Ryan Parry

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@elonmusk Why is this guy not running Restore, he's the first person who gets it. However..
How does it come to a foreign trillionaire with an agenda piling this level of focus onto a borough of Wigan..

[matrixbot @thematrixb0t]

Made in the dark ages with no electricity or power tools

How did they do it?

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@scaling01 Is AI development restrained by power supply at this point? Nuclear plants in the US are reaching the end of their operating licenses with no new ones under construction.

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@rauchg Who called it the SaaSpocalypse when the San Fran SaaSsacre was available?

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

In 1942, the Japanese rounded up all Chinese men in Singapore.

They were filtering out the healthy young ones to execute.

Lee Kuan Yew was 18. A guard pointed at him and said: "Go to that lorry."

He knew what that meant. The lorry went to the beaches. The beaches meant machine guns.

He asked: "Can I collect my other things?"

They said yes.

He walked away, found his family's gardener, and hid in his quarters for two days.

When they changed the screening inspectors, he tried again. This time, he got through.

The ones sent to that lorry were taken to the beaches and shot. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 didn't survive.

60 years later, he sat down at Harvard to explain how he built Singapore from a tiny island into one of the wealthiest nations on Earth:

On what the war did to him:

"We lived in happy, placid colonial Singapore in the 1920s and 30s. The British Empire would have lasted another thousand years, so we thought."

Then the Japanese came. In less than one and a half months, the British collapsed.

"Three and a half years of hell. Butchery. Brutality. Many didn't survive. I was fortunate. I did."

"But it changed us."

"What right did they have to do this to us? Why did the British let us down so badly?"

When the war ended, Lee went to Cambridge to study law. But he was watching with different eyes.

"Can they govern me better than I can govern myself? Because they scooted when the Japanese came in. And why shouldn't I be running the place?"

On learning languages to lead:

Lee was the best speaker in English. But only 20% of Singapore spoke English.

The masses spoke Hokkien, Mandarin, and Malay.

"So every day at lunchtime, instead of having lunch, I would sit down with a Hokkien teacher and laboriously and painfully learn to convert my Mandarin into Hokkien."

"Had I not mastered that, the battle would be lost by default."

His first speech in Hokkien, the kids laughed at him.

"I said, please don't laugh. Help me. I'm trying to get you to understanding."

By 6 months, he could get his ideas across. By 2 years, he was fluent.

"Believe it or not, at the end of two years I could speak better than most of them."

"That came respect."

It showed two things: how determined he was, and how sincere. Here was a man doing all these other things and still learning their language just to talk to them.

On fighting the Communists:

The Communists had been organizing since 1923. The year Lee was born.

"Here we were in the 1950s trying to beat them. And they are professionals at organization."

They had elimination squads. Guerrillas in the jungle. Killer squads in the towns.

Lee stood up and said no.

"They denied that they were Communists. 'We're just left-wing socialists.' So I did a series of 12 broadcasts to set the scene. And I made it in three languages."

English. Malay. Mandarin. 20 minutes each.

"When I finished each broadcast, the director of the station couldn't see me. Went into the room and found me lying on the floor trying to recover my breath."

"But it was a fight for survival. Life or death."

On where trust comes from:

"It's difficult to establish trust in times of calm. You just say, 'Well, it's an argument, therefore I'm a better guy than you.'"

"But when the chips are down and you can get eliminated in a very unpleasant way and you show that you're prepared for it and you'll fight for them, it makes a difference."

"Without that trust, we could not have built Singapore."

On IQ vs EQ:

Harvard asked him: would you prefer high IQ or high EQ in a leader?

"IQ, you can get beautiful paper done. Complex formulas worked out. Elegant solutions."

"But when you've got to get a team to work and put that formula into practice, you're dealing with human beings."

"If you're not good at EQ, you can't sense that A doesn't get on with B, and you put them in the same team. It's no good."

He rated his own EQ as 7 or 8 out of 10. His IQ as "maybe 120."

But he had colleagues who could sense a person instantly.

"He shook hands with the man and said, 'I recoiled when I felt his palm. Evil man.' And he was. How does he know? I don't know."

"So I learned whenever I had to do interviews to choose people, I would get people who are very good at seeing through a candidate."

On corruption:

Singapore in the 1950s was full of deals, bribes, and organized crime.

"When we took over, we decided that this was the critical factor. If we did not make it so that every dollar put in at the top reaches the ground as one dollar, we're not going to succeed."

"We came in and made a symbolic act. We dressed in white shirts, white trousers, and said we will be what we represent."

He put the anti-corruption bureau under his personal portfolio.

"I gave the director the authority to investigate everybody and everything. All ministers. Including myself."

One of his own colleagues took half a million in bribes. When the investigation started, he asked to see Lee.

"I said, if I see you then I'll be a witness in court. So best not see me. Better see your lawyer."

The man committed suicide. Left a note saying: "As an oriental gentleman who believes in honor, I have to pay the supreme price."

"It's a heavy price. But it reminds every minister that there are no exceptions."

On consistency:

Lee had three journalists analyze 40 years of his speeches.

He asked them: what was the dominant theme?

All three said the same thing: consistency.

"What I said at the beginning, throughout all that period, the theme stayed loud and clear."

"That made it simple. Because you know where you stand with me. And you know what I want to do."

On delivering results:

"We deliver the homes, the schools, the jobs, the hospitals."

"Today, 98% of our people own their own homes. The smallest would be about $100,000 US. The biggest about $300,000."

"Once you own that amount of assets, you are not in favor of risking it with a crazy government. Your assets will go down in value."

"But that was planned."

Why? Because Singapore is small. Everyone does national service. If you're going to fight, you better be fighting for something you own.

"So we give everybody a stake."

On changing culture slowly:

Lee wanted Singapore to speak English. But he couldn't force it.

"Had I passed a law and said you will all learn English, we would have had mayhem. Riots."

Instead, he let parents watch who got the best jobs. The jobs were already there, from the multinationals and banks. They all used English.

"They watched and saw who got the best jobs. And they switched."

It took 16 years.

"I did not want to have said 16 years. Because in those 16 years I lost 20,000 Chinese graduates who had poor jobs. I wanted to make it shorter. I couldn't. I would have run into flack."

On whether leadership can be taught:

Lee quoted Isaac Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Yiddish literature.

Someone asked Singer: "Can you make a writer write great literature?"

He paused. Then said: "If he has the writer in him, I will make him a good writer in a shorter time."

Lee's version:

"Can you make a leader of anybody? I don't think so."

"He must have some of the ingredients. He must have that high energy level. He must have the ability to project himself, his ideas. He must have the desire, almost instinctively, to say 'let's do something better.' Of wanting to do something for his fellow men and not just for himself and his family."

"You can't teach those things. He's either got it or he hasn't got it."

"But if he's got that, then you can save him a lot of trouble."

On sustaining yourself:

Harvard asked how he managed despair over decades of leadership.

"If your message is one of despair, then you should not be a leader. You must give people hope."

"But there are moments when you feel very down. Either because you're physically down, or emotionally down, or because the world has turned adverse against you."

"When you are in that condition, the first thing you do is get a good night's sleep. Then get a swim or chase a ball. Get the cobwebs out of your mind."

"If you're not fit, you're going to make mistakes. Physically fit. You must stay physically and mentally fit."

In his later years, he learned to meditate.

"At the end of 20 minutes to half an hour, my pulse rate can go down from 100 to about 60. You can feel yourself subside. You still your mind. You empty your mind."

"Then when you are rested, you resume quietly. You still got the same problems. Maybe you sleep on it. Come back. Look at it for a few days. Then decide."

This 2 hour Harvard interview will teach you more about leadership than every business book you've read combined.

Bookmark & give it 2 hours this weekend, no matter what.

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@DeItaone Which president?

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@sciencegirl The fish should be in a rice field so their waste fertilizes the rice

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@spectatorindex Have they not heard it's winding down?

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@nocontextmemes @grok is this real?

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@TawhakiTheGod @TomTugendhat If the US are to maintain hegemony, the sooner the better for them don't you think?

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@ryangrim @tiberiusfiles It would play into US hands. They're desperate for a chance to set China back whilst the balance is still in their favour. China only needs time.

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@RnaudBertrand @HKarlsborn The Wikipedia page said there were thousands of Italian POWs on board - isn't that who they were intending to rescue?

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@Jo_Marney @GraceGym_ https://t.co/HawoIH50yQ

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@grok @Linahuaa @grok What percentage of China's energy comes from oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz?

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@r0ck3t23 Interesting to read national stances on lethal autonomy, albeit from 2020. Nobody can ease up on its development in such a heated competition.
https://t.co/6t54RNWLvo.

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@MsMelChen @andrewfibonacci If the US hadn't meddled with our system, there'd be no confusion

[Ryan Parry @rcparryid]

@trussliz Damn Andrew Callaghan brushes up well

[Ed Conway @EdConwaySky]

📽️Donald Trump wants you to know he's targeting Venezuela because of illegal drugs.
But what if this were really about something else altogether...?
Dig into the murky world of crude oil refining and you find another, even more intriguing explanation...
Full primer 👇