August 2026
Shea and Marianna Spring are picking apart the Bali digital-nomad scene: the courses, the co-working villas, the matcha raves. Just before this, Spring points out that the gurus selling the courses often are not very viral themselves, which is why they need the course. Shea's line names the loop the whole economy runs on.
Transcript
all the perks. And that was the four-hour work week. That book. People were like, wow, this guy's working four hours, traveling the world, living this amazing lifestyle. I can do that too. Now, in reality, he was doing that by outsourcing a lot of his work to virtual assistants in third world countries, which is a lot of what these digital nomads are doing. He also eventually had to sell nutritional supplements like every podcaster in the world because that's kind of one of the few ways you can make money living this lifestyle. What do people end up doing? They end up selling courses on how to be an influencer, how to be a digital nomad. So there are courses in Bali where they cost like £3,000 a month and they promise you like influencer crash courses and stuff where you live in a villa with a supposed like influencer guru and they teach you how to become an influencer and you'll be earning £30,000. Even though often the gurus themselves, the
gurus themselves are not even actually that viral. It's like that's the reason why you're having the course in the first place because you're not making enough money from your own social media.
And look, some people do make it and they end up living this dream lifestyle, but it's hard. But like the vast majority of people don't. And so what you end up having is this kind of like matcha flavored Russian doll of nothingness where it's like influencers selling courses to influencers on how to become influencers selling courses to influencers and so forth and so forth. And no one's actually doing any real work basically. And that is where matcha raves come from. Because what is a matcha rave but just like an empty, vacuous chance for like cross-pollination between a matcha shop, an influencer and another influencer and a DJ to all like promote. It's like so social media
coded. And is anyone having a good time? Probably not.
I just finished my first class in Indonesia. Everyone say hi. Hi. We're off to our matcha rave. Apparently the matcha is really good. So we're going to see because I've never really had a good, good, good matcha.
But it comes back to that thing we chatted about when we did one of our top comment episodes where we were talking about influencers and observations about how they interact with one another and the slightly sort of abnormal, disingenuous lives they live, which feels so at odds with what is supposed to make an influencer good at being an influencer, which is they are very genuine. They are very authentic. They seem like the average person. It's like the lifestyles these people are leading are so different to the average person's life. They become almost unrelatable and like quite almost like dehumanized, right? They don't really seem like human beings. It's sort of like little robots.