🎙️ Politics, Migration, and Urbanisation with Stu Patience
David speaks with Stu Patience, a nonprofit co-founder, teacher and blogger. He lives and works in Jakarta, Indonesia, as part of Saya Suka Membaca, an Indonesian literacy charity that trains teachers to teach reading in Indonesian in an effective and fun way.
They talked about:
🌍 The political history of Hong Kong
🚀 The future of cities
✨ How cities fuel creativity and connection
🏗️ The clash of capitalism and conservation
🚪 The Tourism Paradox
🏛️ The physicality of culture and context
This is a replay of a previous conversation. You can listen to the original episode here:
Original Episode: 🎙️ How Curiosity Shapes the World with Stu Patience
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🎧 Listen on Spotify:
📹 Watch on Youtube:
📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[02:35] What brings Stu to Jakarta
[03:25] How a passion for stories became a teaching career
[05:52] The politics of Hong Kong
[07:33] The many faces of China from a global perspective
[10:27] My unforgettable stay at Chunking Mansions
[14:55] The role of cities in a changing world
[18:59] Why most people flock to cities
[23:48] The future is already here
[26:24] Tourism vs. sustainability
[27:53] The tourism paradox
[30:40] The two sides of city migration
[33:15] How our living preferences change over time
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Saya Suka Membaca | https://www.sayasukamembaca.org/en/
Srinivas Rao | https://twitter.com/UnmistakableCEO
The Unmistakable Creative Podcast | https://podcast.unmistakablecreative.com/
Cathay Pacific | https://www.cathaypacific.com/cx/en_PH/about-us/about-our-airline/history.html
Chungking Mansions | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chungking_Mansions
Kowloon Walled City | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
Opium Wars | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
Chinese Civil War | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War
World War 2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
Hinterland | https://www.driverlesscrocodile.com/sustainability-and-change/hinterland/
Marc Andreessen | https://a16z.com/author/marc-andreessen/
Marc Andreessen: Scenius | https://www.driverlesscrocodile.com/teams/marc-andreessen-scenius/
William Gibson | http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/
Mark Zuckerberg | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
Lord Balaji Sculpture | https://amzn.to/3X3vqbo
👤 Connect with Stu:
Twitter: https://x.com/StuPatience
Website: https://www.driverlesscrocodile.com/
Organization: sayasukamembaca.org
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
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📜 Full transcript:
Stu Patience: I'm not in love with western tourism and western tourism in Bali, but whenever I go anywhere, I continue to be a Western tourist. So it's kind of important to be aware of that.
Families who have held paddy fields or have had those beautiful paddy fields for generations selling their land to build a concrete block Airbnb or hotel for backpackers or for digital nomads. It's not simple, but it's very easy as someone who has enough and who isn't working in the paddy fields 12 hours a day to look at that and go, what a shame about those paddy fields. And it is, it is a shame.
David Elikwu: This week I'm speaking with Stu Patience. Stu is a highly underrated and yet extremely prolific creator.
And he shares on Driverless Crocodile, his blog, a ton of incredibly insightful ideas. Some of them are quotes and nuggets from other books and other sources that he's come across, but some of them are really incredible insights in and of themselves that are really good to wrestle with things that are inquisitive, things that make you think, things that make you want to think again about something that you may have already taken for granted.
Stu and I talked about his background growing up in Hong Kong and how that influenced or led to him eventually moving to Jakarta and a lot of the work that he and his team are doing, building a nonprofit in Indonesia, and it's really incredible work that they're doing.
So you're gonna hear us talking about, on one hand, what it's like building a nonprofit in Indonesia. We also talk a lot about this idea of emerging nations, emerging industries, and how the changing world of work with people going remote with changing forces in globalization will affect a lot of industries, both domestically and internationally.
And we try to unpack a lot of the complex and often political discussions around tourism between different countries and how a lot of these different worlds can collide between tourists, digital nomads, domestic citizens. It's a really interesting package that we unwrapped through our travels, through our work. It's a really compelling discussion and you can find out more about the great work that Stu's doing with his nonprofit Saya Suka Membaca. There's links in the description and in the show notes.
You can find the show notes transcript and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io And if you love this episode, please do share it with a friend and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts because it helps us tremendously to reach other people just like you.
David Elikwu: I was trying to think of where is best to start, but first of all, I mean, you are in Jakarta right now, so what brings you to Jakarta?
Stu Patience: Yeah. So, I with my wife have been living in Jakarta on an alleyway for 10 years pretty much now. So we are originally from the UK, from Norwich. I work in a literacy charity, so the program is called "Saya Suka Membaca", which means I love reading in Indonesian. What we do is we make curriculum, we make reading books in the Indonesian language, leveled reading books and we train teachers how to use them. So it's kind of one of the keys to education is a huge need in Indonesia for improvements in the quality of literacy teaching. So that's kind of the spot, so I was a teacher and involved in mentoring, training teachers when I was in the UK. So that's kind of the skill what I'm doing here.
David Elikwu: So, is teaching always the path that you were on, what got you into that? And maybe actually, perhaps a more interesting question, which I'm stealing from Srinivas Rao, who has a great podcast called The Unmistakable Podcast. He likes to ask guests, what did your parents do for a living and how did that impact what you ended up doing?
Stu Patience: So, no, I definitely did not want to be a teacher, from the beginning. I actually grew up in Hong Kong, which was a british colony at the Colony at the time and I was there through 1997 and through past the handover. And my father worked for an airline there, Cathay Pacific. And my mom was a stay-at-home mom and did up, you know, all sorts of other things, in the background.
Yeah, so that's where I started. I went to an international school in Hong Kong, but a very diverse one. Especially by the time we left and loved Hong Kong. I left Hong Kong thinking, I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I didn't want to go in an office, into an office. And I think I had a sense from observing the careers and some of the different things that various people did that high powered, high earning career, which was in some way what we were being groomed for was not going to be fulfilling.
But I didn't have a good sense of the alternatives, so I ended up studying English literature, which was something that I really, really loved. Loved stories and storytelling and found some of the theory about what stories to how they work, super interesting.
So after studying that, Oh, I had a little experience doing some teaching while I was still studying. So while I was a student, I helped a second language English speaker to learn English. And those moments, I think there were just some moments where there were real little light bulb moments for them. And that was probably the trigger that got me thinking, okay, maybe, there's something in teaching.
So I finished, studying and did a course, to teach English as a foreign language. And with that, yeah, had my first trip to Indonesia. This was back in 2004 and I taught English at University there.
So that was, yeah, that was how I started and from that point and from enjoying that experience, I went back to the UK and trained to be a teacher. And I think my motivation there was just this sense that I'd been given a whole lot by my parents by the opportunities I had growing up and wanted to do something, something hopefully of use or of service to other people.
David Elikwu: Were you cognizant at all of the, I guess, the political history of Hong Kong while you were there and did that, I don't know, did you interface with that in any way growing up there?
Stu Patience: Yeah. But in terms of the history, very much so I don't think, no, that Hong Kong is a unique colony, but it has an interesting history in that most of its history is of immigration, at least in terms of percentage of the population, immigration and people choosing to come there. So we were certainly aware of the history of the Opium war and conflicts with Britain and China and that kind of thing. So we knew about that, but it wasn't, I would say it wasn't so much part of the lived experience day to day.
David Elikwu: Okay. Fair. That's really interesting.
Stu Patience: Yeah. And it's, it's interesting coming forward to today and the political upheaval and the difficulties there, it's really, it's really hard to watch.
David Elikwu: Yes, I can imagine. I think Hong Kong is really interesting for a few reasons. So first of all, I used to run a travel business and they were one of our first customers, so we ran some trips with them. So went to Hong Kong, went to the Philippines, went to some places around Asia.
Hong Kong is a really interesting for me in that actually, I think there's a few different paradigms to this, and this might be an aside to, you know, the rest of our discussion, but I think, one layer of it is the fact that I haven't actually spent very much time digging into the history of it specifically, but it has come up and been touched on in a lot of books I've read, even fictional books. And it's so interesting how I've kind of started putting together this patchwork understanding of the politics of the time just by how I've seen people interact with Hong Kong in that way. And then also number of years ago,
Stu Patience: I was gonna say, is there, is there like a theme that comes out from that? As you look, I should say as a disclaimer that I more or less left when I was 18 and I have been back a couple of times, but not nearly as many times as I would've liked.
David Elikwu: That's a good question. I think, so some of it you touched on is this notion of people moving there by choice and that being like a voluntary thing and kind of this idea of building something there. I guess it's interesting how it also interfaces with the aspects of it being a British colony and then also, now and everything since then as it being part of China and acknowledged as being part of China, at least by China.
And so I think then the other aspect of this is that I worked in Shanghai for a while, I spent some time working there and that was a really interesting experience, really great experience. I found it so interesting having spent some time living in China then how by moving around the rest of the world, you get to experience other aspects of how people interface with China. And I'm sure actually perhaps being British might be a similar thing, if I was born British and grew up here, then going around and hearing what other people think about Britain might be interesting as well. But I just remember. You know, first of all, okay, you are in China, you're in Shanghai, you get this view of Hong Kong and also a view of Taiwan and then there's been times where I've been in the UK and I'm trying to practice my Chinese, and the people I'm practicing with are from Taiwan, and so actually the picture of China that I'm getting from them is also very different. And then I think last year or the year before I was in Switzerland, I went to a Chinese restaurant and the guy that had the Chinese restaurant was actually from Tibet. And so then again, I'm getting this very different side of the picture.
Lots of people giving different perspectives on their thoughts on China, how China's treating people and there's so many things in there. It's a really interesting mix.
Stu Patience: I think it, like what you've said, just really you put your finger on the diversity of China as well. The diversity of ethnicities within the Han majority states and the diversity of points of view and perspectives and of experience as well. So, it's just really very hard to imagine. I think, coming from a cultures, if you say the UK has been a stable political entity since, or not the UK, I should say, England has been a stable political entity since like maybe the eight hundreds or something like that, and it's very hard to imagine like the total upheaval of the start of the Chinese civil War, the end of the imperial system. And then through World War 2, the start of the Chinese Civil War and then into the successful revolution, the cultural revolution and all those changes, it's very hard to, to kind of get your head around that. The huge amount of upheaval and also the huge diversity of experience depending on where people are. The country's so big and Indonesia, where I live now is a little bit similar. It's almost as long in an arc as Europe is wide. And we talk about Indonesia, we talk about China, that there's so much, so much there and so many perspectives.
David Elikwu: Yeah, I think one of the first questions I probably should have asked was where in Hong Kong you lived? Because I've been twice and I've had extremely divergent experiences, and maybe this is part of the cultural milieu that exists now, which is really interesting.
The first time I went to Hong Kong was probably the worst travel experience I've ever had. Not any, you know, that's not painting anything on Hong Kong, so this is actually when I was still living in Shanghai, my visa was expiring, and so technically you have to leave China and just, what you do is you just go to Hong Kong and then you come back. It was just a really messy, logistically, so I think I had waited too long or the queues at the immigration center were too long cause I was on a business visa and so I ended up almost overstaying so I had to just leave as quickly as possible and I was still working. So I was like taking days off work to go to Hong Kong. And so I just booked the cheapest place that I could find cause I was still paying for my apartment back in Shanghai. And the cheapest place that I could find happened to be in Chunking mansions. And so I
Stu Patience: Hey. Okay. Nice
David Elikwu: Staying there for a few nights and it was not, not fun. So maybe you can tell us what Chunking mansions is from the perspective of someone that has lived in Hong Kong for a while.
Stu Patience: Yeah. Look, I have quite a lot of affection for, at least for the concept of Chunking Mansion. So though I've never stayed there and never stayed in a budget hotel there.
So, Chunking mansions is like a multi block combination of a couple of ground floors shopping mall. This is on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong, and above the shopping mall, which is largely Indian or Indian sub Continental in terms of the businesses that are there or was at the time with a few Chinese businesses mixed in. And then it's like at least four tower blocks and this is a combination of this is circa 2000, I imagine there is some really nice flats somewhere up there, but also very small and budget rentals, budget hotels slash, I don't know what you call them, flop houses, brothels vice the whole lot. Some amazing Indian restaurants as well. It's just buzzing and a very interesting place. And maybe not a happy place depending on who you are what you do there.
Was that a decent summary? What do you think?
David Elikwu: Roughly Yes. Yeah. No, no, it was a good summary, but I think if you're not prepared and you don't know, let's say you didn't have that summary in advance. Wow. I was in for a, I don't think I'd really, I just, I booked somewhere on booking.com or somewhere just sorted by, you know, cheapest and it was probably like 10 pounds a night or something like that. And yes, it was not the funniest, it was like even what you were describing, I think people listening to this might not appreciate the scale of this building, which is actually several buildings, but all connected together in one huge thing. And some of the places that you might stay in are actually almost like buildings within buildings or complexes within complexes. So the room I stayed in had no windows. It was literally the smaller
Stu Patience: The size of the mattress.
David Elikwu: Yeah, pretty much. So I think I opened the door, you have to climb onto the bed. So close the door and then behind where the door just opened is where the bath was, like the bathroom, which was just a shower and
Stu Patience: So you had it on suite, this is, this is,
David Elikwu: Yes, on suite. Yeah, I mean I paid above, you know, I paid a bit more for that cause otherwise I would've been in bunk beds with a bunch of other people and I thought that's the one thing I didn't want to do. But yeah, it was literally, it was a shower and everything else was stacked underneath it, so it was like the toilet, you kind of hunch around the toilet to use the shower and yeah, it was a really interesting experience. And like you said, it is pretty much like the Indian subcontinent and a lot of maybe African immigrants. It's hard to explain. So I came speaking, and this is actually what caused me to struggle somewhat, you know, I speak English, I speak some Mandarin. The first month I was working in Shanghai, did like a month of language school and I'd studied some before then. So I can speak Mandarin a well, at least at the time. But I can't speak Cantonese
Stu Patience: Doesn't help you much in
David Elikwu: Yeah, in Chunking mansions, those are the two things that nobody speaks, many people speak Indian, people speak whatever language you had wherever you came from, that is probably what you speak and nothing else cause that's kind of the point of being there.
And I remember reading a story about how this is after now, like Googling, where did I just end up? Apparently, a large proportion of all the stolen phones in the world end up going through Chunking mansions at some point. So it's a very interesting cultural heritage aspect.
Stu Patience: So when I was growing up, we had the Kowloon Walled City, which you may have heard of this little pocket kind of neutral or in theory Chinese territory in Kowloon in Hong Kong, which was a, a block, I don't know, a couple of hundred meters square, high rise. And I think Chunking mansion is pretty tame compared to how the Kowloon Walled City was.
David Elikwu: That's really interesting. I think, I mean, this kind of leads onto something I know you've written about before. What I'm interested in, and I think I've seen you write about this from a few different angles in the past, which is this idea of cities.
And I'm interested in what your take is on the concepts of cities in general. Cause I think there's a few different angles from which you can come at this. One is we've just had the pandemic, people are no longer thinking, at least as a, the primary view that you have to go and work somewhere in order to work there. There is a greater possibility of being able to work remote, you have a lot of people, it's weird. We've kind of come full circle in some respects where on one level I think people are drawing back a bit from globalization, at least in terms of having the risk of manufacturer being overseas. But then simultaneuosly as people get used to the idea of working remotely, people are also simultaneously starting to hire more remote workers, whether they are expats or whether they are like native people living somewhere else in the world.
So I think there's that aspect of it, then there is, so I know you've written before about like hinterlands and this idea of just, I guess the surrounding area of the city and the fabric of the area around it and this idea that you can add to it, you can extract from it. And I think humans in general have always had this complex history of the extent to which we add value to the land that we're on or the extent to which we extract value from it. And that is kind of where we're at with climate change.
There was a report just last week about how Exxon, the gas company or the energy company had a report all the way back, I think in the eighties of what they thought the effects of climate change would be, and they were pretty much exactly what has
Stu Patience: They'll bang on the money.
David Elikwu: Yeah, they were banging on the money, but they just buried the report. And it's just crazy how the gas companies knew exactly how bad climate change could be cause they modeled it all out. The models were exactly correct and here we are where we are now.
So I think there's those aspects, and then just from what we were talking about, this idea of slums, and you had a really interesting post about this, which I loved, which is there's this duality where on one hand people hate the idea of slums and people hate how they look, people hate how they smell everything about them, they're ugly, and well, more than that, you know, you empathize with the people that are living there and you don't want people to have to live in those circumstances.
But then on the flip side, it's also really interesting that people move to those places. It's not like, you know, maybe in some circumstances you end up there maybe because you didn't get a visa or, something happened that was a negative. But very often, particularly within a big city, and Kowloon I think might have been a good example of this. You have people coming from India, coming from all the way across the world, coming directly to this place to come and live there because they see the opportunity in that space, even where other people might see the negative aspects.
So I know I've just thrown a lot at you, but I would love to hear maybe your thoughts on some, some intersection of that.
Stu Patience: Yeah. I think the way I've come to think about cities I think is possibility machines, places where combinations happen. So if you take the view that economic growth or economic dynamism and progress is somehow a function of people with a particular skill, talent, resource. Finding good matches, now that might be employers, that might be buyers for their services, that might be something buzz for the services or for something that they have, maybe they have a connection back home and a resource that they can bring into the city to sell or trade. Like cities just have exponentially more possible combinations that people can make within them. So I think, for economics, for culture as well, for just for creativity and interesting stuff happened.
I've written a post, taking an idea called Scenius I think it was Marc Andressen and I heard talking but the idea that a lot of the, a lot of artistic movements, also movements in technology and things are not very rarely the work of individuals that happens, but they're always building on someone else's work. But also where you really get explosions is in a group of people coming together. They're trying things out, they're encouraging each other, they're failing. So a lot of artistic movements, I think like modernism would come down to this kind of thing, literary modernism in the start of the 20th century. I think the birth of hip hop was similar. This is just how it goes, people encourage each other, people take ideas and mix them together.
And that's what is in almost all aspects of life. Dating, matchmaking, finding friends, finding hobbies and things to do, educational opportunity. This matchmaking is just happening in cities and I think that's kind of what they do. And the rewards from that, be they in terms of the ability to feature family, be they in terms of cultural enrichment, the rewards from that coming together are why people move to the cities. And it's why either people who could afford to live in a nicely leafy suburb somewhere or somewhere rural want to be in the city, cuz it's where the action is. And it's equally why people from poor communities also, you know, have throughout the 20th century particularly, but throughout history really moves the city in droves. Because however hard it is and however difficult it might be living in a slump or not even in slum, somehow there is a sense that the reward or the possibility of reward is worth it. And that's really what we see living, in Jakarta as well.
So I spent quite a lot of time in poor communities in Jakarta. One of the most densely populated areas of Southeast Asia. So something like 70,000 plus people per square kilometer, you'll have to check this, but I think London has 6,000 per square kilometer. It's dense, you've got families, living in a room, you know, a meter by two, a room like your room in Chunking mansions without the bathroom. You've got a family of five, they might be sleeping the short direction across a single mattress or sleeping in shifts and making it work. Because the possibility is worth it. And sometimes actually, people that I've known have some land or have family land in a village in Java somewhere, but they come here to make some money, so that they can go back and have a better life.
David Elikwu: Yeah, that's a really interesting point, and maybe I guess the intersection of these two ideas is what do you think the future of the way economies are moving and shifting now, how do you think that might impact some of these kind of, I don't really like the time developing nations, but yes, the nations that are still like rapidly developing in a sense where you're still having mass urbanization even in China, I think is such an interesting thing to me. As an example, just as somewhere that I've been, where I think people still don't realize the extent to which China is still largely rural and as many people as there might be in all these big cities, the majority of Chinese people are out in these farmlands somewhere and they are gravitating towards these cities. And actually even in Shanghai as an example, there's a ton of people that actually are only there during the week because at the weekend they're taking the trains or however they travel back to their village, back to their home. And so actually on the weekend they're not there. And so I think that's an interesting aspect.
So I'd love to know how you think some of these changing patterns might affect people in places like Indonesia, places like Nigeria, Pakistan. I think Pakistan's a really good one because, or no, I think India is about to pass China actually, in terms of the world's most populous place apparently that will happen this year. So yeah, what do you think of some of those changes?
Stu Patience: Yeah, with the caveat that I'm not hugely well qualified to kind of talk.
Maybe, we'll come back to this later. I'm actually, the work that I do now is in Indonesia. So we're training teachers to teach in Indonesia. So the team that I work with is Indonesian, but I know we'll come back to that later. Just wanted to.
David Elikwu: Okay, fine. But I think even still, I think the point being that even at one level removed, there's an extent to which you are training people and giving them skills, which soon, one day there's a possibility that the horizon at which they can use those skills might be far greater than how they might use them now. And so I think that's the interesting part.
Stu Patience: There's a quote I love by, I believe it's William Gibson, which is, the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. And that's, I think, true of technology. I think it's true of cities. In the history, if urbanization happened, I think London was the first city, at least since ancient Rome that passed a hundred, sorry, 1 Million. So if we say it in the modern era, there's like this initial Western urbanization. And in some sense, other places have been catching up to that. If you say that's like the history of the 20th century, you are a large part of the 20th century.
So in some sense, a lot of the things and the experiences that we've had in the west with growth and declines, stagnation, say in our city sensors and then re-energizing and regrowth. I think all those things will happen in newer cities and mega cities. The flip side of that is in some way the future perhaps of some western cities is actually, Shanghai, Singapore, parts of Jakarta, like the futures here. And if you compare them to most cities in the West, actually they're way ahead in terms of technology. And some of the stuff that happens.
I think in parts of the world where the population is growing, I don't see it stopping. I don't see people choosing not to go to the city. I think if we are serious about our environmental impact as well, probably urban living is the way to go in terms of ecological footprint and wider carbon footprint. Cities will continue to grow and because there's nowhere else where, apart from maybe the internet. Yeah, where you can get this face-to-face at least, combination, generation of possibilities for people.
I see middle class Indonesians moving to suburbs, so that whole cycle as well of coming to the city wanting to have a family, feeling like there's not enough space, and maybe the second or third generation moving somewhere leafier and greener kind of out of the city. All those cycles of sprawl and concentration I think.
Yeah, and they say like cities, there are a few companies that are super old, but I think cities are just about the oldest institutions, or whatever you wanna call them, that humans have. Longer lived than pretty much anything else, including nation states and empires.
David Elikwu: And one more question that I might have, this actually touches on Indonesia specifically, I think is, how do you think that the changing nature of the way people work might interface with tourism and the fact that there are some places that historically have gravitated towards making the most of their money through tourism.
And I think in Bali, for example, at least from what I've heard and from what I've read, you've had large parts of, you know, entire rice patties being wiped out just to create these nice tourist destinations and a lot of life having to, not just life, but the geography and a lot of the cultural aspects of the place being shaped and re modified around this idea of maybe Westerners coming or other people coming.
And how do you think maybe either that might change or that might match with, I guess the economies themselves being self-sustaining, but when you've already maybe used a lot of land for certain other things.
Actually, an another example that just came to mind is Mark Zuckerberg buying huge swaths of Hawaii and just having this massive, I have no idea what he's planning to do with the hundreds of acres of land that he's bought, but he has a ton of space there and I dunno what he's doing with it. But again, it just goes to this idea that maybe just as part of capitalism, there's, you know, countries and nations that have given away parts of their land, a time where it may have been more convenient, but there might be a future time at which it becomes a lot less convenient because you are actually able to make a lot more for yourself.
Stu Patience: So I'm not in love with western tourism and western tourism in Bali, but whenever I go anywhere, I continue to be a Western tourist. So it's kind of important to be aware of that.
There's this thing called the tourism paradox, which is that tourists go to seek a new place and a different place somewhere beautiful, somewhere natural, somewhere culturally really interesting, like Bali. And yet in the act of going there, they destroy the thing that they're going to see, or we, I should say, not they, we destroy the thing that we're going to see.
Families who have held paddy fields or have had those beautiful paddy fields for generations selling their land to build a concrete block Airbnb or hotel for backpackers or for digital nomads. It's not simple, but it's very easy as someone who has enough and who isn't working in the paddy fields 12 hours a day to look at that and go, what a shame about those paddy fields. And it is, it is a shame and I feel that at the same time. I bet Mark Zuckerberg's Hawaii resort is gonna be really natural and really beautiful because that's a real, a thing that it takes money to afford to have a nice clean, well maintained, orderly, but natural enough, natural environment. That no annoying people are wandering into and ruining be that people who are from the place or be that other tourists. So in some sense that kind of unsullied tourism is very much a luxury good. Either people have, who have enough money to buy it. Now Zuckerberg owns it, but lots of people pay for resorts and whatever, and they go to these places or people who have the luxury of time to do the adventurous thing and to trek through the jungle to find the unspoiled place that in 20 years time maybe won't be unspoiled.
And I think another thing to throw in there is, you know, Jakarta used to have a lot of paddy fields as well and it's not tourists per se, that have come and brought up the paddy fields and developed them but it is Indonesians now. There are families selling land, maybe selling it too cheaply and then having nothing or then spending the money and then where they had an asset, they had cash and then cash goes, and then there's nothing. But there are also people making a living or moving up in that way. So I guess they're a winners and losers. So capitalism by no means produces perfect outcomes, but also, people are making choices.
Markets seem to enable people to make choices, not always choices that turn out great sometimes because of folly and things people do and sometimes, because of bad luck. Yeah, I don't know what the alternative is, apart from telling people that they can't sell their paddy fields, and I don't feel very comfortable. I don't know, with the Bali tourism authority telling people they can't sell their paddy fields on my behalf, it's complicated.
David Elikwu: And I think maybe a global aspect of it, which I find really interesting, just listening to what you were saying is there's a really interesting paradox around this trap of urbanization in some ways where I mean, it's kind of been cyclical through history where thinking back in history a long time ago, it was the Lords and the rich people that lived in, you know, I guess the city type places, and then the poor people had all the land on the outside. And then, the poorer people then gravitating towards the cities to make their fortunes and to, to try and get richer. And then the richer people going out and buying all the land on the outside. And then you have people then in slums in these huge, tightly packed, super urbanized in some sense areas while all the other people moved to the suburbs. And so it's a, it's a really interesting cycle in that respect where, I dunno if there is an answer or how people win.
I know Balaji, if you've come across him, he is a somewhat mythic figure on the internet who has all these futuristic ideas, and people love him because he's made a lot of predictions, particularly about technology in the past that have come to pass and that have been somewhat accurate down the line.
But he talks about this idea of the networked state and his prediction. I don't know if I believe in it to any extent. One of his predictions is that in the future, people will come together almost anywhere in the world and essentially create their own nations you know, nations that will be recognized by sovereign nations. It's hard to square and it's also hard for me to explain because even listening to him, explain it, is very complex.
But it's a very interesting idea that, going back a step to something you mentioned earlier, I'm finding this really interesting duality where as a result of people being able to work remotely, I see professionals diverging and moving away now that they don't have to live in London as an example. You have more people living in Kent, you have more people moving slightly further out. They can commute when they need to, but actually they're moving slightly further out. But then I see creatives converging. I see tons of people moving to Austin, to Silicon Valley, to a lot of these places and developing scenes like, you referenced before with Marc Andreessen. This really interesting balance of there are some people who would gravitate towards scenes because of the balance they get from it and maybe that is something that is always the preserve of creatives and something creatives always benefit more from. But then there are other types of people, maybe professionals or some people that have more or less money, depending on the city you're trying to escape. But typically people move away from the city so they can have more space, probably at less cost. And so you have that simultaneous divergence as well. And I see those two things happening at the same time.
Stu Patience: Yeah, I think those values, our values change at different stages of our life. If you are a young single creative professional of some kind or another, you want to be where the action is. Actually, if you're young, or a young single person of any kind, you probably want to be where the action is. So you head to the cities, you head to where the other people are, and probably we don't all have that strong preference, but probably the distribution is skewed way over that way to crowds and to being, where the action is. And space is less important too, you wanna get up and have breakfast and get out and see, be in the world and have a place to sleep. But I think as we age, if we have families, space becomes more important. I mean, even if you wanna live at the same population density within your house or apartment, if you add two kids, you know, you need more space. So I think there's just that very natural push. I think, we become more conservative in different ways and we long for different things.
Yeah, to me that's quite a natural process, I guess the distribution effect of the internet allows people to spread out further. And in fact, I guess the highest number of digital nomads in Bali right now are Indonesian, digital workers rather than, we hear quite a lot of western digital nomads there and there are plenty of them, but I would guess by far, the highest number Indonesian digital nomads in Bali. If you can work like that, if you have the skills, and I think as much as anything, if you have the cultural capital, then that's a great possibility. So, for example, you can teach almost anyone to do some HTML or certainly to use, you know, a block-based layout tool and build almost anything that you can picture, but you need an aesthetic like it's an internet aesthetic, but there's kind of a, an artistic taste that not everyone has full stop. But that also, consciously or not, we are educated into at home or by our peers. So if you are from a very poor community or a rural community, you're much less likely to have those skills. So there's those options are kind of less open to you as well. Although increasingly, people are accessing, they have the internet on their phones from when they're young. Maybe also we see the internet undermining this trend. But certainly in this generation, that's how it's gone, and will going.
David Elikwu: Yeah, that's a really interesting point that you can diversify knowledge, but it's harder to diversify taste. And there is an extent to which, you know, design taste, and those things have to be almost by necessity embedded in some culture. And so you have to participate in that culture to an extent. Even if, and actually maybe this does translate well because there is an internet culture and there is, you know, like Web3 has an internet culture, it has an aesthetic. If you embed yourself in that community, you know what it looks like, and you know when you are interacting with something that is of that nature. And so I think that maybe is the interesting aspect there. Where, there are ways that you can embed yourself within, I guess, a cultural milieu. But you have to go there either physically or on the internet, you have to kind of embed yourself within that space.
Stu Patience: And you need to have as well as access internet access, which I think we can assume increasingly is effectively free or becoming free at the margin for most people. But there's language and there's literacy as well, so there's also this kind of catch. Now with video, it's less of a thing and people say we're moving toward more of an oral culture with the internet, with podcasts, with videos, YouTube, I think it's the second most visited site and it's just this amazing boon for anyone who wants to learn anything.
But we still live in this, in this world where cutting edge technology depends on or access to the cutting edge information, and culture depends on this 3,000 plus year old, 5,000 year old technology of the written word and of literacy, different types of literacy, bit of literacy.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.