Who is John Ho?
John Ho is a Hongkonger who has lived in Chiang Mai for a decade. He grew up in Cantonese-speaking, pre-1997 Hong Kong. Studied cognitive science at UCLA, picked up Japanese after graduation, and married a Thai woman.
Their kids speak three languages. He spent nine years working in Hong Kong hotels, then amassed a big following as a live streamer on Periscope, which is where his marketing instinct comes from.
He crowdfunded Alt_ChiangMai, the city's first coliving and coworking space purpose-built for remote workers, and later opened Alt_PingRiver in Wat Ket district.
Today he leads the Nomad Friendly District initiative with provincial government backing. Runs the Cosmo Local CNX pop-up village, co-writes The Extended Stay newsletter, and supports coliving owners across the world.
CosmoLocal CNX
The CosmoLocal CNX is starting on September 1st 2026
John Ho's projects and online presence
- The Extended Stay — John's newsletter on community-powered hospitality. He published the Network School piece I mentioned in this episode
- How to Crowdfund a Coliving Space — an earlier interview with John on the Colivers Club podcast, if you want the origin story of Alt
Colivings and coworking spaces
- Alt_Coliving — Chiang Mai's first purpose-built coliving and coworking spaces
- Alt_ChiangMai — the original site in the Old City, 27 ensuite rooms and a full coworking floor
- Alt_PingRiver — the second location in the Wat Ket riverside neighborhood, and the home base for Cosmo Local CNX
- Nine Coliving — the coliving in La Orotava, Tenerife, where I stayed. Placed in 19-century Canarian house in a town that has almost nothing to do with the tourist south
- Colive Fukuoka — the Japanese nomad gathering that partners with Alt
Events and projects
- Cosmo Local CNX — John's month-long pop-up village in Chiang Mai, September 2026
- We Got Government Support for a Nomad District in Thailand — how Wat Ket became Chiang Mai's officially recognized Nomad Friendly District
- Building a September — John's argument for filling Chiang Mai's quiet month instead of accepting it
- Can an Unknown Japanese Town of 7,000 Become a Digital Nomad Destination? — the Kotohira story I bring up when we talk about paying to stay a month somewhere you know nothing about
- The Role That Makes or Breaks Your Community Promise — John on community managers
The Network School case
- Network School — Balaji Srinivasan's live-in startup society, launched in Forest City, Johor in 2024
- Forest City, Johor — the half-empty megaproject next to Singapore that hosted it
- Forest City's Network School shut down after business licence revoked — the licensing decision that ended it in a week
- Booted from Malaysia, Balaji finds a new patron: Kazakhstan — the pivot I compare to leasing a cosmodrome
- The Network State — the book the whole movement came from
- Baikonur Cosmodrome — the Russian launch site leased from Kazakhstan. My reference point for what a rented enclave actually looks like
John Ho
People and platforms
- Mapmelon — Ramón and Sole's coliving platform. They connected me with John, and I am grateful for that
- MangoBeds — their booking software built specifically for colivings
- Colivers Club — the coliving community and podcast where I was a guest as well
Piotrek Bodera
Places we talked about
- Chiang Mai — a famous nomad hub where we met in person
- La Orotava — the hill town in northern Tenerife where I stayed for a year and met Ramón
- Jiuzhaigou — home of the Five Color Lake I spotted on John's Instagram, shot from a drone
- Kotohira — the Shikoku temple town of around 7,000 people that now hosts a coliving
- Kanazawa — another Japanese city building coliving and workation programs for remote workers
Hong Kong pop culture
- Jackie Chan — my biggest role model as a kid
- Jet Li — next in line for me after Jackie
- Hong Kong action cinema — the 1970s to 1990s run I still consider the benchmark for doing a lot with a small budget. No CGI, no AI, all stunts, and fights were real
Manga
- Naruto — the series I spotted on John's Instagram
- Boruto: Naruto Next Generations — the sequel still running after the main story finished
- One Piece — thousands of chapters and still one continuous story
- Manga Plus — the official app I recommend. Many manga titles are free. Full archive access requires a subscription. I use it on an iPad and it reconnected me with my teenage self
Concepts and references
- Six degrees of separation — the handshake theory that keeps proving itself in the nomad world
- 996 working hour system — my side-note question to John about how hard he actually works
- Periscope — the live streaming platform where John built his early audience
- Fiat 500 — the car from his Spanish road trip photos
Chapters / Timestamps
0:00 Start
1:46 No culture = no identity: growing up Cantonese in Hong Kong
4:35 A colony's side effect: learning there is more than one way to live
7:32 Culture shock in California, a second life in Japan, third culture kids at home
11:53 Jackie Chan, kung-fu economics, and the golden era of Hong Kong cinema
16:47 What Hongkonger still means to John after ten years away
19:53 No money, no talk: Cantonese culture, swearing, and why every square meter counts
23:27 From landmark tourism to people tourism: John goes where someone will host him
28:59 Chiang Mai before the label: meeting nomads when the word was still new
32:09 Nomading is something you do, not something you are
33:53 Cosmolocalism explained: a pop-up village that rooted in Chiang Mai
39:48 Four tracks for September 2026: AI for Chiang Mai, solopreneurship, nourishing food, and a futures lab
45:26 John realized he was building bubbles: the 2.0 mission for Alt_Coliving
50:59 Membrane, not bubble: visas, taxes, and the pathways Thailand still lacks
52:45 Kotohira, population 7,000: how a temple town learned to host nomads
58:56 "996" workweek, overcommitting, and the monthly stay that baffles the locals
1:01:51 Network School post-mortem: Forest City, Edge City Lanna, and skipping the neighbors
1:07:22 White Lotus economics: enclaves, Baikonur, and the win-win-win alternative
1:12:07 The counter narrative: an AI agent, a bunker, and nomad loneliness
1:16:00 Wednesday runs: how a community outgrows its founder, John
1:19:54 Manga, Rick and Morty, and why every nomad has a good story
1:24:11 Where to find John Ho online
John Ho podcast quotes
“Because if you look at how the world is developing with technology, it is pushing us to be more and more independent, to be less reliant on people, to say, I can do everything by myself. All I need is an AI agent and a bunker.”
— John Ho
“Five years later, I understand that I'm actually building bubbles. I'm building bubbles for the nomads to be very comfortable to live within it, to live and operate within it. And that's not enough.”
— John Ho
“If you don't associate with the local space and people that you coexist with, then you might as well do it in Mars or the Moon or the Sahara Desert.”
— John Ho
“We want to grow, we want to develop, we want to be better. But hopefully not at the cost of the places that we pass by.”
— John Ho
“We can preach as much as we want about the importance of communities and loneliness is not good. But then at the same time, will you pay for it? Do you put the effort to talk to people that you don't agree with?”
— John Ho
Discussion