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Recently selected as Campaign Asia’s 40 Under 40, Daniel Cheng has been a pioneer in Shanghai’s advertising scene for the past 15 years. In 2013, upon leaving his brand management role at LVMH, Daniel started Metric Design Studio (MDS). Today, MDS has served over 200 clients, including the likes of fashion powerhouses MaxMara to luxury hospitality chains Shangri-La Hotels, to the pharmaceutical gi...

One of the most memorable early guests on the show, Tony Clemente returns after 2 years to continue his story. Once a veteran Wall Street director who commanded authority in the corporate world, Tony ultimately walked away at the height of his career. Burned out and disillusioned with "the matrix", he traded prestige and security for the challenge of building something of his own. Today, he runs m...

What do McKinsey, Bain and BCG (MBB) consultants actually do? In this episode, YH Hwang takes us inside the world of management consulting: from navigating on-campus recruiting at Cornell to cracking case interviews and tackling high-stakes client projects. We talk candidly about the grind, the culture, and what life as a young consultant is really like behind the LinkedIn polish. YH is a Cornell...

One of Asia’s foremost minds in regional policy, trade, and diplomacy, Dr. Pushpanathan Sundram was the Deputy Secretary-General of ASEAN from 2009 to 2011, overseeing the ASEAN Economic Community. After decades at the heart of ASEAN, he went on to advise multinationals like Eli Lilly and now leads PublicPolicyAsia Advisors, guiding Fortune 500s and regional governments on policy, market access, a...

A fellow graduate of Cornell University, Kevin Yi started his career at EY in New York City, before moving inhouse to Dell as a strategy manager based in Singapore. In 2021 at the depth of Covid pandemic, he relocated to Cambodia to work for Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI). Working at the frontlines at a developing country deeply shaped his outlook on life and career, and led his return to...

Dr. Maxim Dickieson received his PhD. in chemical engineering under the supervision of Professor Yan Ning (NUS) earlier this year, and is now working alongside Professor Yan to commercialize biomass fractionation deep-tech. He has experience in green catalysis research for waste-to-value; more specifically, his thesis focused on CO2 hydrogenation to methanol (carbon capture and utilization), and h...

John is an experienced tech sales professional, currently the APAC regional manager for a global software company. In this conversation, leveraging his knowledge and experience, we cover a variety of subjects relating to this challenging but rewarding career. What is the typical sales process from intro meeting to closing the deal? What is a typical career path from sales development representativ...

How did Europe colonize Africa and why it happened much later than other continents? Would Africa be more prosperous today without colonization? In this stimulating episode, we dive into the intricacies of Africa’s colonial history and undertake a multitude of challenging topics, some difficult and unpleasant. We begin by looking back on what happened, and in the process discern centralized vs dec...

Jasper Hsu is a recovered "Twitter addict" and amateur cultural anthropologist who have been lurking around the different niches of the internet for over 2 decades. In this episode, he takes us back to the 2010s - arguably the “golden age" of internet, when a myriad of online subcultures proliferated and permeated into the mainstream. We review 4 subcultural factions in particular: (1) irony twitt...

How can businesses harness the power of data to make better decisions? Why brands need to have end-to-end supply chain visibility? How can banks attain a 360 degree view of their customers? This episode answers these questions and more. We also discuss how your phone is always spying on you, why privacy and AI are “fake news”, why you should always choose your children over a new Mercedes, and how...

It takes on average 3 business days for a crossborder payment to clear through the traditional banking system. On a digital remittance platform? 30 seconds. This is because your money was actually sent yesterday. This pre-funding process and other innovations such as cash pooling, cross-border netting, and automated FX hedging, are what enable your legal tenders to onboard a supersonic jet when it...

A former medical school prodigy, Dilshan tracks every bodily metric humanly possible, from sleep, diet, urine color, to mood, inspirations, and intelligence quotient. Beneath the peculiar obsession lays a personal but ambitious pursuit. Life seemed limitless to the young Sri Lankan immigrant growing up in Australia. However, an encounter with the actual Disneyland (a study exchange to Florida) unw...

Dr. Caleb Tse is a business professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. This podcast was originally scheduled 3 months ago to discuss his research, until an unexpected health crisis upended Caleb’s life as he knew for over 30 years. In this episode, my guest tells his unfiltered firsthand account undergoing an emergency open-heart surgery, from the initial shock, to seeing th...

One of New Zealand’s finest home-grown basketball successes, Jordan Ngatai is a regular on the world stage leading his squad’s pregame Haka, as recent as the 2023 FIBA World Cup where he was the starting Small Forward. In a storied career spanning over a decade and counting, Jordan won multiple championships in New Zealand and Australia, and was honored as an All-Star Five in 2020. In this slam-du...

Dr. Clincy Cheung obtained his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from UCLA. This episode is a layman’s introduction to radiopharmaceuticals, a class of radioactive drugs with transformative implications to cancer diagnosis and treatment.  Besides the science and applications of radiopharmaceuticals, we also discussed their production process, key players, and recent industry trends. Th...

Jonas Gjesdal is a liquefied natural gas (LNG) originator at Equinor, Norway’s largest company and a critical supplier of gas to Europe. Recorded on August 15, 2023, this episode is an unparalleled masterclass on Europe’s delicate balancing act between energy sustainability, security, and affordability, also known as the “Energy Trilemma”. A buzzing alternative to fossil fuels, we take particular...

In some sense, Tony should have been either killed, incarcerated, or locked-up in a psychiatric ward. At 14 and abandoned by divorced parents, Tony was living alone with his teenage brother. Every night, every criminal gang from the area would move in-and-out of the house. Drugs, alcohol, parties, violence - Primrose Lane wasn’t a place you’d want to mess with, as your chances were slim. So was To...

Fraser Waldron is an experienced law enforcement officer currently serving at Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization). After a brief stint in finance, the sudden transition from a small town Canada “pristine bubble of loveliness and naivety” to an isolated and hostile environment where “rubber hits the road” made Fraser realize the need to inoculate himself with some strategies to na...

“The cosmos is within us. We are stardusts contemplating the stars.” In the inaugural episode of this moonshot project where I traverse the multiverse to learn just about everything under the sun, I invited Dr. Thomas Tuloup to shed light on the genesis story of our universe. Dr. Tuloup obtained his PhD in quantum computing from National University of Singapore (NUS) where he spent most of the spa...