Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Mahathir Mohamad: How Democracy Should Evolve | Endgame Luminaries Special

Episode Date: July 16, 2022

Malaysia's fourth and seventh prime minister and a towering figure in Asian history, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, talks about the things miring democracies these days and what it means to be devout Muslims. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #MahathirMohamad ----------------------- Watch the special episode in video format: https://endgame.id/mahathir Pre-Order the Endgame official merchandise: https://wa.me//628119182045 Join the next generation of progressive "policy leaders": admissions.sgpp.ac.id [e-mail] https://wa.me/628111522504 The Endgame playlists: https://endgame.id/season2 https://endgame.id/season1 https://endgame.id/thetake

Don't know how much you know about what we're doing. We started a podcast about one and a half years ago on a mission to educate Indonesians and to some extent the people beyond Indonesia. So we've interviewed various people from different backgrounds and people from the background, spirituality, science, Science, digitalization, genetics, and academicians. You have been an inspiration to me, personal.

This is NG. Hello, my time. Today we're coming Tud Mahatir Muhammad. Manthan-Mentery Malaysia who has been made up to make up in Malaysia two two times, the first, for 22 years, until 2003,

and the second, almost two years, from 2018, until 2020, Torn Mahathir, it's a pleasure and an honor for you to be here, and for me to be able to speak to you.

It's my pleasure also. I want to... I want to... I asked you a lot of questions, but let me begin by asking how you grew up. More in the context of how you made a decision, first to become a doctor, and how you switched over to politics. Well, it's the reverse, actually. I wanted to be a politician. I was in school, I was already involved in politics.

But I found that people don't take me seriously because I was a schoolboy. And I thought that I need to have something to give me some credibility. And I thought that getting a university degree would help that. So I wanted to study law, but they gave me a scholarship to study That's all right, because it's still about getting a university degree. And when I came back from studying, I was more easily accepted for what I had to say. So it is a politician who chose to be a doctor, not a doctor who chose to be a politician.

But you stayed on as a doctor for quite a long time. I stayed on, yes, while waiting to have a role, bigger role in the world. role in politics. I was still involved in local politics, but I had to make some money for myself. So I worked with the government for a few years and then I decided to go into private practice. And that gives me a lot of free time and no regulation from the government stopping me from being involved in politics. Okay. And was it a calling to to change the nation as for you to finally make that decision to go into politics?

Yeah, you know, Malaysia is a multiracial entry. I was disappointed to find that my people, Malays, were not involved in business. They were, they just want to earn a living through while being employed and getting a salary at the end of the month, a pension when they retire. when they retire, they look for the easy way out. But they have to do business. And I was very disappointed that the town of Alasar, where I came from, the business people were almost entirely Chinese and some Indians. No Malays.

So I wanted to change that. I've read all your books, Malay Dilemma, Doctor in the House, capturing hope. there's a set of recurring themes. And one of which is, of course, what it means to be Malay, right? And you've shared your views about how the Malays could actually be better and how that basically relates to how they could be better educated. Talk a little bit about that. This country had always been known as Malay land, kind of Malayu.

And I felt that while we are willing to share with other people, migrants, but we should have our fair share of the wealth of this country, the opportunities in this country. But I slowly began to realize that we are not getting our share. It's not anybody's fault, it's our own fault because we don't try hard enough, we don't go into business. particular. The idea was that as an employee with a salary, life would be very easy. No fear of not getting money at the end of the one. Is this a case of perhaps they're not being predisposed to entrepreneurship early enough? Or maybe something else. I know you came up with so many statements and even policies as to try to correct that, one of which probably was you're embracing the NEP as to help with the

nurturing of Malay entrepreneurship. Talk about that. Well, life is very easy in Malaysia. Right. normally settle on the banks of rivers. They can get fish from the river, they can travel with canals in the river and behind their house they could grow some rice and maybe have some cattle. So life was easy. There is no great effort needed, no challenges, no like in Indonesia you have earthquakes and the like. What? Life is not challenging in Malaysia and the need to strain yourself is not there and the

culture of easy living developed over the centuries and when they meet people from other cultures they found it difficult to compete because people who came to settle in Malaysia had to face many challenges and they were very with overcoming all the challenges. But the Malays don't have to overcome any challenge. Life was easy. And because of that, they tend to let other people do things. While they have a reasonably good life,

without making any extra effort. Do you think this could be helped with the cultivation of leadership at the top. At the community level, or at the provincial level, or at the national level, that would basically get them to change from a behavioral standpoint, because there are places or countries out there

where one would argue that the lifestyle is also pretty laid back, but they're doing better, right? right because of perhaps of a better leadership that's in place. Yeah. We were we had agreements with the British to provide us with administrative guidance and they practically took over the administration or a country. A few Malays were employed as under study but people they created a lot of jobs in the government so getting a job steady income was not a problem then so if they don't they

resort to just planting rice and and doing just work that is not too strenuous for them so as i said there is no challenge no pressure on them and they live a very safe secure life because the British did provide good administration, but of course the British did not try to upgrade or improve the lifestyle of the Middle East. I want to take this or put this in a context of leadership and what it would take for a nation to have the right kind of leadership. We live in an era where the cultivation of a leadership or the ushering of leadership nowadays is more by way of sensationalization as opposed to intellectualization. Thanks to social media, it works both ways, right? But I see a phenomenon or an episode or a tendency where the guys that get to the top,

in many places around the world, particularly democracies, it's not, who could actually think about the future. But it's the guy that's more popular than the next guy. You have been very adamant about not wanting to win a popularity contest. You've always been a man of principles in wanting to advance principles that you believe are good for the people of Malaysia. I want to seek your wisdom on this. Well, we didn't develop any leadership capability because politics in those days was limited to the ruling class.

The ordinary people were not allowed to participate in politics. We just leave everything to the ruling class which consists of the Sultan and some of his offices. As a result, people, especially when they are not challenged, they, they were. were quite satisfied. Under the Malay rule, there was absolute monarchy. And then when the British came, the British continued with that. The people should not participate in politics. And there was no challenge, as I said, until the British decided that instead of just advising the Malay states, they decided that they should take over the whole country and, right, it by themselves like a colony. At that stage the people became agitated, especially when the

rulers were weak and they decided to hand over their states to the British. And the people at that time decided that they would protest. And then that time they developed leadership, leaders from among themselves, of which one of the most prominent was Dato On and then later on of course to go up Brahman. But because of the challenge of the possibility of British taking over the country, then they became concerned about the future of the country and they went into politics merely to protect their country. Okay, fast forward to today. You've, you're a lot of older than I am. So you've seen many more events and phenomena, but how do you see democracies

as they are today? And how do you see them needing to evolve going forward? We can claim that we live in a democracy, but we can argue that I think it needs to be remedied to some extent, or probably to a great extent. How do you see that molding? going forward for the benefit of the people of Southeast Asia. There is no doubt that democracy is perhaps the best form of government. Unfortunately, it is very complicated. It gives power to almost everyone and obviously they will challenge each other. Unless there is a willingness to accept certain rules,

you cannot make the democracy work. For example, if you have elections, If you lose, you must accept losing and wait for the next election. But in most cases, new democracies, we find that people who participate in the election, when they lose, they invariably objected to the result. They say that, well, the other party won because they cheated. And when they win, the other party will say also the same thing, that they cheated. So because of that, after election, there is no stability. There is no period when the country was stable and able to have a good administration.

This is a problem of democracy. And we noticed this very early. And fortunately for us, the idea of democracy was very well accepted. And people were not against. losing, they were willing to lose because the winning party was powerful, very strong winning two-thirds majority and all that. So there was no challenge and sable governments were set up in Malaysia despite the differences of found among the people.

So later on of course the people began to challenge the winning party. They want to have a share of the politics and they had to demonize the government in order to become popular. So the situation at the beginning when we were, when we became independent and adopted a democratic form of government, things were run smoothly. But later on, everybody began to feel that, well, if they can win election, we can win too. And so a lot of people, they begin to break up, the parties begin to break up. And the result is that there is no party that is strong enough by itself to win election. Are you suggesting that democracies have a better chance if there is less of a fragmentation on the political landscape? Is that when you're alluding to?

Yeah. I think if you have a two-party system, then the chances of one party winning is easy. Because one or the other will win. But when you have multiple parties, then everybody would have a small piece. And nobody would have the majority to form the government. In that case, of course, there is a need for some parties to come. come together and they have different ideas, they don't work well together. So if you look at most of the European democracies, usually there are two-party systems.

Two to three parties, yeah. And because of that, at every election, somebody is going to win. Correct. Now, I want to peel the onion a little bit more here. Democracy essentially distributes power to everybody, right? And you go with the presupposition or presumption that everybody is well informed, everybody is competent. But there are many countries around the world where not everybody is well informed. Not everybody is as competent as the others. That kind of skews, right, how democracies would function.

Would that be the right way to look at it? Well, the assumption is that people will choose the best people to form the government. That's the assumption. But there are other factors which influence the thinking of the people. For example, if there are different races, different tribes or different ideologies, they do not choose the best, but they choose people who they believe in their particular concern. For example, if it is tribal, they pick the people from the same tribe or race or maybe ideology. And they break up into many parties. Once they break up into many parties, then it is difficult for any one of them to come up and win a very significant number of seats to form the government.

I want to drill down on this a little bit more. more. We are seeing a bit of a paradox where many democracies around the world have not been able to democratize talent, democratized talent, selecting talent based on merit. But instead, they've chosen talent based on patronage or loyalty. And that is a discount to the ability of a democracy to function, right? Whereas on the other hand, we've seen an autocracy like China, having been able to select talent

based on merit. Right? And that, to me, was sort of like the way to democratize talent. And we're believers of democracies on the basis that in a democracy, you should be able to democratize talent. Well, actually, in the democracy,

the talented people are unwilling to go into politics. The reason is that in politics, of course, you get criticized, you get hammered almost every day. Nothing that you do will be fully supported by everybody. Maybe somebody will support you, but you are always facing a lot of opposition from different groups. because they don't care about your ability, your talent. All they care is that they want to unseat you

so that they can take over. Whether they are capable or not, to them is irrelevant. So they just say, because winning means you get power, and they want the power, because the power enables them to do a lot of things, including wrong things. I mean, you've talked about this in your books, right? how bureaucracies and the administrative processes have been upended by way of the selection of the wrong talent.

And it's not supposed to happen. So how do we fix that? How do we remedy it? Do we have to take the really long view? Or is there a way to remedy this in a much more faster way? When a government is formed, that government invariably wants to be supported. Right. And for that, they are willing to dismiss or put aside people who are talented but are not supportive.

They pick people who support them. And the people who support them are not always the best people. So even the administration will go wrong. People are put into coal storage because they don't follow the... They didn't support the government fully. And when a government stays in power for too long, even the administrative machinery becomes dominated by the government.

They actually participate in politics. They work in order to ensure that the government wins. Of course, the opposition is not happy with administrative officers. because of the tendency for the administration to uphold the existing government because they feel comfortable. The last one on democracy,

I kind of touched on this earlier, but how do you think we can fix the way social media has been amplifying algorithms for the wrong narratives instead of the right narratives? Well, in the past, the normal media is subjected to some kind of censorship. If you write an article for a newspaper, the editor will either reject it or modify it, etc. But in the present media, nobody checks on what you say.

And so you have fake news or some rumors. created by these people, which has no basis in fact. So this makes it very confusing. You want to know whether this is true or not true, sometimes it's difficult. So people may get worked out, say, with some idea that excite them. And then, of course, you get the wrong people supporting the wrong candidates. I mean intuitively I just get the sense that as long as this platform is not editorialized when it's being looked at or viewed by billions of people I'm not so

sure if democracy is going to be able to work whereas a typical newspaper which is read by maybe a few hundred thousand people or a couple of millions maybe it's properly editorialized so there is there is an imbalance here in terms of what we're trying to achieve on the democratic front, but what we're still failing to do on the media front? Well, when the idea of democracy was first mooted, there was no social media. So there was no problem.

And the government can have full control over the media through various means. But now you are challenged by the media. The media can see what it likes and you have to explain yourself. Very few governments are able to handle this. So you can see changes taking place in government so much so that there is no stability. Even good ideas get challenged and when you get challenged like that, then you can't actually implement the good ideas.

So democracy now is facing a challenge of too much freedom. You see, freedom cannot be absolute. But the fact is that if you try to cope or to prevent certain things when being said, then you will be accused of controlling. And that is not democratic. So playing around with media and all that now becomes very, very difficult. very very difficult and people employ good very clever people they have a group of people who will answer all the questions that come up in the media but others

who are weak they don't have this mechanism they just cannot defend themselves the next one i want to seek your wisdom on is Islam You've talked about this repeatedly in your books, and the last one of which, capturing hope, you reminisced over the golden age of Islam by way of the existence and presence of al-Biruni, Abisina, Al-Qarishmi. These are the great scientists that would have lived, you know, under the leadership of the al-Bir-Mas. Mansour's, Al Mahmahmuns and Harun al-Rashits of the world. I think of it as an era where Muslims were very open-minded at that time.

My question to you is, you're a Muslim, you're a devout Muslim, I'm a Muslim. What does it take to be a good Muslim? Yeah, you know, after the death of the Prophet, you know, you know, you're a devout Muslim, you you cannot refer to him for his opinion. So a lot of people now come up front to interpret the religion. And their interpretations differ one from the other. So the Muslim broke into groups following this teaching, that teaching, this teaching, to the point where they consider certain groups as not being Muslim, not being Islamic enough.

So over the years, the centuries, the number of new thinking, new ideas and all that is numerous. Right. Thousands of different interpretation and it's all very confusing. And the people who interpret, insists that they are the right people to interpret. Other people cannot. For example, they say that if you want to read the Quran, you must have a teacher with you. with you to make sure that you interpret correctly. But I had to face an Islamic party here and they keep on quoting from the Quran and the

Hadith and all that. So I wondered whether they were doing things correctly or not. I read, I finished my Quran reading at the age of 12, I finished the whole Quran already. But I did not understand the message. of the Quran because I didn't understand Arabic. So I had to read the Quran in Malay and in English. I made comparison between the different translations. And I found immediately that what they are saying about Islam is not true.

It's not what is in the Quran. In fact, they are saying things which are opposite to what the Quran teaches. Then I began to question whether they are making the right interpretations or not. or not by comparing it with the message from the Quran. Very simple. For example, the Quran says all Muslims are brothers. But we are not treating each other as brothers. Then in the Quran it says that a Muslim cannot kill.

Whether he is a Muslim or non-Muslim, you cannot kill. That means you are killing the whole of humanity. And many, many other teachings of Islam are not being followed. So I felt that the reason why we fail is because we don't actually practice what the region is telling us to do. You know, Islam has the way of life, Adin, way of life. And we are not following the way of Islam, the way of life of Islam. And therefore we make a lot of mistakes and we are saying, a decline of the Muslim Ummah.

So if you go back to the Quran, there is less possibility of your differing from each other. Because there is only one Quran, unlike the Christian Bible, which we have many versions. But the Quran, you have only one Quran. And what it teaches there is the message from God, from Allah. So this is the message that created Islam. So when you read it, you find that all the advice, all the guidance given there are very positive and good for you. But we don't follow. Even Muslims don't follow. For example, you shouldn't be fighting each other, but they're doing that.

You're killing people and the Quran stresses. when you judge, judge with justice, but we don't. There are many, many things there that we do that is not the teachings of Islam. And that is why we are in trouble. So I have been talking to a lot of people now to go back to the Quran. If you go back to the Quran,

the differences will be much less. But of course, they tend to feel to stick with the teachings of their particular ulama, their imam and all that. And so we are divided. Right. Some have suggested or hypothesized that religions are malleable. They're shaped by interpretations that are poured into them by whatever is in our head. And you're suggesting that it's the differential interpretations.

that have caused difficulties. And it doesn't just happen with Islam. It happens with other religions too. What I'm trying to get at is it kind of relates to the later point with regards to education. How important do you think it is for Muslims around the world to be educated on a broad-based basis so that we have fewer differences in interpretations,

so that we may have hope in re-enacting whatever we saw, close to a thousand years ago. Well, the early Muslims, there was not much literature on Islam. They read books written by the Greeks and the Indians and others and they were very open-minded. They studied science and they enlarged the amount of knowledge coming from science and they were good scientists, good mathematicians and all that. Until a period in the 15th century, when an ulama came along who said that there is

no merit in learning anything other than religion. Right. Hamid al-Nazali. If you read science, there's nothing for you in the afterlife. Right. But you must study religion. And then we find that the Muslim, the intellectuals switch away from science and mathematics and all that, to study religion. And when they study religion, they have different interpretations and they bring up the Muslim, the Muslim Ummah. But actually if you read the Quran,

the Quran actually urges you to read and it doesn't specify what to read. You just say Iqra, read. And you can read whatever because at the time when that message, the first message given to Muhammad was Ikra, there was no literature on Islam. So when you say read,

they can read anything. And they read I think the writings of philosophers like Aristotle and all that. And they develop their own thinking because of that. But now when they started saying that only reading about religion is, will gain you merit. Then of course we cut ourselves out from knowledge and as a result we cannot fulfill the teachings of the Quran.

For example, the Quran says, you must be prepared to defend the Muslim. What I say in the days of the Prophet, you need to have bows and arrows and lances and all that. But today, I mean, bows and arrows and war horses are going to help you. You need to have fighter planes. You need to have tanks and the like. And to do that, you need to have the knowledge of the sciences. of physics, of chemistry, mathematics and all that. But you have lost that knowledge. So now we are dependent on our own defense on others.

We had to buy weapons from them. We cannot make our own weapons. So we are actually diverting or going away from the teachings of the Quran because of this interpretation. And because your knowledge is confined only to religion, Farduan, Fardu kifaya and all that. But you have no knowledge about the sciences and therefore you're not able to protect yourself,

which is one of the things enjoined by Islam through the Quran, that all Muslims must be prepared to protect the Muslim. Again, I'll recite what you alluded to how the Muslims during the 8th until the 13th century, were making references to Aristotelian know-how, wisdom, physics. They were learning from the Indians.

The Arabic numeral was basically derived of know-how, wisdom from India, and they picked up the utility or use of paper from China. And it just shows tremendous degree of open-mindedness amongst the Muslims. And we just are not. seeing that today as much as we would have seen maybe a thousand years ago. You've been a proponent and a pioneer of this notion. I know you've tried to gather, you know, so many Islamic countries around the world to pound on this message. What can we do about this so that Muslims around the world can become more open-minded?

We need more enlightened leaders to change the curriculum in the schools. I mean, you have to teach good values to our children. In the past, of course, we all learned about values, living values from our parents, from our father and mother. But nowadays, they are preoccupied. Both parents are working. They don't have quality time with their children. So the schools must replace them. The school curriculum, the school curriculum must teach them that there is something wrong with the present teaching. You see that we have deviated from the Quran to accepting the teachings of certain imams and olamars to the point where we now fight each other.

So we must go back to the Quran because there is only one Quran and the teaching is the same if you based on the Quran. But unfortunately, we don't have leaders who are first brave enough to say that we are wrong and of course knowledgeable enough to say why we are wrong. That is why leaders must understand the religion. Otherwise you can't counter these people who says that, well, The Ulamas are the successes to the Prophet.

Well, I think they know a lot about Islam, but if you ask them, well, Islam asks you to protect the Ummah, how do you propagate? Oh, that they will know. You see? So we are lacking in the kind of knowledge that is adjoined upon by the Quran as part of the duty of the duty of

Muslims. This takes us to the next topic of education which is very dear to you and me. I want to raise some stats to you. I mean in a context of Nobel prizes in the field of science, you know there's been about more than 600 Nobel prices awarded for science, mathematics, chemistry, physics and all that good stuff. Only three Muslims have won. More than 150 Jews have won. The rest are basically mostly Christians. So in terms of percentage, the Christians have won more than 65% of total awards awarded. The Jews have won more than 25% whereas the Muslims have won less than 1%. But the population of Muslims is more than 2.2 billion. sorry, 1.8 billion. Christians are 2.1, 2.2.

We're the second most populous and we're nowhere near in terms of scientific achievement by way of the Nobel Prize Awards. What can be done with regards to education and more particularly with respect to STEM? You've been very passionate about the need to promote STEM. Well, we need leadership. We need people who are knowledgeable enough and brave enough to insist on a revolution in terms of knowledge, acquisition of knowledge. I think our school curriculum, even in Malaysia, is wrong. For example, the teaching of Islam here. Focus more on the afterlife. What will happen to you? in the afterlife. Very little about this world. There are some who actually thought the children that this world is not meant for us. We will get our share in the next world. This life is meant

for the cafe, for the non-Muslim, which is totally wrong. I don't know where they get that kind of teaching, but they are. Because what happens is that the teacher has studied religion and he wants to be sure that he becomes the leader because of his knowledge of Islam. People with other knowledge will not be supported by him because he wants to have people look up to him. That makes it difficult for them to teach. to the children that you must learn science, you see, because this is important to Islam, because they don't get this interpretation correctly. So what we need is to have a revision in terms of the curriculum that we teach our children.

Very simple thing. For example, this idea that you must have four witnesses to a crime. You see, but it's not always easy to get forward with people witnessing you committing a crime. But if you read the chapter on Yusuf and Zulaika, the fact that Yusuf's shirt was torn at the back was evidence that it was Zulaika who was chasing him, not as alleged by Zulika that Yusuf was trying to chase her. So that is circumstantial evidence. There are no four witnesses. But the Quran accepted that as evidence that it was Zlaika was wrong, not Yusuf.

It's accepted in the Quran. And yet we still have people who say that you must have four witnesses. For example, a woman is rape. No witness. She reports and she's blamed for wrong accusation. maybe get 80 lashes. And if she gives birth, accused of having committed Zina, you see, and the men who would rape her gets away scot-free because there are no four witnesses.

How can a person rape in front of four witnesses? I mean, the Quran provides that circumstantial evidence is enough. And today we have DNA and all that. We can verify who did it by examining the blood and all that. This is circumstantial evidence. It is accepted in Islam. But the average Muslim expert or whatever, ulama, no, no, we must have forewitness.

Their interpretation is different. Right. I'm in a camp that believes that your interpretations are shaped by how broad-based your education is. And that, I think, could be the critical part that needs to be remedied, right? You were a minister of education, and you talked a lot about, I know you scolded the teachers at some point. And I've been following this from you in the sense that there is a lot. There's a statistic where if you're a good teacher, you can create a real good impact as opposed to if you're not a good teacher.

If you're in the top 20th percentile, you can actually teach in one year, one and a half years of teaching. But if you're in the bottom 20th percentile, in one year you can teach only half a year's worth of teaching. I hate to say this in many parts of the world. Too many of those in the bottom 20th percentile are teaching, right? Is that something that you believe is realistically fixable? Yes, I think so. You see, in the past, the way of teaching is we have a teacher in the class to teach. The teacher may be good, the teacher may not be good, and of course the students will suffer or benefit depending upon the teacher. But nowadays you can actually record the

teaching, exact teaching by a good teacher and broadcast it, show it on the screen and he, she will be teaching well a hundred classes or a thousand classes and you can interact with him. We can ask questions and modern technology is such that the The method of teaching can be much more easy and more effective and you can zero in on the best teacher. After all, when you read books, books help us because they are written by the best author. But here we have an opportunity to change the way we teach in the class, but everybody is against it because they say, well, it may cause the teachers to lose their jobs. They don't have to lose their jobs.

They can assist in the class, but the teaching, actual teaching, should be by the best teacher. And today it's almost like life. The pictures are very clear, the experiments can be seen, everything can be shown in greater detail from the screen. But we are not using it. You know, in places like South Korea, teachers are picked from the top 5%. And on top of that, they're paid well, as well as if you had gone to work for a major consulting company or a bank or whatever, or a startup. And the social status is also pretty good.

I think it'll take a while for many countries around the world to reach that. because the recognition for teachers to be curated much more meticulously, the recognition as for teachers to be better compensated to the point where eventually, or sooner rather than later, they get recognized socially very, very well. I think that's problematic, don't you think? Yeah. What happens in most other countries in Korea in Malaysia? in Malaysia.

Yeah. Is that when a student cannot get into some discipline, study in some subjects or some discipline like engineering or what, they choose to become teachers. They are almost the dropouts. And they are not very good, of course. Still, in those days when I was a boy, a teacher is very well respected. My father was a teacher. And everybody calls him Master.

I mean, he has a certain aura about him. But nowadays, a teacher is just somebody who has no other job but British. He couldn't study something else. And you get not the best people to become teachers. Now if Korea gives a better treatment for teachers, that is a good thing. But then you need a lot of teachers. to find them it's not easy. For example, a lot of people want to study English

and we don't have enough people to teach English because English is not as well used today as before. So you try to your best, you get some teachers who are not very good, and as a result the students suffer. So I believe that if we adopt modern technology, will do better. I want to switch over to family matters.

How has the role of your wife been all this time? While you were a doctor, while you're a politician, and now you're back out of politics. Well, she's very tolerant. I don't spend much time with the family. I spend more time.

Even as a doctor, a private doctor, I spend a lot of time I'll try and get calls at night and all that. She's tolerant and doesn't get in the way of my career. So, well, I think she backs me. So I don't have any problem on that score. This morning I had a chat with your daughter. I asked her casually what it was like to be the daughter of

of Tun Mahathir. I'm going to flip the question. What is it like to be the father of your children? Yeah, my daughter's sometimes hold opinions which are not the same as the father. Right. And she's very critical and she joins, sometimes she joins with the opposition party. I mean, not actually becoming a member, but he is very close to them. And he voiced their their ideas also. But I felt that, okay, I have to tolerate that. And in the end, of course, she supports me. If I campaign for an election, she would go along.

But it doesn't mean that she agrees with me all the time. What is it that you do to keep you look and feel a lot younger than your age? I really don't know. I mean, I've read what you wrote, but I'm just curious. Now that I'm with you in person, I just wanted to find out. I think being interested in doing things in life itself, I think keeps you, maybe it keeps you young. But if you lose interest in your surroundings, you age.

You feel that well life is not worthwhile and things like that. But if you are doing something that will give you satisfaction in the end if you achieve, I think you feel much more spirited, much more willing to take chances and things like that. But I think the most important thing is the best thing, the best thing, The best payment is actually the success of your ideas. Right. I want to end this discussion on politics. You ran the country for 22 years, and you've showed us some really good things, right?

At least to me, right? And you've taken Malaysia from one place to another that's completely different in a good way. In hindsight, what is it that you could have done differently during those 22-year period? Well, one of the things that is necessary in a leader is to have ideas and to have solutions to problem. It's not just about naming the target, but to know how to reach the target. If you tell them to do, to carry out a certain policy, you must know how that policy can be carried out. So doing all this keeps me going or keeps me alive.

But what happens is that some people think that, well, if you get a certain position, that is an achievement, but getting into a position doesn't give you, doesn't make you achieve things. Maybe it will in some time. It will in some cases. But a leader must be able to see more than his followers. The followers have got a problem and they post the problem to you, you have to solve the problem. You see, when Malaysia became independent, we were a very poor country, very poor.

We were basically agricultural. We wanted to become industrialized. We had no capital, no knowledge of the technology, no understanding of management of big business, and no knowledge of the market. So how can we become industrialized? The answer was, okay, we open the country for others to come in and start some industries. That was the beginning of the foreign direct investment. Malaysia was different from quite a lot of other countries which became independent.

Most countries which were colonized before did not want to see the colonial masters come back or even people close to the colonial masters. But we went the other way. We invited them to come back. They and their people come back. The British came back, the Japanese of course, and Because we want their contribution. That is a solution which most people reject because we must do things on our own. We are independent now, therefore we cannot have other people tell us what to do. But we have to learn. We have to learn from successful people. So in Malaysia we decided on looking east, looking at Japan, later on looking at Korea and China and all that.

and all that and begin from their experience. You know, not anybody gets a chance to run a country twice at two different periods or, you know, over 15-year interval. I want to ask you the last question. It was different this time. And I want to know your views about how different or how it was different from your first time. you being slightly older than I am, what sort of a legacy do you envision for many of us in Southeast Asia?

Yeah. It's important to identify priorities. There are lots of things that you can do, lots of things that you want to do, but some of them cannot get the support that is needed. So in the case, In my case, for example, I identified only one objective to change the government, to remove the Prime Minister. And in this, I had the support of even the opposition. So I had to work with the opposition. People who used to call me dictator and all kinds of things. Who resigned.

But they decided that I should be their candidate for prime ministership. It's not my attempt to come back as a prime minister, but they realize that in this multiracial country, the support of the Malays is very important if they are going to win the election. They have tried to, in several elections they fail. They need some Malay support, and I represented Malay support. So they accepted me as part of their coalition. At the same time they appointed me as their leader. This is the man whom they used to condemn before, but now they exacted me as their leader.

And sure enough, because for me, perhaps, we get the kind of Malay support that gave victory to the opposition. Thur, Mahathir. Thank you so much for the time and honor. Welcome. and that's that's Tun Mahathir Muhammad, the man-in-lawyipin

or man-an-pimping Malaysia. Thank you, this is an endgame.