I'm just wondering if you could give us your take of the state of the U.N., and the kind of reforms that you think the UN should be undergoing and in what way in order to reacquire relevance and saliency in the international order.

Thank you, Natalie.

Let me start at the very beginning first, just so that we have some context as to why the UN and the multilateral system was established in the first place.

It was very much a pivot from the age of empire to a multilateral rule-based order that was going to be based on collaboration for a more secure world.

And the focus was very much to restore our humanity after the Second World War, because it was started in 1945, and it was to restore our humanity at the deadliest war that we had ever faced in humanity where 85 million people lost their life.

And we were confronted with our capacity for dehumanization and also the propensity of our human nature to destroy each other if we're not careful, but also the fact that it was a world that was decolonizing.

And therefore, how do we deal with coexistence? So the UN Charter was very much the framework and the foundation of how we should do that collaboration.

So I'm curious how you made that leap from this very poor childhood in Singapore to Cambridge and how these very difficult experiences you had as a child clearly started propelling you in a direction for academic study and then a lot of the government work that you did after that.

Why do you take that path?

I grew up in, I mean, of course, you know, after the Second World War, at the time of the new nation states being built.

But it was a time of where my family fell into very deep poverty.

And I had a very difficult childhood.

Didn't go to school until I was eight.

But I was such an observant child, but I didn't have books, right? So the world was my classroom.

So I learned and I observed things.

yes.