Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
not just looking at a biography. We're really
dissecting a miracle. Or maybe, depending on
how you look at it, a very calculated, very disciplined,
and yeah, occasionally ruthless machine. We're
looking at a man who stood on... I mean, a swampy,
malaria infested island with absolutely zero
natural resources. Nothing. We're talking not
even enough fresh water to keep the population
alive. And he just decides he's going to force
it to become a first world metropolis. It's a
story that sort of defies the standard laws of
post -colonial physics. I mean, if you run the
simulation of the 20th century 100 times, Singapore
fails in 99 of them. Right. Usually the story
goes something like this. charismatic revolutionary
wins in attendance, the crowds cheer, the flag
goes up, and then the country just slowly slides
into corruption or civil war or, you know, economic
irrelevance. The classic winning the war but
losing the peace scenario. Exactly. But this
story is the inverse of that. It involves a man
who didn't even want independence. He actually
fought tooth and nail against it. Yeah, that's
the crazy part. But when it was thrust upon him,
he built one of the most hyper -efficient...
wealthy and controversial nation states in history.
We are, of course, talking about the founding
father of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. And
the stack of sources we have for this deep dive
is, well, it's honestly a little intimidating.
We've got biographical dossiers, declassified
intelligence documents, transcripts of radio
speeches, even some very recent government gazettes
from just last month, December 2025. It is a
massive topic. But to really understand Lee Kuan
Yew, you can't start with the gleaming skyline
or the crazy rich Asians aesthetic we see today.
You have to start with a moment of absolute trauma.
The weeping. The weeping. If you go to YouTube
right now and you search his name, I guarantee
the first clip you'll see is from August. August
9th, 1965. It's a press conference. He's 41 years
old. Yeah, just 41. He's wearing that simple
open collared white shirt. And he just he breaks
down. He can't speak. He's physically wiping
away tears on national television. And we need
to be very, very clear for anyone watching that
clip. These are not tears of joy. This isn't
a we did it moment of triumph. No. He calls it
a moment of anguish. He struggles to get the
words out. But he says, for me, it is a moment
of anguish because all my life. I believed in
Malaysian merger and the unity of these two territories.
He just announced that Singapore was being kicked
out of the Federation of Malaysia. Kicked out?
In his mind, he had failed. He thought Singapore
was a dead man walking. And that is the hook.
Everything that Singapore is today, the financial
hub, the obsessive safety, the, you know, the
clean streets, the obsession with reserves, it's
all a direct overcompensation for that specific
moment of vulnerability. Wow. The entire national
psyche was forged in the trauma of that rejection.
Lee Kuan Yew spent the rest of his life completely
obsessed with one word, survival. So our mission
today is to reverse engineer that survival. How
do you go from weeping on national TV, believing
your country is totally doomed, to becoming this
global sage who advised U .S. presidents from
Nixon to Obama and Chinese leaders from Deng
Xiaoping to Xi Jinping? It's an incredible arc.
We're going to look at the man, the methods,
which were often incredibly harsh, and of course
the legacy. And to do that, we have to rewind
the clock way back before he was the father of
Singapore and long before he was the scary authoritarian
figure. He was just Harry. Harry Lee. That name
alone tells you so much about his starting point,
doesn't it? He was born in 1923, a third generation
Peronican Chinese. Now, we see that term Peronican
a lot in the notes. Let's unpack that because
it explains his initial disconnect with the people
he later led. It's a crucial distinction. Peronkin
means straights born. His family had been in
the region for a long time. They were deeply,
deeply acculturated to the British Empire. So
not like the new immigrants from China. Not at
all. They didn't speak Mandarin at home. They
spoke English, Malay, and a dialect called Baba
Malay. They wore Western clothes. They, you know,
they played cricket. His grandfather, Lee Hoon
Leong, was the one who gave him the name Harry.
He worked as a purser on British steamships.
and was a huge admirer of the British establishment.
He wanted his grandson to be basically an English
gentleman. Right. So Lee Kuan Yew was what they
called an Anglophile. He grew up singing God
Save the King. And in fact, and this usually
blows people's minds, he didn't learn to speak
Chinese until he was 32 years old. 32. That just
seems like a massive political handicap if you're
trying to lead a population that is majority
Chinese immigrant. Oh, it was a huge liability.
When he eventually entered politics, his opponents
mocked him constantly. They called him a banana
yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Because
he wasn't one of them. Exactly. He had to work
incredibly hard later in life to master Mandarin
and Hokkien just so he could talk to the rickshaw
pullers and the port workers without a translator.
It wasn't natural talent. It was just a calculated
necessity to survive politically. And what about
the family dynamic? It sounds like his childhood
wasn't exactly a bed of roses. His father, Lee
Chin -kun, he worked for Shell. but had a serious
gambling addiction. Yeah, he was a classic case
of the charming but destructive father. He had
a nasty temper, often violent, and he just blew
the family's money on the tables, very distant.
But his mother, Chua Jimneo, she was the steel
in the family. She was the one who stood up to
the father, managed the finances, and really
kept the family afloat. Lee later credited her
for his resilience. He saw a very clear lesson
right there at the dinner table. If you want
things to run correctly, you have to be disciplined
because chaos, like his father's gambling, it
just destroys everything. That desire for order
over chaos. That is the through line of his entire
political philosophy. He never, ever trusted
that things would just work out. He believed
you had to make them work out. But if his mother
gave him the resilience, then World War II gave
him the worldview. I mean, we cannot overstate
how important the Japanese occupation of Singapore
was to making Lee Kuan Yew who he became. This
is the crucible. No question. It's 1942. The
British, who were supposed to be these invincible
masters, the protectors of the realm, they surrendered
Singapore to the Japanese Imperial Army in just
70 days. 70 days. Lee called it 70 days of surprises,
upsets, and stupidities. You have to imagine
the psychological shock of that. The locals looked
up to the British. They were the superior white
man in the whole colonial hierarchy. And then
they just collapsed. They couldn't fight. They
couldn't protect the civilians. It just shattered
the myth. Completely. Lee realized right then
and there that the British had... And that's
the seed of independence. Yes, but it wasn't
born from high -minded liberal idealism. It was
born from pure anger at incompetence. And he
almost didn't survive to do anything about it.
There's this story about the Suk Ching Massacre
that, I mean, it still gives me chills. This
is a legitimate sliding doors moment for the
entire 20th century. It really is. The Japanese
military police, the Kempeitai, they were rounding
up Chinese men to screen them for anti -Japanese
sentiment. It was arbitrary. It was brutal. And
they were looking for anyone with influence.
Right. Volunteers, civil servants, teachers.
So Li went to the screening center at Jalon Bazaar.
He stood in line. And as he's standing there,
he just senses. Something is wrong. He sees the
men being herded onto these trucks. Survival
instincts kicked in. I mean, they must have been
screaming at him. He knew he should not get on
those trucks. So he walked up to the Japanese
guards and used a very mundane bureaucratic excuse.
He said, I've left my clothes behind. Can I go
home and get them? And the guard just let him
go. The guard just waved him off. Lee went home,
hid in his room, didn't come out for days. The
group he was standing with, the men who got on
those trucks, they were driven to the beach at
Chongi and machine gunned. he survived by a hair's
breadth that is just terrifying and then talk
about pragmatism he spends the rest of the war
working for the japanese this is what separates
lee from your typical romantic revolutionary
right no he didn't run into the jungle to fight
a guerrilla war no He learned Japanese. He got
a job in their propaganda department, the hujibu,
because he was translating allied radio intercepts.
He wanted to know what was really happening in
the war. He wanted information. He also ran a
black market business making glue called stick
fuss. Yes, stick fuss. Because the Japanese war
economy was so bad, there was no glue. So Lee,
the future statesman, is in his kitchen boiling
tapioca to make adhesive. He was a hustler. A
total hustler. But that period taught him that
power is raw. It's not about constitutions or
rights. It's about who has the gun and who has
the food. He saw the brutality of the Japanese,
especially the Kempeitai, but he also weirdly
respected their discipline. He internalized that
ruthlessness. So the war ends, the British return,
and Lee goes off to the UK. He crushes it at
Cambridge Double First Class Honors. The star
student. But he returns to Singapore in 1950,
not as a loyal subject, but as a man with a plan.
He becomes a lawyer. But he doesn't join some
fancy firm to make millions. No, he starts representing
the trade unions and the postal workers. Which
is just a... brilliant pivot. Here's this Cambridge
educated elite wearing a suit, but he's fighting
for the guys in the sweaty singlets. He was building
a power base. That's what it was. He was bridging
the gap between his English educated circle,
the bourgeoisie, and the Chinese speaking working
class who actually had the numbers. And this
leads directly to the formation of the PAP, the
People's Action Party, in the basement of his
house in 1954. And this brings us to what you
could call the marriage of convenience. Because
the PIP wasn't just Harry Lee and his moderate
friends, was it? No, not at all. This is the
part that gets scrubbed from some of the simpler
history books. Lee Kuan Yew knew he couldn't
win the masses alone. He couldn't speak to them
effectively yet. So he allied with the pro -communists,
led by this incredibly charismatic young firebrand
named Lin Shin Strong. So you have the bourgeoisie
lawyers on one side and the hard left trade unionists
on the other. That just seems like a recipe for
disaster. They hated each other ideologically.
Lee called it riding the tiger. He knew the communists
wanted to use him as a respectable front man
to avoid getting arrested by the British, and
he wanted to use their street cred to get votes.
Both sides thought they could outsmart the other
in the end. Exactly. It was a high -stakes game
of political chicken. Spoiler alert. Lee won.
In 1959, the PAP wins a landslide election. Singapore
becomes self -governing and Lee Kuan Yew becomes
the first prime minister. And immediately that
Puritan Street comes out. Oh, instantly. He launches
what he called the anti -yellow culture drive.
Yellow culture was his term for anything decadent,
Western or morally loose. I love the list of
things he went after. He banned jukeboxes. Jukeboxing.
You raided places selling pornography. He cracked
down on long hair on men. Literally, if you had
long hair, you were served last at government
offices. It sounds kind of funny now, but the
message was deadly serious. The party is over.
We have a country to build. He banned jukeboxes
because he thought they encouraged idling, loafing
around. He wanted a population that was working,
studying, or sleeping. That's it. He even introduced
air conditioning to government offices, but not
for comfort, for efficiency. And then he slashed
civil service salaries to balance the budget.
He was signaling that leadership was about sacrifice.
But look, the biggest issue on his mind wasn't
jukeboxes. It was the existential question. We
need to remind you, Singapore in 1959 was not
viewed as a viable country. Not by anyone. It
was a port city with no hinterland. It imported
its water, its food, its construction material,
everything. Lee believed, quite logically, that
an independent Singapore was a complete absurdity.
It was like imagining New York City trying to
be a country without the rest of the United States.
It had to be part of the larger Malayan Federation.
So his entire political platform was merger.
We must join Malaya. And this brings us to the
battle for merger. This wasn't just backroom
deals. He took his case directly to the people.
He gave 12 radio speeches. These are legendary
in Singaporean history. He explained in agonizing
detail why the communists were wrong and why
merger was the only path. He spoke directly to
the people in multiple languages, bypassing the
left -wing press. It was a masterclass in political
communication. But he didn't just use words.
He used the knuckle duster, as he would say.
We have to talk about Operation Cold Storm in
1963. Yes. This is where the authoritarian label
really begins to stick. By 1963, that marriage
of convenience with the communists had totally
collapsed. They broke away to form the Barristan
Socialist Party. And they were strong. Very strong.
They could have won the next election. So what
does Lee do? He arrests them. February 1963.
A massive dragnet. Over 100 arrests. left -wing
activists, opposition leaders, newspaper editors,
and his old ally, Lim Chin -siang. They were
all detained without trial under the preservation
of public security ordinance. Now, Lee's official
line was that he was reluctant to do it, that
the British and the Malayans forced his hand
to ensure security before the merger could happen.
That's the official narrative, but declassified
documents. Well, they suggest Lee was actually
quite enthusiastic. He needed to clear the board.
He decapitated the opposition leadership right
before the election. So whether they were a violent
threat or just a political threat is still debated.
It is. But the result was clear. The PAP won
and the left was crushed. So the board is cleared.
Merger happens. Malaysia is formed in 1963. Mission
accomplished. For about two years. It was a disaster
from day one. A total clash of ideologies that
just couldn't be reconciled. Lee Kuan Yew wanted
a Malaysian Malaysia. Which sounds nice and inclusive,
but it was political dynamite in that context.
He meant a meritocracy where race didn't determine
your political standing. But the federal government
in Kuala Lumpur, led by the UMNO party, wanted
a Malaysia where Malay political supremacy was
enshrined in the system. They saw Lee's call
for equality as a direct challenge. A challenge
to their special constitutional rights. Tensions
escalated fast. You had the 1964 race riots in
Singapore. People died. It was incredibly ugly.
And then came the moment that probably sealed
Singapore's fate. Lee Kuan Yew went to the Malaysian
parliament in Kuala Lumpur and gave a speech.
But he didn't just give a speech. No, he spoke
in flawless Malay. He went into the lion's den
and spoke their language better than some of
them did. Exactly. He out -debated the Malay
leadership in their own tongue. And this didn't
impress them. It terrified them. They realized
this man wasn't just some nuisance mayor of Singapore.
He was a potential prime minister of the whole
federation. He could appeal to everyone. So Tunku
Abdul Rahman, the Malaysian prime minister, basically
decided he's got to go. Hived off. That was a
term they used. They decided to just cut Singapore
loose. The calculation was that Singapore would
fail on its own and come crawling back on Malaysia's
germs later. Which brings us right back to that
weeping man on TV. August 9th, 1965. Singapore
is independent, unwillingly. And Lee Kuan Yew
is staring at a country with no army, no economy,
and hostile neighbors. This is the pivot point.
The third world to first. journey begins right
here. And it starts with the economy, which is
about to just fall off a cliff. Right. Because
in 1967, the British announced they were pulling
their military bases out. And that was something
like 20 percent of Singapore's GNP. It should
have been a death sentence. But this is where
Lee Kuan Yew and his team, specifically Dr. Gokeng
Swee, the economic architect, did something radical.
I mean, you have to understand the context of
the 60s. Most developing countries were anti
-Western. Right. They were nationalizing industries,
kicking out foreign companies. Neocolonialism
was the enemy. And Lee does the exact opposite.
He pivots 180 degrees. He says, we have no domestic
market. We need the world. So he aggressively
courted multinational corporations, the MNCs.
He told the Americans and the Japanese, come
here, set up your factories. We will be cheaper,
safer, and more reliable than anyone else. He
practically laid out the red carpet for them,
built the infrastructure, guaranteed the rule
of law. But to make it safer, he had to do something
the unions really didn't like. He brought the
unions to heel. He basically said, you can have
jobs or you can have strikes. You can't have
both. He passed laws that made strikes illegal
in essential services. He disciplined the workforce
to be attractive to foreign capital. It was a
tradeoff. A huge one. Suppression of labor rights
in exchange for rapid employment. And it worked.
Texas Instruments, Hewlett -Packard, General
Electric, they all came. Singapore became a manufacturing
hub. But you can't have investment without security.
And Singapore was surrounded by big neighbors,
Indonesia and Malaysia, who weren't exactly friendly.
Indonesia was actually waging a low -level conflict
called Confrontasi, setting off bombs in Singapore.
So he had to build an army from scratch. And
here is a detail that I find fascinating, and
it shows just how pragmatic he was. He asked
for help to train his army. The British were
leaving. India refused. Egypt refused. Who did
he ask? Israel. Israel. But he couldn't tell
the neighbors, hey, the Israelis are training
us. Because Singapore is surrounded by Muslim
countries. That would have caused a geopolitical
firestorm. So what do they call the Israeli military
advisors? Mexicans. Mexicans. I mean, can you
imagine that? All these guys, just some tanning
military consultants from, you know, Mexico City.
It's hilarious in hindsight, but it was deadly
serious. He took help from Israel because they
were the only ones who knew how to defend a small,
surrounded nation with a conscript army. And
he instituted national service mandatory conscription
to make sure every single man had a stake in
defending the country. Now let's talk about the
visual aspect of this transformation. The Garden
City. Because I always thought the trees in Singapore
were just... Nice, you know, for aesthetics.
Oh, no. With Lee Kuan Yew, nothing is ever just
aesthetics. Everything is strategy. He was obsessed
with greenery. He launched tree planting campaigns
in the 60s. He personally chose the types of
creepers to cover concrete flyovers just to hide
the gray. And why? Because he wanted to send
a subconscious signal to investors. He reasoned
that if a city in the sweltering tropics could
be kept green, manicured, and orderly, it proved
that the government was disciplined. It proved
the workforce was disciplined. It was branding.
Decisely. And that extends to what he called
the most important invention of the 20th century.
Don't tell me. The internet. Air conditioning.
He really said that. Dead serious. He believed
you couldn't have high mental productivity in
the tropics without climate control. He made
sure civil service buildings were AC'd so people
could think clearly. He was an environmental
engineer of the highest order. So we have the
economy, we have the army, we have the trees.
But to truly will a nation into existence, you
have to mold the people. And this is where we
get into the nanny state territory. This is the
stuff that makes Western liberals very, very
uncomfortable. But we need to look at it through
his eyes. Lowe didn't just want to govern the
state. He wanted to engineer the society. He
believed that the government's job was to maximize
the potential of the population, even if that
meant, well, interfering in their private lives.
Let's start with housing, the HDB. Right. When
the Papi took over, people were living in these
squatter settlements with open sewers. Lee embarked
on a massive public housing program. Today, over
80 % of Singaporeans live in HDB flats. But the
genius wasn't just building them. No, the genius
was allowing people to use their pension funds,
the CPF, to buy these flats. He wanted a nation
of homeowners. Because if you own property, you
have a stake in the country. You're not going
to riot and burn down your own block of flats.
It was social stability through real estate.
It anchored a rootless immigrant population to
the island. But then he gets into the bedroom.
Literally. Let's talk about population control.
The pendulum swing here is just wild. In the
60s and 70s, the fear was overpopulation. So
the slogan was stop it, too. They penalized families
for having more children. They taxed them higher.
They gave them lower priority for schools. But
then in the 80s, Lee looks at the census data
and panics. He realizes that the educated women.
The university graduates, they aren't having
kids, while the less educated are having big
families. And this reveals a core and very controversial
part of his worldview, eugenics. He believed
that intelligence was 80 % genetic. He famously
said that if the smart people don't breed, the
society will become stupid and the economy will
collapse. That is candid. and incredibly offensive
to a lot of people. It's hard truth, as he would
call it. He didn't care if it was offensive.
He cared if it was true, according to his data.
So he launches the great marriage debate. He
sets up a government matchmaking agency essentially
for graduates. And then the graduate mothers
scheme. This was the policy where graduate mothers
got tax rebates in priority for their kids in
schools. It was a complete disaster. It was wildly
unpopular. It cost the PAP a 12 .9 % swing in
the 1984 elections. felt it was unfair, elitist,
and just plain wrong. So they pushed back. They
pushed back hard. The government actually had
to roll it back. It's one of the few times Lee
reached a limit on how much he could socially
engineer the populace. But he never backed down
on discipline, corporal punishment, caning. No,
he was a staunch defender of it. He believed
that for a society to be free, it first had to
be orderly. And if that meant caning vandals,
so be it. Which brings us to the Michael Fay
incident in 1994. An American teenager vandalizes
cars with spray paint. The U .S. president, Bill
Clinton, asks for leniency. And Singapore says
no. Well, they reduced the strokes from six to
four as a gesture, but they still caned him.
It was a message to the world. Our laws apply
to everyone, and we don't care if you're an American
or if the U .S. president calls. It was the ultimate
clash of Asian values versus Western liberalism.
Lee argued that the Western focus on individual
rights led to decay drugs, crime, broken families.
He championed so -called Asian values community
over self, order over liberty. He'd just point
to the safe streets of Singapore and say, this
is the result of my way. And part of that order
was zero tolerance for corruption. This is arguably
his greatest achievement. Most post -colonial
nations just drown in corruption. Lee kept Singapore
clean. By giving the Corrupt Practices Investigation
Bureau, the CPIB, absolute power. Power to arrest
anyone. Anyone. To investigate bank accounts,
to look into families, and the other side of
the coin, paying ministers huge salaries. Right,
that was the carrot. The logic was, pay them
like CEOs so they aren't tempted by bribes. But
the stick was ruthless punishment. There's the
tragic case of Tess Ching -Wan, the Minister
for National Development. He was a close colleague
of Lee's, a founding member. In 1986, he was
investigated for accepting bribes. And he wrote
a letter to Lee Kuan Yew and then committed suicide.
Lee Kuan Yew's response was chilling, but completely
consistent. He published the letter. He didn't
cover it up to save the party's face. He read
it in parliament. He showed that no one, not
even his closest friends, was above the law.
It reinforced the system's integrity, even at
the cost of a friend's life. Let's pivot to the
global stage. By the 70s and 80s, Lee isn't just
a local leader. He's become a geopolitical sage.
He positioned himself as the China whisperer.
Deng Xiaoping visited Singapore in 1978. This
is a historic turning point. Deng looks at Singapore,
this clean, prosperous, orderly city run by ethnic
Chinese, and he's just stunned. He realizes that
China under Mao's communism had fallen so far
behind. He goes back to Beijing and basically
says, we need to do what Singapore did. So Lee
Kuan Yew essentially provided the blueprint for
modern China's economy. In many ways, yes. And
because of that, he was the only person who could
walk into the White House and explain China to
the Americans and then walk into Zongdanhai and
explain America to the Chinese. He was the ultimate
translator of East -West power dynamics. He supported
the U .S. in Vietnam. which surprises some people
given his non -aligned stance. He was a pure
realist. He knew the U .S. would probably lose,
but he wanted them to stay as long as possible.
He said the war bought time for the rest of Southeast
Asia to stabilize and not fall to communism.
He was buying a firewall of time for Singapore
to mature. But for all this international acclaim,
at home, he was tough on the press. Tough is
putting it mildly. He sued them. Repeatedly.
The Far Eastern Economic Review, the International
Herald Tribune, opposition politician J .B. Jaretnam.
If you defamed him or impugned his integrity,
he would take you to court and very often bankrupt
you. He didn't believe in a crusading press.
No, he told Charlie Rose once, I believe in truth.
But to him, the truth was that the press shouldn't
be a political player. They should report, not
set the agenda. He saw the Western media as arrogant,
trying to impose their values on his society.
a climate where the press knew exactly where
the out of bounds markers were. As he got older.
He stepped down as PM in 1990, but stayed on
as senior minister, then minister mentor. He
never really left the stage until the very end.
And he kept being provocative. In 2011, he released
the book Hard Truths, and he made comments about
Islam and integration that were so controversial,
his own son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong,
had to publicly distance the government from
them. He just didn't have a filter for what we'd
call political correctness. He didn't care about
being polite. He cared about stating what he
saw as the facts, however uncomfortable. He was
worried that the younger generation was taking
Singapore's success for granted, that they were
becoming soft. We have to talk about his final
years and specifically his house, 38 Oxley Road.
This story has taken a major turn very, very
recently. The irony of this whole house situation
is just it's heavy. So Lee Kuan Yew. hated personality
cults. He didn't want statues. He didn't want
shrines. And he explicitly stated in his will
that his home, a simple pre -war bungalow at
38 Oxley Road, should be demolished after his
death. He wanted it gone. He didn't want it to
become a place of pilgrimage. He wanted the land
returned to the state or redeveloped. He was
completely unsentimental about bricks and mortar.
He was worried it would fall into disrepair.
But here we are. It's January 18, 2026. And just
last month, On December 12, 2025, the government
officially gazetted the site as a national monument.
Right. For years, there was a stalemate because
his daughter, Dr. Liu Wei Ling, was still living
there. But after she passed away recently, the
legal hurdles cleared and the government moved
to preserve it. They argued it has too much historical
significance. I mean, the basement is where the
Piafu was formed. It's where independent strategies
were hatched. So the man who planned everything,
who controlled every aspect of Singapore's development,
couldn't control the fate of his own living room.
It symbolizes the tension between the man and
the myth. The nation he built feels a need to
own his legacy, even if it contradicts his personal
wish for privacy. It's the state acting in what
it sees as the national interest over the individual,
which, ironically, is exactly the philosophy
Lee Kuan Yew taught them. That is, wow, that's
a paradox wrapped in an irony. It really is.
He trained them too well. So let's try to wrap
this up. We've looked at the weeping man, the
street fighter, the economic architect, the social
engineer. What's this summation here? Lee Kuan
Yew was not a Democrat in the Western sense.
He never pretended to be. He was a pragmatist.
He traded civil liberties for economic survival
and social order. He famously said, I am not
interested in political theory. I am interested
in what works. And it worked. The data is undeniable.
GDP, life expectancy, homeownership. It all just
skyrocketed. Yeah. He took a place with no future
and gave it a future. But he was also a knuckle
duster politician. He neutralized his enemies
ruthlessly. He created a sterile political environment
and he left a legacy that is incredibly hard
to follow. Here's the final thought I want to
leave with you, the listener. Lee Kuan Yew built
a nation of educated, critical thinkers. He built
a first world economy. But in doing so, did he
create a society that eventually outgrew the
need for his style of leadership? That is the
big question, isn't it? Could a Lee Kuan Yew
exist? in the Singapore of 2026? Could you run
a modern, hyper -connected, educated populace
with that same iron fist? Or was he a man for
a specific season, a crisis leader who was necessary
then but would be impossible now? That is definitely
something that you want. If you want to see the
intensity of the man yourself, go to YouTube
and look up the battle for merger speeches or
that 1965 press conference. Watch his eyes. You'll
see exactly what we're talking about. It's history
in the raw. Thanks for joining us on this deep
dive into the giant of Southeast Asia. We'll
see you next time.