A Salt Shaking Trip to Southeast Asia

As I noted in the post about charities, I was invited to a three week trip to Southeast Asia, to tour the tsunami ravaged countries, learn about them, and advise them on dealing with the post-tsunami infrastructure issues. I might discuss the actual trip in more depth elsewhere, although an anonymous blog about sex and relationships wouldn't be the most leveraged place to post. So instead I'll focus on the relationship-related parts of my trip.

Our evolution has pushed a lot of interesting social behaviors into our psyche. Try reading Moral Animal and the Selfish Gene for a perspective on this. The writing is more accessible and friendly than the authors (particularly since one of them is dead). Yes, they are often too strident in making their points, but they and many books like them are good introductions into a different world of thinking of the origins of our behaviors.

In order to advise governments on dealing with infrastructure issues, it was very important to first learn about the social patterns in those countries. This was the most fascinating part of the trip.

Much of Southeast Asia are collections of small villages. Modernization means they can have running water, electricity, television, and mopeds, but many social artifacts of their past remain. Newer villages branch out from older ones. They tend to be small. The reason a new village starts is to exploit a natural resource, and therefore most villages are single economies -- they may be mining metals, stone cutters, fishing, or finishing goods. Consequently they must trade to survive.

Although my education in Southeast Asia was intense -- and sponsored by various governments and non-government organizations -- let me talk about two kinds of trade that I think relevant to the blog: salt, and women.

Desperate Housewives and The Spice of Life

Salt is a necessary chemical for survival. In Africa, the salt lick is the UN for animals, where animals of many types will temporarily peacefully coexist to obtain their salt (and then, continuing with the UN analogy, the larger animals will eat the smaller animals when nobody is looking). With today's modern high-salt diets and our continuous pressure to reduce salt, it's hard to believe that not too long ago, our ancestors actively would seek salt, and die if they had insufficient quantities.

This was still the case in parts of the developing world as recently as the last century.

In small island communities, salt is available. You are never too far from salt water, for example, so it isn't too difficult to have your own salt. But consider a large continent, like China or parts of Indonesia and Malaysia. The interiors are relatively inaccessible. It could take weeks or months to get salt from the ocean or a salt mine to villages in certain locations. How do you do it?

Enter the salt trader, a curious artifact of recent history.

The salt trader is a man who travels with loads of salt. He wanders from village to village, selling salt. Given the long travelling, and the fact that salt keeps well (so the salt trader doesn't have to visit any given village very often), the salt trader's range is usually very large. He gets around, but episodically.

So if you are a village, how do you make sure that the salt trader will come to your location? What is the incentive?

Sex, of course.

The incentive for the salt trader is that the villages would allow the salt trader access to their women. Usually any woman who was a widower would have sex with the salt trader. This was voluntary, the salt trader was generally very popular with those women. Hey, he's from out of town and probably had a lot of good stories. He was also contributing to a little genetic diversity. There was no stigma with having the child of a salt trader. This was all part of the social contract to get the salt trader to come. So to speak.

Not a bad job, if you don't mind walking. In fact, I'm surprised there wasn't a ton of competition for the job. Yep, get in line... Behind me.

Of course, the salt trader is gone now. Given that most developing nations in the world have extensive roads and available mopeds or automobiles (and fuel infrastructure), moving salt is no longer such a time-consuming lifetime endeavor.

Mixers

Small villages don't have genetic diversity. A population of under one hundred, or even a few hundred, runs the risk of inbreeding. So what do you do?

Parties.

There are a truly stunning number of holidays in Southeast Asian countries. Well, in fact most locales with lots of small villages. Many of these holidays are opportunities for villages to visit other villages and have celebrations.

Part of the reason for these celebrations are to introduce the young men to young women in other villages. Even if mediated by their elders, it gives a reasonable way to cement village trading relationships, continue social interactions, and, well, cross fertilize ideas, training, and genes.

The trade in women is a long tradition, reinforced by genetic necessity. Again, this is a historical case, and is no longer the norm. Again the reason is the moped and automobile; it is now easy to move between villages so mixers are not required to enhance genetic diversity.

Salt trading and trading women. This must be why I love to travel -- it's in my genes.

I almost forgot to justify the title of this posting. While I was in Sri Lanka and only a day out of Aceh, that area was hit by another high magnitude earthquake. In fact it killed one of the support staff I had met just a few days earlier. Very sobering. So that was "shaking things up." It was one of three earthquakes I have experienced in my year in Asia. About three too many, actually. But between the travel and the earthquakes, I guess I have truly qualified as "a mover and a shaker!"

Charitable Endeavors

Part of my work is managing money, according to my needs. Money has never been a goal for me, but as a means to an end, it's hard to argue that it helps. Managing money wisely, however, has been quite educational for me. My mantra is to learn from my mistakes, and I have made my share of mistakes.

Charitable giving is something that deserves a few entries by itself. But that's for a later time. Right now, I'll just say that I have several causes of interest, I attack them in a very low profile manner, and in total I try to give away 80% to 90% of my wealth. I'll be the first to admit that 90% isn't as impressive fraction as you might initlally think (unless you are wealthy, but I'll get to that in a moment), since the remainder of what I keep is more than enough to maintain a lifestyle in which I can do whatever I want; it's a luxurious lifestyle, and more than enough. What would I do with the rest anyhow? Somebody is going to get it, whether I'm spending it on a yacht, or buying a company, or wiping my ass on hand-softened Egyptian cotton toilet paper every day (yes, I am very regular). Might as well be people who really need it.

Having said that, I learned from my first fortune, that there are far too many people who need money to help even a small fraction. The more you help, the more you realize how much more help is needed. Somebody with a statistics background might find it difficult to believe any one person can make a difference. And an optimist like me wants to feel they are going a good job. An obvious point is that giving the poor and needy money isn't always the most leveraged approach. There is a Chinese parable: "Give me a fish, I eat for a day / Teach me to fish, I eat for a lifetime." There are variants on this theme that may be more relevant, but leverage and independence is the key point. Sure, maybe I could buy everybody in Africa a french fry (and I mean a single fry, not an order of fries), but perhaps it's better to invest in education and economic productivity. Yes, there is a fine line between such "wise" investment and cultural imperialism but again, that's a topic for another discussion. I happen to believe that self-determinism, productivity and economic independence is the best compromise to solving issues of the poor and repressed while respecting culture.

So when I was asked by a close friend to join a strategic advisory mission to the tsunami affected countries in Southeast Asia, my first reaction was to research it. Could I make a difference financially and in an advisory capacity? Was this something that would be interesting?

I found it curious how poorly covered this disaster was in the United States. At least I could learn a lot, and advice often leads to a closer relationship than just money. And I had a little surplus that year, surprise found money, not much, but a little bit that I could put to work if I found this interesting. So I accepted.

In the course of the highly educational trip, I did end up investing charitably into the cause. But only after extensive research, and strings attached. Micromanagement? Yes, perhaps, but it is my money...

Comrades in Arms

I alluded to being in Belarus in an earlier post. What was I doing there?

Let's wind up the Way Back machine and go back in time to before that meeting...

I had occasion to hook up with a Russian billionaire, Vladimir, who has been moving a lot of his wealth off-shore. He is a fun-loving guy who is looking for certain places to park his money. I actually think it's a way to launder his money but I have no direct evidence, just a hunch. A really strong hunch...

An overriding constraint on all activities is that Vladimir does not want to cross Putin and end up in the modern version of a Siberian gulag (which is what a jail looks like to a billionaire, I am sure). Consequently most of Vladimir's experience in hosting VIPs comes from giving favors to Putin and his family; use of the ski chalet, the yacht, and so on.

I hadn't been to Russia for quite some time, and I had business reasons to be there. So when I next met Vladimir in NYC, I asked him for some references for things to do in Russia. Throwing aside his Muscovite pretentions, he said in his hearty Cossack voice, "No, Zeegmund, my friend, you must come as my guest!"

Now one previous trip to Russia involved having bodyguards, a first for me. If you're going to be in a dangerous zone, I can understand bodyguards. But in this case, the bodyguards were there to protect me from... the bodyguards! Let me explain... it was explained to me that I needed bodyguards. In my analytical way, I asked for actual evidence that this was so. It was then explained to me that the company that provided the bodyguards could also, in essence, sell me to the highest bidder in terms of kidnappers. Buying their bodyguard service would ensure that this unfortunate and entirely preventable event would not occur. Hmm.. in the old days they called this a "protection racket." Today they call it the Russian security services business model.

Keeping this in mind, I took Vlad's offer of guidance. But hindsight being 20:20, I now know what I should have kept in mind was my trip with J.

Spending time in Moscow with Vlad was something like spending time in a drunken hedonistic fog. Four days and nights of continuous revelry. Days spent at a dacha stocked with drink, women, and food (in decreasing order of total mass); evenings spent ferried in limos between private clubs and private rooms in public clubs soaked in alcohol, food, tobacco smoke and perfume; and late nights in drunken gropes supervised by spookily silent armed bodyguards. I was never more than ten minutes away from the nearly-forced company of a woman, who more frequently than not, was not the same woman from the hour before. What started as an exciting and novel experience quickly degenerated into a numbing parade of anonymous flesh.

I had emotionally checked out before I arrived. I mentally checked out around the tenth hour: after that I was just coasting, observing but not really participating. I physically checked out early the third day: after that I was relying on muscle memory to keep me from sleeping.

I will say this, though. The women there were breathtakingly beautiful. A mixture of model looks, very open and willing personalities, sexually liberal, and submissive to men. On the other hand, they were not very sexually skilled. A single evening's encounter was much like masturbating to the photo of a gorgeous magazine model, except the model was really there and would do all the work. Okay, so it's better. But bear with me here while I make my point: but four days of encounters was much like having a room full of those magazine photos and masturbating to them. Not as good as you'd think: visually exhausting, and frankly takes the fun out of it.

I was careful to see if there were hidden cameras or other such paraphenalia around. Not that Vladimir would gain much that way, but, well... you know. Didn't see anything, but I suppose that doesn't mean anything. On the other hand, I didn't do much that would result in a valuable recording. I was also careful about eating and drinking the same things as my host(s). Call me paranoid, but it was quite clear I was utterly and completely at the mercy of Vladimir when I was in an estate about two hours out of Moscow stocked with dogs, armed guards, servants, and women, about a dozen of each, without knowing anybody else around.

After this experience, I made excuses to get back to work. My break with Jill Monroe in Belarus was, by comparison, a true vacation for the senses.