I made an exception for this episode because I wanted to speak to Chris Jones. Chris is a journalist and screenwriter who is best known for his work at Esquire Magazine, where two of his stories won the National Magazine Award, the highest accolade for magazine writing in the US.

I'm a long-time reader of Chris's work and also enjoy his hilarious Twitter feed @enswelljones. So when his book publicist reached out -- out of the blue, which is a first for Foolish Careers -- and asked if I wanted to check out the book and interview Chris, I wasn't going to say no. 

The book is called The Eye Test, where Chris makes the case for the value of human creativity in an age of algorithms: https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/chris-jones/the-eye-test/9781538730683/

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Spoiler alert: Temujin lost to Trevor Noah. But it was comfortably in second place with 34% of the 2 million votes cast. (The Daily Show with Trevor Noah got 40% of the votes. Third place got 10%.)

It has opened doors for the show’s producers. Writer and director Roshan Singh was brought on as a writer on the animated adaptation of the beloved graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan. He and fellow Temujin producer Isabel Perucho have set up Andas Productions to create narrative stories for audio and video games. 

But back in university (they graduated from Yale-NUS three years ago, although it feels like a lifetime in the past), Temujin was a capstone project Roshan worked on with his classmates.

Most thesis projects simply get printed and sent to the archives. He wanted to put it out into the world, despite little encouragement from mentors. 

“One thing a mentor of mine said was that Temujin was just a silly little side project I was doing with my friends and that I would have to grow up soon and figure out what my actual career is going to look like.”

He first pursued it as a play, but there was no interest. So Roshan considered audio. “The beauty of audio is if you have the resources, nobody can tell you not to do it.” With Isabel running marketing, they raised $10,000 on Kickstarter to fund the production. “We decided to push ahead because we had this faith that if it meant something to us, then it'll mean something to someone else.”

In this interview, Roshan and Isabel reflect on the experience of finding a listener base for Temujin and how they're navigating the industry as young producers. 

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Their idea of having one’s own brand of chocolate…seemed…possible. 

They had already planted 400 cacao seedlings on a plot of land in Mae Tang, in Chiang Mai province. Which they found while on a motorbike trip around Thailand. Which they had done to slow their lives down after two decades working as lawyers clocking billable hours. 

“Those hours, we only spend them and we don't get anything back,” Paniti says. “Lawyers have a good life. We get paid well, we reward ourselves with cars and watches. But finally, we felt that this wasn’t for us. So we tried to enrich ourselves with more experiences than objects.” 

The plan was to build a retirement farmhouse, eventually. But in Thailand, unused land is taxed heavily, so a farmer suggested they plant cacao. “We can grow cacao in Thailand!” Nuttaya thought. “This is interesting.”

Following their curiosity, they crisscrossed the country on their own cacao learning tour, then Nuttaya taught herself how to make chocolate using YouTube. The texture of these early batches wasn’t great, but they discovered that cacao from different provinces presented unique flavor profiles. 

Cacao from Chumphon, on the Gulf of Thailand’s western coast, has “notes of ripe grapes and red berries.” Just 200 kilometers north, Prachuap Khiri Khan, which grows pineapples and coconuts, is “bright and citrusy, with a smooth floral aftertaste.” Beans from Chantaburi, in the east, hint of “passion fruit, mango, and a honey-lemon creamy body.” 

“And that was it, the idea ran wild,” Paniti laughs. 

Kad Kokoa, their brand, celebrates Thai culture through chocolate. Now three years old, Nuttaya and Paniti have self-funded it to where it is today: a retail space, a cafe, a lab, a talented team, relationships with farmers, awards, the support of top chefs, an outpost in Tokyo, and a growing base of regular customers. 

Paniti used to think this was the time to scale. They met with many investors and almost closed some deals. The typical response was: “We like your brand very much, but you need to move a needle. If one day you make half a billion [baht], talk to us then.” On reflection, this type of investment was not for them. “We cannot take money then suddenly we are running like a rat trying to deliver investor returns from chocolate.” 

So until they find their “investor soulmate,” as Nuttaya describes it, someone who has patient capital and is investing for impact, they’ll continue to bootstrap. 

In this interview, Nuttaya and Paniti share what they’ve learned about patiently building a product, brand, and creative life from scratch.

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“I felt like we were just designing the candy wrapper for this thing. I didn't really know what we were selling, whether it was good, whether it lived up to its promise.”

The situation amplified the value (or lack thereof) businesses saw in design. Design Film Festival — the studio’s first, most visible, and longest-running venture — was their response to the need to educate non-designers about the value of design. 

“The design conversation had to move beyond its professional ghetto,” Felix says. A conference or book wasn’t the solution. “It's difficult to convince a banker or a housewife to go out and buy a huge design book, but if you ask them to spend 70 minutes watching a film on Dior, that’s quite simple.”

They convinced movie distributors in the US and Europe they were legit film festival producers and assembled a lineup of 8 films screened over 10 days in a 100-seat theatre.

On the first day, only 30 people showed up. 

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He incorporates these ideas into the robust innovation workshops he designs for clients seeking to imagine meaningful customer experiences in a world of accelerating change. While the work requires academic rigor and practical experience working with organizations and ecosystems, Keith says “quite often, the soft skills are actually the difference between success and failure.”

And if you enjoyed this episode, there's more where that came from. Sign up for the free Foolish Careers newsletter. You'll get fresh stories and actionable takeaways from a creator who's ignored the advice to get a sensible career. Go to foolishcareers.asia. We look forward to hearing from you!

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The experience opened her eyes to the wealth disparity in the kingdom and was part of Sunisa’s political awakening. (“I was one of those people who probably couldn't have told you it was rice growing in the field for a long time.”) 

It planted the earliest seeds for her debut novel, A Good True Thai, a coming-of-age story about three young Thais from different classes and ethnic backgrounds who join Thailand’s 1970’s violent democracy movement.  

The characters are compelling; the story has the sweep of historical fiction. Jonathan Head, the BBC’s long-time Thailand correspondent who hosted Sunisa’s launch, says it has an incredible sense of place. It is deeply researched and took six years to write.

Between the writing and the topic, there was potential for getting published in the US. “We tried to sell it in March 2017. Donald Trump took office in January 2017. I talked to my agent about it: ‘You think Americans are going to want to buy anything to do with the rest of the world?’ She was like, ‘I think it's so topical.’ And that's really not what anyone else thought.”

After trying to sell it to a US publisher for three years, Sunisa submitted her manuscript to the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, a Singapore competition that opened up to Southeast Asian writers in 2020. A Good True Thai was a finalist and sold out in four months, which hasn’t happened since the Prize’s first year.

In this interview, Sunisa tells us how she advocated for her own work and promoted the book during the pandemic. 

We're also joined by Epigram's Fiction Editor, Jason Erik Lundberg. He edited the book and provides insight into the writer-editor relationship today.

If you have a novel in your drawer, or in your head, this is the podcast episode to listen to

And if you enjoyed this episode, there's more where that came from. Sign up for the free Foolish Careers newsletter. You'll get fresh stories and actionable takeaways from a creator who's ignored the advice to get a sensible career. Go to foolishcareers.asia. We look forward to hearing from you!

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Gerald Lu, one of Singapore’s leading sommeliers and current chair of the Sommelier Association of Singapore, had no choice. “The industry wasn't very helpful then. There wasn't a sommelier association. All the best wine guys are at The Raffles Hotel or maybe Les Amis, and these guys are very busy so you email them and nobody replies.”

Choosing to become a sommelier is unconventional in Asia, and hard graft in a place like Singapore where alcohol is expensive and wine isn’t baked into the culture. The Ministry of Manpower created a category for the job only in 2015.

Gerald is an example of how one can pursue the work you love despite being misunderstood or dismissed. In this interview we talk about how he found a path through an under-developed industry and the role of a sommelier as storyteller.

For a summary of actionable takeaways from this interview, go to www.foolishcareers.asia and subscribe to the newsletter.

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They had authored two books on graffiti art in Asia which led to a new project, Stickerbomb, a series of sticker books curating street art from around the world. 

These projects established Studio Rarekind’s reputation as a creative studio plugged into contemporary culture and attracted projects in sports, music and art. 

Not bad for someone who started out as video paparazzi doorstepping Justin Timberlake as he came out of a club.

The day after he submitted the hard drive containing Soka Africa, Shaz got on a plane to Southeast Asia “and basically never left.” He lived and worked in Siem Reap, Jakarta, Bangkok and Singapore for the next decade. 

Shaz had come up as part of the street art and DJ scenes in Brighton and then London’s East End, which nourished Studio Rarekind creatively. Coming to Southeast Asia, he sought new creative scenes and found pockets of it in Jakarta, Bangkok and around the region. 

Moving to Singapore to “get serious,” Shaz struggled to find a scene that synced with Studio Rarekind’s edgy vibe. While they won great projects with advertising clients like Nike and Netflix, it pulled them away from making the films they loved. (It maps to the 5-year gap in Shaz’s IMDB page.)

“I was out drinking one evening with another agency and I realized that what we were creating was essentially what they have. It set off a trigger in my head: Wow, I don't want what they have. I never wanted that in my life. What am I doing?” 

In this interview, Shaz talks about how Studio Rarekind built a culturally-relevant body of work, the decision to close down the studio in Singapore, and why every creator has a “therapy piece.” 

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And what if you craved cheese while living in the poorest country in Southeast Asia, where milk isn’t part of the diet and farmers didn’t know they could milk their buffalo? 

If you’re the founders of Laos Buffalo Dairy, you do it all from scratch: build the dairy, convince farmers to rent you their buffalo, grow the grass the buffalo was going to eat, set up the breeding program to improve genetics, import the equipment. And of course, make the cheese -- and yogurt and ice cream and cheesecake.

“We wanted a midlife crisis with a purpose, not a Porsche,” says cofounder Rachel Elman O’Shea. “The Porsche would’ve been cheaper.”  

Rachel is a trained chef. With her co-founder Susie Martin, a seasoned corporate executive, they decided to deal with their midlife crises by moving from Singapore to Luang Prabang, the Lao city known for its monks and languid life along the Mekong. The plan was to build a hotel, sell it, then figure out “the cheese thing” afterward. 

But a farmer was willing to lend them his buffalo for the cheese experiment. Before they knew it, they were learning to milk buffalo and trying (and failing) to make buffalo mozzarella.  

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“I was doing rock-and-roll journalism. After your hundredth party, you begin to wonder if you’re really contributing anything to society.”

This triggered a career recalibration that included 18 months of volunteer work in Guyana, an experience that informed her editorial decisions when she came back to the publishing world and built a broad body of work that spanned business, politics, culture and travel. 

As editor-in-chief of Esquire Philippines (she’s the first female editor in the title’s 80-year history), Kristine led an editorial shift that featured fully-clothed middle-aged women on the cover and called out misogyny in its pages. She helped the country’s youngest billionaire write his first book. Then out of a desire to read and tell travel stories about the Philippines that were not stereotypical listicles about white-sand beaches, she co-founded Grid Magazine, an independent title still running today that has found a new revenue stream during the pandemic. She is currently editor-in-chief of travel title Smile Magazine.

In this interview, Kristine spells out the traits that helped her build a versatile writing career, how to turn a passion project into a sustainable business, and why she looks for attitude over talent when hiring writers.

If you enjoyed this interview, there's more where that came from. Join us at Foolish Careers, www.foolishcareers.asia, where you can sign up for the weekly newsletter and connect with the Foolish community. We look forward to meeting you!

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While working long hours as a creative director at an ad agency in Manila, Budjette and his co-creator, artist Kajo Baldisimo, started writing the graphic novel Trese, featuring heroine Alexandra Trese, a detective who walks among Filipino mythical creatures and helps the cops solve supernatural crimes. 

From its first print run of 30 copies, Trese gained a fan base. Budjette and Kajo became fixtures at Komikon Philippines, got on Neil Gaiman’s radar, and broke convention by being the first graphic novel to win the country’s prestigious National Book Award.

Trese was acquired by Netflix in 2018, which while an accomplishment in itself, was important because it led to the dream fulfilled: following the Netflix announcement, Budjette and Kajo got an email from Ablaze, a US-based comic book publisher, with an offer to carry the comic book. Trese is now available to a US audience. 

All this only took 15 years. 

In this interview, we learn about the attitudes and systems Budjette and Kajo devised so they could make time for creative work and get their comic book into the world with limited resources. 

We also hear Budjette’s perspective on balancing this creative work with his advertising career. Parallel to Trese’s rise, he rose to Executive Creative Director at MRM/McCann Philippines and has since taken on another challenging role as Senior Brand Creative at LEGO, his current day job. 

If you enjoyed this interview, there's more where that came from. Join us at Foolish Careers, www.foolishcareers.asia, where you can sign up for the weekly newsletter and connect with the Foolish community. We look forward to meeting you!

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If you want to get a creative project going and it’s unrealistic to block out big chunks of time, find shorter, more manageable blocks. Budjette’s collaborator, Kajo Baldisimo, figured he could draw one page in one hour, so he blocked out his lunch breaks for a month. That’s 20 days to draw the story plus 10 days to add the word bubbles. The first Trese story was in the world a month later.

What one thing can you work on for one hour a day for one month?

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