Season 1 Recap-isode

Transcript

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So Jay, what's up with your crappy Instagram game?

Jay Ooi:
Is it that crappy?

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
It's very, very crappy.

Jay Ooi:
Oh, I just can't be bothered. I make the episode, and that's when I've checked out mentally, when the episode is done, and then I have to then promote it, and I just don't want to promote it.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
You're promoting it with stock images. I feel like all the effort that you've gone through in making these episodes, mainly by interviewing cool people like me, has gone to waste by your crappy marketing game.

Jay Ooi:
Well, do you want to just do my Instagram for me?

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
You're a social media manager. What are you talking about? This is your expertise!

Jay Ooi:
I just don't want to do it.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
It's horrendous.

Jay Ooi:
Okay. I like the quotes that I animate, though. They're nice.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
They are very good, but they should be interlaced with actual photos and not a salad.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
You put up a picture of a salad for the D&I episode. What the hell?

Jay Ooi:
Hello and welcome to Shoes Off. I'm Jay Ooi.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
I'm Thinesh. Hey, Jay.

Jay Ooi:
Hey, T. What are we doing today?

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So we are recapping season one of Shoes Off.

Jay Ooi:
Awesome, and some people might recognise your voice. Who are you, and where have we heard you before?

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
I'm the guy in the last episode of season two.

Jay Ooi:
Oh, you're that lawyer guy from Canada who got called a Tamil tiger.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Very proudly, so yes, I'm that guy.

Jay Ooi:
So today's in-between-isode is a little different from what you've heard so far. It's going to be more conversational and a bit more reflective as well.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
And it's going to be way more fun, because I'm here.

Jay Ooi:
Yo, it's not mine.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
All right, let's get into it. What sparked you to start this podcast?

Jay Ooi:
So funnily enough, you had a part to play in this.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Unsurprisingly.

Jay Ooi:
We will get to that, but basically, growing up in Australia, I just sort of felt uncool, because I was Asian, and I think a lot of us have this feeling where being Asian wasn't cool because being Asian wasn't white, but because I had only lived in Australia my whole life, I just thought this was normal, and it wasn't until I visited other countries like Canada and the US and the UK and I saw Asians embracing their culture, I saw them dancing to K-pop videos in a way that they were proud of this cool Asian thing, whereas I think when I'd seen that sort of thing back home, it would be people in a kind of sheepish way embracing that Asian-ness.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
It's almost like they were embracing it in private.

Jay Ooi:
Yeah.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
And they wouldn't boldly be dancing to K-pop in the street. So you can kind of see that shift now, because a lot of white Australians and white Americans and the West is embracing K-pop and people like Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande and Dua Lipa are collaborating with Black Pink and other K-pop bands, so it's now cooler.

Jay Ooi:
Yes. So it is shifting, which is good, but definitely growing up, that wasn't really the case for me, and because we're shy about talking about our culture because we don't think it's cool, we then think that we're alone in the way that we think and feel about these topics and issues, so having this podcast is a way to be like, "Hey, you're not the only person who's gone through this. I'm in this together with you, man."

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So what's your process like when you're creating all these episodes?

Jay Ooi:
Yeah. So I have a hundred ideas and topics at all times. They're just all on the back burner, and then I'll pick some that are super interesting, I'll start researching, but even at that point, it's not necessarily an episode yet. What I need is cool people to talk to obviously, like yourself.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Hello.

Jay Ooi:
So episodes come together, basically, when I find people for that topic, and that could be someone introducing them to me, it could be me actively looking for someone and reaching out to them, but once I do have, say, two people for an episode, I will then actively search for the people that I need to finish it off. So it means that the episodes that are in the season are just the ones that I happen to find the right people for, and I know there are so many topics that people have submitted. They're like, "Jay, you need to cover this," and they're all on the back burner, I promise. I'm just waiting for the right time and the right people to come along.

Jay Ooi:
So after I find the right people to talk to, I will then go research more about the topic, more about the person, do the interview with them, and this is the thing that I think I do that not a lot of podcasts do, is I get a transcript for each interview, I read and highlight, and once I have all the transcripts for one episode, I then go, "What is the story here? What are we going to talk about? How do we get from point A to point B? What is the overall message?

Jay Ooi:
So I start with a big general idea, and then I write from there. So I get grabs from everyone that talked to this big general idea, lead us to the end. This writing part is probably my favourite part of the process. So I do enjoy interviewing people genuinely, but you hear other people who do more conversational style podcasts, and they just flow really, really, really well, and that's not necessarily my strength, and that's because I really like writing and making it a cohesive story. So then after that, then I record my own voice and I edit the show and I add music and sound design, that sort of thing, and then it's done.

Jay Ooi:
Oh, and I left out one really important thing, and obviously, because it's my least favourite part, which is after the episode is done, promoting it, uploading it, doing social media.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Which you're not very good at.

Jay Ooi:
Which I'm not very good at. I obviously forgot to mention it, because I don't like doing it.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
An afterthought, an afterthought.

Jay Ooi:
It is an afterthought, it's true.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So what were people's favourite episodes?

Jay Ooi:
Surprisingly to me, there was a lot of variance into what people's favourite episodes were. I thought the episodes that I really loved would be the episodes that everyone else really loves. Turns out that's not the case.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Kind of like your social media.

Jay Ooi:
Yeah. That's true.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
This picture of a salad bowl is going to go off.

Jay Ooi:
So today, we're going to talk about my favourite episodes, but there were a couple that other people to resonate with, which was the Tiger Mom episode and the doctors episode, and these are just collections of stories, and so to me, they weren't as exciting, because they weren't an academic or deep dive into why these things exist, but I think one person wrote in and he said, "Man, hearing this stuff is so validating," and I think that kind of sums up why these two episodes resonated with people when it didn't necessarily resonate with me, because they've had this experience, but they've never had it talked about before, and hearing it talked about was validating, but the rest that we're going to talk about today were also favourites with people.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Sorry, I'm just taking photos of Jay for his social media.

Jay Ooi:
Yes, because I remember I did a whole story with someone. We've been working on this for months. I kid you not, months, we've been writing this thing, and he came over, we recorded it, and then he left it and I was like, "Oh shit, now she's going to be mad because I didn't take a single photo of us."

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So let's talk about episode one, names. I think this is something that a lot of people resonated with, and it seems like quite a common experience. What was the response for this episode?

Jay Ooi:
Yeah. So there was a really huge response for this episode, but I think it just goes to show how names are something that are so personal to us, yet we never really talk about the meaning behind them and what it means to us. So a lot of people wrote in about their own experiences with their own name, and what I realised was everyone's story was unique. So for me, it was I didn't get to choose a Western name growing up. Other people, it was, "I chose this Western name for myself growing up because my parents told me to, but as an adult, I realised that my Chinese name is really, really cool." So one guy wrote in and he said, "My Chinese name means mysterious poem." That's so much cooler than Michael.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Yeah. Sorry to all the Michaels.

Jay Ooi:
So he's going through this process of reclaiming his culture and heritage through his name, and then I've also had other people who wrote in about people found it difficult to say their names, and so they shortened it or they just made it their initials. So instead of Chun Jie, it's now just CJ.

Jay Ooi:
I had a question for you, which is that I noticed a lot of my brown friends don't adopt Western names, yet a lot of my East Asian and Southeast Asian friends seem to adopt Western names. What is the deal with that?

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
I think it comes down to the person. I know me personally, I've had a very interesting relationship with my name, because I'm also Christian, or I was born Christian, and so I had a Christian name, which is Andre, and I kind of play this game where depending on the person that I'm talking to, I decide which game I'm going to give. I think earlier in my career, before I was established and when I was trying to get into the corporate world, I often went by my Christian name, Andre, and a shortened version of my last name. Now that I'm much more established, I'm getting published and things like that, I make much more of an effort to use my entire 16 letter last name and give people the inconvenience of having to learn it, because they bother with French names, German names, Spanish names, spicy white names, but when it comes to ethnic Tamil, Chinese, Indian names, they won't make that same effort. They take the lazy approach.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Even last week, I was in the Hunter Valley with my now fiance, and we were at a restaurant and we had made a booking, and the guy was like, "I'm not even going to bother with your last name," and just kind of dismissed it. I was so inclined to say, "Actually, I would really appreciate it if you did try," but doing that every day with every single interaction becomes very exhausting, and I remember being in another cafe, it was a very busy time, I think they were understaffed and they were taking our coffee order and she asked me what my name was, and she was already stressed out, and I felt like giving her my actual name would be an inconvenience to her, so I then gave Andre, and I think this is the kind of game that people are playing constantly, which is you have to kind of know what assumptions people are making about you and try to counter that in one way or another.

Jay Ooi:
I guess also one difference that I think, correct me if I'm wrong, at least in Chinese, it's not just the word, but there's a tone that comes with it. And when you get the tone wrong, you actually get the whole name, the whole word is wrong, and I believe that's different in Tamil.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Yeah. So we don't necessarily have tones, but in Tamil, there are particular inflections with how you say particular letters. So for example, in Tamil, we have three Ls and three Ns, and they all have slight variations to them, and those variations are lost when, essentially, white people say our names, and the fact that people are even saying Thinesh is something that I used to be very grateful for, and I'll pick my battles, but as I'm growing older, I'm becoming more adamant about people pronouncing my name correctly, and I try to make it as accessible as possible by comparing it to names that they might already be familiar with. So when it comes to Thinesh, I'm like, "Thinesh, like Tenacious D," and that way they kind of remember how it should be pronounced rather than being like, "Tinesh. Tineesh."

Jay Ooi:
Yeah, that's good. I like that. One other person wrote in about how on her badge at work, it says Dr. Yi Zhao, but she always introduces herself as Dr. Cici, because it's just easier to remember and it doesn't confuse patients as much. A name's just a thing that affects all of us every day, and so I think that's why this episode struck a lot of people and is still one of my favourites.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So episode three, Diana Nguyen.

Jay Ooi:
So yeah, we say Nguyen in Australia, but I believe it's pronounced new-in, and I believe it's also slightly different depending on what region of Vietnam you come from.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Ah, okay, cool. Thank you.

Jay Ooi:
No worries.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
This seemed to be the first episode where you seem to relinquish some control over, I guess, a narrative of that particular episode. What was the response to this?

Jay Ooi:
So people really loved this ep, and I think I have to really give credit to Diana, because she was very open and raw and honest in this episode, and it shows because she actually messaged me that after she listened to it, she had a little cry, because it is, it's a very personal story, and there are a lot of things in this episode that I think we can relate to. So one of the first things that she talks about was when Pauline Hanson first came around and she gave her famous speech where she talks about Asians swamping Australia, and she talks about her experience of then being worried about her family getting kicked out, and so she tries to whitewash herself so that she can be as white as possible so that her family is safe, and this is her as a kid.

Jay Ooi:
I think a lot of people went through something similar, where there was this sudden awareness of your own race, and then a desire to then go against it, because it was being uttered by this politician, and this incident with Pauline Hanson was, for a lot of people, kind of the first overt calling out of Asians as a problem in Australia and of racism, but yeah, I think that incident is something that a lot of us did experience, and then Diana also talked about how her mom was super strict and didn't want her doing arts and would walk out on her shows. I think, again, this is something that we can relate to, because a lot of our parents did not support our pursuits of anything artistic.

Jay Ooi:
To be fair, my mom is not a huge tiger mom, but when I was thinking about what I wanted to do in university, we'd be looking at the degrees book and we'd look at photography, and she'd be like, "That's a hobby, Jay. You don't need to do that for a profession. You can do that as a hobby." That was a very nice way. I know other Asian parents who were like, "You pretty much have to do this." So I think people did relate to that. So you have this moment at the end of the episode where her mum, in a direct, but still indirect way, talks about how she's proud of what Diana has done, and I think we understand the gravity of that. The spoken yet unspoken and her being proud of Diana after all these years is a big deal, because a lot of Asian parents don't say that to their kids.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So No Rice, No Spice, episode five. This is something that we have both heard more often than not, and attacks both of us at the same time. Tell me about this episode. Why did you want to cover this?

Jay Ooi:
Yeah. So I'm sure we've had this conversation a few times. We've had this conversation with friends, and it would always be, oh, but Jay, it's just like a preference. It's not racism. Some people are attracted to women and some people are attracted to men. That's just their preference, and I'm only attracted to white guys, so I'm only attracted to Asian guys. Why is that any difference? It's sort of painted as this harmless thing, but I would say, yeah, when you look at what's happening on the bigger scale, when you see that, who are the people who are being consistently discriminated against? It's the people who are encapsulated in this beautiful phrase, "no rice, no spice," and so, sure, on the individual level, it could just be a personal preference, but when you see a pattern on the bigger scale, you realise there's something else going on here, that our preferences are informed by something.

Jay Ooi:
I didn't have the data, I just had this feeling that it wasn't right, and then I found this researcher, Denton Callander, thank you very much for the research you did because he studied it specifically in Australia, and it showed that these same racial patterns that we have in broader society carry over into our sexual preferences, and so to say that it is just our preference and that it's, firstly, harmless, and secondly, we have absolutely no control over it, is actually just not true, and that's why I did this episode. I wanted to show that this was not true.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
How did you feel releasing it?

Jay Ooi:
I was nervous, because in a sense, it's calling out people on their racial preferences, which are very personal to them, but it's also saying, "Hey, how you feel has a bigger impact, and we don't like to be called racist, and I think that's why I was nervous, because I didn't want people to be like, "Oh, he's fucking calling me racist." It's not the intent to call people racist, because I think that term is very loaded. The intent is just so that we can actually self reflect on our own preferences and try and understand where they've come from, and maybe if we want to try and change them, because you can actually change it.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So this episode is very MSM focused, MSM being men who have sex with men. How have the straights responded to this? Are the heteros okay?

Jay Ooi:
So I met up with a hetero friend the other day, and he said to me, "Jay, my favourite episode is still this No Rice, No Spice episode, because it doesn't just exist in the gay world," and I'm like, "Yeah, I know." I know it doesn't, and I want to cover this, I just haven't had the time or haven't found the right people to talk about it, but it's this idea that Asian men are emasculated and Asian women are fetishised, and it has broader effects than just the gay world.

Jay Ooi:
One person wrote in and he said, "You have to do an episode on the prevalence of white male, Asian female relationships and colonial mentality. I'll be the first to share it, especially with my female friends who say they'd never date a South Asian or African and would only date white or Chinese guys, and this is coming from a Filipino guy." So racial preference is a big issue and a big problem that exists in the straight dating world as well.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
It was super insightful. It's definitely one of the episodes that I resonated with the most, but, What is Asia?, episode eight. This, I thought, was a really interesting episode, just because I don't think people very often think about Asia as a social construct. Where did this episode come from?

Jay Ooi:
So I just looked at Google maps one day, and I looked at where Europe was and looked at where Asia was, and then I saw this line in between, and I was like, "But y'all are on the same continent."

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Abolish borders.

Jay Ooi:
You see North and South America, and they kind of look like two distinct landmasses. You look at Africa, and it does look like its own distinct landmass, and then you look at Europe and Asia, and you're like, "Eh?" So it just sent me down this rabbit hole of wanting to find out why this is the case, because we use the term today still, and because we use it in a very specific way today.

Jay Ooi:
So yeah, I found out that it was ancient Greece, obviously, who wanted to be the centre of the world, and everyone else was other to them, and that, to be fair, is also including the people north of them, so the other Europeans were seen as other, and the people South of them, so the Middle East, and they didn't have as much of an understanding of Africa at that point, but then yeah, the people east of them are Asian, and that's where this term started, and it's just sort of carried forward today to refer to this very, very diverse group of people, and when we use the term, it's almost like we're talking about this monolithic culture, but that's just not the case.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
We're obviously very different.

Jay Ooi:
We are very different, and especially in Australia.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Lice, spice.

Jay Ooi:
Exactly. Exactly, and especially in Australia, South Asians often aren't included in the term Asian when we talk about Asian. So fun fact, I used to go to church as well, and I went to an "Asian church", and then we had a white pastor who came in, and he made this really insightful comment. He's like, "When you guys say Asian, you just mean Chinese," and I was like, "Kind of."

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
He was woke.

Jay Ooi:
Yeah, because he had no concept of this term Asian and how he used it until he was around us, and it does usually refer to Chinese, also including the Chinese diaspora, and to some extent, Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese, but definitely not South Asians.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
These are the crazy rich Asians.

Jay Ooi:
Yes, which we will get into next season. We will talk about this movie.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So I'm looking at the white handbook of irritating phrases. Let me play devil's advocate. Why don't you have counterpoints on your show?

Jay Ooi:
Yeah. "Why isn't the show balanced, Jay? Aren't you doing real journalism? Isn't journalism supposed to be balanced?" To that, I say, no.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
My show, my rules.

Jay Ooi:
You know what? Essentially, the way I view it is, okay, there's no such thing as an unbiased anything. Everything is going to have bias. Even the news that you read, the way that they write their headline is biased. They might have the counterpoint in there right at the end to say that they've got it, but it's still some form of bias, but for this show, I wanted it to be things that you haven't thought about in that way before. So for example, episode one about names, I don't need the counterpoint in this episode of some white guy being, "Oh, these fucking Asians just need to all adopt Western names and stop making a big deal out of their names." It's just not necessary for the show. It doesn't add anything. It's something that we've heard a lot in our life, and so this show is balanced in the sense that it's providing balance to all of the stuff that we've experienced in our life. It's the other view that doesn't get any air time. That's the way I see it.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
It's a counter narrative to what we're bombarded with on a daily basis.

Jay Ooi:
Exactly. Exactly.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Technically, based on what you've just said, we're still not balancing the conversation.

Jay Ooi:
No.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
We're just adding one tiny voice to a monolith of counterpoints.

Jay Ooi:
Yeah. So it is trying to add some balance into the views out there, but the individual episodes are not "balanced views".

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Yeah. What do you think were the main takeaways for you that you've now applied to your life?

Jay Ooi:
Going back to episode one, because I love this episode, I really do love my Chinese name now. It's not that I hated it before, but after understanding the meaning behind it and how it ties me to my family, I'm like, yeah, my name is really important to me, and I'm less shy about using it, but I still don't embrace the English anglicized version of my name. I still find that really weird and gross. If you don't currently call me Jian or Gian, please don't start calling me Jian or Gian. You can call me Chien Long, that's fine, or Jay, one of those two, just not the weird English Chinese version.

Jay Ooi:
So yeah. That's one thing. Another is understanding a lot of these nuances that exist within race. I'm way more willing to call out racism than I was before. So like no rice, no spice, before, I just had this hunch that it wasn't right, the way we have preferences, and now I'm like, "No, no, that's bad, that's racism."

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
You're just calling a spade a spade.

Jay Ooi:
Exactly. Now that I have the information and data to back it up, I'm willing to actually call it out, and lastly, I'm more careful with when and how I use the term Asian, and this is because I did episode eight on what is Asia. So you're noticing, especially season two, if I'm referring to us as collective as Asians, I'm not going to say "all of us Asians", I'm going to say something like "many Asians" to experience this, and then if something is specific to a specific culture, I'm going to use that culture much as I can, and even these cultures are still generic words. To say that this is Chinese culture does not apply to every Chinese person, and there are so many subcultures within China, but I think it helps being a little bit more specific so that we don't see Asia as this monolithic culture.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So how has this impacted your relationships, your friendships, your dating life?

Jay Ooi:
Yeah, so ...

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Tell us a goss. Who have you fought with?

Jay Ooi:
The main thing is, because I think and talk about issues that affect Asians, and not just issues, actually, topics that relate to Asians a lot. I talk about race a lot now. I don't know if you've noticed.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Definitely. I feel like when we first met, it was in reverse, where I was always bringing this up and you were quite annoyed with me.

Jay Ooi:
Yeah.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So now we're bringing some balance into our relationship by you teaching me things. It's great.

Jay Ooi:
Yeah, and it also annoys some people, because it feels like I don't have anything else to say, which might be true, I don't know. But no, it's just a lot on my mind, because I'm understanding and thinking and reading about so many things that I want to talk about it, because I find them so interesting. Even I'll be at the gym and people would be like, "Oh, so Jay, how's the podcast going?", and then it's just me talking for 10 minutes, and I'm like, "Oh shit."

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
I think it's important that you do that, though, because while it would be nice if everyone went and took their time to read up on all these issues, a lot of people won't, and the only contact point to these issues are people like you, who can now just share your experiences and the knowledge that you have to make society better.

Jay Ooi:
Yeah. That's very true, and a lot of people at my gym are white and they listen to the podcast, and they told me what they learned from it, and one person was like, "I just learnt so much about Chinese culture from listening to episode one about your name, and I didn't know all these things." So I think it's good that we're getting more understanding, and at the same time, I have some white people when I was like, "Oh, what'd you think?", and one friend wrote, "I rewrote this message six times, because I didn't want it to come across as sort of ..." I'm like, "Aw, that's like ..."

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Good. That's the labor that you should go through to make life more convenient for us. Thank you, miscellaneous white person.

Jay Ooi:
Yes. Thank you. I guess another way is I'm more interested in talking to people when they have a curiosity about these things and they don't dismiss these things. So if I meet someone who's just like, "Oh cool," and doesn't want to talk about race, then I'm just less likely to want to be their friend nowadays, because it's like, "You don't get my experience, man."

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Can I ask you, though, just in my personal experience, I'm like you, where I end up talking about these topics quite a bit, but it can become exhausting, just because, obviously, the topics are very heavy. How do you find that balance?

Jay Ooi:
I'm very bad at balance. I work the podcast a lot outside of my full time job, but it means that I am surrounded by this stuff all the time. So at the moment, I just started playing The Last of Us II, and that's kind of, if you don't know, this pseudo scary, very beautiful story game. Well, I don't know if it's beautiful yet. It's beautiful so far. It could turn out to be terrible, but that's a nice way to switch off and be in another world for a bit.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So in Final Fantasy X-2, High Priestess Yuna becomes a pop star.

Jay Ooi:
She does!

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
And she sings, "What Can I Do For You?" The question is, how can we help, Jay?

Jay Ooi:
Yeah. So I feel like if you listen to podcasts, you hear this all the time, and it's, "Hey, if you really like this show, tell someone and leave a review," but there's a reason why all these podcasts say this, and it's because, firstly, word of mouth is honestly the best way for new people to find the show, because people will more likely trust your recommendation than reading something online about it. So if you do want to help, one way that is really, really, really helpful to me is to recommend the show to people and to talk about it highly, because I think it's good, and I think more people need to listen to it.

Jay Ooi:
The second way is, again, to leave a review. So Apple Podcasts is one of the few places where you can leave a review for a podcast, and having good reviews there does get it to rank higher, and eventually when I submit it to be featured, it will just show that it's a really good show to people who click on it. So please do leave a review on Apple Podcasts. I'll leave a link in the show notes.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Can you do a favour for me?

Jay Ooi:
Yeah.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
Can you make better social media posts so I can share it, because I don't know how comfortable I feel sharing a picture of the infamous salad.

Jay Ooi:
Stop it with the salad. Yeah, I know. Okay, the salad was bad. I just didn't ... What photo was I supposed to use? Every corporate D&I photo is way worse.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
So you opted for the salad.

Jay Ooi:
I went with a salad, because I was trying to draw a link between two things that you don't really consider. Anyway. Point taken. Social media is not my strength, and I need to do better.

Thinesh Thillainadarajah:
No, thank you for doing this podcast. It's been super informative, and I know me and a lot of my friends have been very grateful listening to your voice week on week, talking to us about various issues of the Asian community, the very broad and diverse Asian community, so thank you.

Jay Ooi:
Thank you for being a part of this.