500 Episodes Later: What I Learned From 11 Years of Podcasting with Bernard Leong
Fresh out of the studio and we hit our 500th episode milestone, guest host Yana Fry from Yana TV turns the tables on Bernard Leong, CEO of Dorje AI and host of Analyse Asia, in a special ask-me-anything format. We start with Bernard's journey from finding his first guest to navigating 11 years of podcasting, revealing his 12-word life philosophy: "Learn from everyone, follow no one, observe the patterns, work like hell." Following on, Bernard shares how his theoretical physics background provides the tools on everything from digital transformation to building Dorje AI's vision of reimagining ERP systems. The conversation dives deep into Bernard's pragmatic idealist worldview, lessons from managing products to running business teams, and the pivotal 2022 decision to pivot from audio to video that nearly ended the podcast. Bernard also reflects on fatherhood with three children, the profound impact of his late father, and announces a major rebrand: Analyse Asia is dropping "Asia" to become the Analyse Podcast as it expands to a global audience, marking a new chapter in the show's evolution.
"For Dorje AI, what great looks like is being able to solve the ERP problem for businesses. It could take five years, ten years, or even two decades — because every technology adoption cycle takes time. We’re at the beginning of a massive shift, but many still cling to the old ways of doing things. The one thing I’ve learned about digital transformation is this: everyone loves transformation, but they hate to change. Everything that people say will happen in two years usually takes five.
When I think about Analyse Asia, greatness for me is being able to do an interview without looking at a set of questions — to tease out a guest’s story authentically, without prejudice, without being a fanboy. Just getting the story out. If I can do that, that’s great. Of course, hitting a million subscribers would be fantastic — that’s the next milestone I’m chasing. But for me, it’s always: ‘I’ve reached this milestone — what’s next?’
When you think about frugality at the highest level, it’s not about resources — it’s about time. The real measure is how much time you can spend doing what truly matters. That’s what great looks like for me: asking, what’s the minimum amount of time I can make the maximum impact? Maybe I’ll never fully get there. But if we can say we lived this life without regret — that’s enough." - Bernard Leong
Profile:
- Bernard Leong, Host of Analyse Asia Podcast, CEO of Dorje AI, Adjunct Associate Professor from NUS Business School & Institute of Systems Science.
- Guest Host: Yana Fry from Yana TV (LinkedIn, YouTube) which we highly recommend and subscribe to.
Here is the edited transcript of our conversation:
Yana Fry: Welcome to Analyse Asia Podcast, a premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of media, business, and technology in Asia. Today is the 500th episode because it is so special. I am co-hosting the show with Bernard Leong, who is founder of the Analyse Asia podcast. Bernard Leong is also the CEO of Dorje AI and an adjunct associate professor at NUS [National University of Singapore] and the voice behind hundreds of conversations that have been on this podcast and have mapped stages of the evolving tech landscape. Bernard, welcome to your own show.
Bernard Leong: Thank you. Yes, I know. We decided to do this as an ask me anything (AMA). So I'm not prepared for anything because this is the first time you have the questions and I am just going to answer them.
Yana Fry: Well, I'm glad I'm prepared and I have questions if someone does. So let me just throw you the first question. When you started Analyse Asia, this very first episode, what was the biggest challenge back then?
Bernard Leong: The biggest challenge was finding the first guest and I had to go to the internet and look for someone specifically understanding Asia tech. I managed to find this analyst. He's now become a venture capitalist with the company called Breadcrumb Capital. His name was Sameer Singh, and I just reached out to him. We had our first conversation, then putting all together the podcast editing tools. At that point in time I was still using GarageBand. Then slowly, when you listen to the first episode again you realize how far you have come and how bad it was putting that thing out there. So those were the challenges.
Of course when you do the first episode, the next thing is who's gonna come on the next episode? Who's gonna come on the next episode? So there's always the fear of how many people I'm going to ask and how many people are gonna say no. If you believe this, for every 10 guests I've emailed at that point in time, I usually get one. Yes. Nowadays it's slightly better. I'm getting people sending me requests but I have also continued to source for guests who I am really interested to have on the show.
Yana Fry: I was gonna say you probably get 20 and you turn down 10.
Bernard Leong: I try not to turn it down unless I have a clear story in mind. I always try to prepare every interview as if there's a story I want the guest to tell me. I am actually okay if it comes from their perspective. I know that there are a lot of people who feel that sometimes when I interview corporate leaders, I tend to let them speak their own narrative. But I think it's very important in a podcast world to be authentic and to make sure that they speak what they believe. Questioning it in a way where there is a fair balance, and of course, also giving them their own voice to have their point of view.
Yana Fry: In your life, you have lived through, you could say, various careers. It was physics and studies, law, aerospace, digital transformation, and now AI entrepreneurship. So how does it all come together for you?
Bernard Leong: So maybe at a very fundamental level, I'm a theoretical physicist. I was trained as a theoretical physicist. So when I think of everything, whether it's digital transformation, whether it's AI, it's from the lens of looking at everything as first principles. It turns out when I was studying theoretical physics, I was specializing in astrophysics and cosmology. When you're working in this topic, you will be using Einstein's General Relativity. To do Einstein's General Relativity, you need to use something called tensors. What is happening in AI specifically now in the large language models, they're all governed by tensors.
So the beauty of being a theoretical physicist is that: if you look through the history of all the theoretical physicists across the ages, there has been a lot of what we call cross-disciplinary entering from bio theoretical physicists into another domain and able to do something differently. So if you think about Black-Scholes model, which is known in finance for options trading, that was actually the heat equation. Black was a theoretical physicist. You take Watson and Crick—Francis Crick was a theoretical physicist, and they found the structure of the DNA.
So when I look at every problem, whether it's digital transformation, whether it is redesigning a post office, redesigning a parcel locker, how to use the app interaction or do a drone flight, everything is just a set of basic questions: How do I get this done? Who are the five people I want to talk to? What are the five most pressing problems and what are the five books I must read in order to understand what's going on? Then through that it also guides me in terms of how I do interviews. There's a very systematic way, but ultimately you and I should know, we talk about this that podcast interviews are not science. It's art.
Yana Fry: Art and science, I would say. Well, science, you need to have some kind of structure and then leave a lot of space for the flow.
Bernard Leong: I'm trying to do that. I get feedback. Sometimes people are asking me, "Hey, you know, those questions seem to be always very similar. You have a very basic structure. You're not very conversational." So over time I also have learned to evolve, right, where I'll try to ask a follow-up question or nowadays, thanks to ChatGPT, when I design the interview, I could ask a couple of questions to ChatGPT and say, "Can you criticize how I'm going to make this interview flow? What would be a good follow up question so that I can get the speaker to talk more about this specific topic, be it data streaming platform, be it cyber security, be it AI and also be like maybe interviewing you right about Yana TV? How do you think about what are the things you learned from talking to? You have interviewed diplomats, you interviewed recently a monk, right?
Yana Fry: Yes, actually Lama Rinpoche, he's a reincarnated master. Yes, very close to Dalai Lama. Yes. He's like a spiritual teacher. That's right.
Bernard Leong: When I think about different people coming on the show, thinking about how I want to tell their stories is actually surprising that you do not know that after 11 years now probably, where you get to the 500th episode, how do you think about—I'm still thinking about how to interview somebody well.
Yana Fry: A follow up question, since we're on that. You often describe yourself as a pragmatic idealist. Yes. So how does it come together? Does it mean in practice, particularly in the intersection of academia, business and innovation?
Bernard Leong: Okay. I like the term pragmatic idealist. This was actually coined by U Thant, one of the Secretary Generals of the United Nations. It was actually based on a compilation of essays written by diplomats, and there was an essay written, I think, if I recall correctly, by Tommy Koh, one of the very well established Singaporean academics. He talks about U Thant's point of view about world affairs.
You have to be an idealist because you want to think society is gonna get better, it's gonna progress towards a better society. But the problem is human nature is very complex. There will always be trade offs. So the word pragmatic is very important. While you may be thinking about trying to end a conflict, while you may be trying to solve a very, very difficult problem, you may see the angle inside, but you have to be pragmatic about maybe what you assume will work today may not work. So you have to push in little, little steps towards that change.
So I read that when I was 18. So I tend to take that worldview because I think I'm naturally an optimistic person. So I decided that that would be how my philosophy in life is going to look like. That means I'm idealistic by nature, but when I approach a problem, it does not mean that I'm not pragmatic. I'll think of very practical steps. I'll think about what are the things that really matter that will make me move the needle a bit, a bit, a bit until I can make that change.
Yana Fry: From Cambridge to AWS, from Singapore Post to Dorje AI, which we're gonna talk about. Then my question is here with actually diverse career, what were the biggest lessons?
Bernard Leong: Wow. That's a very good question. If you can share with the audience, actually, I always distill advice that I give and all the lessons that I learned into 12 words. So I mentioned this before: Learn from everyone. So you learn from everyone. You take a look at different points of view, even the other extreme point of view, and try to imagine if you were in the other perspective, what it looks like, and then trying to find that middle position.
Follow no one. I think something that I learned across in life, you have all these people who you look up to, you idolize them, but you cannot live their lives. Just as much as I would like to admire what Elon Musk is doing, what Sam Altman is doing, these are people that are not without their flaws, right? So when I say follow no one, your life is actually your own. Because this is your own, you have to find your own path. So whatever the path is going to be, I think of myself now at the age of 51, I think of maybe another half a century. Hopefully, with the progress of medical science, I think about what is that end state I want to be. If there's that end state that I want to be, I'll just follow my own path and not think about anyone.
Now then there is another three words: observe the patterns. I try to see what is going on. I think very deliberately about things. I tend to think about what is gonna happen, what's the next 12 to 24 months.
Then of course the last three words: work like hell. So, you know, I will work extremely crazy. So if you ask me over this, like all these different careers, I think these 12 words are just very nice, right? Learn from everyone. Follow no one. Observe the patterns. Work like hell. Then now the Chinese have a very nice term. It's called 996. But you know, founders like you and I, we are 007, 0:00 AM to 0:00 AM seven days a week.
Yana Fry: Yes. Let's talk about Dorje AI. What problems are you truly solving beneath just automation and workflow? It's like what is actually the real problem?
Bernard Leong: The real problem is this: every organization they have financial ledgers. In the world of enterprises, we call them Enterprise Resource Planning systems, or what people call the ERP. What the ERP does is specifically taking whatever your companies receive as revenues, you know, payments to suppliers, doing all kinds of financial transactions, maybe sometimes even doing things like very sophisticated ERPs will include things like treasury management.
Now, what has happened in the world of enterprises is that the ERP system is pretty clunky and it's pretty dominant. Ones like SAP and Oracle NetSuite, they are leading the way, except that a lot of the things they're doing is still in the 1990s. If you look at today's world of the internet, actually these systems are very, very ill suited to deal with very, very high e-commerce transactions. So people have come out with different ways of doing it.
When I think about Dorje AI, what I'm really trying to solve is, can I bring everyone into an ERP as well? That means what I'm saying is, is there a way that I can design a better ledger together? Because one big problem that also brings all of this ledger is that every time when a business tries to use SAP, they have to write their business logic according to SAP's rules. Because of that, some ERPs fail because the business process just cannot work with the software logic. But thanks to generative AI now, because you can customize anything, that specific problem, I suppose with the help of AI agents, you should be able to solve that. So if I were to look 10 years ahead from now, then the question becomes can I build the ERP based on this new AI framework? I mean, I'm pretty sure there are a thousand people working on this. I may not succeed. But I think the line of thinking is there. Then the question becomes business model.
The problem with ERP systems, if you look at the top 10 enterprise software in the world the last 10 years, SAP is still number one, right? Everybody hates SAP. But the question then becomes, can you find a way to break it? But to break it is not about technology to break, it is actually about business. So the counter positioning is how SAP is charging its customers. It's charging its customers by having, if you have a thousand people, I charge you a thousand licenses. But you know, you have a head count. I have a head count. We have to plan. So one way to do this is maybe we shouldn't charge by users. We should just be charging as pay-as-you-go, which is what business owners like you and I like, right? We don't want to be having some hidden fees hitting somewhere. We're actually right at the beginning of this AI cycle where we can actually make changes like that. But that also means challenging the status quo. Everybody is rushing into the agent AI piece at the moment, but they're not thinking about even redesigning the fundamental core of what the ERP system really is—basically a ledger. Everyone has tried to challenge everything outside the ledger, but no one has actually tried challenging the ledger.
I like to read history books, and one of the books I was reading was about Kublai Khan. He was a Mongol leader who unified China. Before that, the Mongols conquered north of China and couldn't conquer the south of China because the Chinese were very good at the Navy. Their naval forces were one of the best in the world. Kublai Khan, because the Mongol army is usually cavalry, what he did was he decided to change the fundamental thinking of how Mongol troops work. He built a navy, which is shocking to everyone, which is what they're weakest at. Essentially he conquered the whole of China.
So it's actually taking the strongest strength of your opponent and pushing it right through. So reading these history books tells me that no one is not defeatable. There are different ways of reading, thinking about history and thinking about how you want to dislodge it. I think being a founder is always very difficult. It's always like, there will always be another hundred people who's doing the same thing, maybe with slight variations, and they may not have a point of view. So you have to, I've grown old enough now to tell myself, try not to let everyone sidetrack what you are doing. It could be slower than everyone. Just take a step back and let everyone run the course, but just think through what are the correct set of actions you want to take, and then hope that you can get to the finishing line.
Yana Fry: Just to deepen into this, since you know so much about it. If you were to advise an enterprise leader who is just starting the AI journey, so what do you feel is the biggest misconception they have to unlearn to succeed?
Bernard Leong: I think if you ask me today, because I have been teaching a lot of business leaders across Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Philippines, and Saudi Arabia. One common theme that seems to have come up is the use of tools. One of the biggest problems for a business leader is they cannot agree to what tools they want their staff to use. Is it ChatGPT? Is it Claude? Is it Microsoft Copilot? Then the next part of it is that some business units will prefer to use this solution and some business units are prepared to use another solution. Hence what is happening is there's no standardization because we are at such an early stage.
So I think one of the advice now I've given them is try not to be so dramatic to decide what tools to use. Let everyone select the tools and slowly prune them off because some of the tools will go out of fashion and some of the tools will get better. Just basically allow the businesses and the employees to innovate around the edges, but you protect your core. So there is something that I think business leaders need to think about.
In fact, before you even wanna do any generative AI applications, I have business leaders come to me, "Hey Bernard, can you build me this knowledge base system, this chatbot system?" My first question is, "Why do you wanna do this? Can you tell me how your staff are using AI today?" They say, "Yeah, they use ChatGPT." Then my next question is, "Do they know how to prompt properly? How do you know that they're giving you the output that you want?" Then nowadays you have something called work slop, which is like they give bad AI generated content and then the senior people have to spend more time cleaning up the mess. So if you start to untangle most of it, the first rule is find out what, why, and how should they use generative AI? What are the reasons? How should I enable them? Once I think you can clear those three hurdles, then you can start talking about implementing AI across the organization.
Yana Fry: You built products within large organizations, and then you moved into your own company, entrepreneurship. So my question here would be, what do you feel the best lesson that you carried from your experience in the largest companies and then into running your own business that other business owners should know? Besides what you just said.
Bernard Leong: A lot of people like to classify me as a business or technology person. I think I find myself sitting in between. So one of the aspects of working in large corporations that I really enjoyed is product management—not just a single product. It's when you become the person looking at five different products within the company and try to find a unifying theme around them. The one lesson that I find very interesting is that I have learned to focus only on the boring stuff as the leader.
So let me tell you a story. When I was designing the SAM machine—this is a curiosity you'll see in Singapore, and we redesigned the fifth generation from all previous generations. It was using some keyboard and I decided to use the iPad. So in the early stages where we were working on this product, you need to type in some information and it uses a keyboard. So my team were very excited because Apple Pay came out. So they said, "Hey, maybe we should implement this." So I was looking at one of the recent versions. I said, "Can you show me how much you typed?" Then they were like saying, "Why do you want to check that? It's such a boring thing."
So as they were typing, the keyboard was actually loading very slowly. So I started to take out my iPhone and tried to put a stopwatch on, and I pressed for the number of seconds. Then essentially I said, "Why do we need half a minute to be able to type this?" Because as you're typing, the words are coming out slowly. So I asked them, "Can you try to bring it down to how many milliseconds?" They were like, "What?" I was like, "Yes." Obviously if you're an engineer who likes to build sexy stuff, right, you're probably like, "But this is not a good use of time."
So I said, "Well, what is not a good use of time is there are five people queuing up to use the machine. If each person is being delayed by half a minute, try to count the order. If the queue goes up to 20, what happens?" Then they suddenly did the math and said, "Oh yeah." Then they realized they have to get the keyboard sorted before they wanna do anything with Apple Pay.
So when I think now, the new is easy, but getting it right is very hard. So when I think about podcasting, when I think about everything I do, I always try to think about is the new really easy or should I try to get it right? So maybe a lot of things that I do in Analyse Asia doesn't change. Sometimes it's just because I'm trying to work out is there a need to make those kind of changes. One of the biggest changes, I think you interviewed my wife, was the move from audio to video. That was actually the hardest pivot that I've actually done because for a very long time I preferred to have my voice and someone's voice in the audio file. I was never ready for like a front screen in this situation. 'Cause even when I was in theater, I was always the producer or the technical director, but never the person on the stage.
Yana Fry: Well, until now, now you are. I also know that they also say in podcasting that if you don't do video, you're really behind on the podcasting. So credits to you.
Bernard Leong: I'll credit my wife for pushing me on that.
Yana Fry: Well, since we are talking now about Analyse Asia, over the 500 episodes, you have talked with a lot of brilliant minds. My question to you would be, which conversation or person has changed you the most and why?
Bernard Leong: Wow. That is a very, very difficult question.
Yana Fry: I know.
Bernard Leong: I would not say that there is—there are a few interviews that changed my perspective on how I think about things. I think, let me give some an example of one interview that I always mention, even in the early days. It was actually an audience member who happens to, his name is Ray Ozzie. He happens to be the former CTO of Microsoft. He messaged me on Facebook to Analyse Asia Facebook page and asked me, "Hey, I listened to your podcast. Can you do something about Foxconn?" Those were the days of the iPhone manufacturing and Foxconn. I think he was very curious about the question of, you know, if I want to engage Foxconn to make my hardware device, how many minimum order quantity units?
So I looked around the internet and I found this gentleman by the name Tim Culpan. He's now still living in Taiwan. He's probably the best Bloomberg reporter on Foxconn and TSMC, and he eventually became an opinion writer on Bloomberg. I think now he has gone freelance. I heard from common friends that he's writing currently a book on TSMC. I got him on the show and Tim has this point of view that he doesn't like to do video even now, so I couldn't get him on video anymore. But what was interesting in that conversation, he laid out the things that I was asking and he gave the correct answer. It was quite interesting because a lot of people found my podcast through that episode.
As the years go by, the surprising episodes will be with some different business leaders. I can give another one that's pretty interesting. For the first time I did an interview with the person who was heading Google's Asia Pacific. His name is Scott Beaumont. Scott was talking about the next billion initiative of Google across the Asia Pacific. As we were talking about it, he pointed out some insights about leadership, how to manage across different regions, how to localize. Then as the years go by, when I start talking to every Asia Pacific leader, be it maybe recently I had Ling Hai who's actually one of the three executives on the management committee for MasterCard. When you ask them what is the overall view of the region, how do you think about things, they give you very, very interesting perspectives.
So then we also have the journalists. Sometimes I interview some journalists. I'm very lucky. I'm probably the only podcast who gets somebody from The Information. The Information is a very well known Silicon Valley tech publication. I had Jessica Lessin, the founder of The Information, but I usually interview Asia bureau chiefs. I first interviewed Shai Oster and then I interviewed Jing Yang, who's now leading the bureau. Usually every conversation about China always gives me a very different perspective.
But I do recall Shai mentioned a comment that I now use with my ex-colleagues in Amazon, and I always tell them, "You know, Amazon is like a Chinese company. It's just that they don't know it yet." Then all my ex-colleagues are like, "That is so spot on, Bernard." Then I use it and it becomes part of me. Then some people attribute it to me then, but I said, "No. The person who actually said it to me was Shai because he was the one who mentioned it to me."
Yana Fry: That's cool. Five hundred episodes is a huge achievement. Any podcast, they say what is statistically, most people don't go beyond 10 or 20 episodes.
Bernard Leong: Fifteen. I think if you are 4%, if you hit 50.
Yana Fry: Wow. If you have 500, you're like zero. What percent? I think it's about
Bernard Leong: 0.2%, according to Harry Stebbings from 20VC.
Yana Fry: So you're 0.2% in the world of podcasting, which is a huge, huge thing. Now, what kept you going all those years when podcasting wasn't cool or popular like it is right now?
Bernard Leong: I think when I approach Analyse Asia, I always thought of it like, you know, a Japanese craftsman making you know, that perfect vase, but the perfect vase has cracks and everything. So I always thought of it as a craftsman. So one of the things that I took as an approach to doing this podcast was to be a Shokunin—what the Japanese call a craftsman. So what kept me going was trying to make the show better and better. You and I have this conversation about distribution, right? How do you get the correct audience to watch your show? How do you get them to discover you? How do you make it work? I studied a lot of my other, the other podcasts in the world. To be quite honest, I still haven't figured it out. I'm still trying, but I think the way I've been thinking a lot about what keeps me going is I just want to make it better and better to a point where I can actually just walk into a studio like here now—now we are in Poddster Singapore—and then we can just, you know, have that conversation and then I can go back to my pretty busy day. Because the beauty of generative AI now is that a lot of things that I have to work for two different companies have now reduced from days to weeks to days, days to hours and hours to minutes. So the fractional time of being able to converse with someone and to learn what they are thinking about is something that still keeps me going.
Of course, Yana, I'm sure you and I have that feeling, and I'm sure a lot of podcasters also have that feeling—sometimes, you know, you may feel that you want to stop. I think I have gone through that.
Yana Fry: I did. I stopped Yana's TV three years in when I launched it in 2015—2018—and then relaunched it. So I know what it feels like. That's why I'm so admiring that you actually kept going all these years.
Bernard Leong: I kept it going. There was actually a point in time, I think around 2022, and that was the decision to go to video. Right. I was thinking that I'm actually reaching a point where I don't think I can continue anymore. It's like the seventh, eighth year kind of situation. Then I decided that, hey, maybe I should just give the video thing a shot and no harm trying, right? Of course, what my wife said, "Go and talk to Jeremy." We are talking about Jeremy Au from Brave SEA podcast. I spoke to Jeremy and I'm trying to understand his workflow, how he's thinking about the video side. I gained quite a lot of understanding that it's a very different medium, and because of my theater background, it utilizes much more from my theater background than before. So ultimately it's a gut feel. So I went with the gut feel. Of course there was a crypto crash and I happened to know one of the founders who crashed and I got him on the show, and that basically upshot the traffic very quickly. I even got a New York Times article. But they didn't mention my name. They just said I'm the "unconvinced [unnamed] host of Analyse Asia podcast." So, you know, those things happen, right? But people then realize, I even got like Twitter messages saying, "Why are you giving the guy a platform to talk?" I said, "But I think it's fair to give everyone a platform to talk despite what you say." Then there was some prominent podcaster who later interviewed the same person and got it. We kept conversing over Twitter. Then I was saying, "Now you understand how I felt."
Yana Fry: Speaking about the podcast, for 500 episodes, you have been having this iconic line that it is an Analyse Asia podcast where you are dissecting the pulse between business, technology, and media in Asia. What your audience doesn't know yet—you and I had a private chat before we started this episode—and you're retiring the tagline. So what's happening, what's happening next?
Bernard Leong: Okay, so I am just gonna make the announcement here. We are going to rebrand the Analyse Asia podcast. We're gonna drop the Asia off and call it the Analyse Podcast. The tagline probably still says the same. "Welcome to the Analyse podcast, where we dissect the pulse of business, technology, and media globally."
Why the change? I think we are at this juncture where thanks to the internet we can be global. I am actually continuously getting more and more global audience. So that is one of the impetus. I have also interviewed guests that are actually beyond Asia, for example. I did with Lionel Barber, who was the former FT editor who wrote an iconic book on Masayoshi Son, "A Gambling Man," Patrick McGee from "Apple in China." Soon I'll be hopefully, fingers crossed, I should be getting Karen Hao, who wrote "Empire of AI," on my show.
So when you think about the bigger picture, and I think the world's so interconnected, I'm just starting to realize, actually it doesn't matter where I'm from. There are people like 20VC where you see Harry Stebbings almost every week interviewing somebody from Silicon Valley. The reach of the internet allows me to also reach out to new audiences I have not reached out before. But I think for the ecosystem to grow, we need to be thinking bigger. Maybe the Amazon value of Think Big. So we have to think bigger and how do we take this to the next stage?
That is something I'm still thinking about. You'll start to see some website changes. You'll start to see maybe the domain name still stays the same, but the roots were all there. I think making this big step is probably where I want to go. You can analyse anything. You can analyse AI, you can analyse, you know, energy, you could even analyse—I probably have a whole rush of very good interviews coming out where most of the people are all global, from Microsoft. Some of, I have another gentleman, Arnaud Frade formerly from Nielsen, who just wrote a book on AI, who's coming on the show as well. So these new dynamics will change the way how I think about the world. So I decided that, hey, let's just drop the Asia and let's move on and go global.
Yana Fry: Go global. Beautiful. We talked a lot today about the podcasting journey and your professional journey, and I just wanted to paint a bit more on the personal journey. Because I also find this is what really gets people excited to know who is the person beneath and underneath all of this. So you are father of three children.
Bernard Leong: Yes.
Yana Fry: So your kids, what did they teach you about leadership and life?
Bernard Leong: Wow.
Yana Fry: Among many lessons.
Bernard Leong: I have three children. They are very different people in their own right. So I have three children, Eleanor, Evan, and Estella. So they're now six, eight, and 13. When you—I think you have interviewed my wife, we are both CEOs of companies and we have to think about what should we do for them. I think a lot of the time is about trying to learn to manage and give them the freedom to look for something. One of the things we try to do is not to give them too much work or too much to allow them to explore. To the point that I think Yuying was saying that my daughter went up to her and said, "I'm bored." The question is: How to let them have the will to explore.
I've also learned that for some of my kids, when—for example, I've recently brought my son for a chess competition, couple of chess competitions, and the original intent was that I don't think he will win. Right. But I just tell him, "Just go and experience the game," et cetera. He lost a couple of times, you know, he fell down when he was there. Then you have to be the coach and tell him how to come up again. Then he went for the nationals, Singapore's national school competitions, and then he managed to win 2nd of the North region with a very good team. They were unrated. Unrated means they have no [FIDE] rating. That means all the top schools are there. They managed to get the 4th position on par with the 3rd position on points and lost on tie break points, as the only unrated team in the top 10, and they were number four. They even beat probably one of the most well known schools in Singapore. He drew with the top player of his generation, which—when he was meeting the player, I just told him, "You have played that well before. All you just need to do is to draw."
I think that is something like trying to coach them, trying to think about how to allow them to expand beyond themselves. I think that's very hard. Sometimes when you manage their emotions, when they throw a tantrum, you need to think about, you know, how do you manage them? My expectations are relatively high.
Yana Fry: so hello Asian family. Yeah. Come on. Everybody here is like that.
Bernard Leong: But then it is quite interesting that both my wife and I, we have decided very, very early that all three children will go through Montessori education. So we had a very, very clear view that the future is not about whether it is AI today, quantum computing tomorrow. It's actually about the ability to learn fast. I can see in my eldest daughter, she learns very, very fast. She self-learns and every time I try to teach her something, she says, "No, no, no, I'm just gonna go turn on Coursera, turn on Udemy, turn on Khan Academy," and she'll do it by herself.
So when you think about children, they will take very, very contrarian paths. I think the only thing I learned is exactly the same thing I learned from my late father was don't try to decide for them what they should be doing. But sometimes I do that just to, you know, try to give them a purpose. But I think in the back of my mind, it's like eventually they will decide they want to do this, and then they're just going to follow their own passions and do that. I think that's what's gonna end up happening because I think essentially like the same thing I said, right, follow no one. I'm sure my kids would also follow no one and they will have their own path ahead.
Yana Fry: Speaking about your late father, I know that you have been very close with him and he greatly impacted your life. I would like to ask you, what do you think one thing that the world should really know about him that it doesn't?
Bernard Leong: I think it's the concept of loyalty. I wrote an article about him. He was—okay, so my dad worked at the age of, I think 13 or 14 and retired at the age of 68 for one company. Wow. He is a working class individual with probably just primary school education. The only thing that he ever told me about himself that he's really proud of was the day where he got the 50-year anniversary with the company and he got this watch.
That has impacted a lot of how I think about managing people. It's very hard to have someone today who worked more than average of two years, specifically even in the tech industry. If you can get someone to stay two years, it's already an achievement by itself, right? So a lot of the understated thing about life is about loyalty, right? So I can't do the same thing as my dad did, working for the same organization for 50 years. But I have made a point for my life that when I part with any organization, despite maybe there are some things that I disagree, there may be some conflicts that I don't like. It's not every corporate job is smooth sailing. Some corporate jobs didn't work out. There were, you know, you feel resentment, et cetera.
Part in good terms is how I think about it. Just think about the good things that you learn from the organization. I usually do not ask any of the team that was in my previous company to join me unless they leave the company themselves. That means I will never poach anybody back from immediately, et cetera. It's only years later when I find out, "Hey, you just left the company," then yes. Then I will just maybe hang out. Maybe this is a person I want to hire, then yes.
So I think about things like that a lot. I know some people think, "You should be bringing a team from X to Y, Y to Z, Z too." But I think loyalty to people is also pretty important. So maybe that is probably the lesson that I think my dad has taught me. We live in a very, very unpredictable and chaotic world. So I think when I think about the future, I always think that everything is, you have to just take it step by step rather than trying to have a very definitive way of saying that all these things are gonna happen. Some things are preventable. Yeah.
Yana Fry: Since this podcast is still focusing on Asia, so my next question would be, what is one thing you know about Asia that you feel very few people do, but they should?
Bernard Leong: The one thing that I still find from people who are talking about Asia, they talk about us as if we are one identity. There's 4.4 billion population in this part of the world, and they have different cultures. They have different points of view. They may have points of view that even differ from each other. They have their own practices and what is meaningful to one may not be meaningful to another, and the languages, the nuances—I am beginning to appreciate more about the diversity, but it is also extremely complex for businesses to navigate.
I find that gradually I have learned to, when I think about business within the Asia markets, I think about in terms of cities. I don't think of it in terms of countries. Because countries have a very, very different way of organizing. 'Cause it could be, there are some parts of the country may be very advanced and some parts of the countries are still very rural. So you have to think about how do you approach the market. So that's the one thing I think I know, but maybe I still feel that everybody's still like saying Asia is like this big fat continent.
Yana Fry: What is a fun question that you wish more people would ask you about AI and they rarely do?
Bernard Leong: Okay. I wish that they would ask me, "Why should my organization adopt AI?" You're not gonna ask me the same question, right? Yeah. Okay. The reason why I think they should ask me why their organization should adopt AI is the follow up question to that is, "What are the problems you are currently having and what do you think AI can do for you?" Just give it to me in generic terms and then I'll try to ask you a couple of questions and then I see actually this is not an AI problem. Sometimes it is actually like that.
I've spent, you may find this surprising, talking to a lot, teaching the classes to a lot of senior executives and board level. They come in with the perception that these are their issues and then after just asking them a couple of questions, you realize that it was not AI that they need to solve the problem. It's actually something even more basic. You have the AI tools to let your employees use so that they can solve the problem. So you know when they ask me that question, then it becomes very easy for me to work out whether the problems are AI or not.
Yana Fry: You interviewed so many people over the years, so you ask them many questions. So what is it that one question that is still burning for you, that you are still looking for an answer?
Bernard Leong: Wow, that is hard.
Yana Fry: I told you it's gonna be hard today. No preparation.
Bernard Leong: No preparation is always a good indication. So the question is, what is that one burning question that is unanswered?
Yana Fry: And you're still searching for it?
Bernard Leong: I'm still searching for it. I think one question that I always find that most people leave unanswered is what are the real challenges within the Asia region that we are not resolving that if it were ever solved, it would be great? There are some glimpses of that conversation that always get answered. Like sometimes somebody will say, "Well, you know, if in Indonesia you have high speed rail and you have good logistics infrastructure, things will happen faster." Or if you have in India—so one surprising fact people may not know—it is actually cheaper to fly an airplane with a cargo of goods from one city to another than driving a truck from one city to another. In fact, the cost is 10 times more, right?
So if you're asking me, it's like, what kind of infrastructure, right? But then when you ask questions like, "Oh yeah, what ASEAN wants to be—a common market, but we need to standardize all our payment infrastructure. We need to standardize our economy, we need to have one flow of the economy." That is a very, very difficult question. I think it's those hidden and real challenges that people are still trying to solve, step by step that people don't wanna talk about.
Yana Fry: You have met a lot of great minds through the podcasting, through your work, through teaching in general in your life right now. What is it that one trait that you feel connects the greatest leaders you have met personally?
Bernard Leong: I think it's their ability to listen and to be able to provide some—like they listen to you and then they try to take whatever you have said and articulate in a way that becomes actionable. I think it's actually a very difficult—I see this in most of the Asia Pacific leaders that I've interviewed for the different respective companies. I also have interviewed the CEO of South China Morning Post before twice, and I find that the ability to listen is extremely important. Sometimes I tell everyone my secondary reason on why I really started the podcast was actually to teach myself how to listen better. When I'm interviewing, I have to capture every point of view, and I have to know when do I have to ask the next question and the next question so that this interview follows the conversation that we are having—a meaningful conversation because it's a quality time that's spent between myself and the person that I interview. Maybe that is how I'm thinking about it.
Yana Fry: Well, and then we are coming with the final question of the show, your iconic question. What does great look like for Bernard, for Analyse, for Dorje AI or anything else in your life?
Bernard Leong: Okay. I think it's very hard to really know what—let me put it this way. For Dorje AI, what great looks like is that we are able to solve the ERP problem for businesses. It could be five years, it could be 10 years, it could be even two decades because every technology adoption cycle requires time. We are actually at this beginning where everything is changing, but there are still people clinging on to the old ways of doing things. The only thing that I always understand about digital transformation is everyone loves transformation, but they hate to change. So everything that everybody says will be replaced in two years is actually five years. So I think great looks like for Dorje AI is very clear.
Analyse Asia, what great looks like would be in the next five years where the audience is global. My next aim is actually to be able to interview great leaders from everywhere. It doesn't need to be in the U.S. or you know, Europe, it could be in Asia, it could be people like yourself, always interviewing, always trying to talk about what is it like to interview other leaders within the area? So when I think about Analyse Asia would be, for me, great looks like when I can do an interview without looking at a set of questions and able to tease out the story that this person is here to tell without prejudice, without being a fanboy, just trying to get the story out. If I can get that done, that's considered great for me. Of course, if I hit a million subscribers, great. Okay, but that is the next milestone I'm looking for. It's always like, for me, it's like I reach this milestone, what's next? There's never been a time where I always say, "I reached this milestone. Oh, what am I supposed to be doing?" So it's always what's next? So that's what's next for myself.
What does great look like for myself? Wow, that's a harder question. The harder question is probably, I think I've already avoided a lot of—okay. So I run a corporate teaching business. Okay. I run Dorje AI, I run Analyse Asia. I have a family of three kids, and my wife as well. I find that if I were to aspire for myself, I look to the inspiration of John D. Rockefeller. One of the things that John D. Rockefeller does, which I think is very different from a lot of the entrepreneurs, he's an extremely boring person. He works from home three days a week.
Yana Fry: Does it make him boring?
Bernard Leong: If you interview all his descendants, including his immediate children and his grandchildren, one of the things that you will hear very commonly across on him, and that's why he lost the antitrust situation was that he's extremely present with his family. Yeah. That for a person who owns an entire oil empire without internet, you have to communicate. We imagine you have a lot of oil pipelines running across the whole of the U.S., which is a very big continent, and the need to communicate—you have to work. You're working from home. You know, it's impressive in that way.
But there are things that Rockefeller doesn't do. Like he avoids meeting all the other rich people at parties, or going to conferences. He doesn't care. I started to do a lot of this, not because I need to do it. It's because the amount of time I have is becoming less and less.
If you think about frugality from the highest level, it's not about resources. It's actually time. So the amount of time you can do the things that you really want to do, that's probably what great looks like for me. If you're asking on it, what is the minimum amount of time that I could make enough impact across—I mean, I may never reach there, but at least we can all say that we lived without regret.
Yana Fry: Wow. Thank you so much Bernard. Thank you for turning the mic around. That was very candid, very deep conversation. I definitely learned a lot about you and I'm sure that the audience also just to look at all kind of aspects of your life. So thank you for today.
Bernard Leong: Thank you for being such a great interviewer. I can drop the Asia now.
Yana Fry: Yes, exactly. Dropping the Asia. Here's another 500 episodes.
Bernard Leong: I wonder whether I will survive to the 1000.
Yana Fry: Well, let's put an intention here. So I want to be here for the thousand episode so we can have this conversation again and just be curious what's gonna change in Asia and in the world landscape when it comes to media, business and technology. We know for sure with your audience that any change starts with a very good conversation. I believe we had one today.
Bernard Leong: Thank you so much, Yana, for coming on the show to be my host today.
Podcast Information: Bernard Leong (@bernardleong, Linkedin) hosts and produces the show. Proper credits for the intro and end music: "Energetic Sports Drive" and the episode is mixed & edited in both video and audio format by G. Thomas Craig (@gthomascraig, LinkedIn). Here are the links to watch or listen to our podcast.
