Fresh out of the studio, Dr. Rafael Frankel, Head of Public Policy for Asia Pacific at Meta, joins us to unpack how Meta is stepping up on the fight against scam syndicates in Southeast Asia along with a coalition of partners. He explains why today's syndicates operate with state-like capabilities and forced labor at scale and how AI has become both the scammers' sword and Meta's shield, powering the removal of hundred million scam accounts in 2025. Frankel walks through the disruption-sprint model that took down the million accounts in a single week alongside the FBI, Microsoft and Starlink, and argues that beating scams demands a coalition matched to the criminal supply chain. Closing out, he reminds us that crime is never zero — but through sustained, collective pressure, it can be cut by orders of magnitude.

"I think that people underestimate the criminals that are the drivers of the scams. Mostly what we're talking about at this point is extremely well-financed, highly sophisticated transnational criminal networks that have turnover in the billions, tens of billions, and have the finances, the technological know-how, the sophistication to really be trying to scam people 24/7, 365 days a year. That's a tough adversary to be up against." - Dr Rafael Frankel

Profile: Profile: Dr Rafael Frankel, Head of Asia-Pacific Public Policy at Meta

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafael-frankel/

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Quote of the Day by Rafael Frankel from Meta
[02:38] From foreign correspondent to tech policy
[03:39] Career lessons: gut instinct and taking risks
[04:33] Why the Meta APAC policy role, and why now
[07:26] The one thing people misunderstand about scams
[09:13] What changed: industrial scale scam centers
[11:35] AI as Meta's shield, deployed at scale
[13:07] Genesis: the Bangkok 2024 convening
[14:14] First disruption: 59,000 accounts, six warrants
[15:45] June haul: 1.5M accounts, Microsoft, Starlink, 63 arrests
[16:52] Matching the coalition to the criminal supply chain
[18:52] Building trust: results create the feedback loop
[20:05] The Global Signal Exchange and the FIRE program
[22:50] Counter-intuitive lesson: Meta doesn't see everything
[24:13] Asia Pacific as front line of the solution
[26:20] Pulling on the same rope across governments
[27:30] POGO centers and pinpointed police action
[29:02] Is sanctioning a kingpin just theatre?
[30:52] Crime is never zero, but reducible by orders of magnitude
[31:02] The question Rafael wishes people asked: how can I help?
[32:52] What success looks like three years out
[35:08] Closing

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format.

Fresh out of the studio, Jing Yang, Asia Bureau Chief at The Information, joins us to explore how China is building frontier AI under chip constraints, state capital, and open source ambition. Jing breaks down her scoop on DeepSeek's $7.4 billion round at a $50 billion valuation, unpacking a deal structure in which the founder wrote two-fifths of the check and outside investors got no voting rights. She explains why Chinese AI valuations trail US labs, why seven to eight language model players refuse to consolidate, and why DeepSeek chose Huawei chips before Huawei knew about it. Last but not least, Jing shares the indicators she is watching from now to 2027.

"This is one of the things that really surprised me when I was working on this story: DeepSeek had spent a lot of time last year retrofitting their models and software with Huawei chips. I think a lot of people assumed it's because the government ordered DeepSeek to work with Huawei to embrace the domestic ecosystem, but it's actually the opposite. It was DeepSeek that voluntarily started using Huawei, experimenting with the Huawei chips, and Huawei actually only found out after. Then they started sending people to DeepSeek to help..." - Jing Yang, Asia Bureau Chief, The Information

Episode Highlights:[00:00] Quote of the Day by Jing Yang from The Information
[01:30] What changed since September: the ByteDance mystery resolved
[03:00] Why China's AI must be read on its own terms
[04:10] Breaking the story of DeepSeek on their 7.4B fundraise
[05:40] How the valuation went from $10 to $50 billion
[08:30] The lab that became famous for rejecting scaling laws
[10:15] Unpacking the DeepSeek deal structure: four types of investors
[12:40] Five-year lock-up and no secondary market trading
[14:20] Reverse due diligence: DeepSeek vetting its own investors
[16:40] Balancing open source, AGI research and IPO pressure
[17:45] The irony: inclusive vision, exclusive deal structure
[20:35] How Anthropic's Mythos preview changed Liang's mind[21:30] Why Chinese AI valuations look tiny next to US labs
[23:00] Why Chinese founders go consumer when they go global
[26:45] "The worst of customers" — price sensitivity and zero loyalty
[27:45] The compute constraint that caps every Chinese lab
[28:40] New labs in China: weaker infrastructure, harder exit
[30:30] Can China leapfrog on hardware the way it did on models?
[32:50] Stricter compliance, not political muscle
[34:30] Founder power when your company becomes strategic
[36:40] Junyang Lin's new lab and the scarcity premium
[38:00] Open source influence versus sustainable commercial models
[39:30] Zhipu versus MiniMax: how sentiment diverged after IPO
[42:30] What is the right mental map for China's AI ecosystem?
[43:20] The consolidation that still hasn't happened
[45:00] Seven to eight serious players and nobody giving up
[46:40] The one thing Jing wishes people would ask
[47:20] Nobody ordered DeepSeek to use Huawei chips
[50:00] Indicators to watch from now to 2027
[55:30] Closing

Profile: Jing Yang, Asia Bureau Chief from The Information

The Information Profile: https://www.theinformation.com/u/JingYang

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jing-yang-33548123/

X: https://x.com/jingyanghk

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format.

Fresh out of the studio, Aneesh Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn and co-author of Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI, joins us to dismantle the flattened narrative that AI is simply taking jobs. His counter-thesis: work is changing, not ending — and we never truly left the industrial age, only traded the factory floor for the office floor. Aneesh walks through his three-bucket framework for auditing your week, the move from the career ladder to the career wall, and why the org chart is giving way to the work chart. He closes by reframing the current AI moment as a battle of belief, urging leaders and workers to move from anxiety to agency and bet on themselves.

"We are in a battle of belief right now more than anything else. So stories matter a lot to humans. It's not just the tools we create, it's the stories we tell that have allowed us to become everything we've become. But whether it leads to better or worse... depends on the story we tell now. If we tell ourselves a story that it's going to lead to worse, it's more likely going to lead to worse. Because we have to unwind a lot of what the industrial age has told us to think about ourselves. A lot of industrial age work was about deficit management. I don't have the degree yet, I need to get it. I don't have the job title yet, I need to get it. We all started from a place of what we don't have, that we needed to get, in order to feel of value and succeed. This world..." - Aneesh Raman

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Quote of the Day by Aneesh Raman
[01:55] Aneesh's origin story
[04:00] The labour market: least efficient, transparent, dynamic market ever built
[05:45] Career advice: worry about what you can control
[07:19] Open to Work and the misaligned labour market
[09:00] We never left the industrial age
[10:36] Jobs are tasks, not titles — the software engineer example
[11:50] The three buckets: automated, augmented, uniquely human
[13:34] Gen Z: highest AI confidence, entrepreneurial by survival
[15:49] The real gap: mid- and late-career professionals
[16:13] Using the tool while rejecting the fatalism
[18:06] Auditing your week: list twelve tasks, sort three buckets
[20:22] Is there a cognitive ceiling? Bucket two for everyone
[21:00] Human capability is a fraction; it's human with AI
[23:34] Why the org chart emerged from the industrial age
[25:30] Work-chart principles: capabilities, not categories
[26:30] Managers as coaches and the rise of the super IC
[27:37] Asia Pacific: a responsible AI-era workforce strategy
[31:00] Anxiety to agency: we are in a battle of belief
[32:10] Bet on yourself: from deficit management to asset inventory
[34:07] How long is the window? Five years of experimentation
[36:04] The question no one asks: what's possible?
[36:23] The innovation explosion and the Lost Einsteins
[38:02] Fifty years to outdo the last five hundred
[38:17] What this all means for LinkedIn
[40:30] Recommendations

Profile: Aneesh Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, LinkedIn and Co-Author of "Open to Work"

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aneeshraman/

Open To Work: https://www.linkedin.com/opentowork/

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format.

Here are the links to watch or listen to our podcast.

Analyse Podcast Main Site: https://analysepodcast.com

Fresh out of the studio, Benedict Evans, independent technology analyst and author of AI Eats the World, returns to explore whether the AI model layer is becoming commodity infrastructure. Benedict argues there is no winner-takes-all effect in models yet, drawing parallels to telecoms, cloud, chips and the fiber bubble to ask where durable value actually accrues when everyone runs similar infrastructure on similar tokens. He unpacks why the chatbot remains a poor interface, introduces the "blank screen" and "jagged frontier" problems that keep software companies alive, and explains why large language models inherently give you "the average." Closing the conversation, Benedict reflects on the indicators that would show AI has truly eaten the world — and why the answer is better products, not better models."When you automate away work, you can always see the jobs that are going away because they're right there. And you don't know what the new jobs are going to be. Human needs are infinite. How many people are earning a living from making podcasts now? Imagine predicting that 10 years ago. There's a stage in the evolution of the market where like if you're still arguing about that, you're an idiot. But there's a stage at the beginning where you might have opinions about some of these questions, you're probably not even asking the right questions. That, I think, is where we are with this stuff today." — Benedict Evans

Episode Highlights: [00:00] Quote of the Day by Benedict Evans from AI Eats the World[01:16] The public market test: what are investors buying?[04:21] How far up the stack can models go?[05:30] Models can't build all the apps themselves[06:00] The thesis: models as commodity infrastructure[07:52] "All the value went up the stack"[08:24] Chips and Rock's Law: down to three players[11:23] The 1999 reseller story: one-time sales[13:28] The S-curve framing of technology[16:38] You're probably not asking the right questions on AI[18:02] "If this works, we're competing with a Mac"[20:25] Incumbents make it a feature[22:14] Big tech "killing startups" is overstated[24:39] Cowork as the new spreadsheet[26:01] The blank-screen and jagged-frontier problems[29:00] The hard part isn't writing the code[31:25] "What a good answer would probably look like"[33:38] The job displacement debate[37:38] Jevons paradox and the lump-of-labour fallacy[40:30] LLMs inherently give you the average[42:36] Why you really hire McKinsey[45:33] Punk versus prog rock: outside the training data[49:00] Automating ever-higher human functions[49:55] Why this is unanswerable: no theory of scaling[51:30] Indicators that AI has eaten the world[54:53] The solution isn't a better model[56:39] Where to find Benedict Evans

Profile: Benedict Evans, Independent Technology Analyst

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benedictevans/

Website: https://www.ben-evans.com/newsletter

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format.

Here are the links to watch or listen to our podcast.

Analyse Podcast Main Site: https://analysepodcast.com

Analyse Podcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1kkRwzRZa4JCICr2vm0vGl

Analyse Podcast Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/analyse-asia-with-bernard-leong/id914868245

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Fresh out of the studio, Eyck Freymann, Hoover fellow at Stanford and author of Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China, joins us to explore why the Taiwan question will be decided by economics and coercion, not by invasion. Eyck unpacks the Thucydides Trap as a warning, not a prophecy, traces how Xi Jinping's Belt and Road statecraft shapes his approach to Taiwan, and contrasts a kinetic invasion with the "quarantine" scenario he fears most. He reframes 2027 as a capability milestone, recasts TSMC as a "silicon magnet" binding America to Taiwan, and flags Taiwan's 2028 election as the real flashpoint. Last but not least, Eyck argues the real task is to deter the crisis, not the war.

"For Beijing, I hope they will say: the United States actually does have a strategy to use every element of its national power to preserve peace and stability without provoking us, and we should not assume the United States is incapable of an effective response. In Taiwan, I think the lesson is: the United States trusts the people of Taiwan to choose the best future for themselves, and ultimately Taiwan's fate is up to the people of Taiwan to choose. That is the heart of what the American One China policy is about and must be about. The people of Taiwan must choose, and the United States will respect their choices. That is a profound insight that doesn't get said often enough." - Eyck Freymann

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Quote of the Day by Eyck Freymann from the Hoover Institution at Stanford
[01:18] Eyck's origin story
[04:02] When Taiwan deterrence pulled the threads together
[06:33] Why the CCP embraces the Thucydides Trap
[07:36] Belt and Road as decentralized statecraft
[10:18] How Belt and Road consolidated Xi's power
[11:39] Xi's legacy project: why Taiwan comes next
[12:17] What gets lost without untranslated Chinese sources
[14:12] China's unexplained nuclear breakout
[16:23] Applied history: lessons from three mentors
[19:50] Reframing the timeline: 2027 vs 2049
[22:49] Declassifying the Davidson window
[24:27] Is 2049 bound by Xi's resolution?
[27:34] Cross-strait history and the counterintuitive lesson
[29:28] Two scenarios: kinetic invasion vs customs quarantine
[34:00] The TSMC financial-shock trigger
[36:48] Strategic ambiguity vs structured ambiguity
[42:39] The one thing few understand: it's all economic
[44:39] The right and wrong asks of Southeast Asian neutrals
[47:17] The silicon shield paradox and chip onshoring
[50:19] Why the CHIPS Act won't replace Hsinchu
[53:49] The January 2028 Taiwan election as a flashpoint
[55:24] Meta-question: the neglected domestic politics of Taiwan
[58:07] What success looks like for the book
[60:14] Closing

Profile: Eyck Freymann, author of "Defending Taiwan" and Hoover Fellow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eyck-freymann/

Personal Site: https://www.eyckfreymann.com/

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format. /

Here are the links to watch or listen to our podcast.

Analyse Podcast Main Site: https://analysepodcast.com

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Analyse Podcast Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/analyse-asia-with-bernard-leong/id914868245

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Fresh out of the studio, James Liang — Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Trip.com Group, economist, and author of Innovationism: A New Philosophy for the Age of AI — joins us to explore what becomes of human meaning when AI does the work. James argues that innovation and heritage are "the same coin": innovation measured by how much heritage it leaves behind. He unpacks why the individual, not the nation or firm, is the binding constraint on innovation, why aging societies stop producing startups, and how his Nature 2024 hybrid-work study reframes family-friendly policy as economically rational. Closing the conversation, James explains why he is bullish on China mid-term but bearish long-term — and why population, not chips, is the real race.

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Quote of the Day by James Liang, Chairman of Trip.com Group
[01:06] Introduction: James Liang
[03:18] Stepping down twice — the mobile wave he didn't see
[05:57] Founder mode and returning to lead Trip.com
[07:31] Three life lessons: a rich life, experience, family
[09:44] Innovationism — why the book opens with his daughter
[11:24] Core tenets: innovation and heritage as one coin
[14:38] Innovation as writing a company's cultural values
[16:00] What heritage really means
[17:32] Distil to simplicity; learn more in the age of AI
[19:00] The Nature 2024 hybrid-work experiment
[19:44] Triple-win policies: employee, company, society
[22:52] Innovation capacity — neurons, scale, connection
[25:37] Three levels: nation, firm, individual
[29:00] Why innovation cannot be planned top-down
[30:21] Japan's missing startups; Korea and China compared
[32:14] Hierarchy, vested interests, and blocked young talent
[33:17] AI and moats — operators and the physical world
[35:36] Education reform — stop filtering children too early
[37:31] College as universal general education
[40:00] Understanding still matters in the age of AI
[41:46] What readers won't pick up from the page
[42:14] The AI end game — master, child, or pet
[43:27] Population as the safeguard against losing control
[45:14] Technology ethics at the frontier
[46:01] Longevity, fresh blood, and stagnation
[49:19] Interstellar trips as Trip.com's next frontier
[49:41] The biggest misconceptions about China's innovation
[50:36] The big-country advantage in digital technology
[52:23] Electric cars, life science, three times the talent
[54:16] The China–US race — researchers as the real bottleneck
[56:38] Why blocking China hurts the US more
[57:42] The question James wishes people would ask
[59:25] Success for innovationism — relax, travel, have children
[61:22] Closing

Profile: James Liang, Co-founder, Executive Chairman of the Board, Trip.com Group and Author of "Innovationism: A New Philosophy for the Age of AI"

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-liang-tripgroup/

Trip.com Group: https://investors.trip.com/board-member/james-jianzhang-liang

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format.

Fresh out of the studio, Eric Ries — author of the new book Incorruptible, founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, co-founder of Answer.AI, and author of The Lean Startup — joins Bernard Leong to discuss his blueprint for building mission-controlled companies that resist financial gravity. Eric explains why trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in business and why success, far from being a shield, makes companies a target worth capturing. He walks through the governance fortresses that have kept Costco, Novo Nordisk, and Patagonia true to mission for decades, and argues that today's so-called best practices have destroyed billions in shareholder value. The conversation turns to AI: which parts of the Lean Startup it accelerates, which parts it cannot, and why validated learning still lives only between the ears. Eric closes with a radical redefinition of profit as the maximization of human flourishing, and a challenge to Asia-Pacific leaders to leapfrog the governance failures the West is about to live through.

"We're helping people create this asset and we're teaching them the wrong idea. We're teaching them that success will protect them. But that's backwards. Success makes you a target worth capturing. And so that explained to me all these companies I saw that failed—not because they went out of business, not because they failed to create value, they failed because of their success." - Eric Ries

Profile: Eric Ries, Founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, co-founder of Answer.AI, and author of The Lean Startup.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/

Personal Site: https://www.incorruptible.co/

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Quote of the Day by Eric Ries from *Incorruptible*
[00:45] Introduction: Eric Ries, author of "Incorriptible" & "The Lean Startup"
[01:11] Pulling the thread from programming to accountability
[03:12] Lean Startup built companies; didn't teach protection
[05:15] The billionaire dancing alone at the party
[06:09] Trustworthiness: business's most underrated asset[07:18] Why success makes you a target
[08:19] Today's best practices destroy value
[09:19] Costco's governance fortress defends customer experience
[09:54] Novo Nordisk's 100-year foundation structure
[11:12] AI and the Lean Startup on steroids
[14:09] MVP advantage dies when everyone has AI
[15:39] The professor with the dangerous biotech breakthrough
[17:13] Investors revealed as amoral actors
[18:13] The builder's intuition: create then capture value
[20:52] Protecting research from capital's gravitational pull
[23:30] Organizations are literally alive
[25:26] More humans, worse collective problem-solving
[25:46] Moral character as an emergent property
[27:25] Current profit definition has fatal blind spots
[30:13] Hitman marketplace: humans as input factor
[32:29] Surrogation: the measurement becomes the target
[33:51] The pre-IPO team laughing after CEO leaves
[36:36] Vatican conference on AI governance
[38:00] Emperor-for-life founders carry impossible burden
[41:31] Best practices young; ancient wisdom forgotten[44:40] Closing

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format.

Here are the links to watch or listen to our podcast.

Analyse Podcast Main Site: https://analysepodcast.com

Sign Up for Our This Week in Asia Newsletter: https://www.analysepodcast.com/#/portal/signup Subscribe Newsletter on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7149559878934540288

Fresh out of the studio, Geoffrey Cain, author of Steve Jobs in Exile and Samsung Rising, returns to the Analyse Podcast to argue that the twelve years between Jobs's 1985 ouster and his 1997 return to Apple were not a footnote but the forge. Drawing on private archives at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, unbroadcast footage from inside NeXT, and interviews with the people who lived it, Cain reframes the wilderness decade as the cause, not the gap, in Jobs's transformation. We trace the NeXT collapse and the failed IBM licensing deal, the parallel crucible of Pixar where Catmull and Lasseter barred Jobs from creative meetings, and the deep Japanese and Zen influences — Akio Morita, Sony, the beginner's mind — that Isaacson and Schlender underplayed. We close on Apple at fifty, John Ternus's ascent, and what Jobs would have done with AI.

Profile: Geoffrey Cain, author of "Steve Jobs in Exile"

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gcain/

Personal Site: https://geoffreycain.net/

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Quote of the Day by Geoffrey Cain, author of Steve Jobs in Exile
[00:30] What Geoffrey has been up after his first book: Samsung Rising
[04:05] Working in the US House on technology policy & rebuilding America's industrial base
[04:50] De-industrialisation, and rebuilding America's industrial base
[05:24] The central thesis on Steve Job's exile [07:13] The Steve Jobs we don't know — before the turtleneck and the iPhone[09:07] The wilderness — where every great founder is forged[12:30] The failed coup against John Sculley[14:10] Was Jobs early or wrong about what universities needed?[16:31] Object-oriented programming — the real innovation Jobs couldn't see[18:36] Jobs of 1997 was not the Jobs of 1985[20:00] Technology does not change the world — it makes things easier[22:38] The butterfly effect — if NeXT had gone differently, no iPhone[25:13] A failure of ego — Jobs versus the company he hated[28:49] NeXTstep — twenty years into the future in 1990[32:24] Pixar as the parallel crucible — bought for $5 million[35:25] Toy Story and the IPO that made Jobs a billionaire[38:57] What the NeXT and Pixar years really reveal[40:38] Three biographies, three frames — Isaacson, Schlender, Cain[45:26] Why NeXT became the ugly duckling of Apple lore[48:12] The Japanese influence Isaacson never pulled on[51:30] Apple at fifty — Ternus and the era of execution over reinvention[54:11] How Jobs would integrate AI — quiet, in the background[55:10] The Apple-Google Gemini partnership and swallowed pride[56:38] Jobs as second mover — Macintosh, iPhone, the bicycle for the mind[57:30] Why ChatGPT and Claude would look ugly to Jobs[1:00:30] What NeXT veterans say about the Ternus appointment[01:02:33] What success means for the book[01:03:13] Closing

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format.

Here are the links to watch or listen to our podcast.

Analyse Podcast Main Site: https://analysepodcast.com

Fresh out of the studio, Bernard Leong sits down with Kiren Kumar, Deputy Chief Executive of the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) Singapore, for a conversation on how Singapore is building trusted AI at national scale. Kiren traces IMDA's arc from the 2018 Model AI Governance Framework to the Agentic AI framework launched at Davos this year, the four AI missions — advanced manufacturing, finance, connectivity, and healthcare — anchoring the next strategic bound, and the programs moving enterprises from pilots to production. He argues the real blocker is leadership rather than policy, that trust is Singapore's enduring competitive moat, and that the country must shift from 10% productivity gains to 10X transformation. The conversation closes with a preview of ATx Summit 2026 and what great looks like for Singapore's AI economy by the early 2030s."What would be amazing to see in Singapore is, number one, we have our large companies truly transforming themselves and becoming way bigger than they are today in the global competitive landscape—in manufacturing, in finance, in healthcare, and in connectivity. That's one. The second one is we are known globally as an economy where everybody in our workforce is AI-ready. Yeah, is AI fluent. The third thing I'm hoping to see is we have amazing AI native startups being born in our ecosystem, which are global in the niche areas that they can play in. We may not have the next OpenAI, but I'm hoping that we have a lot of new AI native technology companies that are developing products and services and solutions enabled by AI, powered by AI, transforming industries and creating a lot of growth." - Kiren Kumar Episode Highlights: [00:00] Quote of the Day by Kiren Kumar from IMDA Singapore[02:24] Origin story — Singapore, Stanford, dotcom crash[05:00] Digital economy now 19% of Singapore's GDP[08:08] Career advice — start at a startup first[09:04] IMDA's four core mandates explained[11:47] Trust as Singapore's enduring brand advantage[12:48] Co-create with industry rather than regulate[14:09] Why agentic AI changes the governance equation[15:18] Pilots versus production — the hard transition[17:18] Forward deployed engineers as scarce commodity[18:55] Why agentic AI needed a separate framework[20:23] SME AI adoption tripled in a single year[21:36] From 10% productivity to 10X transformation[24:20] SME Go Digital — 100,000 SMEs in ten years[25:40] Leadership, not policy, is the real blocker[30:46] National AI Impact Program upskills 100,000[34:50] Four missions — manufacturing, finance, connectivity, healthcare[35:49] Owning the global AI standards layer[38:01] ATx Summit 2026 themes and headliners[41:07] What Singapore must get right by 2030[42:05] AI is a contact sport — just start[44:36] What great looks like — companies, workforce, startups[46:52] ClosingProfile: Kiren Kumar, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Infocomm Media Development Authority (or IMDA), Singapore (LinkedIn) Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the Analyse Podcast show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format.

Fresh out of the studio, Alex Topaloski, CEO and Co-founder of Pulse ID joined us in a conversation on his company's customer engagement infrastructure powering Visa's cardholder offers across Asia Pacific. Drawing on Pulse ID's recent white paper, The Age of Knowing, Alex unpacks the three forces reshaping bank loyalty: interchange, partnerships, and intelligence. He explains why banks have solved the data problem but still struggle with engagement, walks through agentic AI architectures and the minimum effective nudge principle, and lays out why Asia-Pacific diversity demands distinct playbooks for Australia, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Closing out, Alex argues the next 12 months belong to banks that prioritize the last mile — where ROI on a decade of data investment finally lands and lays out what great would look life for Pulse ID moving forward.

"So we are making that transition from being a system-of-record platform for engagement, loyalty, and rewards to being a system-of-action platform that drives measurable behavioral change. And I think that is quite a big step forward. The efficiencies that clients are able to get—the outcomes, the revenue, ROIs that it can get on interactions—it's something that people are now going to start experiencing." - Alex Topaloski

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Quote of the Day by Alex Topaloski, CEO of Pulse ID
[01:13] Introduction: Alex's career journey
[03:41] Pulse ID: Infrastructure platforms as invisible organs
[06:26] Lifelong learning as the hardest conviction to hold
[08:11] What Pulse ID does as a B2B fintech infrastructure company
[09:26] Defining the era of intelligence
[10:56] Two stages: data architecture, then engagement
[12:56] Why super apps deliver smoother journeys than banks
[16:11] Why loyalty platforms struggle to absorb new signals
[17:26] Why customer engagement is the wrong primary KPI
[19:41] MCP as a way to act without seeing the full data
[20:26] The Visa, GCash, JCB partnership playbook
[22:41] Why move-fast-break-things fails in B2B finance
[24:11] Smart pricing as the hardest model to scale
[25:26] Operating across Singapore, Japan, ANZ, UAE, Oman
[27:56] Multiple AI brains across the stack
[29:26] The guardrail principle: AI selects tools, not data
[31:11] System of record to system of action
[34:11] Where the moat sits when foundation models commoditize
[35:56] The Asia-Pacific market diversity playbook
[38:41] The boardroom decision in the next 12 months
[40:56] What great looks like for Pulse ID
[41:41] Book recommendation: The Fountainhead

Profile: Alex Topaloski, CEO of Pulse ID

Main Site: https://www.pulseid.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/topaloski/

Fresh out of the studio, Bernard Leong reconnects with Rebecca Fannin, founder of Silicon Dragon Ventures and author of Tech Titans of China, six years on from their first conversation about the original landmark book. Rebecca traces China's transformation from copier to innovator, the decoupling of US-China venture capital and the reroute of capital flows toward the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and an AI race where China commercialises while the US theorises. The conversation moves through Chinese EV dominance, humanoid robotics, and semiconductor self-sufficiency, before opening out to a multipolar tech order with India and Saudi Arabia rising. She closes with a hopeful note on reopening US-China collaboration.

Episode Highlights:[00:00] Quote of the Day by Rebecca Fannin from Silicon Dragon Ventures
[01:00] Introduction: Rebecca Fannin
[03:00] From copier to innovator: the global perception shift
[04:00] BAT plus ByteDance: still the tech titans
[05:30] Beyond BAT: TMD, ByteDance, DiDi go global
[07:00] Temu and the de minimis tariff hit
[09:00] Cross-border VC decouples: Sequoia, GGV split
[10:00] Capital reroutes to the Middle East and Singapore
[11:30] No more golden era for cross-Pacific VC
[12:00] AI, quantum, semiconductor funding dries up
[13:00] The 2020-2023 crackdown and Beijing's reset
[15:00] Apple's supply chain dependency hard to unwind
[16:00] The AI race: Chinese open-source models surge
[17:30] China commercialises, the US theorises
[18:30] Silicon Valley adopts 996 and Chinese-style attacks
[20:30] Chinese EVs surpass Tesla and European makers
[22:00] Why Xiaomi built a car where Apple couldn't
[22:30] DJI, Unitree, UBTech: China's robotics dominance
[24:00] Humanoid robots and the policy maker dilemma
[25:00] China's semiconductor self-sufficiency push
[25:30] Nvidia export controls and the SMIC question
[27:00] What few in the West truly understood five years ago
[28:00] Quantum computing as the long-term frontier bet
[29:00] Beyond binary: India, ASEAN, Saudi Arabia, Israel
[31:30] Why China's rise became the biggest tech story
[33:00] Hope for a reopening of US-China collaboration
[33:30] Closing

Profile: Rebecca Fannin, Author of "The New Tech Titans of China" and Silicon Dragon Ventures

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-fannin-533128/

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format.