How years of teaching across Asia turned into a book about judgment under pressure

Why Asia

In late 2018, after years of running exam-prep courses in Germany, Pascal felt the pull to see more of the world. A former student, herself Malaysian, suggested Malaysia: a blend of Malay, Chinese and Indian cultures that works as a crash course in Southeast Asia. He landed in May 2019 for what was meant to be a short visit and left already planning a return.

How it started

The pandemic ended his in-person teaching almost overnight. With exams cancelled and lecture halls empty, he began teaching Cambridge A-Level courses over Zoom at four in the morning, reaching students across Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. What began as a stopgap turned into a years-long connection to Southeast Asia’s classrooms, one that outlasted the pandemic itself.

What he noticed

Working with students and staff across the region, he saw the same thing again and again. Give someone a problem with a clear method and they would solve it in seconds. Give them a problem with no clear method, one where they first had to work out what was actually being asked, and many simply froze, waiting to be told what to do.

That is exactly where AI is strongest today. It already outperforms people at well defined, rule based tasks, the same tasks these students had spent years mastering for exams. Outside school, that mastery is exactly what gets automated first. The students who only know how to follow instructions are the ones most likely to be automated out of a role, and the most exposed when a real decision (a bad job offer, a risky loan, a manipulative relationship) comes with no playbook at all.

Why it matters to him personally

For Pascal, decision-making stopped being only a research topic. It became personal, something he wants the next generation to have that his own generation largely lacked: real judgment under pressure, trained through repeated practice, long before the stakes get real.

Where it led

The Art of the Durian Deal and seed2rise grew out of that question, shaped alongside his doctoral research on decision-making under uncertainty: a story and a set of tools built to give students the kind of independent judgment no exam tests and no algorithm can replace.