Singapore: “Disneyland with the Death Penalty”

We were just talking about caning and hanging in Singapore. Hanging now, is that the new one? No, it's always been. That's how they always do it? Caning is one of the forms of capital punishment, but they still, they actually hang for drugs. What is Singapore like? I've never been. It seems like a strange place because it's relatively wealthy, right? Yes, very much so. And upscale and very nice, but also ruthless. But you know what happened in like my generation? I've witnessed it go from third world to first world in my lifetime. Really? Yeah, yeah. So it's one of those success stories of nation building. But it's kind of like, you know those snow globes, the perfect snow globes? Yeah. Yeah, when you like turn it over and like everything kind of sprinkles. That's what it feels like living in Singapore. For me at least. I had to get out. It's just, it's a bit sterile. It's perfect, but it's too perfect. It's almost like there's somebody called it once Disneyland with the death penalty, which is a pretty good decision. And you get the death penalty for things like drugs, right? Just possession pass like maybe 25 grams or 25 milligrams or something. Marijuana trafficking. So if you have an ounce of marijuana, how many grams is it? What's the conversion? I don't know. I haven't converted to 20. Your system 28 grams in an ounce. So like an ounce is a good amount of weed, but two ounces of weed, you're dead. Yep. Yeah. By hanging. Ooh, two ounces. Wow. That's weird. You can go down the street and buy that at a store. No. You just have to show your driver's license that you're over 21 and you can buy that at a store and if Singapore, they'll kill you for it. Right. How many people have they killed for pot? I don't know about that, but I do know like one time they actually executed a Australian citizen who was on transit. So he didn't even get out of the airport. He was just kind of carrying the drugs on transit. Wow. And they executed him? Oh yeah. Hanging. It's always hanging. And do you remember what kind of drugs, was he selling drugs? He was carrying quite a bit. He was definitely trafficking it. Jesus Christ. They just hung them. Yep. Zero tolerance policy. Yeah, that's great. How did it go from third world to first world so quickly? I guess the founder of the country, well not the founder, the founding prime minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew was probably one of the world's most famous modern statesman. He was resolute, like weeded out corruption. He was kind of like very, very tight controls on free speech, but very much sort of neoliberal economic policies. So it tracked a lot of foreign investment, right? Because the highest income tax bracket is like maybe 13%. It's very low. That's almost no welfare, at least in the sense of how we understand welfare. But there's a lot of... It's a hybrid system, so there's a lot of zero capital gains taxes, zero state taxes. Very easy to set up a business. So he managed to attract a lot of foreign businesses to set up their multinational corporation headquarters in Asia, because the other alternative would be maybe China. But China would probably end up stealing all your corporate secrets, your intellectual property. But Singapore was billed as, this is the country that protects rule of law. So English, he kind of made everybody speak English, it was the working language. So if you wanted to set up business in Asia, that was your place to go. You gotta like, if you want to attract investment, you have to say like, okay, what's in my region and how can I have a competitive advantage? So that was how Singapore really developed and just gained a lot of traction as a state. The average American knows Singapore because of that kid that got caned. Now it's that stupid movie. Which movie? Crazy Rich Asians. Oh, Crazy Rich Asians, right. I never saw that. Was it good? I didn't like it because I don't like rom coms. And like, come on, the premise is like, a girl, an American Asian girl is like dating this guy from Singapore, she doesn't know he's rich and she finds out on the plane there. It's like the most bullshit thing. It's just conspicuous consumption. I mean, it's got some, you know, the city looks beautiful. And in fact, I kind of grew up with some people that lived that lifestyle. But I just don't like that kind of movie. It's a chick flick. A chick flick. Got it. You're not into chick flicks.