Front Row

About Front Row

Front Row Interviews with experts to expand your mental map of the world. Made in Singapore. For Asia and the World.

Publisher

Keith Yap

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Jul 2024

Latest episode

15 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

98 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   15 Oct 2026

   #98 - Samuel Rhee : The Secret To Financial Security in 2026

   Samuel Rhee is Co-Founder, Chairman, and Group Chief Investment Officer of Endowus, the Singapore-headquartered digital wealth platform. He heads the Endowus Investment Office, where he is responsible for asset allocation and investment selection across the firm’s offerings, and he has built the company around a single conviction: that individual investors should have the same advice, access, and institutional-level pricing that sovereign wealth funds and university endowments take for granted. Under his leadership, Endowus became the first digital adviser for CPF investing in Singapore and the first scaled independent financial adviser in the region to return all trailer fees to clients. Before co-founding Endowus in 2017, Rhee served as CEO and CIO of Morgan Stanley Investment Management in Asia, capping nearly three decades of institutional investing experience across Singapore, Hong Kong, and London. He left at the height of that career to build what he describes as the second, more purposeful half of his working life. Born in Korea and raised in England before moving to Asia, he has called Singapore home for over twenty years. Rhee is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Longevity Steering Committee and a vocal advocate for financial literacy, evidence-based investing, and the elimination of hidden fees. This conversation matters because it comes from someone who has sat on both sides of the table: the institutional investor who had everything, and the retail client who discovered he had almost nothing. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Trailer 0:26 Introduction 0:57 The Mistake Even The Best Investors Make 2:53 What Risk Actually Means 5:57 Taking Risk Without Being Paid For It 7:58 Why We Never Learn From Bubbles 12:40 Is AI A Bubble? 15:45 Walking Away From Morgan Stanley 18:12 Show Me The Incentives 22:35 Everybody Is Selling 23:01 Why Retail Investors Have No Bargaining Power 29:47 Why The Robo-Adviser Playbook Failed In Asia 35:02 Advice, Access, Cost 38:47 Where A Beginner Should Start 40:50 Spending, Saving, And Propensity 42:54 How Sam Would Invest $100 48:26 Greed, Fear, And The Missed Rebound 51:48 Bootstrapping Through The Funding Winter 56:11 Doing AI Without Firing People 1:01:06 Advice For Young People 1:03:55 Closing

2. 

   5 Oct 2026

   #97- OCBC Chief Economist Explains How The Global Economic Order Is Changing

   Thank you for checking out The Front Row Podcast and my interview with Selina Ling. Selena Ling is Chief Economist and Head of Global Markets Research & Strategy at OCBC, where she leads the team responsible for the bank's macroeconomic insights, forecasts, and trading recommendations across foreign exchange, interest rates, corporate credit, and macroeconomic commentary. Under her leadership, OCBC's research has been consistently highly ranked in industry surveys, and her analysis is widely quoted across print, television, and radio.Before joining OCBC in 2000, Ling worked in Singapore's public sector, with the Fiscal Policy Unit at the Ministry of Finance and the Economics Department at the Ministry of Trade and Industry. That vantage point, from inside the policymaking machinery and later from the markets, gives her an unusually rounded view of how Singapore's economic strategy is made and how it lands. She is Vice President and a council member of the Economic Society of Singapore, sits on the Board of Governors of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) and the Advisory Board of NTU's College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and received the IBF Fellow Award in Financial Markets in 2017.In this conversation, part of my collaboration with RSIS, Ling examines how a world reshaped by war, pandemic, geopolitical rivalry, and the AI investment boom is rewriting the economic assumptions behind Singapore's success, and what it will take to stay resilient.TIMESTAMPS0:00 Trailer & Introduction 1:03 The External Conditions Behind Singapore's Rise 3:29 Why Singapore Never De-Industrialised 5:45 The Trading Order We Took For Granted 7:36 From Just-In-Time To Just-In-Case 10:46 Is This Just Trump? 15:28 How Wars Drive Inflation 18:59 Singapore's Healthy Paranoia 21:00 Is AI A Bubble? 25:27 Singapore's Big AI Bet 28:50 Trust As A Scarce Resource 31:03 Defence Spending Has No Free Lunch 34:17 America's K-Shaped Economy 39:39 Pragmatism Over Ideology 43:38 Weaponised Interdependence 46:45 Can ASEAN Truly Integrate? 49:28 Singapore's Biggest Structural Risks 52:47 Will AI Make Us Lazy? 54:33 Stay Intellectually Curious This is the 95th episode Of The Front Row PodcastA huge thank you to our amazing Front Row Friends for supporting and advancing the podcast: @marinama2728@deborahchoi1455@annkowong@yewchoutan5876Full transcripts of episodes can be found here: https://www.ykeith.com/tag/podcast/Feel free to mingle in the comments below or head to...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontrow.65/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-yap/Website: www.ykeith.comEmail: keith@frontrow65.coGet access to every episode by subscribing for free on Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/keith-yap8 or Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast/front-row/id1771599400

3. 

   26 Sept 2026

   #96- Chairman Of Evercore Asia & Kallang , Keith Magnus On Leadership Lessons, Bringing Taylor Swift & Singapore's Reinvention

   Keith Magnus is Chairman of Evercore Asia, Founding Chairman of The Kallang Group, and Chairman of the Families for Life Council. In this conversation, filmed live at an event in partnership with the National Youth Council, he traces a career shaped by crises: the Asian Financial Crisis, the dot-com crash, and running Merrill Lynch in Singapore through 2008.He explains why he left the big banks to start Evercore's Singapore office with little more than a mobile phone, and how a four-and-a-half-hour night of phone calls began The Kallang's turnaround. He also tells the full story of how Singapore persuaded Taylor Swift's team to base her Asian shows here: "Let us deliver Asia to you."The second half turns to what comes next: why live sport and entertainment are the anti-AI bet, what judgment still counts for when AI works at the level of a second-year associate, and why loneliness, more than healthcare or money, is the biggest challenge facing Singapore's ageing population.CHAPTERS0:00 Introduction1:20 Sick, On a Drip, Fighting for a Job6:45 Leading Through the Chase–JP Morgan Merger9:23 Who Are You Without Your Name Card?14:44 What 2008 Taught Him About Security17:36 Building Evercore Asia From Scratch23:13 Taking Back the Sports Hub26:41 The Nicoll Highway Test33:21 How Taylor Swift Came to Singapore39:54 Can Commerce and Community Coexist?45:31 Grit, Patience, and When to Walk Away51:24 What AI Means for Your Career56:00 Live Events: The Anti-AI Bet59:17 Integrity, Dignity, Empathy, Kindness1:05:27 Is Singapore Too Sterile?1:09:03 Delivering Hard Decisions Kindly1:10:44 Singapore's Social Cohesion Challenge1:21:38 Closing

Who has been a guest on Front Row

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Joseph Chinyong Liow
• Cedric Chin
• Karthik Nachiappan
• Professor Euston Quah
• Grace Shao

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

1,171,212

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.0 / 5

2 ratings

Spotify

4.9 / 5

101 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 52 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

46

Social presence

0

YouTube

93

Engagement

51

Contact Front Row

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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