EDIT HISTORY

We are drowning in advice about AI. Upskill. Adapt. Stay ahead. But underneath all of that noise is a question nobody seems to be asking: what is this actually doing to us? Psychotherapist Michelle Mah works with high-performing professionals navigating exactly this - and what she's seeing in her practice isn't a skills gap. It's exhaustion, dysregulation, and an identity crisis that the productiv...

What does it take to build a podcast that's designed to outlast you? Keith Yap, host of The Front Row Podcast, grew his show to 15K subscribers in under a year - not by chasing trends, but by doing the opposite. His mission: create a living archive of Singapore's brightest minds on geopolitics, economics, and technology. A time capsule for the next generation of Singaporeans. In this conversation,...

Claire Tan started her first business at 17 - not because she had a plan, but because she refused to work in a system where someone else decided how far she could go. In this episode, Claire walks us through how she built Ladyy Claire Makeup into one of Singapore's first makeup-only bridal companies, pivoted into luxury real estate during COVID, and quietly became one of the most respected agents...

When you've always been the straight-A student, quitting feels like a character flaw - not a decision. In this episode, my friend Jennifer Ho turns the tables and interviews me. We go through my three-page resume and look for everything it doesn't show: the shame of quitting law school, my mum telling me I needed to "bring harmony back into the family," and then quitting a PhD years later - terrif...

For five years, I've been podcasting. Side Hustle Club. Thought Leader Club. Now EDIT HISTORY. And for most of that time, I built it while quietly wondering if I was actually qualified to do any of it. In this episode, my friend Rae Fung interviews me - and we go deep into the parts that don't show up in the highlights: why I rebranded twice, what I learned when my most casual episode outperformed...

My podcast won two awards at the 2025 Asia Podcast Awards.  In this solo episode, I break down what I think actually makes a podcast stand out. TIMESTAMPS   (00:00) Introduction (03:31) The Current State of Podcasts (05:12) Show Concept (09:29) Differentiation (15:14) Consistency (18:23) Success as a Podcaster (20:30) What Awards Don't Measure CONNECT WITH CHERYL LAU   Website:  https://cheryllau....

Everyone commends you for being brave when you start over. But no one tells you that your reinvention might also look… ridiculous. For our guest today, that looked like explaining to people - very seriously - that she quit her career as a lawyer… to start a podcast as a cat. Because that's the thing about starting something new: More often than not, it doesn't look polished or profound. It looks l...

When Aiken Chia was broke and ready to walk away from media after six years of rejection, a friend paid his phone bill so he wouldn't miss a callback. That single act changed everything. In this episode, Aiken sits down with us to go beyond the Food King years and the viral moments - including the video where he sat with his mum to unpack her 18-year affair on camera. We talk about what it costs t...

When Ainul Md Razib first started posting about tech careers on TikTok, almost nobody in Singapore was doing it. No blueprint, no local creator to follow, no way of knowing if it would land. In this episode, Ainul - cybersecurity engineer at IBM and one of Singapore's first career-focused tech creators - opens up about what it actually takes to build something original in a space that doesn't have...

For years, Simon Alexander Ong told his strict Asian father that the job was "going okay." What he didn't say was that he'd already quietly started coaching clients on the side - building a business in secret, evenings and weekends, until he had three paying clients and a decision to make. Today, Simon is a bestselling author, international keynote speaker, and one of the most-watched creators in...

In this unscripted bonus episode, I answer delightfully weird and deeply personal questions from friends - Covering everything from past insecurities, podcast advice, to how my friendships have evolved.     TIMESTAMPS   (00:00) Introduction (0:35) What crime would you commit if it were legal for 12 hours? (0:59) If you were a cult leader, what's your cult's name and aesthetic? (01:41) What's the w...

Most people think podcast production is editing. Clean the audio, add the music, hit publish. But here's what that misses: if the pre-production is weak, no amount of editing will save the episode. In this solo episode, I take you through the four stages of producing an authority-building podcast - the way I do it for organizations like the Institute of Mental Health Singapore and established show...

A lot of us don't like how we sound. We cringe at our recorded voice, worry our accent makes us seem less credible, and sometimes never start at all because of it. Caitanya Tan - actress, host, voiceover artist, and content creator with over 200,000 followers on both TikTok and Instagram - has spent years being asked to explain and defend how she sounds. In this episode, she responds to a 300+ com...

What if the most important part of building something wasn't the strategy or the talent, but the willingness to keep going through the seasons when nothing seems to be working? Laurie Wang built a YouTube channel with nearly 200K subscribers. But before that, she ran a startup that failed, sat in what she calls the "liminal space" - that in-between period when you don't know what comes next - and...

In this impromptu bonus episode of EDIT HISTORY, I answer spontaneous questions from my friends after a last-minute guest cancellation. From podcasting highs and moments of self-doubt to K-pop playlists and unpopular opinions, I get candid about my personal quirks, creative process, and what keeps me going as a solopreneur podcaster.      TIMESTAMPS   (00:00) Introduction (00:23) What's one decisi...

Anna Ong spent 15 years in banking hoping her work would speak for itself. It didn't. What she learned instead: great ideas don't win. Great storytellers do. After leaving banking, Anna couldn't find a stage for the kind of stories she wanted to tell - raw, vulnerable, real - so she built one. What's Your Story Slam is now Singapore's longest-running live storytelling show, and Anna has coached ov...

In 2018, Dr. Gertrude Nonterah lost her postdoc position. For the next 18 months, she applied for jobs with a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology — and heard nothing. During that stretch, she googled "famous people who were fired" just to find something to hold onto. Today, Dr. G is the founder of The Bold PhD, helping graduate students navigate careers beyond academia. She's spoken at Oxford, Nort...

Most podcasting advice is about tactics: the mic, the posting schedule, the SEO. This episode is about something harder to find and more valuable to build. In this solo episode, I share the five internal qualities I see in the most successful podcasters I know - the ones whose shows hold up years after they started. Not the ones with the biggest numbers, but the ones people keep coming back to. We...

Jennifer Van Alstyne posted about academics being paid for their speaking. It went viral - but not in the way she hoped. The comments were hateful. Some were racist. Fellow academics pushed back. She kept showing up anyway. Jennifer is the founder of The Academic Designer, where she helps professors build their online presence through website design, social media, and bio writing. But before any o...

Most people trying to build thought leadership are doing it backwards. They share their story online, wait for people to connect with it, and wonder why the bookings aren't coming.  Simone Heng has a blunter take: nobody cares about your story. Not unless you're Michael Jordan. Simone is a human connection specialist, award-winning author of Let's Talk About Loneliness, and one of the few Asian wo...

There's a moment when we're taught to quiet ourselves. Maybe someone told you that you were too much. Maybe your accent made you feel like your voice didn't belong. Maybe something happened that made staying quiet feel safer than speaking up. Jam Gamble knows what it means to have your voice taken from you. In 2021, she experienced a hate crime. Weeks later, she forgot to cancel a webinar with Sho...

In January 2023, Dexter Zhuang published the first issue of his newsletter. It was literally just survey results - 75 Singapore expats answering questions about how they invest their money. He had no idea if anyone would care. Two years later, the newsletter had grown to 7,000+ subscribers, hosted real-life meetups in Singapore where almost everyone in the room had just quit their job, and pivoted...

In 2018, a stranger's Instagram post stopped me mid-scroll. She had just quit her corporate job to start a business, and something about the way she wrote it gave me the courage I didn't know I needed. That person was Vanessa Lau. That post was why I eventually started this podcast. In this solo episode, I share what's working on EDIT HISTORY right now, one thing I'm doing differently, and one exp...

When Janice Tee started her business in 2020, someone told her she was delusional. She didn't disagree. She didn't know the market was saturated. She didn't have a perfect strategy. She just showed up on Instagram Stories every single day for two years - and missed exactly one day. In her second month, she made five figures. A few years later, a free Instagram account had bought her two houses. Ja...

In August 2024, two weeks before her 29th birthday, Dielle Charon had a kitchen floor breakdown. She was dealing with a failed launch, a six-figure tax bill from her accountant's mistakes, team issues, online hate, client drama, and summer seasonal depression - all at once. That year, she made $1.4M cash. When a YouTube channel with 10,000 subscribers made a video tearing her down, Dielle didn't i...