Before We Get There

In this episode of Before We Get There, host Nicholas Braman interviews Pashmina Binwani, the Malaysian creator and writer behind The Gone Goat. She didn’t learn to cycle or hike until her late 20s. Then she quit her corporate job with 10,000 ringgit in the bank and spent three months alone in the Himalayas.

Almost 10 years later, she’s traveled overland from Iran to Europe, cycled Kyrgyzstan for 45 days and built a career on stories from the places most people pass through. They talk about being called brave when it doesn’t feel that way to her, doing work people still treat as a hobby, and what happens when every mountain starts to look the same. Between trips, she goes home to be bored for a few months. Lately, she’s started picturing a future with less travel in it.

00:00 Quitting Predictability

In this episode of Before We Get There, host Nicholas Braman interviews Ng Yi-Sheng, a poet, playwright, novelist and activist who has spent three decades writing the parts of Singapore that official stories leave out.

He grew up loving fantasy and science fiction at a time when Singapore's literary scene looked down on both. It took a novel from Colombia, read during national service, to show him that his dad's kampung stories counted as literature. Since then he's written about pre-colonial kingdoms, queer Singaporeans and ghosts, and he's learned what it means to end up on a gray list instead of a blacklist.

We talk about why he never settled on one form, what it was like to publish SQ21, why he came home from New York, what he thinks makes Singapore Singapore, and why his newest readers are kids.

Before We Get There is a podcast about the moments that shape us, the ones we plan for and the ones we don't. New episodes every other Thursday.

In this episode of Before We Get There, host Nicholas Braman interviews Lav Chloe, a Malaysian content creator known for her accents and impressions.

She went viral in December last year from a one-take video she made for her friends and meant to delete. It passed a million views, then kept climbing, and it became her whole career.

They talk about the line she walks doing accents without mocking anyone, and why she so often ends up defending people in her own comments. She makes the case that Malaysian humor comes from something heavier, generations of hardship turned into a way of laughing at pain. They also get into being wired differently and diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, why she resists being called an influencer, and where she wants to take all of this next.

00:00 Podcast and Lav intro

Angela Lee was a six-time MMA world champion. She retired in 2023, not long after losing her sister Victoria. When she stopped fighting, she started talking about mental health, about Victoria, about who she was underneath the fighter. Not everyone around her was ready for that. She felt like a black sheep, with just her husband and daughter supporting her.

What pulled her through was learning to advocate for herself, something she says she could only do at first by treating it the way she'd stand up for the people she loves. She built her nonprofit, Fight Story, out of the same instinct, and slowly found new people, at the gym and around the work, who became a new family.

This conversation is about who she is now, what she's still fighting for, and much more.

Jeremy Tan had a successful business and no reason to go into politics. He ran anyway, as an independent with no party behind him, and took the highest independent vote share since 1972. Then he lost.

In this one he gets into what pushed him in, what the run cost him, and the read on Singapore he came away with. Wealth that keeps pooling at the top. Work that's about to change faster than most people are ready for. A government he thinks is stuck in its own silos. He's blunt about all of it, including the parts that didn't go his way.

At 18, Alyssa Lie auditioned her way into musical theater with almost no training. A decade later she had the followers, the campaigns, the viral comedy, and she was burning out doing it.

Then the comments started. Her accent was fake. Her positivity was fake. Maybe the whole bright, likeable person she'd built online was a performance. She went to Bali to work out whether any of it was real, and the trip made it worse before it made it better.

This one's about what's left of you when you stop giving people the version they came for. Alyssa on choosing the risky path young, managing her entire career herself, and the difference between the self you perform and the self you protect.

Juliana's links:

In this episode, Nicholas Braman sits down with Michelle Lee, who did what most people only talk about: she planned her retirement at 18, hit her number in her early 30s, and walked away from a top career in financial advisory. But the story isn't the money. It's what came after, the year she sat on her resignation letter, the identity crisis of no longer being "the finance person," and the strange emptiness of a finish line that felt like any other day. Now a part-time private hire driver with no financial reason to work, Michelle shares why she chose the driver's seat over the corner office: the passengers who open up to a stranger, the friendships she burned during her years in survival mode, and the lesson her father's death at 42 taught her about time. It is a conversation about what money can and cannot buy, and learning to spend the wealth you spent your whole life building.