggest cultural, the difference I have to adapt is actually how to work with the people,

not just your teams, but others, to mobilize them to do stuff. And also be able to hear different points of views. and solve tactical issues. And then, I think, more importantly, get them to take risk. That was the most, when I inherited the IT team, Pingan then was known to be a very good IT shop, but it's all the take a shot, right? They were afraid, they were measured on how fast you deliver,

how cheap is it, right? They're not going to build big data and whatever, right? So hiring new people that I went to Silicon Valley, my data scientist was from Bing. he doesn't know insurance or financial services when he has really flew to Capitino have sat down in him, make sure he's real and really try and convince him to come and work for us

so getting new people in and then somehow you have to also make them work together I described to my team later on bringing people in is like I don't know if you I rear fish when I was young when you have new fish you don't just you buy the packet you don't just put them in the tank

you put them in the back And then you let them acclimatize both the water temperature as well as the other fish get to know this fish. And then you release it. So you have to learn to be how you build teams, getting new people, figure out who they may not have the capability. But if they have the will, you help them succeed. And there are some that they just need to be removed. So I think that part is probably the one that took me, you know, the first two, three years to really kind of work. this out really well.

And then to your second question, that's a great question. I mean, I'd feel very differently. I got a half million people working for me. Yes. It's very tough because I first started. You've got to have the right ecosystem that

place you back to Earth. That's right. Right? That's right. Otherwise you could You could be very busy. You can have meetings. You get cocky. Yeah. That's right. So I was fortunate because I started off as the CEO company. And then later on second year, I get like two, three companies. So I was built. So I've been, I've ran individual things before. So that was an advantage because as I added more every

year or so, you have become very familiar with this business and the people. So, you know, in my companies, I don't just know the CEOs. I have 10 companies underneath me. It's not just CEOs or their management team. It's just 100 people. I know even the next department head. And it would probably have been difficult. I was just parachuted. But because I was the C-O-1 company, I knew these people.

I could even call today and get the database head. I know exactly who is. And I know his strength, not good. So it keeps you grounded in this area. And the other thing is that I find it very helpful to be grounded. on the numbers too. So I have a team that supports me where I can go very deep into issues. But there are strategic projects that I would be very hands on.

We'll talk about health care later. When we were building the elderly home care, every month I was having me. I would go to the front. You have to, the leader had to choose, but you have to be very careful because you don't overstep. And then your subordinates might feel that, oh, this person is, trying to enrich the space. So I'm very clear about this is business as usual thing.

This is your accountability. I measure you by the result. But there are strategic longer term stuff, the three-year, five-year thing, the cross-cutting things. These projects, I'll spend a lot of time there. And it keeps me grounded on the issues. It also helped me to be relevant to them because you've got to add value to a team. Otherwise, it's just an overhead. And then that also gives me a lot of joy learning about things.

I want to peel the audience a bit more on the culture, right? If you've been known as being hard on issues, soft on people, you write birthday cards, handwrite to hundreds of your employees, at least, right? And you're very highly numerically literate, right? Yes. I mean, talk about those two different boxes. Yeah. How you get very hard on issues, but you get very soft on people.

Yeah. I think they hard on issues, because I believe a good leader needs to have three attributes. When I said, you need to be strategic to know what's the right thing to do. Because the heavy responsibility is that, you know, if you made a wrong mistake, you may not see it now in a year or two. you'll see it three years, five years, and it affects people. And here, my strength has to be analytical. I will listen to a lot of people for different views and stuff, but ultimately, I believe the numbers objectively will show you what's the right thing to do.

I always start five years out, right? Because when you're looking at just the next year, you have a lot of constraints that you can't do. So I always work with my team to do a five-year vision first, three-year, five year. And then we all agree, this is the right thing. Then we work backwards. You have to get there within three or five years. Then this is what you have you. So I think the numbers part helped me understand business really well. So my actual life actuarial, he said, you're the most senior executive that has squeezed us. I go around meetings with a calculator. It's actually embarrassing. I've deteriorated to only calculator. I can't do differential or integration anymore.

But it helps me, and I've thankfully good memory. So then it also can be rapport with the next level down, right? People who are actually doing this. It's got to be really scary to your support. No, it's actually really fun. Yes, that's true. They're very scared. At first, when they're meeting, sometimes they have tons of backbenchers

because the senior executives cannot remember as much. So they have backbenchers with laptops just in case. I ask a question or something. But I think it also sets a discipline to, I wanted to encalcate a culture within my companies that, look, we've got to be fact-based. Because especially Chinese companies tend to be more hierarchical, right? Usually the most junior person speak, then more senior, and then the most senior person will then make a decision. Very few things can be so easily done. So I wanted to incalcate whereby people who have facts and numbers, no matter even if you're backbed,

venture. You should be able to feel free. So in meetings, I use this opportunity. They'd be scared. There's sometimes their hands were shaking. I joke. I'm not going to eat you out. Don't worry. If he makes a good point, I will actually call his name, right, no matter what level with this. I say, oh, that's a great point. We should look into that. So I think that part, it may not be well-liked by a lot of some people, because culturally is a bit different. but I think it's quite important and some of the people have grown then to like that more

so that's one part the second attribute I always thought is because you have to be able to execute and it's then about people right that's the part we said soften people because I'm so scary even though I'm a very nice person

so I know I have to make up and that people know look I'm not criticizing you as a person we should be able to debate issues directly, right? Without sometimes in some cultures, even in developed markets, we've become too polite. Right. Because we see, oh, if I say this, the other person might not think is offended.

But if we're good for the company, right, we should create the environment to do it. So I try to then make up for a cadet to show people, look, I'm not against individuals, right? And so I do not just birthday cards. From the top 100, I get involved in a lot in their evaluation, development opportunity. Just like I have the benefit of being, you know, mentored and trained, I'll put them into different roles to develop them. I'll have very frank conversations like, oh, you're really good at this, but this is not so good. So I'm going to put you in this role. You have to be up for it to do that.

And then I do a lot of team events. Because especially when you're 3,000 people, you can get away with that. When half a million, you've got to do the team events too. So I travel quite a lot across China. I probably do maybe 10 plus provinces. So at least one, if not two cities a month. I will usually visit not just the management team, but the agents. We have 350,000 agents.

And there are the ones, I'm really touched by agents. I've grown to love insurance. I'm not a veteran insurance. But insurance, our agents are, it's one of the rare profession, regardless of education and background. You can make a living. So I remember, you know, I was so touched, one of this top agent, she told me she's from Shenyang. And when she was 18, she ran away from home. She took money, she borrowed money from her brother. She said, I don't want to stay in Shenyang. I want to go to big city. She bought

money, took a train to Beijing. And then she realized because she's not very educated, it was very difficult to get a job in Beijing. And she was selling buns on the streets. And then she so happened that she sold buns outside office, regional agency office. And then she thought, what kind of company is this? Because every morning we'll have morning meetings. And there were so many people coming through to do that. And it's like this looks like an interesting company. Then say regardless of education, you can make a million yen.

If you work hard and we'll train you to it. And she joined us. This was 20 plus years ago. She's now one of our top agents. And she's then grown. She has 100 people that she worked in the agency. And so I'm very inspired by people like that. So when you are half a million people, because these are people who, you know, the first time I went, I said, no, thank you.

Because all of us pay, it's actually about you. You know, we make about 20 billion of U.S. dollar profit. It's a lot. 70% come from life insurance, of which, you know, most of it come from in Asia. I said, thank you for me. Every day. Wow. The morning meeting is about handling rejection because insurance is one.

So if you sit in there, a meeting, it's about. or how you shouldn't be rejected. You got to talk about it. So I was so inspired by them, and it was during COVID times. So for one year, it was a very bad time. They were all very down. So that inspired me even more to really want,

it's not just doing the business so that we can earn money. It's about, you know, I want them to have a good living with us. So we had to make very tough decisions, solve on people in the sense that you really care, about the people. But sometimes we also had to change. So we had to shrunk our

sales force. It was a very tough decision because even though at peak we had almost like a million people, but insurance industry is such that only the top 20% are stable and the rest just keeps cycling through. So it's not the same million people.

But that's how you grow. And so we had a very controversial and I was very firm with my team. I said we've got to change this. Because one of the people who work for us make a living for life. It's not, I use you for six months, nine months, and then you're gone. So we kept most of the people who were stable, we grew them, we doubled their income during COVID. So I'm extremely proud of that.

It made a real difference. The people who already saved us continue to stay, we added more. It's just that we stop their incentives, just higher and a trip. And I think that kind of motivates people to do stuff. So this kind of managing people, I think if you have to really be with people to understand, you think, are okay, it's okay that I get drunk in a while because they're human. And I think I've developed a reputation, at least even though I'm not mainland Chinese, that I'm genuine, and hopefully people can see that.

and that I may not agree with you all the time, but the decisions are trying to be for the good of the company and for everyone involved. And then if I'm wrong, we'll just reiterate. Right. That's perfect. And so I wanted to kind of do that. You talked about you're having interviewed at least 100 people a year. Yeah.

I'm curious as to how you spot a talent. And especially if you meet up with a female candidate. Do you tend to be harder on her or softer on her? Or you're just the same on both, female or male? For me, it's been quite the same. Well, having been female and stuff, I have two girls. Our whole family is like girls.

For me, I think I noticed these less. So I don't I usually And over the years I found Usually I like to ask The person about the background Yeah

For choices that they made Why did they pick this This is the league Right Why did they go here Why did they do this So it's more about the why Than the what

Because the what is You know Whatever is on the seating But the motivation behind Because I think this speaks to what this person really is trying to look for. And you see some series. It's great names, but they only stay in every job, every two, three years.

And then they always skip. And you feel, okay, this is a person that he may be very good, but he or she may be very good. But the motivation is different. So I think motivation is quite important because a lot of things we do, you have to really genuinely believe it because it's not, businesses under me are not easy. I'm not going to be okay.

you know, like growing at a sudden rate, this is just breathing the air. That's what you're supposed to do, right? So I think that's important. And then I think there's the, the second part is then about tenacity. And this I only learned later on because I made a couple of mistakes

when we were especially setting up new businesses. And sometimes we find people with the right qualifications, like when we first start healthcare, and try to look for all either to tech. industry because it's online or the healthcare industry and then we realized that okay domain knowledge sometimes is not difficult so adversity perseverance is quite important and having an open mind both on issues and people right because another common problem is that people are not have they're more conservative in using people and the saying is true I've learned if you are a

person you don't mind get an A plus team. But when you're a B, you that C team, it's actually really true. So I think that characteristic, the open-mindedness in both issues and people, as well as tenacity to me

became much more important later on. Wow. Now, your chairman, is he typical of all the other leadership in China in terms of showing open-mindedness.

Because he seems to, I mean, he seems like a guy who can try to find the right balance between the force of preservation and the force of innovation. Right. And that takes a lot of open-mindedness. Yeah. Right. I mean, Ping-on has stood out like human belief, right? Yeah.

Unlike many other Chinese companies. Do you see that as an occurrence that's happening in many other Chinese? these companies? I think there are the entrepreneurs in my chairman's time have gone through the past 40 years in China through various

stages of reform and the people who survive are people with the right set of characteristics which is a balance of foresight and taking

entrepreneurial risk in areas. So I learned a lot from them. And have that open mind is because China for a long time, if I look back in the O3s, 20 years ago, everything just wanted to catch up. Right. Because they lost so much time. So they were very eager to learn.

They would pay to learn. They would get people to accelerate. If it took 10 years for someone else to do it, can we do it in 5, 3? And then I think China back then in about 2015 was when I realized they actually in certain areas it's not about catching up anymore. They have to innovate beyond because competition within China is so keen. I think entrepreneurs of that generation, because they've grown out in this time, have those attributes.

Because if they haven't, they would not have survived. They wouldn't survive. And I'm very good. I think it's one of the things I learned how to take entrepreneur. because frankly, having grown up, you know, as a Singaporean, as a McKinsey consultant, we are taught to shoot down things, right? You give me something. I'll tell you 10 reasons, all the problems you can find.

We're not as good as taking the entrepreneurs. And with him, I learned that a lot. And to learn, that's why I learn now to look at three years, five years, right? If this makes sense, then all the artists are for us to figure out how you get there. And I think that's a very valuable. execute for any successful entrepreneur. Last bit on culture. We're in the context of how decisions get made.

You know, if you would have heard that Jeff Bezos of the world, he would have, you know, he was quoted as saying that he got lucky with Amazon. Yeah. Having succeeded the way it did by making decisions on the basis of two things. The first one would have been compromises. meaning if they need to figure out the length of a ladder, somebody says seven feet, the other one says eight feet, that's compromise at seven and a half.

The other one would have been on the basis of war of attrition. Whoever could argue better in a meeting room usually gets to decide or his or her view would be the basis on which decision gets. But he's realized that mistake, which is why I would respect to Blue Origin, wants to make decisions on truth. Yeah. Where are you on this, or where have you been on, with respect to any of these three?

I think decision making, there are big and small decision. I think the big decision, for example, when we're in Pingan, the decision at the beginning to invest in technology. not just strategically, was a big decision. And for us to do healthcare, again, it's a very strategic decision. I think these big decisions has to be debated in a very small group, and then the leader in the end have to decide, right or wrong, because it can go either way.

Because this is like standing on top of a very tall mountain and it's seen very far away. And you have to take accountability for that. And so I think that would be, yeah. The how to get there, which to me are the smaller decision, right? Because let's say I want to do healthcare as a concept, right? It's not difficult in that sense to say, okay, it makes sense because healthcare is growing, it's needed, there's some synergy, near insurance, etc.

But the actual business model of what health care do I do? How am I going to offer it? How am I going to still make money because ultimately it's been economically sustainable and compete. These are then the maybe the leather decisions that you were talking about. I think these need to be much more widely debated

because people closer to the ground get the better field. So it might not be a strait. And I tell my chairman sometimes that. Because you say, oh yeah, you've got to get there. Why are you not there? And I say, look, you're like, you're a god. You're like on the mountain.

we're mortals, maybe I'm on the mid-level. There are like, you know, obstacles you've got to make around together. But trust that we will get there, right? So I think those type of decisions need to be much more democratized and you need to create an environment for people to do that. But the common challenge I see is that some organizations, both in my previous line working for McKinsey and also in Peng-Anam, is that sometimes when it's two,

democratize people get stuck because there's no right or wrong everyone can be right and so so i think as a leader you need to set a condition okay uh we're taking some risk right so i'm going to make a left turn now it's okay right the rest of you i hear you like um and then we'll take pauses right uh if within three months six months whatever isn't right okay it's not we'll just make a little turn back uh so you have to set that balance between someone needing to make a call at a certain point in time, yet still doing it. And then I think that's kind of the best for me. Yeah, that hopefully that I try to create.

It's very tough. Yeah. Would you be willing to make decisions in the absence of the full truth? Yeah. Right? Sometimes you've got to bet, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And this just sort of like takes us back to. what Kissinger, you know, you would have, you know, you would have referred this to as a conjecture. Sometimes you got a conjecture. Yeah. In the absence of the full facts. Yes. Because you got the missiles coming to your city. You got to make a decision based on how facts or how truth or whatever.

Yeah. You absolutely. I think in the perfect world, you have all information. Yeah. But often sometimes there are sometimes. critical one that you have to decide. And here, for me, you have to become more comfortable

by what is the max you lose. So this is a bit back to casino. So my philosophy for gambling, I'm a social gambling. Gambler. I just like the fun of it. If I lose this an amount, I'm just going to leave whatever. So you're not going to bet out. You cut lost and you set the limits.

I think it's the same for business too. sometimes when you do certain things, I talked about Asians when, you know, there were so many different voices, you know, of what we should do, you know, give more money, you know, all sorts of things, right? And you don't really know. And then, but you have to decide because people are waiting. And so, so you do. And that, but you know the worst, maybe our easiest is lose money. Actually, because money can be earned, but it's a confined trip. Most of our innovations and stuff, I capped it around one day of our taxes. So I said, okay, you don't have to stress out so much.

If we're wrong, it's okay, well, we're harder, and we'll make that one day of taxes, right? So I think knowing what's your bottom line, but you also just keep monitoring. So you have to keep, okay, this person is this, right, you look for markets, right? Is it the right? Is it correct? If after one month, two months, three months, six months, six months, it's not changing, right? Or whatever you have assumed it to be the truth is not. Then you also, the leader also have to come out and say, we're wrong.

And it's okay. Because most of us don't like to say we're wrong. But I think that's quite important because sometimes you become so vested. That's the worst thing. and then you just keep sticking to it. But if you can do this, actually most organizations are dynamic enough to be able to absorb that. And I find actually the employees, the staff

are actually better if you come out and say you're wrong. My first speech to life insurance was that we made four mistakes, we're wrong. We were wrong X because everyone blamed the economy. Oh, bring COVID, blame whatever, right? And then the headquarters blame. life and life blame the agent since. So I decided I still stay trying to say, look, I'm a newcomer.

I said, look, we were wrong. One, two, three, four. And it was very well received. Surprisingly, I think it took a bit of risk. I think people want the truth or the genuine answer that you have at that time. As you say, it may not have the full truth at that particular point. But, you know, you're transparent of it. And I find that usually people can understand.

Yeah. It was just pretty shocking to hear Bezos. I mean, you know, with respect to Blue Orgy, he would say, if I don't have the truth, I'm okay with not making a decision. Yeah. I guess it comes down to the margin of error. Yeah. The kind of business they're in, they can't, you know, fool around with that kind of margin.

Also probably sense of urgency, do you have to? Because I don't know the context in which you make that. Well, you're sending a spaceship, right, for the outer space. I mean, it's about life. I would imagine that, well, they can, it's okay if they don't do it. Yeah. Then, right. It's all about saving lives.

That's right. That makes it a little bit more understandable. That's right. That's right. But if you, for example, taking over a kind of a business, let's say it's declining. Right. Right. And when it's declining, that's the worst time.

because everyone blames everything and nobody has a constructive thing to what we do. And you can see it project out. And therefore, and then maybe even you and not have the full view. I suddenly didn't have the full view when I first was plunging.

I was not the first trial like the second person. I was like, are you sure you give me life insurance just when there's like the depths of stuff? And you, and that time when the sense of urgency is that you have to make something, that you have to choose the lesser evil,

but then you make it with parameters that you can sustain. But I can understand when you're talking about, you know, space and lives, and he's okay that he, you know, you have to do it this year. You can do it. Then I think that margin of error, frankly, you know, he cannot afford. All right. I'm going to talk about technology, health care, and education,

but I want to set the stage. Yeah. I want to put this in the context of, how Southeast Asia has compared with China. And I kind of talked about this with you earlier, how the GDP per capita of Southeast Asia in the last 30 years has only grown 2.7 times versus China 10 times. And it's highly identifiable as to why.

Massive underinvestment in education in Southeast Asia, massive underinvestment and infrastructure. Lack of governance and lack of competition or competitiveness. Let's talk about technology. If you've spent a lot on AI, if you've gone paying on to be able to research over 600 million customers, you've been able to reimburse to clients over claims in like minutes. you've done facial recognition, image recognition, all that good stuff.

It takes a lot of money. Southeast Asia doesn't have a lot of money. Talk about this. Yeah. I think the, so first I think having been in China for, well, 20 years and the past 10 years kind of being really on the ground. I think the growth is really. helped by, as you said, both the heart and the soft infrastructure. And that entrepreneurial spirit, which is kind of that ties everything together.

And the competition kind of pushes you to be better and better. Right. So we used to say in China, no self-respecting entrepreneur would think of just being good in, let's say, Hamzhou, right? They at least think best in China, if not the world. So now maybe a lot of people won't make it, but if they try to shoot for 10, you know, they might drop to three and it's still okay, so better than one. So I think those three factors really help kind of push the boom and, you know, one of the best times there. Now coming then, you talk about how technology then plays a role in this and, you know, how money is being characterized.

It's good to invest when you are in a growth stage. I've learned that. So that's why when we were doing it, we first started, and we had to make a case to our board. It was a bit of a bat, right? Because even in AI, you're not able, at that time, it was still the early big data machine learning days. We're just learning to do Hadoop and stuff.

It's hard to say what the impact is going to be. And so we came with a different view was that, okay, we're going to spend 1% of our revenue on R&D. I'm not going to be able, like the other projects, do we have to show you all the business case, impact and stuff, for this 1%. But, you know, look, the whole war is going there, you know, big data, etc. At that time, we had strong competitions from the tech companies. And then we could also, we also made the argument, financial services if you look at it, I mean, it's a hundreds-year-old.

It's a very capital-intensive, you know, regulated industry. You can see how kind of goes, right? And we say, look, we kind of need to be innovated. Because Pingan was also in Munich, it kind of forces you. If we were a state-owned company being very large, you'd be fine. Right. Pingan being large, we're still. small in size relative to others. So I think that kind of helps you, oh, I need to do something, but that investment is also something manageable. So but and then in terms of quantity, I think

you can do this. I mean, if you're a big company. So our text was 200 million yuan, so that's a $60 million. So that's a pretty big number. You're a smaller company, even if it's one 10, 6 million you could also do something. So, of course, it limits the amount of things. We talked about, particularly in AI, right? There's a couple of attributes you kind of need to have, you know, putting money aside. You need to have the data. You need to have good people who build the right models.

And then you need to have the use cases to use it. Because I think that's where, I think China in the past 10 years have really grown because the consumers and the businesses are much faster in adopting many of these. So I remember even medical imaging, right, which today seems like a no-brainer. But seven, eight years ago, when we first built out AI medical imaging. And I went to U.S., I went to Google Health, you know, I went to many places. And they have all these models, but it was very difficult for them to convince hospitals to deploy. And so even though that was an edge, because you didn't use it, right?

then over, then left in this. So I think if you have these three cases, from Southeast Asia standpoint, I think we certainly have a lot of use cases. We have vibrant markets. 700 million people. Yeah, and our people are young. A lot of them are very mobile-friendly,

much more than the developed markets in other parts of the world. And so I think we have to use cases. Data is a little bit less organized and clean. We describe data. You lock them in like scrap metal in the warehouse and this way you can use them. So it takes a bit of effort, but it's something that can be done. It took us three plus years to really sort through and make data usable and stuff. So I think our biggest challenge is such talent.

I think money in sizable. There's a lot of liquidity in the world. Yeah. You can attract that money. That's right. Just got to make a place hospitable. That's right. The way Singapore has.

Exactly. I think that if you can get the talents to want to work and do that, right? Because we are growing, you cannot speak globally. There are very few regions that can grow at, say, 5% now. And the sense of energy, I just went around to different parts of society. It's just fantastic. It's a can-do attitude, young, diligent. So I think if we can solve, I think the talent issue, and get different types of talent,

talents who understand the local market and industries and domain expertise talents to work together, I think it would be fantastic. Yeah, and yeah. If you've been pretty pronounced on this, you know, when it comes to the U.S. and China, they've got much better chances of acing it on AI, Because they've got the data, we've got slash market, they've got talent, they've got money.

I'm with you. I think Southeast Asia has a huge market. It can figure out its way on data, right? It can figure out its way on money. It just needs to make itself more hospitable to money because there's a lot of money beyond Southeast Asia. Yeah, yeah. On the last bit, talent. And this takes us to the education part.

You've been very passionate about this. You've been getting paying on to do lots of really fancy-dandy stuff on education. But I want to set the stage. You've got, in Southeast Asia, there's only two countries that are about the global average of PISA, just a non-turturey attainment of lingual proficiency and STEM proficiency. then you don't have a lot of engineers in Southeast Asia. You don't have a lot of doctors. Like in China, in absolute and relative terms,

doctors you've been talking about, four and a half million doctors in China. Southeast Asia only has 500 million, I mean, 500,000 doctors. That's less than a tenth of a percent of the population of Southeast Asia. Whereas China, a third of a percent of the population of China, as in doctors. How do we get these up?

Yeah. And how do you think the role of AI could be or should be to help move the needle so that we get our act together in due time? I think it's a great question. I think there are maybe two things. that might be helpful. And this could be an opportunity, right? Because if you were to play by the traditional rules and games,

as we've seen in the past, it will use, yeah, I think it would be very hard to close the gap. I think there's two things that I think might be helpful. I think one is on specialized talent. We talked about doctors, talk about teachers. Very few countries would say they have sufficient. good quality doctors and teachers. So even China, even though they have four and a half million doctors,

not all the doctors are the same caliber of doctors. We worked with village doctors, which are more quack doctors. But no way they can even lift their engine, even though they have 10 million graduates a year be able to fill that gap. And with Southeast Asia, even tougher. So I think technology,

particularly AI could help. We've seen in cases in financial services, in health care, and a little bit in education when we used to run the third largest online education company in China, that the AI part can be, can, it's not to replace the human, but they can improve their quality and productivity significantly. So I use doctors an example. We started a good doctor, online telemedicine, right? So at first it was just about centralizedization, right? And so having you as a doctor sitting in the hospital or waiting for patients to come,

we put you, centralize you, and then you're able to see, you know, patients more efficiently. Right, you get about, you know, 30 plus percent productivity improvement that way. Later on, I think since 2018, we started to build our own AI medical. I think we had three versions so far. The first version was really more,

like a clinical decision support system. So what we did was we trained our AI model. At that time was large language, but it was not the generative AI. We let it read all the WHO guidelines, read all the medical books, all the 180,000 drug prescriptions and side effects, everything, you know, I read 40 million literature

in every language that's published in Lancet, everywhere. So it becomes a really good machine. One of the things about good machine learning is that they are very good at remembering, which any doctor, even the best doctor, cannot remember everything. So I think we use that as a clinical decision support. We deployed it in almost a million doctors. We worked with actually the government in different ministries to supplement, particularly the lower tier hospitals.

And that they would, when the doctor makes a certain prescription or a treatment, they would be able to look at the AI decision and they will show you, based on these symptoms, this clinical path is more likely than X and Y. And then if they choose something different that is statistically different, it gets escalated to the next level doctor who takes a second look. And I think that was 2018, right? It's absolutely doable in civilization today. It doesn't even take a lot to do it.

And I think that immediately will get a kick, right? And then I think in 2021, we made another big leak through. We wanted to show, because we were getting a lot of pushback. Our pushback was the doctors themselves because they're like, oh, no, no. I'm way smarter than the machine, even though the machine were everything. So we actually participate in the competition. So those are my idea. I said, we should do a touring test for medical.

I said, you know, the AI touring test, you know, every year they would do that. You're supposed to guess where there's a human. So we gathered, we worked with six specialist doctors, two from Singapore, two from Brazil, two from China. And then we had, well, we worked with the, I think it's the International Diabetes Federation. They organized the event. They have a set of specialists are judges. And there's a blind test, right? Every, you know, every case they will, they see two answers, one from doctor and one from our asphalt doctor, right, which

the AI. And then they mock the test, right? And overwhelmingly, our AI doctor get 92.4 points. I think the physical doctors, the six specialists, so I'm sorry that it was like 80-something, right? Even the best doctor got 92, right? And I actually look at the answers, right? So I really looked at it. Why is it? So the AI does two things better. When they ask questions, right? Because you know, in the doctor, there's two frames of mind. First is getting all the symptoms and stuff so they can triage and decide what ICD code,

what condition you have. Then it's about, then the treatment part. So there are the machine overwhelmingly is better at asking a thorough thing so they get a full of you and not by biases by doctors. And then the treatment, they're also more thorough. Now that being said, we did

that to actually show that, look, you have to use it. It can help you. It's like a tool. It's like a laptop, right? It's not to replace you. And to now, I think fast forward to now, 2022, last year we started to upgrade that version 3 with Gen AI. And we now use it live on our good doctor online.

So we also, we said, look, since we operate doctors ourselves. So now last year, I think about 15 million consultations. Now we are at the point I checked earlier last month. we're essentially able to get 98% of the triaging completely done by the AI. And you can imagine that saves a lot of time and much better. The treatment part we still give to the doctor to basically, because it's the doctor's judgment, but it's basically supplemented by what I call the decision.

And all the record keeping, because they have to keep notes, it's completely AI as well. That has basically double, triple the productivity, right? So I think to the first one, I think really for these specialized things, the same with teachers. We started to do this for primary school teachers about what they should learn in functional points in math, English and stuff. I think for these you can really accelerate what they can do and solve a little bit of the gap on the number. And I think the second thing to solve the people issue is we have to change the mode of operating. I'm surprised

in some industries have been left intact untouched the tech industry online since the 90s with the internet has revolutionized

certain industries I think retail being one e-commerce even in most other sectors is still very traditional

the mode of operating to talk about healthcare most healthcare spend 80, 90% to go to hospitals, which is acute care. It's not the best spend of money. We all don't have enough money to spend on health care. Everyone knows since, I don't know, decades ago, it's about primary health care, preventive health care, chronic disease management, infectious disease management. Acute care is really the last resort. But because of the mode of operating, it's been very difficult to change. I've worked with, you know, the Chinese, various governments

to do that. It's very difficult to make that shift. And so I think the opportunity to change the model, right, just like how retail has changed e-commerce. I think, you know, if we really want to solve this product, you've got to set up new operating models. You have to have online versus offline. And I've done this with our team before. We actually mapped out all. There's about 30,000 diseases under Recognize under WHO. That's a third that can be treated completely online. A third, which can be a combination online offline. There's some diagnostics test that you're going to do offline. And then a third that really needs to be offline.

I think this online offline company can get access, particularly like Indonesia when you're very widespread. You can get access so even in China, in the far out places. We serve one of our clients, one of the shipping companies. They constantly have people on the ships. So you get remote health care and even second opinion. So many of our people, you know, when you have serious, when you have things, and then you listen to one doctor, oh, we need a surgery, or we don't. Immediately we link specialists integrated, and you get a second opinion.

And chronic disease, right, a lot of diabetes is such a big problem. It's a simple thing. But the moment you don't control well, it's three times the cost, and it's so bad on the person's health because you have complications, it's six different complications. So I think if you can change that mix digital as a glue to kind of change the operating model, I think it could change a lot in healthcare, in education as well. Education can be so much, you know, you talk about great teachers. It's very difficult to just get great teachers.

But with online learning, my girl learns coding from China. We can learn, you know, even in Singapore you have these Chinese tuition centers. They're going to be obsolete. Yeah, well, I've been a much bigger believer of teachers than curriculum. Yeah, that's right. What I found would have been that many teachers nowadays are not great at inciting curiosity. What we need to teach the younger generation is how to be curious. Yes.

Not just formulation of a certain framework. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And I do believe that at the rate that we don't have a lot of great quality teachers, AI, I think, could be very, very helpful in this. Yeah. And I think even the part part, like the formula, the concept, you're going to remember. That part can be more efficient with AI. Yeah.

So I remember we built before, like just math, right? You get 70 points in math. I mean, as a parent, I would say, okay, try harder. And then you just keep doing, you know, exercise. and exercises. But we managed to map all the function points such that if you get 70, you know, it shows you which concept are you not good at, right? And you only learn that concept, right?

And so it makes that hard part more efficient. So it reduces time because kids these days sometimes also spend a lot of time saying. And then I think more important is like what you said, the curiosity, the thinking part, right? which is not taught in many schools and it requires teachers and you need to get good people you need to get interesting stuff You know, Singapore, Korea and China

and Japan, they're so dogged on selecting teachers from the top percentile and then it shows if you recruit teachers from the top percentile and you paid them well enough they're going to be able to do so many things with the students. Do you think there's an opportunity in even early childhood?

Absolutely. Well, you know, the brain formation, you know, 90% of that takes place until you're nine years old. That's right. So you've got countries that are so exposed to stunting, you know, lack of nutrition, lack of software, because the teachers are coming from the bottom percentile. Yeah. You're exposed. You know, you get a kid out in school for 14 years, K1, K2, and first grade,

until the 12th grade, it'd be tough for him or her to get accepted at NUS or MIT or whatever grade schools there are in the respective countries because of that lack of quality of teaching. And I think AI can do a lot on this. One of the things I was talking to friend who does, they started with Gen AI storybooks. Right. So to your point about pre-child, early childhood, right? Because if you can use it in gaming, because we're now using gaming through different stories and stuff. So they're trying to actually create these software that you could be adaptive to the kit, right?

As the story, you just learn Cinderella, Cinderella. It can be tailored and you can ask questions. It's interactive because this could be one, because it's going to be hard to get great quality teachers, even particularly early childhood. But if part of it can be done in that area, and it would also change the view of parents letting their kids use I, you know, pass or whatever device that can be, you know, affordable and accessible, yeah.

Back on health care. How do you think, what do you think should be done with the preexisting doctors and the incoming doctors by we have the presence of AI? Do you see the need or huge need to retrain many of the pre-existing doctors so that they know how to use this technological capability a little bit better? Do you see the need to actually supplant the training modules for the incoming doctors? Yeah. I think there are, in healthcare, I think there are three parts of the delivery system that needs to be tweaked a bit. The main part is why I said the acute health care.

When people are sick, they come to you, be in a clinic or a hospital or something. This part, I think is to add in the online, the tech area, and you need to lead by example. I mean, we have an 8,000-bit health care group too. It's just very painful. doctors are more difficult to change than actually bankers. I'm sure teachers would be somewhere there as well. Not to mention the egos. Yes, yes.

So I think that one needs to start. We went through specialization by specialization. It's painful, but you've got to do it. It's also not rocket science. And I think that has to be. done and i think having new players like somebody online or whatever i think we'll shake this industry up right just like how in retail commerce have been done right and then suddenly all the walmarts everybody has on like so i think that that is one part that needs to change i think

in addition actually there are two other parts that are often neglected in the health care system One is the more preventive, the chronic disease stuff, the wellness part. And I think as our, particularly in Southeast Asia, as we're kind of always in that, as you say in the middle kind of income area, and it's slowly grow. This is the period, I think, the next 10 years where people start to also want to be well. I mean, our lifespan now depending has at least reached to, I think Indonesia is right, 67, 70, basically between, I think those are solvable problems. But the problem even in like Singapore, which is like 80 and then I think in China is like 79 or something, the last 10 years in sickness. So it's gone up. Yeah, so it's gone up.

And so this prevent part, I think this particular chronic disease, diabetes, hypertension. These are common diseases for us, even tuberculosis. I think this part, with a lot of AI prediction model of four of the ones likely to have problems and working the public health care system to get screening, vaccination, and then getting the consumer actually engaged on the app as well. It's a bit like the revolution we went through financial services. In the beginning, we all worked through our intermediaries, right?

The bank is just a product engine. And we work through sales or brokers or third-party distribution, you never reach the customer. We spent a lot of effort in the past 10 years getting the customer to be direct. So you can get to know them and do it. Health care has to do that too. And you can do it. I've seen we have a million diabetes patients on our cap. They go through these 15-day cam to control.

I mean, it's no rocket science. It's about diet, exercise, checking and stuff. But at first we get nurses to sign like 30, 40 people up through peer pressure, all a bunch of things to get them in Calcutta give you awards. It was very human intensive. Later on, we start to more and more use machine learning to do it. So now it's 80, 90% administered by the bot. You can now take picture immediately show you, good not, get, et cetera.

So I think these things will have huge impact, particularly I think for Southeast Asia, where we are quite young and growing population, and we are very tech-savvy. And I think the third part, and I think this is more pockets, right, in certain cities, because we are also very diverse, each country is also very diverse.

We also have more aging type population. And we don't have, as you said, enough doctors or even nurses. I went to Japan. Doctors, nurses, and beds. That's right. And I went to Japan. I'm so the Japanese elderly are so fortunate. Even in the government, 90% paid for government retirement homes.

They have one care worker looking after three to four person, and they will even note down how many times you woke up at night, how many times you went to the toilet, do you poop, not proof? But, well, we're not Japan. They started doing this several decades ago, making 40-year-olds pay into insurance. But I think we could be pockets of aged care. but we have to build the industry a bit.

In China, even this is a problem because in China there's 217 million people above 65 years old, six times more than Japan. And 90% of Asians want to retire at home. So you have to think about how do I deliver something between 65 to 85 years old? This is when they're retired, but they still live and they want to live well.

and I think this is a whole industry. It's actually a whole sector to be set up. And you have to make it... That's Indonesia, you know, 280 million people. Oh, yeah, that's true. That's true. This is many. Old people.

And so it's very difficult. They don't have enough young people to help these guys. That's right. That's right. And they also want to live, you know, happily by themselves at homes. The one-child policy made it because many times your kids are not in even the same city. So I think, and we have pockets of that, like, because of our population in South East Asia, there are also pockets of Asia, and they're neglected, right?

If a government is richer, maybe you can look after. But if not, you have to find a way to build that up. So I think that is another area that I think will increasingly become important, yeah. How do you deal with rising cases of mental illnesses? You know, if you take a look at the report from the Surgeon General, it's anxiety, depression, and some extent, suicides, right? In the U.S., and that's kind of happening

in many other parts of the world, within here in Southeast Asia. Yes. Will AI be able to help stuff like this? Yeah. It's tough. First of all, first, I believe 70% of us have some mental. I probably like, you know, a little bit too,

some form, right? It's a mental. Actually, once you get into... But it's a real issue. It's a real issue and particularly for younger folks. Z generation. It's a huge issue in any part of the world. And it's even exacerbated because if you talk about psychiatrists and psychologists,

there's even less regulated than the doctors. Many countries, psychologists are not even regulated. In China you can pay 4,000 yuan by less than a thousand things. less than a thousand sing 800 sync and you could be certified a psychologist but and the worst thing is that this is a if a psychologist is not credible it's going to be worse for the patient because only you the patient and the psychologists know what's happening so i think this is a huge problem i really believe we we really believe AI could help but and i think it's not just us even i think facebook at some point created something called robot

I remember maybe five, six years ago. So there have been creations like this. It hasn't worked out as well. I think the challenge we spent a year looking at this, we pushed really hard. The problem is that this industry itself is not very regulated. If, you know, it's actually harder. FSA, I thought it was easier.

It's harder because all the other diseases I talked about, you know, there's a clinical pathway. There is a right answer. It's a very determinist. if you have X, X, XYZ, you do this, you check this, and then you, you know, it's a flowchart. You can see it, right? And so it's easier for machines to learn, right? I realize that different schools of psychologists and psychiatrists, and I actually went to some to experience how it's like, there are many different.

And fundamentally, they don't even have a way. I ask them, how do you measure that the patient is better? It's not, it's very subjective. So I think that's part of the problem. But I do think if it has to be solved, I think AI is probably the way to do it, but you have to work 50 associations. You almost have to redefine the rules. You can bring in a bit more objectivity into the equation. That's right.

That's right. And classify them in all different cases. Because I think Gen. AI is one whereby you can really build report because the worst about psychologists is actually the software skills, right? How do you boot the rapport and the trust and get the person to do something? And this is what Gen AI should be very good at. But I think, you know, if I'm sure there's enough people, this will be an area of huge impact. You know, there's a lot of conversations, if not discourses on longevity and even immortality.

How do you see AI getting involved in the healthcare space in ushering this whatever illusion that, you know, we could live as long as we want? We can live much longer than just 70 or 80 years. I think in the short-term horizon, right, I think a short medium long time, I think short-term horizon, the biggest challenge is going to be actually economic. When you talk about longevity, even at 80 years old, and with a retirement age 65, most countries would not be able to support. And you're not that productive. That's right.

Can you look at replacement income? Look at what is provided by the government, by the employer pension, by your own savings. I think the first challenge we'll save is just economic, just living to 80. How do you make sure that everyone, when they retire, have at least 55% of their income when they were working? I think that's challenge one.

challenge two is going to be, I think, a social challenge. And as my parents age two, that's how the past five years I got really interested in this area because I think, oh, much, it's such an unsolved space. The 65 to 85 is really like chapter 3 of your life. It's 20 years, long years. I mean, I only work for 25 years. I'm getting there soon. And actually, 65 years still well.

I mean, because it's so, you know, we've improved so much. much. In fact, you can do much more and you want to do much more. But you have to, how do you do that? So that's why, and 90% wants to stay at home, 10%, 7% wants to be community, 3% wants it work. So socially, how do you support this? And then also getting them to work.

So I think the Japanese does this extremely well. A third of their elderly in this population. I don't think they call elderly. I don't find the right name. to do that. Mature. They actually, yeah, mature. You've got to get them to work, right?

So I, since I came back to Singapore this year, I've been working with the Singapore organization. We're doing some pilots whereby, how do you do within the community, get them to contribute, right? Maybe sustainable, right? So my girl was trying to get the old people do food composting in the gardens, you know, together,

getting them socially engaged, doing micro work. Maybe in U.S. They do babysitting and, stuff like, because it's about social, mental engagement, physical, you know, the whole well-being of, you know, you can still live an exciting light. This is the chapter three with no other obligations except yourself. So I think this social challenge is going to hit us quite soon. And I don't see people caring enough to do this. And I think it needs to be solved. And I think

it's then the longer term, which is, is it can 80 be 100, 120, right? And there are many kind of research study showing that technically your body and the signs of aging is not a if you think of, I think one of the Harvard guys I was reading Singler. It's actually, yeah, that's right, Sigler. Aging, you should treat it.

People have accepted, oh. Just got to take a bunch of animins. Oh, it's like this. It's a disease that you can be treated. I think that would take something. He tells you to take more MNs. That's right. There are many such things.

I thought it first sounded like Eminens. If you see, in Japan, I saw, I went to one of the homes. This lady was 106-year-old. She's very small. She's so energetic. She was very happy. She doesn't speak a word of English. She took pictures of us.

She was excited. I mean, so unlike what you see in a retirement homes, right? So given that you have seen cases like this, right? And even though I'm not a research scientist there, I believe it's got to be solvable. But I think this one, I'm. And personally, I think this is another 10, perhaps even longer time from. I've come to realize that working in healthcare, we are very good at diagnostic things we can see. But it's very hard when you talk, because we've been talking about precision medicine.

Right. predictive for quite some time. I think it's going to take, it's going to take a while. On AI, do you see AI getting further decoupled between the US and China? Yeah. I think it's just possible in my past 20 years, we've seen, I use telecoms. It's an example. You remember when I had my first Motorola, Nokia. I think that was 2G. And then later 3G, I worked in the telecoms industry for a while. I remember the Blackberries too.

That's right. Oh, yes, the Blackberries. Yes. And then in 3G there were like, three standards. There was a GSM, there was a CDMA, there was a TDS CDMA which China came out. I think Japan has his own standard two, right? Three, four standards. And it was really 4G onwards that people started ITU started to integrate. And then we've now taken it for granted, right, by G6G. I think it's possible that for certain types of technology, you'll start to see variants of them.

and we have to deal with different things that try to make it interoperable at certain places. I think that's probably true. We're already beginning to see on the phones, right? You now have different operating systems and software. And the trick now is going to be, I think, in the country's interest, because if you look from a company or people always want you to be in the close, equal system, one ecosystem. But I think as countries which are not the two countries in contention, we want to embrace

everything, right? That's Southeast Asia. We are a place of diversity and that's opportunities. So I think the key is how do we use hopefully these international bodies that we don't throw everything out or start to split into two that I think South East Asia and actually much of the global south, which actually most of the population, try to have interoperability, right? You're going to have your own different brands of stuff. But when you talk about, for the good of certain things, right, let's say you talk about health care, right? Health care records,

no play. There's no, if you don't have a seamless health care records, you can't do anything that we talked about, right? That's the base stuff. It's the base infrastructure. So I think if we have terms on how we do that, at the same time providing privacy, IP, et cetera, right? And I think it can be done. These technical challenges are usually the least of the worry. I think it would allow us to survive in this kind of more multilateral kind of world. So you see prospect for the sustenance of interoperability? Yeah, yeah.

I think it has to be. Not just for Southeast Asia, but for most parts of the world. Yes, yes. And I think in the past, this is not a new concept. But I think in the past 10, 15 years, it has not been higher on the priority. I remember when blockchain first became, like, really, and people talked about, oh, you've got to be on the Ethereum chain or you're going to be this. And there was a group of us who really argued for interoperability.

I think, so that thought has always been there. But because the opportunity within each, so everyone wants to chase to be that standard and stuff, So no one has really paid attention to that. But if you think about this, I think this is one way of ensuring we are still globally connected yet with slightly different forces, if you will. And hopefully that will be a mitigating factor and not a complete reversal. You take into account this, call it decoupling or derisking, right? You juxtapose that with data points on global trade still very robust. It just shows that economic activities are still very intertwined.

Yes. Right? And I see the argument for the sustenance of interoperability. Yes. Because you're going to be so sore without it. Yeah. Economically, socially, what have you. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. And frankly, the bulk of the consumer, you know, we grew up in benefiting from this. You know, in the U.S., we had really cheap everything. In fact, at one point, it was cheaper because of the export credit, buying from the U.S. than, let's say, the place it was manufactured. So hopefully there's sufficient clout within the people right now. They say, look, yes, there are flaws with anything.

there are some imbalances, so new forces and geopolitics. But let's not throw everything that we've worked, I think, for the past 30-plus years on. And hopefully we find that. And like you said, the robust data is a good, it's a positive sign. Last bit on AI. You know, I've been spending a bit of time in the Bay Area. I just, it's an observation that it tends to get pushed forth in a much more technological matter. It doesn't seem to rope in other disciplines enough.

I mean, I feel like the culturalists, the socialists, sociologists, environmentalists, economists, economists, economists, economists, philosophers, I think they need to be roped in. And, you know, this is with full cognizance of the fact that the technologies are so damn smart. Yeah. But they tend to think that they know everything. Yeah. Don't what I mean? Yes.

They're not roping in. They're not having coffee with people of different dimensions. And I fear, where I'm a bit concerned that at the rate that it's not being pushed for it in an adequately multidisciplinary manner, it might end up in a pretty non-benying manner. this hallucination. Yeah, yeah. It was true that given where things are going now, it is dominated by a few big players.

It is dominated even from a tech side. I mean, when you talk about engagement, I'm not even yet there at the philosophy, the discipline. even in the business side. So people talk about AI for AI. Right. You haven't heard as much some of the things we were talking about.

Because in this part of the world, we are more about solving the actual issues. This is just a means to an end. Right. And I think even that hasn't really happened. Now it's about a new piece of technology. And so I think that swing has to be calibrated more about what is it really going to be used? So I think that's the first thing to happen.

And of course, as you said, because it's such a new thing, regulators, people are still trying to figure out the implications of all of this, right? Particularly with Janice, it's a hallucination. Where should you use it? Where should you not use it? What should you hold who accountable? The rules of the game have changed. And I think these debates

needs to be half, but I'm a believer of market-driven that is very hard when you're not even sure what to come out and there's a risk of either over-regulating or not trying it. And so I think this, the onus is actually on the government and the regulators

to keep a balance between, you know, how do you still encourage use a bit, but keep your eyes wide open, right? And have these discussions about and debates. Then before you formulate, okay, this is this got a bit, right? And if you look at in the history, that's kind of a little bit how things have happened. Now, of course, we would likely miss out on certain things. That's why, you know, some of the antitrust thing kind of always kind of backwards looking. But it would, it would calibrate a little bit more. I think the second one is something actually I worry more.

And I think actually Asia, having spent kind of more time, that's what I like about Asia. I think in Asia it's a very different vibe because we are so much in need. When you are in developed markets, when you have a lot of, like, that's why I talk about the medical imaging, they don't deploy it because they're worried that the radiologists will run our job. Right. So, and they say, okay, it's nice to have.

But in Asia, where we are all desperate for more, I think actually use case and scaling up should be done here quite well. We just need, as you said, we need that access to the cortex, the people. And then we are very entrepreneurial people. So obviously, it's really one of the most diverse regions there we're in. and then it will flourish. It will flourish significantly. I really hope to see lots of things in education. There's so many things that can be done.

So many things, but people talk about it. Very few people really actually do it. Yeah. And if we can convince more people, I think it would be fantastic. Something just popped again in my head. Last bit on AI. It's more of an engineering. challenge right

AI yeah it's not a software challenge and when one talks about engineering it's it's about the few that have the money to do it scale right

and I fear that at the rate that there's only few that I can spend the money it it runs the risk of further elitizing the narrative right

the preexisting order which would have been a bit more elitized than necessary. We're seeing rising genie coefficient ratios all over the world, China, the US, Africa, Southeast Asia, inequality of wealth, inequality of income, inequality of opportunities, centrifatality of economic development. When only few have access to money to scale for engineering purposes for AI purposes are they going to be thinking about the rest of the planet. Yeah. Right? Intuitively, I'm just thinking, I don't think so as much as I would like.

Yeah. Right. It is some this is the, okay, do we call it the digital divide? Like something. It is, but I I'm a little bit more optimistic. I think it can go either way. Yeah. It's a bit like what you use it for, good or evil. If you use it, if it continues to be controlled in a few handful of companies. Right. With the purpose of making more money, then it's going to be more and more diverge. Right, more and more that much.

I think if it opens up entrepreneurship whereby people, we've been talking about democratizing AI in Silicon Valley for like a decade, I think that can really be realized. And I think there are some people who really believe in that and enable many people to actually create that. It could go the other way and lessen the device. So I'll use them. I talked about the friend I, you know, I don't know whether he'd be successful,

but in this early education, gen AI startup, right? One of the things that they're doing is also building off the foundation models. And then, you know, you can imagine that could be opened up like a library of modules or models and APIs and stuff and allow lots of different entrepreneurs, startups, to create different applications on top. Now, this concept as a business model is not new. You have games who would open up some, like, Roeblocks. I think they open up APIs,

and then people can develop various games on it. If we could steer that in that direction, really democratizing, yeah, as you talked about. And then that would unleash, because this is, again, and something that Asia, South East Asia, in particular, we're very good at this. there's tons of entrepreneurs everywhere.

I mean, look at e-commerce, all the sellers. They come from all part Asia. Whoa, there are many small sales. They would understand the local market, the nuances, et cetera. But we need to lower the cost of them doing the business. And so that's why I was so excited when you said that you were saying out the Self-Easagion Center in Stanford. We need more people who has the ability.

when you talk about money and the talent to deploy that to areas where we need it. We're doing this not to get more advertising revenue or whatever. We're trying to solve real humanity, social, economic problems. And if you could get that to do it,

actually the amount of investment we're talking about they're all a different level. I just made the case to one of the financial services regulator. And we're talking about how if you want to do AI, you get into problem sharing data, which is privacy concern. So I share it as I look, you got to get into federated learning, privacy, computing, right, whereby now we are actually able to build models. Used to be everybody put their data together and then you train the models together, right? But actually federated learning privacy is such that not able to build models while data is with you, data is with me.

Right? It takes a few iterations. And that's, to me, a breakthrough thing. And we've done it now in China. It took a while. We worked even the regulator PBOC to do that in some of the anti-money launching, etc. It doesn't take a lot. I have probably about 10 to 15 people who are experts in the area

that have sustained them for a while to really do this. But one, they can break through in one use case, they didn't do others. So I think if we could channel that a little bit, it'd be really exciting. And I think back to your point about you, what I'm encouraged is also the younger generation, right, in your teens, 20s, even the early 30s, they're full with passion to do that. I particularly feel that in Indonesia. She's always been very vibrant entrepreneurial. People want to do stuff, right? And you get frustrated when you don't have the ability to do it.

So if we could lessen that and provide this platform, I think I think. It could really do, it can really do one this, yeah. I'm not worried about entrepreneurialism and South Asian, but I think it needs to be supplanted with certain attributes, one of which is liquidity. Yeah. And I think to get liquidity, you know, I'm just... Liquidity as in money.

Yeah. Capital, economic capital. Technological capital is there. Economic capital is there beyond Southeast Asia. They just need to figure away. Yeah. To get those in a sensible manner. Yeah.

And we just don't have enough storytelling capabilities. You're a great storyteller for Southeast Asia. Yes. Yes. We need thousands of you. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

I mean, Indians, they're so great of telling stories. Yeah. And I just wish, you know, we're 700 million people. Yeah. Yeah. We're not a small potato. Yes, yes. We got to have as many or almost as many storytellers like India would have.

We've been, as I said, we've been trained all to just do quietly, literally, counter down, no, and we will do well. Thinking that you're going to get recognized. Yes. Somebody's going to pat your shoulders and, you know, not going to happen. In a much more multipolar kind of world, you have to seek attention differently. Yeah. Yeah.

And I do believe, well, you know, our mission, whether it's, in the context of that center at Stanford or whatever we're doing right now is to inspire people, as many people as possible, to be better storytellers. Now, we've spent a lot of time, Jess, on so many things. What would be your message to the young girls

or women out there in the villages and secondary cities and primary cities of Southeast Asia, so that they could be a Jessica tan. Yeah. I mean, you've gone to the pinnacle of one of the coolest organizations in the world. I mean, a global giant. And you're there.

I mean, in a somewhat male-dominated kind of region, of Southeast Asia, what will make it possible for thousands of them to be like you, if not better? So, yes. I grew up, as I said, very traditional family. I remember when I was eight years old and my grandfather died. I mentioned my dad was the eldest child.

So my sisters and I were the only grandchildren. And our names couldn't be even on the tomb of my grandfather. And they made up four physicians name of grandsons that they will have in the future. So I joke to my cousin that, you know, I'm so sorry for you that your name's decided way before you were started. So that's kind of the background. And I remember working in Southeast Asia, the kind of six, seven years I was leading McKinsey, South East Asia for fake and tech. Someone told me to politely, oh, you should walk half a step behind the male client. And of course, I'm being educated in the U.S.

is that all these are lost on me. So there are a lot of, you know, direct, you know, direct. also hidden prejudices. Even in China, as I said, even though the communism have really kind of changed that mix a bit, but there are also some of my reports sometimes

they would tell me, oh, yeah, but she's a woman, so I said, why was wrong? You know, I want to promote her. She's going to have kids, so she's going to be out. I'm like, you know, you idiot. You were born by your mother, too. So I think there are such

kind of biases. Sometimes sometimes willingly, sometimes not willingly subconscious and that you have to go through. I tell my girls since I'm blessed with two girls. I think girls are wonderful. And that I think one is that we shouldn't feel apologetic and we should be confident. And even if we're rejected, just keep asking for it.

There's no harm. I mean, if I have to kiss 100 frogs before I get my friends, I will kiss 100 frogs. And you shouldn't feel bad because, and don't take it. Sometimes we might take it personally. So I've seen also some go the other way become very strong. That's why I just said, I'm not surprised when you ask you, will you be tougher? Because there are also some stereotypes where they become tougher because it's very hard to get there.

So they want to show there, you know, white to them in the sense. So I think having, because self-resilience is actually one, right? It takes a long time to change systems, right? I mean, any systems. I was just reading the American history book, right? And, you know, you forgot, like, you know, the black took 100 years to kind of where Abraham Lincoln do it. And another 100 years and still ongoing. So it takes long time to do that.

So I think this confidence to do it is more important. And then I think whether the position that we are in, we have to, oh, so then change some of the system where we see not right. I mentioned about maternity leave. So one of the things I did in my 10 companies was that I instituted, because usually every corporate has a, you need to be, let's say, a certain performance level. It's like top 40% for two years before you can get the promotion, right?

So usually women sometimes might lose out. If you go for maternity or something, or child care leave, you'll miss one because fair you didn't work half the year of that. so you'd be ranked lower, and then they will miss basically one whole few years. So I instituted, it's not just for female, for male, any valid reason that it's not therefore, that they are ranked lower. We'll have a special debate about this, and we will not risk them. We might still promote them, right?

So there's a very small thing, but I think this is part about us tweaking the system. And as leaders, you know, we inherit a system, and when we leave that position, we should make that system better. So if we all can tweak a little bit, I think that would, that will help significantly. And then maybe last message is that I think we don't, we don't need to feel like we have to be like someone, right, a male or whatever. It so happens I can drink and I sometimes like to drink a little bit. But you don't have to. I don't play golf. So my male colleagues, my girl play golf. Some of my female colleagues also learn golf.

I don't enjoy the game. I enjoy a faster game. You know, like tennis. I think golf is for old people. But it doesn't, so they get the benefit. But I think it's the more the essence of it, right? It is important to have time with your colleagues outside work to have that back to the bonding kind of so that we know each other as people and we enjoy and want to work together.

So if we don't do golf, do something else. I sing. So, you know, we go karaoke. You know, we go, you know, I'm a Buddhist, so, you know, we go to temples. You know, some, but nice temple, we go for like a retreat, you know, we talk about, you drink tea, right? It doesn't matter what. So I think we should be comfortable about our own leadership style.

We don't have to feel like to conform to certain standards. You know, or if I don't do this. This is that I will be cut out. I think that part, I think if we do that, and there's sufficient of us, I think it would make a huge difference. Knowing that confidence is key. Yeah. What small tips can you give to young people that they can do to cultivate confidence? Yeah.

Because I think a lot of people know that confidence is what it takes, but they don't know how to train to be confident. Yeah. I think they have to somewhat. girls, I don't, I'm quite, I don't care about the grace. I mean, the grace will be whether the grace won't be. I care more about you have a passion and that you go do something about it. So my, my eldest daughter loves psychology, youth empowerment. She will go to girls' home. She will volunteer and stuff. My second girl is about sustainability. She food composed and not

so I encourage them I think confidence needs to be built up just like for me you know you know I started off quite I think I was given when I first joined McKinsey they gave me this kind of like office award most likely to be corrupted because I was so demure

and quiet you know it's very different and then but because you keep trying raise our hand you ask something. You do something. And, you know, I try to encourage them to not take no friends. So, like, my daughter who wants to do food composting. So she wants to be learned to be certified. She doesn't want to just read off the internet and then go teach a bunch of other people doing it. And it took a long time. She wrote to various organizations. People ignore her or say,

please go to this website. So I was very concerned because I don't want children to be disappointed. Because if they get rejected too many times in the young age, they were just like, okay, then I'll just do whatever. So I really pushed. I called everybody. I know. I said, look, I'm really sorry. Could you get such?

But even for me, it took a month to get someone. You know, she was the former CEO of HDV. And I said, I'm really sorry to call you. know you're retired, but I read somewhere, HDP does this thing. Could you, could you please? And she really did. You really did. And they went, I saw how the girls became more confident.

They did. Then the after that went to teach such students, more students. So it builds up. And then once they do this, they will know, oh, next time I can do another one better. So I think confident has to be built. And then whether as parents or teachers, I think it's about kind of helping. them sponsoring so that they don't get burned out at the beginning. And then once to a certain level, I think they will then start to take bigger and bigger risk. Because as you said,

I really believe the youth of this generation are much better than when I was there. We just study. I was a late bloomer. So, you know, they have so much more. They will do so much better. I think with the right kind of environment to do that. Yeah. I think the kids need to know that slipping or falling, while trying is okay. Yes, yes. Right? Yeah, yeah.

You know, as I was reading this book, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haith in NYU. He was making reference to how there is a sense of under protection with respect to offline activities and over protection, or sorry, overprotection with respect to offline activities and under protection with respect to online activity. Okay. With the current generation.

Why do you say? A little examples like, you know, when we were in our time, you know, when we would cross the street. You know, our parents wouldn't care. Yeah, yeah, no, that's right. We learned how to cross the street. There's cars and motorcycles, you know, let us learn. Yeah. Whereas now we're a bit more protective, right, with our kids.

So kids, be careful, you know. There's a car coming. There's a way. But we tend to be much more underprotective. Yes. when it comes to online activities. You know? Yeah.

And we have no idea. We have no control over what they look at on their mobile phones. Yeah. You know, outside the 30 minutes that we spend with them over dinner. Yeah. Or lunch or whatever. And they look at the mobile devices for 8 to 10 hours a day. Yeah.

There's a lot of bad stuff on that. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That, you know, he seems to correlate that. Yeah. With, you know, mental illnesses. And also he calls it spiritual degradation.

Okay. But if that's the case, well, the good point is that you can be influenced online, which, if used for good, frankly, could be more effective than offline. So then you can do a slight correction to actually influence them on the more inspirational or positive stuff. Absolutely. Well, I'm a little bit, well, it's controversial. Most of my friends restrict time on mobile devices. Because I'm in this industry, and I freely give, I take it as my job to actually try the new devices. All my old devices, everyone has many versions, and I don't restrict. But I think I was inspired by my second grocery more digitally gifted. Yeah, Lutheran.

She suddenly, there are only two things I make my girls learn, music, and coding. This is a non-negotiable. To me, a language. You don't need to be a musician, but if you didn't learn it, you cannot appreciate it. And coding is like language to machines. So they all protested against it, but they all love it. But anyway, my second girl for coding, one day she came to me when she was, I think, 13 or so. And she wanted to program games.

She asked if the kind of teacher she has, she can learn to, because she saw on YouTube, she plays a lot of games. She just lies there and plays. And this guy learned unity and would program his own game in two days. And she said, I want to do my own game. And she created a little mushroom game that just keep jumping. It's a very simplistic game. But I was, I was really, and these days they get,

information from stuff like she was reading, that was this simplified, this whole series of videos on YouTube and then what is a tyrant? And then she was really, you know, hit and she was arguing me about, no, tyrant and stuff. I was impressed. No, but like you said, the problem is that kids are younger age, they are not at the face of being able to discern facts easily influence. Right. You can the channel the energy. in the right way. But if it can be, the good thing about digital is that

it can be scaled up. Your daughter is lucky to have the mother as a co-CEO of Ping-on. So the conversations are very different. Yes, that's right. I know. I know. Compare that with conversations elsewhere, right? So the question is,

how do you take some of that? Because AI is very simple. AI is about learning what the best people do and then be able to replicate. That's how we train our bots. We took the top 10%. So for me, it's always about can it be done? If it can be done in one case,

then let's figure out all the other conditions that you can scale up. I think digitally, that's the benefit of that. It's not going to be as easy, but actually we have higher chance than offline. Because imagine if it's something that I can only influence offline, you've got to first influence A people, then B people, and then it's geographically,

and then it's hard to determine quality. then I think that would be a harder challenge. That's true if you've got the right person at the zip code that knows how to tell everybody within that zip code what to look at. Yes. Right? So, I mean, I think you opened just now about Southeast Asia

some of the things were lacking. Yeah. I think governance is actually one very important one because we're so few resources, both capital and people. You need good orchestrators to be able to put it in the right area. And, you know, I've seen, like, in China sometimes when you have to a good mayor or something,

suddenly the whole city, problems that haven't been solved for decades. It just gets solved. And I think that kind of balance, if we could do that, could perhaps make a lot of difference. Yeah. Okay. Okay, I'm going to ask you the last question. Of course. We'll spend more than two hours.

AI, when I get asked what AI can do, I try to simplify the answer. It's really supposed to make people healthier, wealthier, smarter. We've talked about all these three attributes. The fourth one is, I think, happier. No, okay, okay. Well, that's really tough.

What makes you happen? Yeah, that's right. Define happiness. Yeah. Happy is very elusive. Well, I hope AI is going to help. Humanity with becoming smarter. Yes.

Healthier, wealthier. Yeah. Yeah. I love that you're pushing happy because it's so, it's ironic that some countries are richer, healthier. Not happy. That's really sad. I'm very sad. And I remember reading some of the university, I think in some of the university in your

I think in some of the university in US, they actually have a center for happiness. Well, for me, I think I'm very simple person. There's two parts of me, the family part, and then the professional part. And the family part for me is a base. Once in a while, on the sheet of people, I'll draw a little bit where I am and stuff like that.

So I always put like a house. Last I drove, but I think in October last year. And so for me, my family, my extended family of 10 people, you know, there are certain goals that they all have, and I'm here to enable, and if they're happy, I'm happy. I think that's for me, it's more important. And so you can see throughout my journey, I never let it compromise that.

And I'm and particularly because I was in New York during 9-11. And for me, life is so sure I can, I take place so often. So I think that that keeps me grounded. And then I'm happy if my professional life, I have, I made a difference. I have impact, the ability to, you know, create a difference. I don't want to do more the same. It's not found. money. And I think a lot of the problems now these days is people run businesses because of

maybe the quarterly earnings or whatever. Money making becomes the purpose. It's not, I mean, actually, whole point of business is that what's your original purpose, right? It's to improve health care or whatever. And then making money is the kind of to make it economically sustainable. So I ask for myself, particularly at this point, I'm very lucky, you know, than my parents' generation where they had to work, you know, and such a, at least I'm able to think about what I want to do professionally and can choose what you want to do. So it's about having impact in the business, in the sector, it made a difference as a model that a lot of things that we talked about, that would give me great pride and happiness,

and that the people who are involved, and it's a more multi-sakeholder, we talk about sustainability, and you define it. A sustainable business is not just profit shareholder. It's about your employees. It's about the customers, of course, environment as well as we. And now, I think people now talk about ESG, but they talk it more as a kind of pick the box. Very few businesses really kind of think about that.

So I'll be very happy if I'm able to do something, at least within my sphere. And, yeah, and I think that would, you know, hopefully inspire more people and do better. I wouldn't have lived my life in vain. Amen. Amen. Jess, thank you so much.

My pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks for coming. All the best. That was Jessica Tan, former co-CEO of Peng-on Group. Thank you. This is Endgame.