Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Ted Fishman: Tulis Buku yang Ingin Kau Baca

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

Jurnalis dan penulis dua buku bestseller (China Inc. dan Shock of Gray), Ted Fishman bercerita tentang pengalaman hidupnya di Indonesia dan proses amalgamasi berbagai minat yang memungkinkannya untuk dapat menulis mengenai topik yang rumit dan membuatnya dapat dipahami dan punya makna bagi khalayak umum. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #TedFishman ----------------------- Saksikan dalam versi video: https://endgame.id/fishman Pre-Order merchandise resmi Endgame: https://wa.me/6282133365263 Info pendaftaran program Master of Public Policy di SGPP Indonesia: admissions.sgpp.ac.id [e-mail] https://wa.me/628111522504

Surprisingly, to many people today, it was the most popular attraction in the entire World's Fair. Wow. The single most popular attraction at an American World's Fair at the end of the 19th century was an Indonesian village. And it was a sensation. It was the cover of every major magazine, newspaper sent reporters just to cover it. And they became the foundation part of the foundational collection of the big natural history museum here. This is NG. Hello, I'm often

I'd say on social media. I want to contribute for Indonesia that's more before 5. It's why

from where? Maybe one one of one one of my is to learn public policy. Now, that's the

important public policy. To change is definitely also policies, right? And to deliver it, Tudorology,

but to money, and but to policy. Now, the problem to have been unethualis the policy it,

can't we can make actualisation solutions for the problem and, what other the fact that

the fact the fact in the government, but in the world in the business,

and the banked Mantan T.B. P.N. M. Journalist Richel Mado. Semuany is Lulusan

Jurusan Public Policy. SGPP Indonesia, School Public Policy first in Indonesia with the language penitator English, is being bared

new. For detail on the program and how and how much whether to consider about recontalurs on your

career to the time to come back to Indonesia through link that is the description.

Now back to the show. Hello, Hello, my friends, today we're to come to Ted Fishman, a friend of my and the person who's very from Chicago, America,

America, Hi, Ted, how are you? Hi, good, good, Good, Malm, and, good, thank you for this

this opportunity thank you I want to leavened in the English, but I mean in English,

but yeah, I'll say, thank you very on this this moment this this one we're on our

podcast our that's really good. Thank you. And I want to peel the onion by asking you about your background.

You spent your early childhood in the US and then you went to university in the US in the U.S., and for some reason you got hooked up with Jok Jakarta, and then you got famous. Tell us. Tell us the story. I mean, you've written two best-selling books, you know, The Shock of Grey and China, Inc.

We'll talk about these, but please, tell us a little bit about yourself. Okay, well, you're right. I grew up outside Chicago in a suburb. My parents were both city kids. Their parents immigrated from central Europe to the United States early in the 20th century, escaping persecution, which is the story of a lot of people in Chicago. And they were the first in their family, you know, they're the first generation in their family to go to college, which is an American story.

It's very close to a lot of Indonesian stories. Right. And I went to a huge suburban high school that had a lot of, lot of activities there. And one of the things that I did in high school was I was on the debate team. And the debate team, you know, you would spend a whole year researching one question and arguing both sides of that question. And I was a very successful debater. I was a national champion debater. Why? And, you know, one of the things that I learned doing debate is, you know, I almost tried to find ways to lose debates, but I just could, I seem to never lose.

I'll never debate you. So anyway, it kind of left me jaded, Pagita, because I thought, oh my God, you know, if you bring enough research and intelligence to any question, any side of a question, you could make the case. And it made me feel like, wow, it's really more important to change your mind. It's just as important to be able to change your mind. to argue your case. Which is why, you know, I, for a long time I thought of being a lawyer, but then I thought being a writer is a little more interesting because you can look at all sides.

You don't have to all, you don't have to dig in just on one side. And, you know, the miracle of an open mind is underappreciated. Right. You know, I think a lot of times people get their gut instinct and then they argue that. And my experience in high school, and then I debated at Princeton too. was that you really have to be careful about your own intelligence because you can apply your own intelligence really intensely on a question and convince yourself of something that's not true.

That's scary. Anyway, this has kind of been a guiding principle in my life now, which is just to really work hard to keep my mind open, to listen, and so on. So I think that's one of the things that drives me towards other countries and other cultures and other points of view. is I'm really hungry for this chance to change my mind about something. What did you study at Princeton? I studied philosophy.

Philosophy in those days, which was in the 1970s, in American and English universities, was not necessarily the big questions about life. It was more kind of closer to math and logic. But I wrote my thesis on a topic that was really personal for me, which was, what is a person over? time. Why do we think of ourselves as somebody who is important to plan for? Even though we know at age 20, we might despise ourselves at age 70. You know, that all our opinions are going to change,

that the facts of our lives are going to change. You might start your youth as a communist and end up as a right winger. You never know. And this topic was interesting for me because I'm an identical twin. And I have a biological clone of myself out there in the world who has almost everything in common with me at that moment. So why would I say for myself at age 70 instead of giving what I have in my life to the person who's just like me now? I never really found a good answer to that. And, you know, it's still true. I still have this clone in the world and I have to live. with looking at a version of myself all the time like that.

I've met with your clone a couple of times. He's a wonderful person. Yeah. And so anyway, when I went to college, you know, I went to Princeton. I didn't expect to go to Princeton, but a friend of mine was there, and she sent me the application. She said, I think you'd like it here. So I applied at the very last minute got in, and it was a really lucky choice, and I was

lucky to go there because there were so many opportunities to explore the world beyond the United States from Princeton. So when I was between my first and second year at Princeton, I spent four months in Japan working in factories for the Panasonic company. Wow. And living in a worker's dormitory and really got a taste for a very foreign experience for me, you know, not only only was it a workers experience, it was an industrial experience, it was a foreign experience, the food was all different. But I also learned another way of being a host and being a friend. And people were so kind to me. I had a funny thing happen to me on my first day. I thought, you know, I'm kind of short. You know, I'm kind of short for Americans. And I thought,

finally, I'm going to Japan where I'm going to be tall. And I was so excited, you know, to to finally not be, you know, the small guy in the room. And then I get to the dormitory where they're putting me. And, you know, in Japan, everybody takes their shoes off like they do in Indonesia before you enter a house. And I looked at the shoe rack at the door. And there were all these gigantic shoes, like twice the size of my shoes. And I thought, what is going on here?

I'm not going to be the tall guy here. It turns out my dormitory. In Japan, they have these corporate basketball leagues, which are at the time where, like, they're big leagues. and I was in the dorm with the National Championship basketball team of Japan. And so not only was I small, I was smaller than usual. And, you know, so they were all still at work at the time. So I went and I took a bath in their searingly hot bath.

It took me about a half hour to get up to my knees in the hot water. And then these giants come into the bathroom, jump right in, and the hot water spills over by the head. And, you know, I'm in the water up to here. They're up in the water up to their belly button. So anyway, you know, talk about, you know, changing your expectations in a new place. You know, you really can't come in with expectations. You have to be open.

Interesting. And that experience for me working in Japan was still in the era where people were moving from the farm to the city to work in factories. Right. So I worked in a factory. One of the factories I worked in was a battery factory, and I worked with a lot of girls who were like 16 or 17, which you don't see in the United States. You don't see girls that young working, doing factory work. And their story was all the same. You know, their parents were farmers. They moved to the city. They lived in dormitories. And every morning I would get up before work. I would get dressed in the company uniform. I would go to the factory. I would go to the factory. I would. sing the company song. I would see the regimentation in the workplace, but I would also see how Japanese industry was so tightly connected to the national project of the country. And this became really, this became a really important point of view for me later when I did research on China. See.

Because that was a stage that China went through later, you know, 20, 30 years later. later. But I got to see it in that early formative stage. And I got a taste for Asian media. In my dormitory, there were giant stacks of these manga comic books that grown men were reading. And it was interesting to me to see how many comic books grown men read in Japan. But, you know, I enjoyed them too. And then eventually I moved over to movies. And then, At Princeton, there was a movie society, and they had all the classic Japanese movies. But if you went to New York City on the weekend,

you could go to these really filthy, divey, cheap movie theaters in Times Square, where they would have three or four Kung Fu movies in a row. So it would escape my studies, go to New York, watch Kung Fu movies, and I thought, I really have to get back to Asia some way or other. Which you did. Which I did.

So Princeton has a program called Princeton in Asia, where they send volunteers all throughout Asia at the time. And they had a good relationship with Indonesia then. And I applied for a lot of fellowships. After graduating, I could have gone to Norway, which interested me because I had a professor from Norway. Right. I could have gone to Taiwan. And I thought, why would I ever go to Taiwan? I had been to Taiwan in 1978, and it was a dictatorship.

It was very polluted. There was no way to go to China. and I thought to myself, why would I go to Taiwan there? You can't even go to China. What could I possibly? What would my future be like if I learn Chinese? You can't go to China. It's probably the stupidest decision I ever made from a practical point of view.

And then, but I was offered this position in Indonesia, and I didn't know anything about Indonesia. But there are a couple very famous anthropologists. It's Princeton, Clifford Geertz and Hildeguertz, who are probably, you know, probably at the time, did the most famous work on Indonesia. So I ran to the office of Hildi Gertz and I said, should I go to Indonesia? And she said, you'd be stupid not to.

It's a wonderful country. You'll have fun exploring it. The language is good. There's no tones. There's no levels. It's a Roman alphabet. And the people are great. So I signed up in 1980, right?

1980. Right. Princeton paid for me to take a 10-week course of Keelaught at Berkeley. in Indonesian, and I did that. And I met a good friend of mine, Nathan. It will come into the story in a minute. And I was always a terrible language student. In fact, at Princeton, I had to get special permission to skip the language requirement

because I was such a terrible language student. But I really wanted to learn a language, and I had the chance to be in Indonesia for two or three years. And I thought I could probably have a good chance of learning Indonesia. So after 10 weeks of the most intensive Indonesian language study, when I arrived in Jakarta, I could say two words, Kuh, Hotel. So I ended up at the hotel, finally went to Jokka, and met my school, the other volunteer. who were going to be teaching at Gajamata University. Gajamata had a center,

may still have a center called Seltu, which was, you know, the, it was the center to teach professors who were going to study abroad on fellowships, mostly in the United States, some in Europe. So my students at Gajamata were professors, which was,

I felt like I was a kid in a candy store, because I could ask these professors anything. I was free to humiliate them with difficult questions. But we had so much fun. I had so much fun with them and they were so generous with me. And Jokja was such a great city to be in. Still is. Still is.

And in my whole time there in that first like two and a half years, I really was only in Jakarta for a few days. I spent almost all my time either in Jokhtja or traveling to more, you know, interesting tourist places. So Sumatra, Bali, Lombok, Siliwesi. And I didn't know anything about the world of politics or governance or anything, but I definitely was a child of the new order in Indonesia. You know, the kinds of things people talked about,

the newspapers that were blacked out, getting Tempo magazine with the cover all inked out, seeing the kind of coverage. and also, you know, the development philosophy. Right. Which was also very informative to me later when I worked on China. For me, you know, there was always, there were always these areas of conversation that stopped in that period because people just didn't want to talk about them too much, even with my professor friends.

But not as closed as you would imagine in a. in a state run by, you know, a strong leader like Suharto. But still, you know, the media was closed down. And then I remember, like, there was one or two weeks where you could get the Pramudia books where they were allowed to be published. And everybody was rushing to get them. And that was like a, that to me was a window. It's like, okay, if this thing is available just now and everybody's so hungry for it,

what else are they hungry for? They must be hungry for so much more. And then, like two weeks later, they stopped publishing the books. It was just, it was a fluke. But my friends got them. And I read, you know, Bumi Manusia with a dictionary. And, you know, to me it was like, oh, you know, there's a lot of genius in this country which is being suppressed, creative genius in this country, which is being suppressed.

And my exposure to Indonesian culture then was really mostly of traditional Indonesian culture or street culture. You know? And I would say for me, some of the most important lessons I learned from my time in Jokshia were learning all the ingredients in Indonesian food so I could make it when I got home. I lived outside Gajima'amada in a DASA. So really learning about DASA life was so fascinating for me. You know, I lived in a small bamboo house. It didn't have electricity. My neighbors all urge me.

They said, Ted, you're Alondo. You need electricity. You should get electricity. They urged me to get a single socket in my ceiling for a light bulb. I agreed to that. I didn't need it, but I agreed to it because they wanted me to. to have it. And then when I came home, there were extension cords to all of their houses. A small service I could provide.

But I lived right across the street from a famous Waurung that served Pichol, which is still my favorite food in the world and all the Jajjanan there. And that became one of the places where I really learned to be a better person and a better friend. people because in the DASA, it's so social and it's so multi-generational. And you really get involved in the lives of other people. And my neighbors were so generous with me and bringing me into their homes and allowing me to get to know their children. And I would say that's a lesson that just serves me every day of my life, which is, you know,

you know, there's a lot of viruses in the world that make the world worse, that make the world sicker. But in Indonesia, the friendship is the virus. Yeah. You know, if you have a friend, you have 10 friends. Yeah. Because they're going to bring you into, Indonesians bring you into their world. And they mutate in a good way. And they mutate in the best way.

Just as an aside, you know, there's a big American holiday Thanksgiving, which I love. And we used to have a Thanksgiving and Jok-Jen, I would invite some friends. but these days I'd like to have a kind of Thanksgiving for Indonesians in the Chicago area, Indonesian students. So this year, because of COVID, it was a little hard to round people up. People didn't know whether they could come, whether they'd be real comfortable in a crowd or anything. And this was the day after Thanksgiving. I had bought turkeys and I had all of the different side dishes and everything.

And I had responses from about 12 people. a couple days before Thanksgiving. And I thought, oh, man, this is going to be so quiet, you know, it's going to be. And then as the day gets closer, I keep getting these emails and WhatsApp messages. Is that Thanksgiving still happening, Pat Ted? If so, I would like to bring a few friends. And I thought, so I said to my wife, Sarah, who knows this, I said, you know, this party's growing.

You know, it's Indonesian party. I wouldn't be surprised if there were 35 people who came. I better get an extra turkey. So I went and I got an extra turkey. And then Thanksgiving came and I keep getting these messages. Then the morning of there's like, I get this list. I'm bringing these people. There's 12 people on the list.

And so that night, 50 people were in my house. Oh, my. And it was so much fun. It was for me, it's like being on drugs, you know. It's just that social world with Indonesians, you know. And I think one reason I really love learning. Indonesian and learning Indonesian language with Indonesians is that there's so much wordplay. You know, there's so much fun with language.

There's so many puns. And a lot of the puns come from other languages, you know, local dialects from English, from Dutch, whatever. And there's so much fun with it. And that's a kind of American thing because we're this big melting pot, the language play often pulls in, you know, this multicultural has this multicultural aspect. Right. And it's just a fun way to be with your friends. But then there's also the loyalty of Indonesian friends. I'm still friends with the people I knew in Jokja, many of them. I was stupid enough to lose contact with some of them,

and some of them have since died, and I feel so, so terrible about that, that I've really promised myself that I don't want that to happen. But when I go back to Indonesia today, we still travel together, we see each other. I know their families, their kids, their kids, their kids come here to school sometimes and then I get a whole new generation of friendship from them. And I don't know, I would just say my life is so much richer because of my experience in Indonesia. My wife calls Indonesia my mistress because I think about it every day. And, you know, I'm in conversation with Indonesians every day.

Really, I am. That's very hard. Yeah, if you look at my Facebook or WhatsApp feed, it's, you know, 80% Indonesians. Yeah, some of those are for me. Yeah, I love that too.

I love that too. Wow. So anyway, then after Princeton, I mean, after Princeton in Asia, in Indonesia, I was very sick.

I got really sick in West Sumatra. And then I went home. I was hospitalized for a long time. And then I left the hospital and I went to New York to reconnect with my college friends. I started reconnecting with my college friends. And as it happened, Pakita, I was hired as a researcher at a law

firm where one of the lawyers helped craft the Indonesian constitution. His name was Robert Hornet. And he had a deep, deep knowledge of the country. And there were Indonesian lawyers in the firm. and also the public relations firm that did public relations for the new order regime was in the same building, producing all of these information sheets, which were basically propaganda for the Suharto regime. And so there was a kind of circle of Indonesians that I had in New York. And this law firm was also suing the Indonesian government at the time because the military, had expropriated a hotel of a Hong Kong investor. And all of these big, scary new order generals were commanded to come to New York

to testify in front of this tribunal that was hearing the case. So here's me, little Ted Fishman, you know, teacher in Jokja, you know, jumped off my Indonesian bicycle into this important legal case being heard. before the tribunal of the World Court, of the World Bank, sorry. And getting to interview and help interview all of these really terrifying New Order generals. And that was actually a side of Indonesia I hadn't seen, which was kind of the deep corruption of the Suharto regime. It was a revelation to me. But it was easier to see outside the country for me than inside the country.

although Indonesians, of course, lived with it. So, you know, I was going to go to law school, but then I changed my mind about that. And I thought, well, what's a career that I would really like based on my Indonesian experience, my kind of love of being independent? You know, being in Indonesia really made me lose my taste for graduate school because I didn't really feel like going back and being a student after being on my own with so much freedom there. So in Chicago at the time, there were the new derivatives markets, the options markets. And my brother was trading on those.

He said, well, you should come trade with me. And this doesn't exist anymore. But at the time, you know, Chicago was the poster child for the worst side of capitalism because you could get these pictures of these trading floors where everybody was in colorful jackets screaming their heads off at each other. And I said, why would I ever do that job? You know, you're buying and selling things you never see. You have no customers.

You have no inventory. You know, all that's in it is money. And my brother said, well, that's why you do it. So I did that job. And for 12 years, I had my own derivatives trading firm. And you would be surprised how close it was working on that. big center poster boy for capitalism as it was bargaining for Batik in the stalls of Passar-Bring Harjo. You know, I had learned by bargaining with the best, you know, the

ladies of Bring Harjo. And I'd like the job for a long time. I went spectacularly broke a couple times. I came back. But once I had a family, I didn't like the idea that I might go broke again. You know, it's a job with enormous amount of risk. You can lose many times what you have. And I had been writing all along. I've been writing for magazines all along, and I really have always loved writing. I was in a writing program in college with a famous writer named Joyce Carol Oates for most of my time at Princeton. And And I had been writing for newspapers and magazines in the hours when I wasn't trading. So I thought, well, I'll stop trading and I'll try and go for a national career as a writer.

And I was old enough then so that my friends who were writers in college were now editors and they could hire me. So I turned to them and they gave me work and it turned out. And I started working for some really great magazines. I think big names. Big name. I've written, like in the English language world, I've written for every, virtually every important magazine. Oh, yeah. Mention. Mention the names.

Let's see. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, so many magazines that are now broke, I think I must curse them because when I write for them, they go out of business. But all of these giant magazines, money, not the New York Times. Yeah, New York Times is still around. And they're going to be around for a long time. Yeah. I was one of the marquee writers at Harper's Magazine for a long time. Right. And I've written for the Atlantic. I've written for National Geographic, for the German magazine Geo or Geo. I even had a piece in Tempo once.

And I did know that. Wow. Yeah. And Tempo ran a big feature on me later, too, which was very nice. and I don't know, so many, so many. I've just cleaned out my office. It took me six weeks to clean out 40 years of work, and I have, I don't know, thousands and thousands of articles here. Wow. And then I also reviewed theater, and I reviewed art,

and I reviewed museum shows, and everything. It's, you know, if you're a person who likes to learn, writing is a really wonderful profession, and I love to learn. And you also get to talk to people. You have license to talk to people that your readers want to talk to, but you get to talk to them. What did you start thinking of writing a book? I wasn't thinking of writing a book. I love magazines.

Magazines to me are the ideal format. Unfortunately, they're kind of going away. But I love the periodic nature of them, the timeliness of them. I love the energy and the writing. And I get a lot of magazines. I get like five or six magazines a day. It's almost like I inject them. I just read them all the time.

So I love the magazine form. But my favorite editor at the time at Harper's Magazine, we did some really good and influential work there, got a job at a book publisher. And he called me, he said, Ted, you're a book author now. Wow. What year was this? this was 90s right no I think that was around 2002 okay I thought it was in the late 90s okay all right

yeah 2002 where he did that and so I wanted to do a book on the world's five biggest businesses which are also the world's five most violent and corrupt businesses it was such an ambitious thing and I had written about a lot of that for harbors magazine You know, it's going to be the sex trade, the arms trade, the drugs trade, and petroleum and other minerals. And then he said, well, I've done a lot with that with you already. Ted, I know you're interested in Asia and China. Would you think about writing a book on China? In the early 2000s, China really wasn't news in the United States.

It was like maybe backpages of the newspaper, business page news. But I was interested in it. I didn't have the expertise to do it, Agita. I just didn't. Call me Gita. Gita. And so I was nervous about it. So I said, you know, what if I did a book about how the changes in China are going to change the rest of the world?

way I don't have to be such an expert on China, but I am more comfortable speaking about globalization in a more broad sense. And I thought I could use my experience in Japan, in Indonesia, as the cornerstone for that investigation. Because when I was working in Japan in the 70s, to my surprise, my boss at Matsushita, which was Panasonic, said, you know, Ted, you're from America. All of us wake up every morning with America on our mind. We open the newspaper and there's America. We listen to the radio and there's America. But Japan has been in China's shadow for a long time.

And eventually China is going to be a bigger deal for you than it is now. And that observation never left me. And I had been tracking with that observation for decades. And then when I got to Indonesia, it was at a time where you couldn't buy any, products from China in the United States. There was no imported products from China in the United States. If it was Chinese, it came from Taiwan. And I had never seen a Chinese thing, maybe some souvenirs from Chinatown, but they weren't even from China, China, you know,

mainland China. And I had been to Hong Kong, of course, so I knew that. But when I got to Indonesia, The first thing I bought was a thermos to keep my hot water for tea in. It was from China. It cost nothing. I mean, to me, it costs like, you know, the amount, the same price is a bag of chips. And then my second week in Jokja, I thought, I can't be walking everywhere. I'm going to go get a bicycle. So I went and got a Phoenix bicycle, which was a knockoff of a Dutch bicycle.

Made in China. But from China, and it costs, in American dollars, it costs $12. New, new. And I had bought a bicycle in college, a cheap bicycle for $200. And so I thought, when is this amazing world of cheap manufacturing goods going to arrive in the United States? It's going to change the country. And so when I was asked to do a book on China, I thought, I thought, well, this is starting to unfold.

And it's going to be powerful. So I did write China, Inc. It was the first book in English anyway to identify China as an emerging superpower. This came out in 2002 or three? No, no. It came out at the end of 2005. Five. I started reporting.

I got the contract right when SARS was happening, speaking of pandemic. Okay, 2002, three. yeah, 2003. And, you know, SARS was terrible, but it was great for me because it meant that every other book that anybody was writing on China was canceled. Well, that was just a year after China entered the WTO in 2001. Right, right, exactly. And everybody saw that as a huge sea change.

Yeah. I mean, you know more about how that unfolded and whether anybody got what they wanted out of it. Right. But so, you know, nobody was going to China. And I called my editor. I said, look, SARS, I don't know if I can do this again. Just do it. Just do it.

So I went to Washington and, you know, there's enormous expertise on China and Washington. And then as soon as China opened up, I went to China. And then I would identify some trend in China. You know, this is kind of the way a writer like me works. You identify some trend and it kind of makes lights go off. And then you think, well, maybe I should follow that. So I'd identify some trend. Maybe a German company was in China head of American companies.

So then I would go to Germany and follow the trend there and talk to people in Germany about China. Or then I would go back to China, report some more. I saw something in Japan. And then I would go to Japan and talk about that or, you know, something in the U.S. So I kept bouncing in and out of China, kind of drawing the lines from China to the rest of the world. and when the book came out, there were no other big books on China. I was lucky. I kind of filled the gap. That was a great book, too.

Thank you. So the book took off. Yeah. And what happened? It became a giant global bestseller in every market in the world. And there's no way to predict that. Nobody knows what makes a book a success, but that one became a success. And what happens when you write a book is that when you're reporting the book, everybody kind of gives you their story, you know, the best version of their story.

We had these goals. Our business was to do this. We really tried. We did it. And now we're succeeding. And this is our story for investors. But when you write the book and it's out there and people have read it, then they start telling you their problems. because you're the expert.

And you've already written the book, so there's no danger. So oddly, after I wrote the book, I learned so much more about the world of international trade, manufacturing strategy. I was brought into Pentagon stuff. You know, like every realm of international relations and trade somehow pulled me in to talk about it. So, you know, I got really. interested in that stuff. And one of the things that just kept coming back to me over and over again was, what is the big change in China that's changing the world? Well, the big change in China is that a few hundred million people have left the farm and have gone to the city to work in these factories replaying what happened when I was in Japan. you know, where you had these farmers who carried rice sacks all the sudden on heavy machinery. And that was the story of China.

And they were building their cities. They were building their factories. The girls were working in the factories. The men were working in heavy industry. And what happened. And China had the one child policy, of course. Right. So while this huge change in China was happening, I saw two things.

I saw the rest of the world buying the labor of young Chinese people. You know, China's 16 to 22-year-olds were on sale to the rest of the world to work at astonishingly low wages, far lower than the average wage in Indonesia at the time. And there was an seemingly endless supply of them. And China had a one-child policy. so that young parents didn't have big families they had to support. They only had one kid. The workers in the factories, their parents were still young,

so they didn't have to support their parents because their parents were still farming or doing whatever. And, you know, this is the demographic dividend that people talk a lot about in Indonesia, but Indonesia doesn't have a one-child policy, thank God. Yeah. And I thought, there's this job. giant arbitrage going on in the world where the aging labor forces from Europe and America

in Japan are being abandoned for the young labor force in China. And because capitalism doesn't want to pay for the cost of aging societies, but they will pay for unburdened young workers who work for almost nothing. And so that was that was the new argument in the next book I wrote, which is Shock of Gray, that there's this giant global age arbitrage that's going on. And in order for that to be effective, China had to create this kind of age apartheid where it ruthlessly separated the young from the old in the country. So you would go to villages in the countryside, there'd be no young people there left.

You would go to the cities and they would be so much younger than any place in the United States or Europe. That's changing over time and China's worried about it. There's opportunity for Indonesia there. And so, you know, that book also had a big international audience and it was published twice in China, Gita. It was published shortly after it came out by a government publisher that did a really boring kind of academic translation. China is another publisher. This is called Shock of Grey. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, the second book. Okay, got it. Yeah. But then there was another publisher in China that had wanted the book to publish in China but didn't get it. Hmm. So when the other company didn't do well with the book, they were wondering, could we buy it and do it again? And so they did, like several years later, like three years ago in 2018, I think. They published it again with another title just called Old and Poor, which is.

which is a great title. Wish I had that title. And they translated in much more lively way. And it became a sensation in China. It became a bestseller. I did a huge book tour. Like way after I thought the book was dead, but the issue is still so much alive there.

And I would go to these events in China, and there'd be hundreds of people at these talks that I gave, you know, who afterwards would just come and plead. like, Mr. Fishman, what do we do? How can we do this? I can't stand it. I've got my older parents. I've got my, you know, the prices of apartments in Beijing are so high,

but if I don't have one, I can't get married and blah, blah, blah. They were so desperate, of course. I don't have good answers for them, but after you write the book, people bring you their problems. Oh, man. And so, you know, that's kind of, you know, just kind of pulling this all together. It's the way these big issues connect in ways that are kind of out of the silos of academic disciplines.

You know, you could think across disciplines. If you go to different places, talk to lots of people. I have the luxury of talking to hundreds of people all the time, seeing things from new ways. These themes can emerge in your thinking that seem worth pursuing and can be. interesting. Hello, my friends, thank you

being team. Check release the new from Future Narrator's merchandise collection and

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the description. Now back to the show. Ted, you've written so many articles and two best-selling book Talk a little bit about the process of writing a book, right?

And I think this could be inspirational for young Indonesians who have the aspiration to write a book on the recognition that I think Asians in general, they have lacked the ability relative to the Europeans and Americans, in documenting things, right? And I think the Asians are waking up to this notion that it's time, it's high time, for us to start documenting things a little bit more diligently, more meticulously.

And I do see a future where I think we're going to see a rise in a number of Indonesians getting involved in book writing. Tell us a little bit about this. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You know, first of all, I just want to open this discussion by saying that Indonesia is a great place to think about writing. Because it is a place where a lot of forces come together that work on you as a person, work on your community, work on a country. And there's no shortage of themes. and in the world of books there's so many ways to approach your own story you can approach it in the most

personal way you can approach it from 40,000 miles in the air you know any way that interests you there's a way to make a book out of it and for me the one thing I always advise people who are thinking of writing a book is you should write the kind of book that you want to read. Yeah. You know, don't, you know, if, if you think that books are written in a very kind of rare academic voice, you know, where you have to write like the world's smartest person, you're wrong. You really just have to write in a way that's true to yourself. Yeah. At the top of your own intelligence, you don't have to be at the top of someone else's intelligence who's beyond you.

your intelligence is enough. And when you do a book, you find the top of your intelligence. That's the drug of doing a book, is that you are so deep in the topic that you are making connections. You never dreamed your imagination or intelligence is capable of making because you're so deep in it. And it's your own passion. For me, a book starts with a question. you know, and I like the kinds of questions that allow you to bring in lots of different topics. So this China topic, you know, okay, that allowed me to talk about people all over the world.

The aging topic. Who isn't affected by aging? What issue in society isn't somehow connected with aging? I could attack it from so many different directions. So if you read my book about aging, you're really reading a book about the world. But it's your world. It's the world you walk in. It's your living room.

It's your kitchen. It's your workplace. It's your community. I like that kind of book. But other people will write about really fascinating book about their disease. It's not a global book at all. It's intensely personal, but it's also very moving. But that's the kind of book they want to read and that they feel compelled to write.

My own process is to do an insane amount, an unreasonable amount of research, because I like research too much. and so I do a lot of research first and then I kind of like sit down and have you know don't sleep for four months and write the book how do you go about researching what's the first preliminary step that one ought to take

you just never know Gita like when I was when I was starting the China book with SARS and like I couldn't go to China you know I did the first thing that all really serious investigative journalists do when they're in this situation. I called my mother. And she said, oh, you should talk to the Cedar family down the street.

I think they have something to do with China. So I called the Cedar family. I went to school with one of them. I said, hey, hear you guys do something with China. He goes, yeah, and then it was off and running. You know, once he started talking, you know, I thought, oh, that's interesting. That's interesting. follow that. And you know, sometimes it's just talking to your neighbor or anybody. And

is it typically within almost always begins with people? What? Is it typically within what, three, four, five degrees of freedom before you hit it off? Yeah, or even, yeah, even more, sometimes even more. Sometimes it's just like, you know, oh, you went to Princeton too or whatever or something like that. Yeah. You know, I do try and find that connection. I love making connection. and it helps getting the conversation going. And then, you know, listening is the number one skill. And then there's real research to do, documentary research, statistical research, and so on. And because I'm not an expert in any of these techniques, even once I have that kind of research,

then I end up having to talk to somebody about it, too. Is there an episode where you get a little too immersed? I mean, in acting, the actor gets to be in character a little too much. That happens to you all the time. Really? And to the point... Yeah, sometimes I know so much about a topic, or I'm so interested in a topic that I can't bring it into a structure that makes sense for a reader.

And sometimes the things that I'm most interested in kind of collapses projects because I've overwhelmed myself. You know, it's like this, I actually wrote it in China. It's like this cliche that people say about China. It's like if you're going to write a book about China, you better do it fast because pretty soon you'll know too much to write the book. You know, and that's happened to me on a couple big projects that I went. I just ended up knowing so much about it that I kind of felt I was at sea.

I couldn't bring the material back into a structure. Editors can help with that, a good editor. For me, my editors are really important to me. And I think they know that working with me is also real work, that they have to help me with that. But, you know, that's also the magic of this job, which is you can go get that deeply immersed in a topic. Yeah.

What about your lifestyle? Does that get affected by your work? Does that change? Your lifestyle, it's basically you're on final exams your whole life. You know, you're in final exam week your whole life. That's crazy. You know, I write short form things too. So I also review theater still.

So I go to the theater two or three times a week. And those, you just, I just have to write those that night. And I really like it because I can't think about it that much. but it's a way to just write and you know I don't have to be the world's expert on that show I just have to tell a reader what they want to know in order to have a better experience seeing it

Ted I know you're working on something big at the moment you want to talk a little bit about that sure sure this also has its origins in Indonesia Gita when I was young in Indonesia I was really fascinated by the Suharto's regime's connection with the cement and concrete businesses. And I was also really fascinated, like, how did the government run without much tax revenue?

You know, Indonesia is still an OPEC country then, so it had the oil revenue. And, you know, I kept hearing over and over again about Suharto's very close connection to the concrete and cement industry. And I was learning like, why is he so connected to that? As a young person, I couldn't put it together exactly. But because Indonesia was receiving a lot of international aid and loans for the infrastructure sector and for development projects, that was a sector in which there was money that was available. And so, you know, there's been a lot written about that and about that connection. But, you know, every construction project is a unique project.

So they're uniquely structured to extract money out of them that you shouldn't be taking. You know, so there's a lot of ways for regimes to enrich. themselves in the infrastructure sector. And if you look at any dictatorship, any dictatorship around the world, and it's true in democracies too, but any dictatorship, especially, one of the coziest relationships is with the material sector, the companies that are, you know, creating building materials in Indonesia, often that was cement and concrete. So I mentioned this to a I mentioned this to a friend of mine years later who does a political scientist who works on Indonesia and he says,

you could write a great book about concrete. Okay. And I thought, so I started thinking about concrete. And then when I did Shock of Gray, I was really interested in what doubled the human lifespan over the last 100 years. And it turns out what doubles the human lifespan over the hundred years, more than anything else is effective public health. And effective public health is mostly due to the use of concrete because it delivers people clean water.

It prevents people from getting insect-borne diseases. And I was thinking, wow, you know, there isn't a realm in life that isn't touched by this material concrete, the political realm, the social realm, the defense, realm. And it's a huge wealth creator, regime supporter, whatever. So I started poking into doing work on this topic. And it's the kind of topic I love because it's a global topic. It touches a lot of different themes. I get to learn a little bit about geology. I get to learn about biology. I get to learn about climate science.

all of these things wrap in under the umbrella of this one material. So I'm in the middle of that project now. It's been endlessly fascinating. It gets me talking to a whole group of people of a kind I really never got to talk to about before, which is people in the construction sector, which is very gratifying to me because my dad was an architect and I grew up going to construction sites throughout my whole,

youth. And it also, you know, it lets me think about Indonesia in new ways, too. Because Indonesia now, you know, infrastructure is such a key part of the aspirations of the nation. Right. Well, I mean, China has been quite massive on this. Well, between 2018 and 2021, I believe that's the three-year period. China used more concrete than the United States used in the United States. used in 150 years.

150, I thought it was 100 years. My gosh. Wow. Well, I mean, that's crazy. There's very little difference between 100 and 150 in concrete because more than 100 years ago they used to make it. When is this, when is this thing likely to come out? Well, I just signed the contract to do the book. Okay. So, I don't know, I'm giving myself like a year or 18 months to do it.

Wow. Actually, I misspoke. I'm not giving myself that time. publishers has a sword over my head with that time. Well, the very best of wishes on this undertaking. Thank you. No, this is, yeah, sorry. But you know, there's a few other things I continue to look into and have written about.

One of which is this period in Chicago history. Yeah. You know, near my house, which you've been to, there's a museum, Museum of Science and industry and the University of Chicago. And that's the site where in 1893, there was a giant World's Fair, probably still the biggest World's Fair that was ever held. And from the colonial East Indies came 165 people from West Java and Central Java to build a Javanese village right here in Chicago for the World's Fair.

And this has been a topic that's endless. I want to explore as much as I possibly can. Maybe some of your viewers can help me do this. The center of where people came from was both the Sultan's Court and Solo and the area around Sukabumi and Parra Gonzala. This was in the late 19th century, right? Yeah, in the late 19th century. So these Dutch planters, the Dutch government didn't want to send people, but these Dutch planters

got together mainly to sell tea, Indonesian tea, and the United States and they created this sensation. They brought all of the materials to build the village from Indonesia. They brought the Indonesians. They could play gamelan. They danced. They did wiangolk, Wying Orang. And they brought a gamelan. They made handicrafts while they were here. They did Batik. Surprisingly to many people today, it was the most popular attraction in the entire world's fair. Wow. The single most popular attraction at an American world's fair at the end of the 19th century

was an Indonesian village. And it was a sensation. It was the cover of every major magazine, newspaper sent reporters just to cover it. People heard gamelan music when they were walking around the fair. And so I've been researching this and I've written about it. People go online and they put my name in and Java Village. in the article. And so what happened then was in the late 19th century,

this was also the birth of the social sciences, you know, anthropology, sociology, and so on. And the University of Chicago was just growing up at that time. So these early social scientists who were interested in other cultures had right in their back door a whole Indonesian village in which to kind of try things out. So it was right there essential at the, the birth of the social sciences. And then at the end of the fair, there were 4,000 objects left over from this Java village in Chicago. And they became the foundation, part of the foundational

collection of the big natural history museum here, which is called the Field Museum. It's one of the four great natural history anthropology museums in the world. And the Java Village was essential in its foundation. Wow. And if you go to the museum and you make an appointment, it's still possible to see some of these artifacts that are in storage, golden masks, statues of all kinds, puppets, everything that we're here. And the museum still has that gamelon, which today is one of the oldest gamelan still playable in the world. That's amazing. Not many Indonesians know about this.

No, I don't think so. I don't think so. How do we get this re-electrified? Well, I would love to, you know, I've been talking for years with every Council General that comes here, with every Indonesian official I could call her who comes to Chicago with all the museum officials about recreating something like it, which would both fill the museum with all of these wonderful traditional practices from Indonesia, but also show Indonesia how it's cool today, you know, what's up to date from Indonesia. maybe somebody watching this will be interested in it. There's a lot of interest here in Chicago. It's really a matter of getting the funding, getting past COVID.

As it happens, the director of exhibits at the Field Museum is half Indonesian. His mother is Indonesian. So he's keenly interested in him. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, it could happen.

It could happen. It would be a really fantastic. thing to see here again. I know you're interested in soft culture. And to me, it's always puzzling why some of the more popular art forms in Indonesia don't burst onto the global cultural market. Yeah. Although it's starting to happen with your help in film. Yeah. Well, I've been involved in this for quite a bit. It's like you said, earlier, you know, you want to do something that you're going to like for a long time. You want to write something that you're going to like. You're going to write something that you want to read, right?

And, you know, that soft culture is something that I've been involved in, which ties to what you alluded to earlier. Because this is something that I like. I want to do something that I like, something I want to enjoy, I want to other people who enjoy. And making movies, I think, has been different in telling the story of Indonesia or Indonesians to not just Indonesians, but to the rest of the world. Somewhat better than music for some reason. I thought music would have been. Well, it has the story aspect to it. Yeah, yeah. Also, I really have a different way. enjoyed the films of yours that have gotten to see because they are really strong on story.

You know, I've been, over the last few days, I've been watching Kaluaga Chumara. Well, they're not my films, but, you know, they're paid by... Some of the people you work with are attached to it, but it's not your friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't deserve to take credit as much as, you know, some of the other guys are. It's really fun because it's weird. It's kind of like it goes into the, you know, it's a family that moves to the DASA. And I get to see all those DESA scenes. Yeah.

But Ted, I want to push on this. You know, I want to tease you and the audience about this idea that we've kind of talked about earlier. You know, there's this notion that what happened in Indonesia about 75, thousand years ago called the toba volcanic eruption might have something to do with the cognitive revolution that took place 70,000 years ago. And I've read quite a number of books on this that have described to the extent where the population of the world actually dwindled to only 2,000. 75,000 years ago shortly after this happened in Tobah.

And this had so many repercussions, you know, geographically, culturally, ethnically, health-wise, you name it, right? And this just seems like something that I think the Indonesian people need to recognize a bit more that there might be or there is a correlation between an event in Indonesia 75,000 years ago with how the cognitive ability of humanity improved starkly 70,000 years ago. Because the temperature drop by 6 to 13 degrees for thousands of years, it created. It created thousands of years of winters to the point where only very few people could survive.

And the survival instinct either reflected upon one's ability to think better or it actually cause people to think better. Brain size got bigger. And you hear stories about how there are skeletons of the genitals of the general. Java man found about 40, 50,000 years ago, then there are stories about some remains of species found in Indonesia more than 100,000 years ago. And we could just deduce that, you know, by way of comparing what we found more than 100,000 years ago and what we found 40 to 50,000 years ago, there didn't seem to be a linear

evolution, right? between the two events, to the point you can sort of hypothesize that there was a disruption in those that were living in Indonesia. And this is, I don't know, it sounds like the kind of story that maybe Indonesians would like to not only write but read about. Well, I think it's a fantastic story. So, first of all, it's definitely worth a book or more. To be written by Ted Fishman.

No, I'm going to read it with your name. But, you know, why is it a good story? It's a good story because, first of all, it's an astounding event that's interesting in itself. You know, and who knows? The world could always be threatened by a volcano of this magnitude. So, you know, we live under this threat at all times, although we may not know it. You know, the human being picking berries or catching fish at that time had no idea this was coming. They're no different than us.

We have no idea that there's coming. But it's also, but more fundamentally, Gita, tell me, tell me if this makes sense to you. It's a kind of Noah's art story. Yeah. Right. So in the Noah's arc story, all of humanity is reduced to two of every, to two, two humans, or maybe at his kids on the ark, I'm not sure. And then two of every other animal.

And the whole, you know, tree of life in this religious story grows out of, you know, this one catastrophe. And people tend to think that this was based on a real catastrophe, you know, big, big flooding that is also in the Gilgum. mesh epic and other things. Well, here's an event which, you know, you could say is several magnitudes bigger than what's described in our religious traditions. And, you know, out of that catastrophe becomes a whole new mode of human existence. Right. You know, in Indonesia is the epicenter of this element.

This is, you know, Indonesia is the Ark, I could say in a way, right? Or Indonesia is the flood. I'm not sure whether this story is the Ark. No, I would rather think of it as the Ark. Yeah. And, you know, it just puts the archipelago at, the center of humanity. You know, if you think of, if you think of Africa is the cradle of humanity out of which the first humans came.

And then this event comes and wipes out all but a very small population, you know, then Indonesia is the place where humanity rebooted, right? Right. Cognitively. And then if you could trace, you know, as you said, as you've already done it. in this conversation, you know, all of the, I think it'd be very interesting for, like, if, if I were to kind of structure it just off the top of my head to kind of build a ladder of cognitive competence over time, you know, okay, after this, this is, this is what happened, this is how people adjusted to the dark, this is how people adjusted to the cold, this is how

skills happen, this is how we move from the no tool age, to using tools to, you know, through the different ages of humankind. It's fascinating. And this kind of book, there's always some kind of book like this on the bestseller list, something that says, where did we come from? Who are we? I mean, there's no more enticing a topic than who are we?

Yeah. But it doesn't have to be just for an Indonesian audience. You know, this is, that's a book with, that. Depends on how it's written. Yeah. What? Depends on how it's written. Yeah.

I think it could appeal to a broader audience. But this is something I've been pondering, you know, for, you know, for a bit. And this is. Well, it also, you know, one thing that's really irresistible about this as a topic is that it combines real science. with room for your imagination. Right. I mean, you can... What was community life?

You can take a look at this from an anthropological angle, historical, of course, topographical, geographic, genetic, biological, physical, chemical. You name it, man, right? It's all there. Yeah. It's all there. And there's probably experts all along the way who... may or may not be talking to each other, but you could string them together.

Yeah. I was talking to a geneticist just a few days ago and started chatting about this. And it was like, oh, yeah, this could make sense because, you know, she has studied the genetic evolution of Indonesia and Indonesians. And what did she, what did she learn? It's not impossible. That's what she said. Because she's been working on the genetics of things as to prove that our ancestry is kind of like all mixed up, right? And it's kind of good because it justifies the notion that we shouldn't be worried about pre-bumi, non-prebumi. We shouldn't be worried about racial differentiation.

because, you know, if we trace the DNA of all the Suku's in Indonesia, all the way back, thousands of years, there's commonality. Oh, yeah. Right? And so, yeah, we just got to try to trace it back to 75,000 years ago. And there is, I think, well, not a deduction, but sort of a number. notion that I think there could have been a disruption. If we go back 76,000 years ago, whatever species that existed in Indonesia, Southeast Asia, or the broader Asia, wouldn't have anything to do with what had existed 40, 50,000 years

ago. It wasn't that linear. So whatever we found that would have existed 40, 50,000 years ago would have been a migration of species or creatures. creatures or things that would have come from a different direction, right? Well, to me this is an irresistible story. Okay. When I was in Taiwan, maybe some people watching this, there's a place you can go,

which is near the famous Turoko Gorge, which is a big canyon. And it's like a Kampung Adat and it has the aboriginal people of Taiwan. of Taiwan. And there's a rock there with some inscription in their native language. And if you speak a melee-based language, you can kind of figure out what's on the rock, right? Yeah. Fascinating. And, you know, the dispersion of people from Indonesia and to Indonesia is so vast. Yeah. That it would be really interesting to kind of take it back to year zero where everything reboots. Yeah.

And how did it all get there? Well, that's encouraging. It turns the global narrative on its head, right? Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I want to switch topic to it. You've written a book about China, you've written a book about, a book about, But, you know, the shock of gray, you talked a lot about what was happening in Florida, you know, with those people that were aging and all that, right? So I want to put this in the context of, you know, the decoupling that's happening between the U.S. and China.

And, you know, some people are of the opinion that the Cold War has started between China and the U.S. but I'm sort of like in a camp that believes that I think if it were to be in a cold war, if they were to be in a cold war, I think it's going to stay cold for a long time. It's not going to get hot. Just from the sheer fact that the trait between the two countries is approximately around 700 billion U.S. Right? Yeah, it's huge. When we saw the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US in 1989, the collective trade between those two countries at that time would have been between $20 to $30 billion.

Right. So it's just, I don't know, intuitively not easy to untangle $700 billion worth of collective economic activities. Right? Yeah, I agree with that. Share your views about what's happening and what you think will unravel going forward. Well, I mean, this is definitely in the spirit of a conversation, because I know your expertise on this is quite deep. No, no, I mean, just in any, you know, from any angle. Yeah.

So, from a big perspective, you know, if we were to imagine a different kind of China that had never engaged with the West or had never gone to, you know, if we were to imagine a different kind of China that had never engaged with the West or had never gone to. to a market economy, how dangerous would the world be now? We'd be dealing with an entity that was closer to North Korea, but with 1.4 billion people. And the world would be far more dangerous. So at the most basic, we should be thankful for the status quo with China right now, because the world has been diffused

from what would be a much bigger danger. And not just a danger from China, but how would the United States react to a North Korea that had 1.5 billion, 4 billion people? The world or Japan. That would be scary. It'd be terrifying. So if you kind of look at China, rather, you know, the classic way of separating the views is, do you look at it as a snapshot right now and all of the problems now, or do you look at it as a movie? And as a movie, we're in a pretty good place. If you look at the snapshot, there's a lot of tension.

And one thing I hear a lot from Indonesians is that they are, many Indonesians are convinced that the United States is somehow in decline and that China is on the rise. I don't think the United States is in decline. I think just empirically, it's not. If you look at the news and CNN is your barometer for the United States or Fox News is the barometer of the United States, you're looking at entities whose whole business it is to sell ads against convincing the world that there are problems. Yeah, chasing clicks.

Yeah, chasing clicks. And so, of course, the most dramatic, the most tension-filled elements of American society are going to be broadcast to the rest of the world. If you see China from the point of view of Chinese media or how China disseminates its information, it is free of drama. There's no drama. You can't even, you'll never know the problems that are there here. You'll only know the problems. So just in terms of evaluating the world empirically, there's a problem with seeing it from the point of view of the sources that most of the world sees. You know, United States has a far smaller population than China.

We're still a big country, of course. But in terms of our economic power, it's still far greater than China on so many fronts. We have an enormously dynamic economy, a changing economy. We have an economy where whole industries can replace themselves in a matter of years with new industries. you know, it's the envy of the world that way. Nobody says they want to build a new Chengdu. They say they want to build a new Silicon Valley.

Or maybe even Silicon Valley's old hat now. And, you know, when you think about it from the soft power point of view, I think China is still kind of a desert in soft power, except for economic, except for the kind of economic pressure it could bring to bear on countries. Or the largesse it could bring with loans and investment. But you don't really turn on Indonesian radio and hear Chinese pop stars. Yeah. Even compared to South Korea or Japan, it has no presence in the mine share.

Yeah. of the world. It's more snoop dog and, you know, Dr. Dre and Mary Jerry Blige and Ariana Grant. Or look at Indonesian pop culture. You know, there's several strains in which Indonesian pop culture is headed. You know, one is kind of a more international mode with stand-up and comic films and and, you know, things that play easily on Netflix.

Right. And there's the more religious stuff that is influenced more by strains, maybe from Turkey or the Middle East or the subcontinent. But pop culture is not coming from China, really. It's coming more from Korea, actually. Yeah, Korea, like, Japan owned it, Korea owned it. It's crazy. Yeah. But you know, you can't be a Korean-style boy band in China anymore because they don't want boys to look like that. You know, it's like they'll just stop it.

You know, what, you know, I just kind of feel in terms of like, what does the world want outside China? You know, what image does the rest of Asia have of itself? It, I think the image, the rest of Asia, the rest of it. I think the image, the rest of the rest of it. I think the image, the rest of the rest of. of Asia has of itself is number one, be as true as possible you can to your own country, whether it's Indonesia, Korea, or Japan. And then second, kind of latch on to the cool, the cool strains of global culture, which aren't coming from China right now. I think the whole world's waiting for it to come from China because there's enormous creativity pent up in that country. And I'm just waiting for it to show up in the way that Japan and Korea have been able to do. Geopolitically, it seems like the United States is, you know, China seems like, you know,

it talks really aggressively and it builds islands where maybe where it should or shouldn't build islands. The South China Sea is really contentious. But who's getting signed up for all these security agreements around the world, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and everything. You know, there's coalition, these are multilateral coalitions that are building as bulwarks

that are insurance against an aggressive China. And maybe insurance against an aggressive United States, too, who knows? Yeah. But, you know, I think there is a kind of, this is one really troubling thing to me about some of the streams of thought that I hear among Indonesian elites, which is there's a kind of romance with dictatorship.

You know, like they think America is coming apart because it's too democratic because democracy has failed and that China's really got it together. You know, look what China has done for itself. But is what China's done for itself better than what Korea has done for itself or then Japan is done for itself or Taiwan is done for itself with democracy. I don't know.

You know, pick the future you want to live in. Yeah. Yeah. You know, China started from a very low base. Its standard of living has gone up manyfold, which is absolutely admirable. It's rescued a lot of people from the most dire kinds of poverty. which you could argue Chinese culture created initially anyway.

But in terms of a model as being a model for other countries in its governance, I think there'd be a lot of regret if that model were to quickly seize Indonesia or other more democratic places in Southeast Asia. You know, I kind of, I kind of see, like you, I kind of see a future which there's a lot more muddling through than a future where things are really decided in that way. And the muddling through kind of, it favors the gray zones. Yeah. I don't know. But, you know, there are, I don't want to say, Gita, that there aren't huge problems facing the U.S. there are huge problems.

Not just the U.S., but many democracies around the world. Many democracies, but that's kind of the, you know, the democracies are under threat, right? So you don't want the democracies to go abroad. But when democracies just have problems, they're just proving that they're democracies. Right. Right. I mean, democracy is super messy. Right.

It's super messy. You just have to make sure that it doesn't vote itself out of existence. Yeah. But, you know, isn't it a good thing that all of these issues are coming to the fore? That they're not swept under the carpet, you know, that race divides, ethnic divides, wealth divides, you know, geographical tensions. Isn't it a good thing that in the long run that they're being fleshed out? Yeah. Interesting.

You know, that's us at work. the media, the media, the issues around the media, though, are, are really intense. You know, I just, I, yesterday I was just so, I turned on the news. I turned on CNN. And, first of all, CNN is just filled with advertisements for medicines that are for people my age and older. So it makes me feel really old. You know, these American ads, they always show. you older people looking pretty fit playing football riding their bikes doing everything and then then

80% of the ad is warnings on all the side effects these drugs have why they show you these beautiful pictures and they just make you feel like a thousand years old and that you're sick so and and and they're selling news against this so that so the people watching these news stations are older people sitting in their chairs coughing looking at the world falling apart yeah And I thought, I'm really hungry for just a news source that's not driven by, you know, these commercial impulses that have to have these hooks every 20 seconds. It's depressing. So getting back to your question about books, you know, one of the virtues of books is that they sell on the virtue of their ideas, not on the virtue of the ads. Well, this is, I think this is going to take us to the last part of our conversation where we talk about the future, right?

And I usually end up asking about where Indonesia is going to end up in 2045, which is about 22, 23 years from today, right? And I agree with you in that, you know, the media have not played enough of a role in democratizing ideas, right? They've, I think, played a much bigger role in polarizing ideas. And I think people deserve to enjoy the whole spectrum as opposed to just two poles of the spectrum. and I do envision a future of Indonesia where every Indonesian gets to enjoy the whole spectrum of ideas. Right? Let's take it from there, Ted. How do you see and what do you see as some of the things that Indonesians or Indonesia need to do?

To achieve a good future in 2045? Well, first of all, you're deeply involved in the project of creating the country's best public policy school. And I assume... In shall be... It's happening. I assume when people come to study public policy with you and your colleagues, you're not teaching them how to propagandize. You're not teaching them how to tilt the facts. you're not teaching them to mislead the public.

You know, you're teaching them how to deliver the best goods and services to the people of Indonesia using the best empirical tools available in persuading people around those. You know, and I think one of the things that is missing from political discussion in the United States,

and it's often absent from political discussion in Indonesia, is who are the candidates, who are the leaders, who we will celebrate for their intelligence and their competence, rather than for the power of their personality, their ideology, their fame, their wealth, and so on. And this might just be part of the pendulum, of democracy, where you move from a period where people are really defending their own to when they have a deeper sense of the public, and what is the public, and what's in the public interest,

and are we citizens of the same entity? You know, both of our countries have these modos, you know, from many, one. But I think both of our countries are also in this mode where we're kind of from one many. And, you know, it has to swing the other way. And I think the way, and I think the that happens is when you get the competent people to stand up and say, you know, this is what's important to the public. What's important is we're making people healthier, happier, richer, kinder, and more satisfied in their community, from a sense of community rather than the things you can do in your own home against the people who are your neighbors. And, you know, one of the things I really love about my time in Indonesia and among Indonesians is that when you get down to the local level, there is no place where there's a stronger sense of community than an Indonesian community.

I mean, I think Indonesians really feel it and they want it. And I learned it. I learned it there, you know, Gotongroyang. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, it's a kind of gift that's always there in Indonesia. But as you get further and further, and the geographies grow and grow, than the divisions.

But look, Indonesia's defied the world's expectations for decades when the rest of the world expected it to break up into 100 different countries. Yeah. And Indonesians like being one country. And it's still relatively new democracy. I think Indonesia in 2045 will just be much more sophisticated about governance. You know, it's still hammering out what kind of structures, what level of local democracy, national democracy, who should be appointed, who should be elected, all of that stuff. I think those issues will probably be further resolved and there'll be stability.

on that front. The United States went through all of those stages, and we still do. But, I mean, those are things that tend to get resolved over time. I think in terms of governance and, you know, the quality of institutions, Indonesia is about it the place where young democracies are at. Right.

You know, I take comfort in a fact. that some of the imperfections that we're witnessing anywhere in any democracy are actually non-permanent. You know, they're not parts of the laws of physics, right? So the non-permanence of some of these imperfections gives me optimism, you know, and I do believe that the young generations of Indonesia or Indonesians, I think they will have that necessary intuition to move in the right direction. And expertise. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

There's your school. I'm here in the shadow of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Every year there's more Indonesians there studying economics, public policy, science. is computer science, everything. And, you know, so the intellectual capital of the country can, you know, only go up. Yeah. The brilliance is already there.

It's just, you know, having the chance to identify it. And look, Indonesia is, you know, even despite COVID and everything, it can still be and is, you know, the envy of many other places in the world. You know, it's a one. It's a wonderful place to live and spend time, you know. And when I'm not there, I miss it. And the big challenges for Indonesia in 2045 are the global challenges. You know, nobody needs me to say it, but climate is a huge issue.

Indonesia faces its own particular threats because of climate change. And the news never gets spent. The news on climate never gets better. It only gets worse. So Indonesia will need the best institutions, the biggest sense of public purpose, in order to have the resilience to manage the challenges that are coming with climate change. I agree. Wow.

Okay. I would say one more thing. I would say one more thing, which is related to your China question, which is, you know, there was this book a while ago, I think it was mostly the United States was the target of the book. You know, in Indonesia that can say no. I think every country has somebody who writes the book about our country can say no. And for most of the post-World War II period, it meant saying no to the United States.

Right. And, you know, people can still say no to the United States because we are a democracy. but the ability of ASEAN countries to say no to China is maybe getting harder. There is some degree of co-optation. Yeah. And, you know, I think, you know, what's, you know,

it's a big question on what direction it'll go in. They'll either be a strong counter-reaction to that. You know, Indonesia's history is to assert its own independence. You know,

it's, it's the founder of the non-aligned movement. Yeah. It's just, you know, how is that going to rear its head? Is it going to come through

the political, you know, the standard nationalist political conversation? Is it going to come from a religious quarter? Is the fact that China has imprisoned 3 million Muslims going to be a political issue in Indonesia. Those are all things that will play out.

Yeah. Yeah. We all have our bugaboos. China's got the wigger issue. The United States is a big supporter of Israel. Nobody's perfect. Yeah. But, you know,

It's important to coalesce. Yeah. Right? To collaborate. So I think whoever is going to be able to collaborate more and better and faster is going to stand out. Yeah. And whoever is going to alienate, you know, himself or herself from the others faster, more. and worse is less likely to stand out.

You know, I thought one of the really great endgame interviews you did was with Pat Marty talking about ASEAN. Yeah, he's a dear friend. Oh, my. And he really, you know, despite all of the ways people badmouthed ASEAN, China in particular, you know, he's a real optimist on the ability. the ability to find common ground. Well, he's a true believer of the centrality of ASEAN. And that's what's going to carry us a long way.

Yes, we've gone through some episodes where centrality has been somewhat challenged or questioned. But I think we're going to, you know, pull through. through. And he's in that camp. Yeah. So, you know, whatever you know, whatever you've been talking about, whatever I've been talking about, I think it's episodic, right? And I think you're right, the pendulum is going to swing. Question is time frame, when? Right. Right. And the world does have these things where you just don't have all the time in the world. You don't have all the time in the world on climate.

Yeah. Anyway, Ted, any final messages for us? Well, you know, when you're talking about the world's concerns, it's natural to sound concern. But when it comes to Indonesia, you know, I think there's every reason to be optimistic. You know, so I'm engaged with Indonesians almost every day in my life. I engage with them socially, intellectually, and in other ways, artistically. Culinarily, culturally. Culinarily.

And, you know, every time I come back to thinking about Indonesia, you know, it's just it's like thinking about a treasure chest, you know, for me, my relationship with the country is one of the treasures of my life. I'm really optimistic about the country's future. I've seen the genius of Indonesians up close. I feed off the genius of Indonesians. And, you know, when I, there's a lot of places in the world to be deeply, deeply pessimistic. Yeah, I agree. There aren't a lot of places to be optimistic, but Indonesia really is an honest. It's one of the few. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Thank you so much, Ted. Oh, my pleasure.

For being a friend of Indonesia. I'm so grateful. All right, enjoy the snow. Thank you. Thank you. It's going to be, there's no snow today. It's an ice storm. All right.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Hita. T-Temann, that's our friend we're dead fishman, penelies, Thank you. Thank you.

This is Endgame.