Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Peng Ong: ASEAN’s Race to Overtake China

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

Join Endgame YouTube Channel Membership! Support us and get early access to our videos + more perks in return: https://sgpp.me/becomemember ----------------------- A philosophical conversation about the future of AI between an engineer turned investor and an investor turned educator. Peng and Gita also discuss the urgency for Southeast Asia to ramp up its education, entrepreneurship, and leadership to be able to play on a global stage. Peng Ong is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Southeast Asia’s top early-stage tech venture capital firm, Monk's Hill Ventures. He has more than 25 years of industry experience as an entrepreneur, founder, and investor, both in Silicon Valley and Asia. Peng has co-founded several successful companies, including Match.com, Interwoven, and Encentuate, which collectively generate over 1 billion USD in revenues annually. Peng and Gita are Trustees of the Angsana Council, a not-for-profit advisory council focused on examining technology and its role in driving equitable and sustainable growth across Southeast Asia. Visit and get to know more about Angsana Council: https://angsanacouncil.org/ https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/angsana-council/ #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #PengOng ----------------------- About the host: Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur, educator, and currently a visiting scholar at The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University. Gita is also just appointed as an Honorary Professor of Politics and International Relations in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, UK. ---------------------- Understand this Episode Better: https://sgpp.me/eps169notes ----------------------- SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy: [e-mail] https://admissions.sgpp.ac.id https://wa.me/628111522504 Other "Endgame" episode playlists: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-hh_bKgnJ6FqDJwTs5YB3xMvQrFCDSoJ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-hh_bKgnJ6GMirnRoVac4TFpkQb85LqD https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-hh_bKgnJ6GKWds018OKy75Vw1bcCH_S Visit and subscribe: https://youtube.com/@SGPPIndonesia https://youtube.com/@VisinemaPictures

I think the fact that the world is getting more and more efficient leaves you less and less places to hide. The older I get, the less I trust myself in positive decisions about people. So we start building systems around that. The sign I'm looking for is the first AI that creates an AI better than a human-created AI. And game. Hello,

time, today we're going to Pengong. Heo is Pimpinan from Monshill Ventures.

He also founder and a friend to me and the cat my Pank,

so nice to graze our podcast. Talk about your early upbringing. You were born in Singapore.

Talk about what sort of values were inculcated into you by the parents, by the broad ecosystem.

that you grew up in? I think that was the core. That's my fundamental operating system I got from my family coming up, growing up, just hardworking, being honest. I come from a family of Christians, so Christian missionaries, elders, etc. So those values just stuck with me all my life. You know, it's just fundamental operating system. And it also drove me through school.

I was not a very sociable kind of kid. I was very, very introvert, which explains my engineering inclination, et cetera. But that sense of mission to do something with your life was there from the beginning with my dad bringing me up. Singapore is touted as one of the few places. in the world where there is a lot of premium put on education and then within the context of education a lot of premium on empirical science yes what role did your parents play in shaping you towards you know an empirical science field i think uh the deeper science part came from later on in grad school but but the the interest

in intellectual pursuits came fairly early. My dad would give me a pocket money every week, but books didn't count. I could buy any book and you'll pay for it. Wow. Yeah, so I went crazy with books, right? So I kept reading books, and this was, I think, my introduction

into the intellectual world. I started reading, of course, comics and all that stuff, but then progressed to books. How many books were you reading on average in a month? Oh, I don't know. When I was a kid, I don't remember, maybe half in a month, maybe one or two. Okay. So not that vigorous, but, you know, and there was all kinds of magazines and stuff like that.

So my curiosity about the world was basically driven by my reading. You know, I've been speaking quite a lot about how our kids all over the world. nowadays, don't pick up the books the way, you know, maybe the earlier generations used to. What do you think can be done about that? I think the core issue is not just reading. I think reading introduces you to the world. But I think curiosity is the thing that's maybe driven out of kids because of, I don't know, school work or, you know, just a busy schedule.

You don't have time to play. and in fact play is how you gain knowledge not just knowledge but high interest in acquiring knowledge about the world I think the idea of curiosity and the idea of play has been maybe remove

too much from our educational system right so you result in kids that know how to memorize a whole bunch of stuff and regurgitate it in the exams and they don't seem to be interested in in almost anything. Yeah. Right.

And that's very sad. So, you know, we've, we've even invested in companies that try to disrupt that kind of mental mindset a bit. We'll talk about that. But talk about the role of your mom at home. Yeah. Was she a big shaper of your life journey? Unfortunately, she was, actually, but I lost her when I was about two and a half.

Oh, my. Yeah. So it was a bit of a learning journey because I subsequently in high school made friends with another guy that, Sun Ming is his name, that grew up basically with a dad. And I realized how different our characters were. I just couldn't read people. I was not. And I became conscious of that. You know, just a simple thing like saying as a boss, you know, good job, right?

You know, took me a while to learn, right? But I think I figured out some of that. But my intuitive nature is still missing, I think, the softer side. It's not intuitive, right? You've named your company after the school you went to. It's not like, you know, some of the other schools that, you know, many Singaporeans would proudly claim to have gone to. Talk about that.

Yeah. Yeah. Mangsel secondary school was the school I went to. Yeah. And I didn't have as much of a choice because I didn't do as well in some of the subjects in elementary school. So I went to Mangstle. And what I realized is that there's almost a giving up of hope.

Right. If you didn't make it to one of the top schools in Singapore, right, if you didn't come from like Raffles or ACS. And what I realized is that that's almost a self-defeating kind of view of life. Right. And one of the reasons we took the name, Mansell is to signal to folks. You know, where you come from doesn't matter that much. It's how you think about the world, how you engage people. that's what makes great entrepreneurs, in fact, great people. Yeah. Yeah.

And there are other reasons like monks are, you know, both East and West were on the forefront of technology for many centuries. Serendipity. So many reasons, but I think the core of which is the sense of you can come from anywhere. Yeah. Kids need to understand that they're not boxed in. Yeah. Yeah.

When they're 16, 17, or 18. Yeah. You're boxing only if you let yourself be boxing. Yeah. Yeah. And when you're that young, you should feel free to explore. Yeah. Yeah.

Did your father play a part in pushing you not to feel boxed in? Yeah. Or it was more your friends and just a moment of serendipity. You woke up one morning. You wanted to defy the odds. My dad was. one of these let

you run kind of guy right he was clear what was important books right gave me

free flow books and the other thing is he would give me money for grades right

I like an incentive system yeah it's an incentive system it's all carrot right

there's no stick I never had any that's a great system yeah and I was just

you know and he would just show me a lot of interesting things in life. He's an entrepreneur, so he showed me his different businesses, et cetera, growing up. So I think the most, well, I got a lot of learnings from my dad, but I think probably the most important one was the sense of confidence that no matter what happens, I can put food on the table. So I think you need at least that confidence if you were to start a company, right? Because what happens? if it doesn't work.

So I think through thick and thin, I mean, this was Singapore in the 60s and 70s. It wasn't Singapore today, and you had ups and downs in the economy. And you could see as an entrepreneur, it's not so easy, right? But he always had food on the table for us. And that's, you know, that's that sense of,

yeah, I don't have to worry about that. Right. Yeah. When was your first moment or episode when you thought that you could, put food on a table after school or while or during school no even in high school when i looked at my dad you know i had this confidence that you know um i could take care of myself and him if i needed to and my family yeah um i think that's the confidence you get out of being a son of an entrepreneur

Yeah. So you went to college in the U.S. Yes, I do. Right. Got great degrees, master's and bachelors, like great schools. Were you already entrepreneurial while schooling there? One of the reasons I went to the U.S. was to pursue my dream to become an entrepreneur. My heroes were like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. And I knew you could do big things in the U.S. as a guy. geek. I wasn't one of these clips sales guy. I was not very sociable. But what these guys gave me was a sense that it doesn't matter if you've got great ideas and you can bring them into reality. You can build value. And that engineer inclination at me was driving that. That's the thing that I'm actually not sure where I got it from because my dad's not an engineer, right? But I've got this incredible desire to build things, right? Even from young. Well, you knew how to make money, right? And you definitely know how to make money.

What wasn't my focus, right? Literally wasn't my focus. My focus was do cool stuff with products and engineering. And then subsequently, I realized how fun that was with teams, and building teams or people. Never focused quite on making money. But I think the result of a passion for products and the passion for people is you make money. Were you like building stuff already in the dorm room? Software. You know, this playing around with ideas. Yeah.

My first company out of school was a startup. Okay. Talk about that, the dating company. Oh, the dating was a little bit after, but I can talk about the dating company first. It was actually very interesting. This is where I started the idea. of looking for ridiculous states of the world, right? You look at the situation and you go, this is nuts.

Why is the world like this, right? It makes no sense whatsoever. If you find something like this, there's probably a big business to be had in there. And we are looking at classified ads and how people find things, you know, and they'll do, you know, looking at classified ads on newspapers

with their finger and it's all ink. You go, wait, there are these things called computers, right? And the internet was fairly new at that point. This was in the 90s or 80s? Yeah, 90s. Okay. Yeah, I'm not that old. But I'm not that young.

Okay. But so we built this company called Electric Classifieds, right? And lo and behold, when you do research into classified ads, the biggest money-making section was the personals. So we got Match.com as a domain and we started. doing the dating business and who have thought that, you know, it would affect the meeting habits of most human beings. This was the early version of whatever is so popular now. Tinder.

Oh, Match is still popular. MASH owns, I don't know, like half the dating apps out there. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So it's a huge company now. And you made that. You created that. We started match 20, sorry, 95, I think.

You're still involved or you got out? Yeah, we sold the company some time ago. I think Barry Diller, who bought the company with IAC, really cranked it up to the scale it is today. And some of the guys at OKCupid, they were also responsible, a couple of them I'm in touch with, also responsible for creating the scale

of that business. How many companies have you gotten involved in before you came up with this VC idea? Oh, wow. I started basically three companies, founded or co-founded three companies. But involved with this is a very broad. Yeah. I've brainstormed lots of ideas with lots of entrepreneurs. So involved at the pre-seat level, you know, before they even started the company.

invested before we started Mung-Sil, I was already investing with other funds. So, I'd say like literally dozens before I even started investing from a fund. As a founder, you already started investing with seed capital, a bunch of other folks. But if I don't count that, I still had. dealings with you know dozens of companies what would lead you up to leave the united states to leave the it's simple my dad wasn't so well i see yeah so i came back you know best decision i ever made in my life i had seven more years with him yeah in singapore same here man so you came back to singapore yeah and then you continued your endeavors and then you decided to go to china yes

Right? That was after your dad passed? After he passed, I discovered I had all these family members in China. Right. Not very distant. They're second cousins. My dad's cousins, kids, right? So I met a whole bunch of them.

I met 41 male pangs. Pangs my generation only. And, you know, it's amazing, right? So I spent a bunch of time getting to know them. And I realized there's this whole part of my life that I know. no clue about. So I decided to move to China and had a good friend called Richard Lim and he invited me to join GSR. And I did and that was yet another adventure, right? Investing some of the biggest, I don't know what they call them. They're bigger than

unicorns, right? They're worth like tens of billions. T.T. For example, we invested in when it was Series A. Wow. Erlama, Elimi. That was, we got that in as a C company. There's a C company. when there are four kids invest delivering product out of their dorm rooms

and that was sold for like $10 billion to Ali so a whole bunch of other companies I got involved in great, great, great fun in China.

The temptation to go to China over the US at that time was more related to your having roots there. But economically,

it could have gone either way, right? Yeah. No, the US is where, if I wanted to make money, the US is where I knew the system, I grew up there. Right. You know, I had the connections there. But China was, there's this huge country where my dad's from, that I have no clue what it was about, right? And I failed my Chinese all through high school.

So I didn't read Chinese literature or anything close. So I thought, hey, you know, better go figure out. where that part of your life came from. We're about in China? Was your dad? Fujian. Okay. He was actually born in Beijing, but the family is from Fuchin.

From a place called Zhangzhou, which is very near Shaman. And most of my, the Aung families were mostly around there still. They didn't move too far. Talk about the founding. of Monsk. So I was in China and I was chair of a fund called Infocom Investments, which is actually a $200 million government fund that I helped the government run. And I brought in Koi, whom I known from a previous startup. I brought him in to run Infoom And both of us were talking and we realized this region, Southeast Asia, was due for a real boom in tech.

And the Series A investors, beyond the seat, series A investors were not, were just not there. Actually, it turns out the number of other funds, a bunch of other people figured this out also and decided to start the fund. So we decided also to start Moncil around 2012, incorporated it in 2013. So this is our 10th year anniversary. Wow. And we started fundraising and started investing. Our first check went to Ninja Van in 2015 in January. Wow.

Hell of a time. Yeah. Still great. I actually think it's even. Not a lot of people were thinking of doing venture. Yes. Right? I mean, you were, I think you're one of very, very few out there looking at Southeast Asia.

The Singapore government actually did invest in a whole bunch of seed funds. Sixteen of them to be accurate. This is part of the National Research Foundation. I was on a board then when we did that. And that triggered a whole bunch of startups in the region. I think they were very clear it's not just Singapore. They had to go to the region. So they started doing that.

And that formed the pool of the investable companies that we, a Series A fund, could invest in. Talk about your investment philosophy. I mean, you've talked about first principles and all that. Yeah. There's a few things we adhere to, which make us very different. I mean, first of all, we have four partners, two venture partners, a bunch of other associates. And all the partners are former CEO founders. almost everyone is a former founder or been in the startup

in the investment team. So we just have a different view of how you engage entrepreneurs. And what we look for is also somewhat different. First principles, do you actually have a unique economic model that you can scale up to make money, right? We like to joke about this concept of negative blitz scaling. When you actually have a negative union economics and you scale your sales anyway, resulting in a very negative scaling of your profits, your losses, basically.

And that was a trend the last 10, 15 years, we thought was a bit nuts. We focus on really solid unit economics. we focus on what we call, and this is probably the main thing, philosopher warrior type of founders, founders that have very, very clear on what they're trying to do. You ask them everything from why are you an entrepreneur, why are you building this company to, how does this marketing campaign return at least three acts? They're very, very clear on everything. They've thought it through logically, systematically.

then you see their warrior's side, right? They go, okay, bam, execute. And they get things done, right? Very quickly, things are done. You give them a suggestion. They agree. It's a good idea. Makes me you talk to them.

Oh, yeah, we've rolled it out through a thousand, you know, customers already. That's what we look for. And that's another piece I've added to this philosopher warrior now. And that's the nurturer. As they scale up, they need to grow people. So that's what we look for. That above everything else drives success. And we've learned through painful mistakes

by sort of going, oh, that's a great idea. Don't quite like this founder, but we'll try it anyway. It doesn't work that way. Talk about the mistakes that you would have made that were really tough to undo. Yeah, if you invest in a founder who has less than the level of integrity you need to be a successful business person,

there's no way to recover from that. You've just lost the investment. If you invest in someone that has, how do I say, being right, then it's more important than winning, meaning the ego is driving things much more than building a successful team, etc that's why you get in trouble because people don't tell you stuff if you don't want to hear stuff right yeah um so those types of investments really hard to recover from right we we focus generally we focus on getting that right up front and early on we made a few mistakes you know

and what i like to say is the older i get the less i trust myself in positive decisions about people. So we start building systems around that. The competent bad people are really difficult to tell apart from the competent good people. So we build reference check systems,

you know, background checks, etc. to do that. Dude, I mean, everybody has cognitive bias. Yeah, that's right. Especially if you think that's a great guy. You forget, you know, to do the right things, right? So now we tend to be a little bit more systematic about the founders. You know, we, a few of us talk to the same person, same founder.

We spend a bit more time with them before we write the checks. You know, since I first met you, you wrote me in us, you know, a member of the council, the Yangsana Council, right? You've always been talking about paying particular attention to unit economics when you're looking at something, right? Yeah. It's a little bit different from the conversations that are ongoing out there with respect to somebody else. Well, it's coming back now.

Well, I'm talking about it maybe until about a year and a half ago, right? How did you feel? I mean, you must have felt differently, right? Yeah. Because, you know, if you're a surfer, you know, you're waiting for this wave, right? It may take you three hours. You hear conversations about these guys that are not waiting for as long as you are. That's got to be disturbing.

It is. I think the fact that I'd done three other companies before that gives me a certain level of confidence. and trusting my philosopher. Yeah. Right. What I couldn't have predicted is that this bubble of this negative blitz-scaling way of thinking, just momentum trading in entrepreneurship, right? I couldn't have figured out this would last like 10, 12 years.

That's something I didn't expect, right? Interesting. What I knew it would stop at some point. because we've seen enough of these cycles you know gravity works at some point right no matter how high you unless you hit escape velocity which then the analogy breaks but um what what was hard to predict and what was hard to maybe explain to people is look this is going to stop at some point right if you go down the path uh you might get lucky and get out in time but you can see most VCs that went in that direction, they didn't get out in time.

If you momentum trade, a very important strategy is when you get out. But I think people weren't thinking of themselves in momentum trading when they were doing these high valuations at negative union economics. There was this perennial trust and dependence on the high velocity of money. Yeah. right? And boy, how they missed out. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, there are a few people I know that actually were very clear that this was momentum trading and they got in, they got out and they made their money. It's like crypto. Yeah. I mean, if you go long for crypto, I think you'll be in not so good shape right now. Yeah. Right.

But there were a whole bunch of people that were traders. Yeah. And they made money. I've never been a trader, momentum trading kind of guy. I'm a fundamentals kind of person. So that's not my game. I don't play that game.

Does your philosophy or philosophizing trickle to each one of the founders that you've invested in? I hope so. I talk about it. No, no. Because it's the success of the business, right? If they don't think deeply about their business, you know, they will be challenged.

It's down to their relationship with their leadership team, the responsibility of a CEO, you know, how to, even if you have a great team, always be looking at upgrading folks, you know. It's triple-clicking into the details of your business. It's questioning how technology like AI, for example, is going to disrupt your business models. So you always got to be thinking.

Yeah. And one of the toughest things I try to get, especially the type A, that really go-getters to do is actually take half a day off on the weekend and think. Right. That turns out to be the hard thing to do. Yeah. Because they're so used pushing forward aggressively. And I've seen the disadvantage of even very smart people who don't stop to think.

Right. They do something very well that they maybe shouldn't be doing. And they missed out on huge opportunities. They get caught in this loop. Yeah. Which. I'm doing, therefore, I must be creating value kind of view of life. And lots of times it just entails arrogance.

Or unconsciousness. Blind, uh? Or unconsciousness. Or unconsciousness. Yeah. Right. Which is scary. I mean, not that I haven't gone through.

any of these. I'll show you the bruises. But when do you think this bloodbath is going to end? I don't think the lessons have been learned yet. Because we've got a whole generation of founders and VCs that grew up in this and they think this is what tech is about. I have the advantage of being a bit older and being tech like 30 years already. So, you know, I know this was a bubble.

is just a huge long bubble, but it's over, right? And we're back to how gravity works, how union economics work. And people are just starting to figure it out, I think. A lot of the founders are a bit lost. I know one guy that's, he calls himself a failed founder. He did a company, ran out of money. he's trying to form almost like an alcoholic anonymous for failed founders. As a startup.

No, no, no, not just a group. They're just trying to help each other, you know, to think through things and to figure out what's next for them in life. You know, I hope a whole bunch of these guys will take their learnings and go back and build great companies from here. It's just that when the whole world is telling you to run in a particular direction. It's hard to go, you know, I'm going to think through what I need to do and just go do it. I think it cuts both ways. You know, the capital allocators had tremendous amount of capital.

Yeah. And the people that were knocking on their doors were promising. Yeah. Large pools of revenue generation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, it entail large pools of profitability. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But none of these two are none of whatever. Yeah. So is this, it used to be a pretty downward spiraling ecosystem in that we were doing things that were not going to create high value companies. And I saw that actually start in China, not here. And I think China got lucky because the Chinese companies got lucky because it's very early on in the cycle. So you could actually exit some of that wealth. and it went over to the public site.

And also some of these companies had enough time to figure out, okay, I actually need to make money to figure that. They had enough capital to get to some kind of break-even points. Not a lot of us out here have had that opportunity. I want to shift gear to Southeast Asia broadly and compare that with China, right? I mean, at the Ansana Council, we were talking about how we underperformed Southeast Asia, right, with respect to China.

You've been to both places. And how the GDP per capita in Southeast Asia has only gone up 2.7 times, China 10 times, and because of the obvious attributes, governance, lack of competition, underinvestment in education, under investment in infrastructure. Yeah. How do you see it forward? I think the one of the reasons we go slower is because I think the 98 crisis caused all our institutions suck the oxygen yeah to be a lot more conservative and you could say there's advantages to that

you know we don't crash as easily right global financial global downturn and we seem to be moving on okay some inflate So I think that's one of the reasons. But, you know, I think one of the underpinnings that I really hope we figure out in Southeast Asia is education. In China, education is, you know, available to everyone to quite a high level. And both socially and institutionally, they have this drive to get kids educated. it. And in fact, all my foundations that I'm involved with are around education, right? Just to give you a sense, right, how important this is. This is very personal.

The 41 male pinks that I met, I mentioned earlier, they were all pick farmers, grocery shop. I want to say, oh, not well off people. Right. And, but then I had other cousins and relatives from the female side of family. My grandpa's sisters, families, my dad's female cousins, families, the chans, the Zhangs, the liaos, etc. And they were doing okay. They were like doctors, you know, PhDs, real estate developers, factory owners, you know, business owners. So when I first met all the these people. I'm going on with this family, right? The Aungs were like poor and the others were doing fine, right? And I kept asking and then I finally realized when the comments took over,

they didn't like my family much, the Aungs, right? Because my great-grandfather was a landlord. So they restricted the education of the kids. So... Interesting. So most of the Aunges in my family didn't go beyond elementary school. Ouch. Yeah. And that's the only difference. There's hundreds of people.

Existential. Yeah. And you can see this difference just because one group didn't get the education, the other group did. And that's all. So this is why I'm so passionate about education. And I think that's where Southeast Asia needs to really push really hard. And I have to admit, it goes down to even nutrition, right?

at the low level stunting is a big issue in Southeast Asia. So that's that. Just making sure our human brains develop. One of the things I saw up front and personal was when I first started Manxel, we went to Myanmar and then we went to different parts like Vietnam and Philippines and so on. You can actually see Myanmar was the first place I saw the effects on GDP per capita, on the shapes of heads, right? You could see that there's something wrong with some of the folks.

As in bigger or smaller? They're misshapen. Okay. Right? Because they didn't have enough nutrition when they were growing up. Right. You could actually see that. When you start to hit the Philippines and Indonesia and Malaysia,

and Malaysia, Thailand, it's harder to see that, right? But you could see that if you push the GDP low enough. So that's the first thing. making sure kids can develop properly. And then it's education. I think this is how, if you think about my own country, Singapore, all the things they've done right, I say education is one of the key things. I'm a huge beneficiary of that.

Well, Singapore is in general. It's a big beneficiary of how much it's invested in education. And I don't know how to say more about that. The difference between China and Southeast Asia, one of the biggest ones, is that there's another difference, I think, works that works in our favor. China is a large market and it's great for founders to start and go grow and all that. The problem for the Chinese companies, though, they are monoculture, monolingual, you know, etc. and it's very, very hard for them to go international. The rest of the world is much bigger than China, right?

The rest of the world is much bigger than the U.S. Our companies have to go international early on because each one of our countries is too small for a large tech company to be built. So, you know, most companies have, you know, Goto, for example, multiple countries, Tokopedia is multiple countries. in fact you cannot build a big company in southeast Asia and be in one country only

so well the rest of the world is ours to go after right we've got the culture we've got the systems we've got the abstraction that allows you to keep going to the next country and the next and next and we will do that you know at one point forest lee from c group was telling me his second largest market Brazil yeah right so it's it's happening yeah it's amazing

they're trailblazers so that's our advantage right yeah there's disadvantage education could be better but I think our advantage is we're set up to conquer the world

yeah but let's I want to peel the onion a little bit here I've talked about Pisa a few times right with you and separately that That is so telling.

Yes. You know, just for Southeast Asia, of all the 10 countries only to stand out above the global average, Singapore and Vietnam. Singapore is globally number two now after China. Vietnam, I think, is thinking of catching up with China, not just Singapore. The rest are below average. You know, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, surprisingly, Malaysia. Who would have thought? Malaysia would be below the global average.

So it depicts the degree to which you're lingually proficient or lack thereof. And stem-wise, you know, and that is quite structural. Yeah, it is. What do you think are some of the things we could do? I mean, I have the simple idea, right? What if we get 400 million people in Southeast Asia

to be able to speak English? With the help of AI, what the help of AI, with the help of Monsale and whatever, right? Let's gang bust on this. You're actually talking about, you know, one of the foundations that you and I are involved in solve education. Yeah. It's trying to teach kids English with an AI, right?

With a game and an AI. So we're trying. It's not so straightforward, right? But what you realize is if you want to teach kids in Asia English, and you try to do it the traditional way, you know, build schools, train teachers and all that, it'll be probably one or two generations before we get there, right? Because there are not enough teachers that are competent in English to teach the kids. So then you ask yourself, is it possible to just transmit that information into the heads of kids?

the skills of English, right, into the heads of kids. And you realize it's doable and is getting more doable now with technology. So that's what that solve education project is about. It's to explore how technology can basically teach kids English for now. And then math and then life skills and other things later on. I think we're hitting, we've hit more than 10 million kids, but right now we're trying to focus on the, what do we call monthly learners, right? Monthly active learners. How many kids are actually learning in our system every month?

And the number we are at is something like 20,000, 30,000. We're trying to hit 50,000 by the end of the year. So that's like a huge school. but we want to be in the millions. And then maybe get to that 400 million in a few years. I'm thinking of 100 million Indonesians speak English. The remaining 300, the rest of Southeast Asia. We'd be killing it.

I'm amazed sometimes when I meet some of the Indonesian kids here. They speak to me like perfect American English, right? And I talk to their parents who struggle a little bit with English, right? And I'm going, how did the kid learn? YouTube. They probably watch my channel. There you go. I'm just kidding.

Well, 700,000 people. But that's in cities, right? Urban sites. But if you go sub-urban, you drive 45 miles out and it's totally different picture, man. Yeah. I go out and meet up with these people. And, you know, I get misconstrued for, I don't know, you know, English. is so damn important because most of the knowledge in the world is documented in English.

Most economic activities are done in English. You cannot be a software engineer and not know English. There you go. Let the software engineer speak. And you cannot be a doctor if you don't know English, right? So everything is documented in English. It's a default language. I have friends in the UN that tell me the older ones.

It used to be like French. Now it's English, right? And everyone at that level know English. It's sort of the default language of the world now. However it got there, it doesn't matter. It's the default language. So if you want information, it's easiest to get that in English. The AI is ungood enough to translate everything to your local language yet.

Right. And so if you want to access it, don't fight it. Just learn it and go. Indonesia probably has less than 10% of its population being able to be proficient in international languages, inclusive of English. We got to bump that percentage up to 40, 50%. Totally agree. It's an economic issue now, right? I mean, even the average Indonesia who can transact in English makes more money salary-wise than if they don't. And this is true not just here. It's all over the Southeast Asia. That's on the lingual stuff. What about on the STEM site? What do you think could be done to upgrade our STEM capabilities?

I'll share with you some statistics. I was talking to a computer science professor at the University of Chicago from Indonesia. He was sharing me the number of STEM graduates with PhD. I forget the year 2018 or 2020. The international graduates, China, over 6,000. From India, over 2,000. Korea, 1,000 something. Turkey, 400 something. Indonesia only 82. Singapore is, I think, above Indonesia.

Ghana is above Indonesia. It's like, man, if we were to, you know, move the needle up a little bit on STEM, I think that number ought to change. And there's this myth about not having enough funding for PhD programs. And this guy was telling me, you know, it's the wrong myth. Because it's not a question of funding. It's more of a question of competence.

If you get in, the school will fund you. And empirically, 80% of the funding for PhD programs and STEM are funded by the very institutions. Yeah. And a lot of disciplines in computer science don't require. a lot of money. It's just a lot of thinking. I agree. I think there's a lot going on in computer science now with AI and all that. And this is the time we are about to disrupt the world again with software. And this is a time for countries to think very strategically about what they can do. That's still time.

If you get into it now, in 10 years' time, it could be a huge difference in your economy. I'm actually having a dialogue with some of the Philippine folks who are part of their presidential council to try and figure out a strategy for the Philippines to take a significant stake in the future of software and AI. in not just the region, but in Asia and in the world. So things are changing very fast, and when that happens, you have the opportunity to come and do something about it. So all you need is the willpower. And frankly, this is a very small part of the economy, very, very tiny. You just need, we've got 250 million people, 270 million people in this country.

you just take the top, you know, 0.1%, and every one of them could be world-class computer scientists. Right? It's just that they're not encouraged to do that. And you could tilt the LPA-DPA program to encourage computer science people, right? And that itself could, there's enough funding there to, just that alone, to create hundreds of PhDs in computer science.

I think for a country with 280 million people, it's apt that we started thinking of scale, right? And there's sparks of excellence, right, sporadically. Yeah. But we need to think big. And even collectively for Southeast Asia, we need to think even bigger in the context of having to compete with the Indians of the world, the Chinas of the world, and the big guns of the world, right? And I want to talk about teachers, right? It's quite fundamental, right? You can come up with the coolest curricula.

But if you end up with the wrong teachers, I mean, our kids are not going to get educated, as well as we want them to be. And that, that I think is a good investment. You know, Singapore has, I think, ASTIS. They've invested in recruiting the best people out of academic institutions to become teachers

They're not the lowest paid people. Yeah. And South Korea does the same thing. Yeah. Israel too. I think the other nine countries in Southeast Asia need to emulate, you know, for STEM and lingual proficiency purposes. Yeah. One thing I learned from my experience in solve education,

and this is not a very positive thing to say, but it is true. A lot of people in education in emerging markets are not in education because they care, about kids. But a lot of them are, but a lot of them, enough of them are not. They're there to make a living. And the result is so long as they can get their paycheck, they'll do the minimum things they need to do to get the paycheck. I think we've taken the nobility out of being a teacher. And I think that's, it's probably at least half a general. to fix that problem. And that's why I've gone down the path of technology.

Because I think the fact that about a third of kids on the planet today will be illiterate is another ridiculous state of the world. This is just crazy nuts. And how do you fix that quickly? I think getting teacher to be a more noble profession will take time. So and that's why I'm focused on the technology. Not to say we shouldn't do it, right? But it's going to take a generation, I think, if we start today, which we're not starting.

So I'm actually one of the things I'm hoping my team would do is to try and figure out an LLM that will act like a teacher that will fit in the phone. Interesting. So you can actually have a teacher in a phone. in a phone and do one-on-one lessons with kids. That's one of the toughest problems when you don't have a teacher. The teacher gives you moral support, encouragement. And a game doesn't do that. AI doesn't do it well.

So if you can actually build an AI that acts more like a teacher, I think that could help. That's probably... I'm trying to find you honest. I'm trying to become a teacher. I'm trying to spend more time. Well, then you got to figure out how to amplify. I think you go to figure out.

This is one avenue, right, of amplifying whatever people think is cool or whatever people think is not cool. Yeah. Right. And I'm so fixated with this idea that if you pick a really good teacher, he or she can teach about a year and a half worth of teaching in a year. But if you really pick a sucky teacher. you lose your interest. You end up with somebody who teaches you about a half years worth of teaching in a year. Yeah.

And I just... If you stay interested in that subject, you might just go and go do something else. And this is occurring in many parts of the world, right? Not just Indonesia. Yeah. And how do we deal with this? And to put this in the context of how the global order has shifted, right? into a much more multipolar

kind of well you're stuck man in a room with just one guy you got to negotiate the hell out of whatever and if you're not competitive if you're not productive you're toast whereas multilateralism

is a beauty right you can piggyback on some big boy to believe the guy that you need to negotiate with we have the principle of single undertaking and you're in good hands. But if you need to keep on bilateralizing, you need to shape up, man.

You need to become more productive. And that can only happen by way of becoming more lingually proficient and scientifically proficient. Professionally competent. I think the... We talked a little bit about this earlier. I think the fact that the world is getting more and more efficient, leaves you less and less places to hide.

And if you are, the prisoner's dilemma, right? If you are in a transparent, efficient society, you've got to be nice, you've got to be capable, otherwise you won't flourish. And I think that's where the world is moving towards with computers making things more transparent. I think with AI, hopefully making things more transparent. the future. I think the journey there is going to be a little bit of a challenge, but

um, uh, the, the, I guess I, being a computer scientist, I maybe overthink about how computers can make a difference, right? And you've got to believe in your profession, I guess. Um, and for me is when I, when I look at human systems and I look at the possibilities, of digital systems. At this point, I think it might be more predictable to push the digital systems as opposed to the human systems and more scalable. I think that's the other reason. I've been holding off so hard on AI because I want to save that for the last part of the

conversation, right? Because that's going to occupy a lot of minutes. Last bit on ASEAN, on Southeast Asia, right? I mean, I've been known for, you know, promoting Singapore. It's a good example of the really cool intersection of power and talent, right, and how they select talent a lot more based on meritocracy as opposed to loyalty and or patronage. what can the other countries in Southeast Asia learn I mean obviously you just got to recognize that as a good thing

right but what what can we do to just speed it up a bit? I mean it's it's in everybody's interest yeah right it's probably more in the interest of the other nine but I think Singapore would look even more cool if everybody else emulates it the good things, not the bad things. Yeah. I think you know more about the answer to that question that I do

because you've been a politician. You understand. That was a lifetime ago. Yeah. What I scratched my head over a lot of times is how the bureaucracy doesn't lead to optimizing for the masses, right? when democracy is at work, when people compete in the political arena, the result doesn't necessarily improve the lives of the average citizen. I struggle to understand why that is. But I'm also cautious

to realize that there's a lot of luck in how Singapore got to be the way it is, right? The luck of having Li Kuan Yu and the PAP there in the 60s. If we didn't have that, we won't have Singapore. Yeah. And a bunch of Cambridge and really smart graduates and really smart people. I call that serendipity. Yeah. And Singapore could have turned out differently.

Yes. And we might not have been kicked out of Malaysia. and the fact that they happen to be some of the more honest people around, right, refuse corruption. And Singapore happened to be small enough that you run it like a company. Serendipatously. Yes. So if you scale that up, I don't know how possible it is to

to self-emulate Singapore. that sense, right? It's just a lot of us, we have to admit as Singaporeans, we have to admit that there's a lot of luck that got us where it is. A lot of good decisions, hard work as a result of the luck. But without that luck, we would not be there. So, but having said that, I'm also a firm believer that great leaders can make huge differences. You know, the one scholarship that Monkshill Funds and I work with is called Tasla. It's technology and science leadership academy. We're trying to get Indonesian kids, the top Indonesian kids,

to think beyond being an engineer to being a leader. And that's what the scholarship is about. I'm a strong believer, if anything, one or two people at the right places in history can change the course of history. you. But how you find those people and how they get up to the top to be able to do that. It's hard.

And to be able to remain consistent for a long enough. And vent off. All the bad sins, the temptations, whatever. It's not easy, man. Yes. It's a true sign of, I think, great leadership. Yeah. And I think how each one of the countries in us,

gets there. I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that however messy it is, democracies, what system until you get some capability. But sometimes it's hard, right? You look at Europe and you look at the U.S. and go, is this where democracy is going to lead us, right? Not sure.

Yeah. I mean, I've been arguing that Singapore ought to be considered a pretty good liberal democracy. Yes. I agree. You know, maybe 10 to 20 years ago you could criticize it for being some sort of a benign dictatorship, but I think it's learned to give

space and room to the opposition. It's learned to give space and room to the media for being critical of things. But it's been proving itself to be good in distributing power to the hands of many,

but also a bunch of public goods to the hands of many, health care, welfare, intellect, social value, moral value, and all that good stuff. You know, people get bogged down with the definition of a democracy or liberal democracy. Yeah. By the way of saying, well, we're distributing power to the hands of many, but we're not distributing out of public goods to do that. You can't call yourself a great liberal democracy. Yes. And I think that's a fundamental problem, right? The Western view of what democracy is right doesn't seem to be

working all that well yeah right and we're scratching our heads going okay if that doesn't work that well what are we supposed to do right and I don't think

there's any substitute for having great leaders come up this is why the scholarship right I'm I see that in companies all the time

every single company that does well we look in there why is it doing a great leader right it doesn't do well not so good leader. It's very simple.

So no different from an organization or country. I don't think it's any different. So the trick for every country, I think, is to figure out how to get your greatest people to lead. And you realize if you're not careful, you can degenerate. So that your best people don't want to lead because it's too much of a sacrifice or it's, Yeah.

And that's what I worry about for Southeast Asia. I see people pushing, trying to get the better folks up front. And I think that's, I'm hopeful, but I'm still quite puzzled as to how you can systematically get there. We formed, to just go back to our Ansana Council. We formed the Yangsana Council as you know to try and tell the rest of the world Southeast Asia. It's a great place to invest in. But I think the side effect of this will also be to motivate Southeast Asian about where we can go.

The potential and we're seeing this in conversations in like Philippines and here where people are excited about the possibility. if we get our visions line where this place can go. This is already one of the growth centers in the world. What if we doubled on that, or tripled on that? And you can look at this place like Europe, you know, 10 years, 20 years from now. Yeah. I think that's a possibility. And that's why I'm very, very pro-Southeasia from that point of view.

I'm very bullish. we just need more storytellers. And the Aung Sanah Council, I think, is built upon the premise or idea that we need to tell the stories. Yes. Right. I mean, it hurts me when I go to places around the world where people just want to talk about India more. Yeah. I want to talk about China more.

They want to talk about Taiwan more. Yeah. And just by sheer size of the economy and the population, I think we're pretty. We're a pretty cool dude, you know. Yeah. We're larger than India, GDP-wise, right? GDP per capita with $3.5 to $4 trillion now. Yeah.

Yeah. And I want to try to shift gear here a bit, but I think, you know, there's this notion. It's a bit paradoxical. There's this notion that the transition into or towards computer, eugeny is going to be so darn smooth right

because they're so darn intelligent right but intelligence is the very thing that's going to disrupt the smoothness right and I want to push this

into the next you know discussion on on AI yeah is that the right way to think of the paradox yeah well yes I mean we talked earlier about my distrust of my ability to judge

positively. It's the competent bad people. So AI is not just going to be wielded by competent good people and sometimes not even competent people and I worry about that because AI is

going to get better and better about getting to its objective. So if your objective is good, well, great, right? But there are competent bad people out there. They could potentially use it for not so good purposes, like misinformation. It's great at generating all kinds of crazy stuff, right? Click baits.

Yeah. And you can totally, you know, disrupt an election, by just flooding the environment with bad information. So much so that you can't tell. I mean, so I do worry about competent bad people, but I actually also worry about my own tribe, right, the engineers. I've seen a lot of the right things that are thinking behind AI. And I don't think that's enough computer science put into AI,

not enough engineering put into AI in thinking about how these systems can go wrong. And the engineering that's needed to make sure they don't. So the analogy I keep talking about, this is the AI scientists came up with this thing and it looks like, wow, the dog is talking, right? And I can talk to the dog and, wow, you know. But the next thing you do is not put the dog in front of a truck and say drive, right? Or in front of a trading desk and say, you know, trade, right? You have no idea what the dog is thinking, right?

And what kind of logic is behind all that talking? So I think from a, even from a computer science point of view, You need to think through the fact that these neural networks are not tractable. I'll use the term tractable, which means you can predict what it's going to do. They are not tractable algorithms, meaning you should never plug these things directly into something that's really mission critical. And if it did something wrong, disasters will happen. People get killed or lots of money gets lost or something. you basically need some kind of straight jacketing

and that straight jacketing would be something that prevents the AI from doing crazy things right and and that straight jacketing has to be software that is tractable you can predict what that software is going to do right and we know how to build software like that but the people doing AI seem to be at least by and large clueless about this whole discipline in computer science and software engineering. And I do worry about us accidentally doing bad things with AI also.

Not just the competent bad people using AI to do bad things, but also accidentally. We've been seeing a lot of biases in AI, right? And people trying to control AI in certain ways that have, unforeseen results in how it behaves. And we can go into story after story about how data biases AI. And since we are in a biased society, the data is biased or the AI will be biased. So we've got to be really careful about doing how we get to sort of competent AI systems. Competent and good.

I mean, we kind of talked about this earlier, right? the analogy that I was trying to draw on is people designed cars not to kill people but I think everybody needs to be sensitive to the side effect yeah of cars being deadly yeah it's one of the biggest killers of men I'm giving AI the benefit of the doubt the creators of AI are probably have good intentions but once created and then once it's consumed, there's a loss of side effects here. Yeah. Yeah. It could be very deadly.

Yeah. I think cars still kill people. Yeah. At some point, maybe it'll be very, very safe, right? Yeah. With, with self-driving cars and all that. You know, I expect the number of accidents to drop as the cars get more digitized. I think we're going to go through that same learning curve.

I think AI's hopefully will be less deadly than cars because they are less mission-critical technology. Do you sense within the universe of technologists there is ample ability to question or there's just too much desire to cultivate? There's something that's happening in science

the last five, ten years that I really worry about where politics has gotten into science where you see well-known academics that have to resign because they've been dittling around with results, right? So, and the peer review process appears to be quite broken. So there's tendencies

for researchers scientists to basically chase just raw academic results as opposed to thoughtful systems construction right to think through how things will affect society right so we're just chasing the technology itself getting the doctor talk so to speak and I worry about the transparency and honesty of academia, let alone sort of research groups in other places. I don't really have an answer to that because once you start getting corrupt in the peer review system, it keeps cascading, right? The next generation doesn't have a good reference point.

now. Someone needs to worry seriously about that because that's not just AI is health, it's public health, it's medicine, it's things that affect us in big ways. I mean, I'm spending quite a bit of time in Silicon Valley now, right? In the small universe of technologists that have been exposed to, I sense that they act like they know. what they're doing. Yeah. And that's okay if it comes to science only. Yeah. But this is something that's going to affect humanity, right? Yeah.

And I think there's a fundamental need to at least get a discourse going on a multidisciplinary manner. Yes. I agree. And I don't think the culturalist, the economist, the environmentalist, the spiritualist, the the philosophers, the historians are getting involved in a conversation, much less a discourse. That worries me, man. Yeah. Yeah, I think the challenge is AI is quite a technical issue.

Right. And so if you don't understand how it's functioning, even today, right, forget the emergent behavior. is that no one really understands, yet the computer scientists definitely don't understand the emergent behavior. Why is it suddenly talking, right? They can tell you what the numbers look like and etc. And it's talking about why is it at this point it's talking? We don't know, right?

But if you're not well-versed in all that in the technology, this is not like it's not like the hydrogen bomb whether the function is quite easy to explain or the new atomic bomb it blows up and you destroy a lot of stuff so you can

conceptualize that and have a ethical discussion on that a social political discussion on atomic energy atomic bombs etc this is this pervade fundamentally into who we are and in terms of thinking thoughts, right?

And so it's not so easy, you know, to, I think the challenge is not so easy for people to have a technology-based discussion on a lot of these issues. I think we should try. But I think that's where the challenge is. I think people will almost demand those conversations, right? You were talking about cars having to make the decision between hitting the kid or the older guy. If we're going to do that, we better have a social discussion, right? There's morality here.

Yeah, have some engineer decide on the morality of the system. And that's the hard part for the AI scientists and engineers to realize where, they've crossed the line into more of a social decision versus a technical decision. It's not always black and white. I mean, no doubt. If you're good in AI, you're no dummy. Yeah.

Right? You're so damn smart. But there's this concern intuitively in me, at least. If you get to be so capable in the field of science, right, and I've seen a lot of capable people around me. They tend to think that they can always inoculate themselves. Yeah. It was arrogance, hubris, whatever you come.

Of any potential perils. Yeah. Right? It's like, dude, you don't know what you're talking about. I know what I'm doing. Yeah. So whenever someone says that, then you get really suspicious. It's like, you know, the alarm bells.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. That should be. Yeah. So I'm trying to think, you know, to what extent would, or should the regulatory bodies think about this, right? But, you know, I've been kind of counterintuitive lately when I tell people that are trying

to be entrepreneurs or whatever. I think you've got to have this mentality or mindset that you got to thrive despite the government. Yeah. Not because. Yeah. Right. That's your baseline. Yeah.

That's what all entrepreneurs do. They build value in spite of everything else. Yeah. So I've seen how, you know, open AI has decided to change from open source to close source to non-profit to for-profit. That's just cultivation mode. Yeah. It's not questioning mode. Yeah.

Right. And when you get into this cultivation mode, you dig. Yeah. But you lose skepticism. Yeah. you lose critical thinking capabilities. That is a worry, I think. I'm not trying to paint a very dystopian picture here.

I'm open to the idea of utoponizing it. I'll give you a hopeful view of this whole LLM's generative AI world. Most of it is open source. Yeah. Right? So it's good. Yeah. No one has a monopoly over all of the,

stuff. You need right now, because we're throwing the whole kitchen sink into the AI, you need like $50 million per LLM. I think over time, I think some of the more interesting research the next five, 10 years, five years is going to be around how you put enough information for the AI to have like common sense and then a domain expertise. like teaching English to kids, right? And build a small enough LLM to fit in your phone, right? To function as almost like a, in this case, a teacher, but something else, a assistant, etc.

I think those are the actually more interesting applications that are going to come out, right? And you don't see some of these big guys doing that. They're trying to create an omniscient kind of. kind of AI, which is, you know, I think when they throw up, I think they're discovering when you throw so much information into the system, it actually is not very stable. Well, they might stabilize it even at some point, but it won't fit into a phone, you know, it requires this huge cloud to run. So I'm not as worried about, you know, these big companies doing these things.

And there'll be lots of them, right? US will have probably a dozen of these. Yeah. LLMs and China has three. There's already this, you know, what people call the Chad GPT mafia. Yeah. The way we would have seen the PayPal mafia. Yeah.

And they're all spreading. Yeah. They're all going to do different things. And who knows, Singapore might have its own, you know, generative AI system, you know, different parts of Europe. This is going to be very common technology. It's like cloud tech, right? Right.

Having cloud tech is no big deal now. You know, you can, it's all open source. There's no big deal. If you want to build an AWS, for example, okay, you need to figure out how to scale cloud tech to the millions and maybe billions of nodes. Right. But if you, and I think that's what's going to happen with these AI modules. And in fact, it's going to be more interesting because. cloud tech you don't try to fit it in your phone

but you want to fit AIs into your phone and that's a very interesting design envelope that people optimize for too again I'm just giving you all this different kind of perspectives to give you a sense of why I'm not as worried about monopolies coming out of AI I'm not

I'm not a complete dystopian or dystopianist but I think conversationally people need to talk about these issues. I agree. Right? Whether you're having a drink with somebody or you're in a classroom or you're at home having dinner with your family. I think people just need to, you know, infuse this into the cultural conversation. Yes.

So that you bump into something and you raise this, you know, dude, I think you've got to take a look at this. You know, we can't just unilateralize this. Plug it in. Yeah. I want to end on a on a utopian note, right? And back to the Southeast Asia, because this is where I think the Aung Sanah Council can be hopefully of value to people in Southeast Asia and the world over.

I think the baseline growth rate trajectory for Southeast Asia is probably five-ish percent. On average. That's just using conventional wisdom. brick and mortar, right? And then safe to say that high tech is probably not going to take place in a big way. We're going to be more users and enablers. We're not going to be creators for most parts of Southeast Asia. But then you take a look at this publication right on the cultivation of AI. Economically, it's massive, staggering. Some would argue 30 trillion, some would argue 100 trillions in the next 10 to 15 years. Boy, just imagine if we get to be in this cultivation mark.

Just a chunk of that. Yeah. Just a chunk of this. Just within logic, there's no reason for us not to be able to grow 10% per year. Yeah. You know, for the next two to three decades. Sort of like what we've witnessed with most Asian or Southeast Asian countries in the 70s, 80s. Yeah.

And some parts of the 90s. Yeah. I think the, we did this on Santa Council report. that made the observation that the old strategy of forming Karetsuo around manufacturing to grow the GDP to bootstrap out of emerging markets is sort of the old way of doing it. Now we do manufacturing, but services is half our GDP. So if we can double that, it's much faster than growing the manufacturing sector. So if you observe the services sector and how China has benefited from that, Frankly, half the GDP in China is services, right, 6.5 trillion or so.

Most of that profit pool go to tech companies that didn't exist 25 years ago. So and if you look at what happened in the U.S. decades before China, they did digitize their services also, right? But it was in the form of, you know, mini computers, mainframes, the old school stuff, right? And then terminals, right, like airline, Sabre, you book through terminals and Web 1.0, et cetera. China came along and started technifying when what was available was the phone. If you look at the phone, you know, you've got all these apps on it. You click on the app. You open up a virtual control panel to this huge machinery.

If you push the buttons in the right sequence, you get services coming to you. So that itself was enough to transform China, hugely. We have that as we are technifying our services industry, which is half our GDP. But now we have AI. What if you figure out the right ways to deploy AI in the technification of your services, with conversations about how to shift that transactional thinking to a relational thinking about the businesses you build and how they create value, not just from transacting, right? We all know there's something wrong with tech, right?

Because the only thing that tech can automate today is a transaction, right? And so if you want to make more money as a tech company, you just speed up the transaction. Human being becomes a factor of production. grab a human being, squeeze the transaction out, throw in a way. So we talk about six months or one year lifetime value of a human being, right, which when the first time I had that conversation sort of was a bit disorienting. We live for a long time. Why are you talking about a six months lifetime value, right?

It's because our technology couldn't support a bigger thinking about what that relationship should be about. Well, the technology that enables us to do that is here now. You can actually start to talk to your customers, not with a human being, but with an AI, and behave to them appropriately and build that relationship. So what if we took that capability and put it into our businesses, our services business, and accelerate it to the next level, right? We call these things a virtual relationship managers.

They could be salespeople. They could be customers. It doesn't matter. you know, it enables us to do things much better with our users. And not only do we get higher productivity, we get much better experiences as consumers, right? So I'm very, very excited. I'm talking to all my CEOs with services, businesses, to think in those terms, right? And so we might not generate some of the breakouts in AI, but we'll generate the

breakouts in the use of AI, I think, over the next five years. And you start seeing an app where you don't need to click on your phone anymore. You just tell the app what to do. Or you just think it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's see what the Elon Musk's neural link does.

When do you think will reach AGI? First of all, I'm not very sure what that is. I don't think anyone has sort of a working definition of what AGI is. I have this image of AI as being a very smart thing, but it's built to serve us. Now, of course, the not so good competent people could do other things with it. And this is where I worry about AGI if it falls into the wrong hands. and it's very, very capable. It can crack through all kinds of computer systems.

You know, the sci-fi movie type stuff, right? I do worry about that. But I think we're quite a waste from it. The sign I'm looking for is the first AI that creates an AI better than a human-created AI. Man, that's scary. Yeah, it'll happen. I think it'll be a while, but I'm not sure. We're supposed to end on a utopia note.

You drove us there. Just think about that. That's, wow. Yeah, but if we build AIs in service of us, then it really will help us. You know, some have said that the day, the minute AGI comes about, that's really the expiration date of our profession. Yeah, I mean, one way to look at I mean, you know, I would tell the young people that, you know,

you better look up a profession that doesn't have an expiration date, man. Yeah, leader. Yeah, right? Well, that's finite. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it might, the AGI might cause a lot of jobs to be destroyed.

But I think it will also try to, it'll help us reconfigure our economic systems so that we have much more optionality as opposed to have to work. I think the challenges of capitalism is it assumes the value labor is non-zero yeah right and when you assume that and you automate everything that's another episode man yeah sorry i mean no no i mean you you got me man you got me man you got me going yeah i mean

i think sooner rather than later governments all across the world are going to be thinking about how to tax the damn thing yeah they need to figure this out because capital is going to create more and more of the value i mean we we see this in the economy you know um capital is going to be able to create more and more of value and labor is going to create less and less of value. Right. Right. So if only like 3% of people own the capital, you've got a huge problem in society. We've seen that.

We're seeing that. Yeah. Issues with respect to redistribution of welfare. Yeah. And developing and underdeveloped. You know I've thought about this quite a bit, but the solutions are not obvious. This is one of the areas where I'm more concerned about. I mean, you need more heart than brain.

Yeah. Yeah, even if you don't have to do anything, AIs can do everything for you. What's your life about? Yeah. It's just basic stuff of meaning needs to be talked about, right? So it's a very interesting set of problems. My belief is most people alive today will live through that transition point.

I think the, the, you know, Frankly, you don't even need AI to get to a lot of it, right? Because a lot of what we do in terms of labor is not that intellectual. It's not that. Will we see ASI in our lifetime? Artificial super intelligence. It's a guess. If I were to give you an answer, it's a guess.

Once you hit that exponential, when the AI starts to create an AI, it's incremental. Yeah. It's because it will happen at Silicon. Right now, the AIs are built by human beings. So it's kind of slow going. Yeah. Right.

Once the AI has figured out, I can build an AI better than myself, right? At some point, we let go and the AI keeps running. Right. That's when you start walking the dog and, you know, sip your coffee at the beach. Yeah. Let's hope, right? Yeah. Anyway.

Any final thoughts or messages? You know, it's the old curse. or wish that we live in interesting times, right? And I think we live in very, very interesting time. I'm so glad to be alive at this point in history. Everything's about to change all over again. And you know I'm an optimist, and I think a lot of it is going to be changing for the better.

But we need to be thoughtful of how we get there. Let's pray. Thank you so much, Hank. Thank you. Tremant, that's Peng Ong, founder, and Pimpinan from Monsil, Tenshors. Thank you.

This is end game. like a whole back crying because I felt like a lot of mine.