Podcast: AMA Question || E-wallet & Science Videos || YouTube Stories (Jan 5, 2026)

VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

With my time in Banda Aceh coming to an end, I sat down and talked about a few things that have been happening on Planet Doug.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning and welcome back to Planet Doug behind the scenes, the Planet Doug podcast.

And I’m actually folding this video into the Planet Doug Ask Me Anything video for December because in the month of December, I got one question for the Ask Me Anything sequence.

Normally what I do is when it comes around time for the Ask Me Anything at the end of the month, I ask for submissions. Like I go across all social media and tell people, you know, I’m going to make a video. If you want me to answer any questions, you know, submit your questions now, submit your questions now. But I didn’t do that this time because on Patreon I have a pinned post for the Ask Me Anything video and then it’s there if anybody wants to list a question for that video. And I just left that there as the main lead-in.

And I got one question. To be honest, I didn’t think I would get any, but I did get one question at the very end of the year.

So I’m going to start this podcast by answering that question. And then I think, to be honest, as I talk about what’s going on on Planet Doug, I’ll end up answering a lot of people’s questions anyway. So I will pretend that people asked me a whole bunch of questions and then I will just be answering them in this podcast.

Oh, by the way, for anyone who hasn’t seen it before, this is the more typical Planet Doug studio setup. I just put my GoPro on a tripod on my bed in my hotel room and I just talk here. Nicely air-conditioned, very quiet.

I have a cup of coffee, instant coffee, because recently I’ve been filming videos at my neighborhood coffee shop. I’m still here in Banda Aceh and Banda Aceh has an amazing coffee culture. So that’s probably my favorite thing about the city — the coffee culture where people hang out and work and socialize after prayers at the mosque. They all go to these really large outdoor coffee areas and gather around tables and yeah, just hang out there. I really like that.

And my neighborhood has a really nice one called Solong Coffee. And a lot of the videos that I’ve posted lately about e-wallets and tidal waves, tsunamis and alcohol proof, things like that — I filmed all of them sitting at a table at the Solong coffee shop. But I thought I would switch it up and come back to normal Planet Doug Studios so I can enjoy cup after cup of my favorite instant coffee.

So I have the one question for Ask Me Anything and it’s from — by this point I should know how to say this person’s online name but I don’t know even now — R A I, Ry, Ray, um, Ry. Ry has been around Planet Doug for a long time, a supporter and viewer and a subscriber.

And Ry, he writes: “Merry Christmas, Doug. I’ve been a subscriber since the pandemic when you were in Mesa, and I’ve really enjoyed following your journey so far. Has the channel lived up to your expectations so far? And do you feel like it still has room to grow? Also, do you have any big plans or goals for 2026? Wishing you all the best for the new year.”

So that’s a big question and yet I mean the answer is actually pretty simple and I think in a way it’s quite obvious though I could go into a lot of the detail.

He asks, has the channel lived up to your expectations? Obviously, I think if you look at the views of my videos, the response to them, no. The channel definitely has not lived up to my expectations. Especially when you consider how long I’ve been doing it now and how much work I put into it.

I mean a lot of YouTubers talk about this, but I think it bears repeating to answer this question that the amount of work that goes into making any video is astonishing. And yeah, it’s just incredible. Like the time that goes into it, the effort that goes into it is really quite something. And until you start making videos yourself, you really don’t understand.

Or maybe it’s just the way I do it. Maybe other people just whip them off very very quickly, but somehow it ends up consuming my entire life day and night. It’s all I do. It may not look like it in my videos or in my YouTube channel. You’d think if anybody worked that hard, that long on something, surely it would lead to success.

But YouTube videos just don’t work that way. So no, it has not lived up to my expectations.

I had very minimal expectations going all the way back to the beginning. To be honest, when I started shooting video, I had no expectations at all. At that time I was just a backpacker and a cyclist. I was in Sumatra at the time and I was doing a bit of hanging out as I always do, cycling a little bit in Sumatra.

So I was basically living a life of traveling on the road, riding my bike around Sumatra, hanging out in various places for extended periods of time. And at that time I discovered YouTube travel videos. I hadn’t really been aware of them before.

I had always been a photographer. I enjoy taking pictures and I enjoy writing. So whenever I have some sort of a travel adventure, I ride my bike somewhere interesting. In the morning I sit down and I write a letter or an email to a friend of mine, a long journal entry basically, and I take a bunch of pictures.

And I had a website back then called The Cycling Canadian. And then I was just posting stories and photos to my website, The Cycling Canadian. And nobody ever went to the website. Nobody ever read anything I wrote. Nobody looked at any of the pictures I took. It was just a website sitting on the internet. It might as well not existed basically.

But it took a lot of work to maintain a website as well. Yeah, that was really hard to do back in those days. It wasn’t like today. Back in those days when I started it, I was cycling in the Philippines mainly. Spent a long time in the Philippines.

And back then the internet hadn’t really exploded in the way it has now. I didn’t have a smartphone. I didn’t have a laptop. I didn’t have a tablet. I didn’t even know about these things yet. I didn’t know about Google Maps.

I was really out of the loop when it came to how far technology had advanced. And the only way for me to maintain my website was to go to internet cafes in the Philippines.

The whole like what I do now, I mean man, I’m like a technological genius now compared to a few years ago when I was in the Philippines. Now with my laptop connected to Wi-Fi, smartphones, GoPro cameras, man, I’ve advanced so far.

None of that existed back then. When I was in the Philippines and I wanted to upload photos or a story to my website, I would wake up at the crack of dawn and I would be writing in my room and then I would go to an internet cafe.

And back in those days these were horrible places. You know, I think back to them now and it’s really like a relic of history. But in the Philippines these internet cafes, it was the only place where I could get on the internet, were awful, horrible, jammed, crowded, smoky, filled with mainly young men, and all they do there is play video games.

So I go into one of these places and it’s like a zoo, screaming and yelling and shouting and chaos and heavy smoke in the air and the computers were a disaster in terms of the keyboard and the mouse and viruses were a big problem in those days and when you had anything on a flash drive you plug that into your computer, you know it was like a thousand of these viruses that were floating around internet cafes and just descend on your flash drive, destroy everything on it.

I mean, it was a totally different world. And I would spend the entire day in these internet cafes. And at the end of the day all I’d managed to do was upload ten photos and one story and put it on my internet. That was like a whole day of work.

And yeah, I remember those days. So that’s where I was at the time, mentally and physically, when I discovered YouTube videos.

And I had never shot video because video files were too big. It was all I could do to upload a photo. And then if I ever shot a little bit of video ’cause I had a camera at that time. I had an Olympus OM-D E-M5, the Mark 1 version. I bought it in Taiwan I think back in 2011 or 2012, something like that.

And that camera could shoot video. But I never shot video because what am I going to do with it? Like massive video files. I can’t upload it to the internet. It would have taken centuries to finish the upload.

It never occurred to me that there was a place on the internet for video. But I guess YouTube was taking off at that time. You know, even people like Casey Neistat were inventing the modern vlog. But I was completely unaware of all of that when it was getting underway.

But then I discovered travel videos. And the one thing I noticed about people who were posting travel videos on YouTube was that they weren’t like me at all. They didn’t match my vision of backpacking and traveling because I predate that era.

And my whole lifestyle has been built around this idea of backpacking where you’re doing everything independently on your own and cheaply. And you know, back in those days hotels were like a dollar a night. There were backpacker hostels and you could get a room there for a dollar up until three dollars per night, something like that.

And all you get is an empty room with a single bed. Like often no sheets, no pillow. It’s just a mattress basically in a room. And then there’d be a bathroom down the hall shared with all the other backpackers. And then you dump water on your head with a bucket.

And much of that world has disappeared.

And when I was watching all these — and these backpackers of course like me, the normal way of traveling is you’re traveling by local bus, local train, you take the bus into town, you get off the bus in the middle of downtown in this crazy busy area. All these touts are shouting at you, you know, come with me, you know, get in my rickshaw, my tuk-tuk, whatever.

And then all you do is shoulder your backpack and you start walking. And then you just walk out of the bus station because right in the neighborhood of the bus station, that’s mainly where all the cheap hotels would be clustered. They’re near the bus stations, near the train stations.

And then you just walk to the nearest one. You see a sign, oh, hotel. Then you go in, can I see a room? They show you a room and it’s like two dollars a night or three dollars a night. It’s awful. You don’t like it. And then you just leave and you walk down the street to the next hotel and you just go from hotel to hotel to hotel until you find a place that seemed okay to you.

And then people had their Lonely Planet guidebooks of course and they list the low-budget hotels. And then quite often people would go to the number one most highly recommended low-budget backpacker hotel. And of course it would be full because everybody’s going there.

And then you’re hanging out with other backpackers and you’re forming little groups. You meet people there and then you go traveling together for a little while and then you split up and go in different directions.

And then when you’re looking for food, you’re eating at the local restaurants near the bus stations, just eating amongst the local people.

That was backpacking. That was traveling for most of my life.

But when I was watching these YouTube travel videos, the very first ones I saw, these were people who had a lot more money, a lot of technology already, and they were going mainly to quite well-known, popular places that were more like vacations than backpacking.

So I’m watching a video from someone describing themselves as, you know, I’m an adventurer. I went to Asia solo on a one-way ticket. And you know, I’m this — and people are like filling the comments with, “Wow, you’re so brave. I can’t believe how brave you are to go there by yourself.”

And then I watched the video and they land at the airport in Bali and then they take a taxi to a condo which has an infinity pool or they go to this beautiful resort in the rice fields where they have a swimming pool, hot water showers.

And then of course, you know, I was always a little bit like, “Oh, come on. Give me a break.” You know, I really had this reaction to these videos ’cause these people would show up in their stunning Bali resort and with a swimming pool and a sauna and incredible place, beautiful sheets and mattresses and food, amazing food.

And then they would see a gecko on the wall and they would freak out. So, oh, there’s a — you know — and they would run out of the room, you know, oh, get rid of it. And they would get the staff of this resort in Bali to chase the gecko out of their room.

And I’m like, come on, who are these people?

Anyway, I made fun of a lot of these people over the years. I mean, I love geckos. Here in this hotel where I am now, I’m very very comfortable, far more comfortable than I ever was in the past. And my own lifestyle has changed dramatically as well from those older days because those backpacker hotels don’t exist anymore.

You can’t find a place that bare-bones for that cheap price. The cheapest places come with Wi-Fi, air conditioning, and a private bathroom. So in the old days all of these things would have been unbelievable luxury for me. Just having your own bathroom. It’s like, “Wow, I’m living the good life.”

But I mean an air conditioner, that was just fantasy. Nobody could afford that. Back in those days you just had a fan — if the fan worked, right?

But now this is baseline. This hotel that I’m staying in in Banda Aceh is like one of the cheapest places in the city, and I’m not paying very much here. If I get it at the right time, I can get it for like 110,000 rupiah per night.

So let me look that up. 110,000 rupiah is about somewhere between six and seven dollars. So sometime in busy periods this room would be like 150,000 a night. So that’s nine US dollars.

So I mean for me that’s expensive because I don’t think in terms of nine dollars per night. I think in terms of how much am I paying for monthly rent, so I have to take nine US dollars. And I’m from Canada, so you convert that into Canadian dollars and yeah, it’s much more expensive. Nine times 30, so it’s actually closer to 300 dollars a month that you’re paying in rent to stay in a room like that.

And for me and my lifestyle, even when I was living in Canada like living a normal life, I never paid that much for an apartment. I know the world has changed, but most of my time in Canada was as a university student. And then post-university, trying to get my first jobs in Canada, finding a place to live. I never paid 300 dollars a month in rent.

Of course now you go to Toronto, you’re probably looking at 3,000 Canadian a month. I can’t even imagine that.

But anyway, 300 US dollars a month as a backpacker traveling the world — to me that seems like a lot of money. So that is the baseline now.

It’s hard to get lower than that unless you’re willing to sleep in a dorm room. You can do that in some places, find the backpacker hostel, stay in a dorm room, and then five dollars a night if you’re lucky.

But I can’t live like that because of all of my technology. Being a YouTuber, it doesn’t work for me. I have way too much expensive gear now. And I have so many things I need to plug in and I need privacy. I need to be able to just come and go as I please, work all day sitting on my laptop, work all night long with the lights on.

I can’t be in a dorm room. It just doesn’t work.

So anyway, yeah, this is like the minimum baseline now.

But what I was getting at, my story was taking me in the direction of this hotel being quite a nice one, even though it’s the cheapest one in Banda Aceh. And yet it is kind of sealed and it is so sealed there are no geckos. And I really miss that because one of my favorite things about the hotels in the Philippines and in Indonesia are the geckos.

I love it when my room is just filled with geckos. Whole families of them. So I mean they’re just such interesting animals. They’re great company.

I mean, I would wake up in the middle of the night with a gecko kind of crawling across my face and I’m like, “Oh, hey there, buddy.” And then he runs up the roof and you know, does not freak me out.

Cockroaches don’t bother me. Spiders don’t bother me. Iguanas, monitor lizards — you know, I remember being in these really cheap places like these shacks in the Philippines that would kind of be open to the world. And for whatever reason iguanas were really fascinated with soap.

And there’d be like a window going into the bathroom and if you left your bar of soap there, an iguana would come in and grab it and run away into the jungle. You know, just like, “Oh, come on.” And I lost another bar of soap. I don’t know what they did with the soap, but they kept stealing it.

Anyway, I love the geckos.

So when I would see these YouTuber travelers portraying themselves as these brave adventurers and they freak out at a little gecko in their room, of course I kind of went, you know, these people.

So when I watched those travel videos, I didn’t see the backpacking life represented. I saw people going on vacation.

So when I started shooting video, it was more — it wasn’t because I was trying to create a YouTube channel and make money and do this, do that. Back in those days I actually had money in the bank and I wasn’t really that worried about money.

I had my savings from the job. I had been working in Taiwan for a long time. Saved up as much money as I could and then I quit and I’ve been living off those savings ever since. That has been my only source of income — was the money I saved up when I was living in Taiwan.

And back in those days when I discovered YouTube travel videos, I still had enough money in the bank that I wasn’t worried about it. I was just living my normal low-budget life. I wasn’t spending that money.

When I was staying around Lake Toba, I remember I stayed at a place — I think I was paying four dollars a night for a single room with a shared bath on the outside, you know. So that was my wheelhouse at that time. About four dollars a night if I could get it. So it’s like 120 dollars a month US.

Anyway, so when I started shooting video originally, it was more as an experimental thing. Thought, no, you know, today I’m going to wake up — I think the very first videos I shot were in the city of Bukittinggi here in Sumatra.

I was living there for a long time actually in a cheap hotel. I was on my way to Lake Toba because everybody’s supposed to go to Lake Toba. And to get to Lake Toba you can pass through Bukittinggi and then you catch like a local minibus from there up to Lake Toba and take the boat across.

And I just got stuck in Bukittinggi. I found a really cheap basic hotel there and I liked the city. It was just a low normal Indonesian Sumatran city and I just started living there and then I would wake up every morning and get my camera to take pictures and I would go out into the markets into the local neighborhoods doing exactly what I do now.

But instead of shooting video I would just walk around. People would call out to me, “Hello, hello.” And I would take pictures in the market, take pictures of people. People would invite me into their homes and we’d have food together and drinks together.

So I was just living the normal backpacker life. I just wasn’t recording it on video. I was taking pictures and I was writing down the stories.

And then I thought, huh, at that time what did I have at that time? I didn’t have my — did I have my Olympus with me? Yeah, I did. But I also had a little pocket camera, like a Canon PowerShot, like one of those slim cameras that just slides into your pocket.

I had one of those and I just started shooting video of myself very awkwardly like hello and I’m going to go to the market and I would take video very bouncy because there’s no stabilization, audio was horrible and I shot these experimental videos of me walking through the market.

And the only reason I was doing that was for my own personal memories to record some video of my life and as a reaction to these actual YouTube travel videos that were more like people going on holidays and I wanted to capture more of a little bit of a low-budget, a bit rougher, a bit more local environment in video form.

So that’s how my YouTube channel started.

So I had no expectations then.

Flash forward to many many years later. I guess I’m running out of money and I went to Bangladesh and that when I went to Bangladesh that was the first time I tried to make a video. I was sort of copying what I was seeing on YouTube and I was doing little things in the video that people told me you should do these things to get an audience to get views to get subscribers.

You know, I started from nothing. Of course I had a YouTube channel like everybody does because I had a Google account. I had a YouTube thing with my name on it, but I didn’t have an established brand or anything.

But I would do things like at the end of the video I put a quiz that was — I was told that you want people to watch the video all the way to the end so you give people little bonus things at the end.

And what I did back in those days was do a little quiz like a question and I would ask my viewers like so I’m here in Dhaka in Bangladesh. What do you think is the population of this city? Some kind of a random geography, history, economics, cultural question about the place where I was and then I would answer the question at the end of the next video.

So that was my fancy trick to get people to watch the video all the way to the end.

So I was doing little things like that. I would have like a musical intro to the video, a little title card, and I don’t know. I was just trying to make a video that would be more polished, more professional.

And that was the very first time I was doing it seriously.

And my expectations at that time was to learn how to make videos because I’d put away my bicycle. So the way the history went, I was riding my bicycle and then I wanted to start shooting video. But first I wanted to learn how to shoot video.

And as soon as I learned how to shoot video, then I could go back to actually traveling. And as I was learning how to shoot video, how to record audio, my goal, my expectations was to build my YouTube channel into something bigger, more popular.

So what I wanted to do was become more professional with video and audio and telling a story, recording my days, and I wanted to build it up to the point where it was a going concern. Maybe I could be earning enough money per month to say cover half of my living expenses.

And once I reached that point, then I could set off traveling around the world using income from social media in order to pay for onward travels.

So that was my expectation and my goal years ago.

And today, as I’m sitting here talking to you, I’m still waiting for that to happen. I never reached that point.

Like I suppose I got a little bit better at shooting video technically and audio technically, but that has more to do with getting better equipment. Subscribers gave me tools. So Planet Doug subscribers — I think back maybe back then I was still called The Cycling Canadian — they sent me presents and I got a GoPro as a gift, a laptop as a gift, things like that. So my gear and a smartphone as a gift from subscribers.

So my technology got better. So the quality of my video and audio improved, but I never reached the point where my YouTube channel became something.

So right to this day my expectation for the channel, even my minimum expectation still hasn’t been reached.

So that minimum expectation now would be to earn just enough money to start traveling around the world. And I’ve never reached that point. I’ve just been living off my savings this entire time.

I earn a little bit of money from YouTube and you know emphasis on little. People have donated money to me through PayPal, through Patreon, through Touch ‘n Go in recent years, things like that.

And that has kept me going as long as I have. But it was really my savings that made it possible for me to continue the lifestyle that I have and being a YouTuber.

So I had very minimal expectations and I never reached it.

The second part of that question was, “Do you feel like it still has room to grow?” referring to my YouTube channel.

And yeah, obviously if I haven’t even reached my minimum expectations, there’s lots of room to grow, but at this point you really have to wonder, is it even a remote possibility?

And yeah, I mean it feels like if the channel was going to grow in some fashion, if I was going to find a groove of some kind, it feels like it would have happened by now.

So there is room to grow obviously, but the chances of that happening are quite minimal and becoming more remote all the time.

And yeah, I’m just not good at it, basically. I’m just not very good at making videos that people want to watch.

And the problem probably comes from my own personal interest because I’ve always approached my videos in the same way. And I can’t break that habit.

And the same way I approach them is as a daily journal. That’s how I started shooting videos because I was writing my journal. And then I thought, huh, why don’t we shoot a video journal?

And when you shoot a daily or sort of daily journal or video vlog, in my case anyway, the video ends up being very long, a bit slow, a bit boring, hopefully a bit thoughtful, a little bit interesting, but that’s not going to get you a mainstream audience anywhere.

You know, if — I mean just look at all the YouTube channels, especially the travel channels that are popular. Compare that to what I do. They’re completely different.

So nothing I do is aimed towards a large audience or any kind of growth or success. I just — it doesn’t suit my personality and I’ve never managed to break through into out of where my channel is now.

So there’s lots of room to grow and I think, you know, I spend a lot of time on YouTube. I watch YouTube and what I’m seeing is a big shift over the last few years like my window of opportunity to be successful as a travel YouTuber.

There was a window I think back when I started in Bangladesh. In those years there was still room but I think now that room is gone.

YouTube feels like it has undergone a fundamental change. It has been taken over by big corporations. Like that’s what they push.

You know, everybody has jumped onto YouTube from all the big TV networks, celebrities, all these people that someone like me — it’s pretty hard for someone like me to compete with that.

YouTube has become a mainstream media platform that everybody is on. All the big corporations and TV shows and now of course we have AI, you know, we can talk about that a little bit later, but you’ve got all the AI slop just pouring into YouTube.

And I look at other travel YouTubers, people who make way better videos than I do. They’re doing much more interesting things, much more adventurous things. Their videos are much better produced, much more entertaining. Everything about them is 10 times better than mine.

And they aren’t getting any views either. I watch these videos now that are really really good and they get 3,000 views.

Like the market seems to have changed that nobody is getting views anymore unless you’re an extreme case. Bald and Bankrupt, you know, Backpacker Ben, these kind of — I don’t know what you call them. They’re aiming for a certain type of audience. Very negative like their video.

You know these guys. I’ve talked about them in the past. They still have a pretty steady audience. I can never make videos like those. It’s not my personality.

And you get people like Noraly on Itchy Boots.

But yeah, it just feels like YouTube has undergone a fundamental shift. It’s been happening for the last few years, but I’m really seeing it clearly now.

So the chances of a little YouTube channel like mine growing — very very low, I think. I mean, I could be wrong about that, but that’s how it feels.

So last part of his question, do you have any big plans or goals for 2026?

Yeah, I guess that’s the million-dollar question.

I’m hoping to after I’m done here in Banda Aceh, when my visa expires here, I’ll be flying back to Malaysia. Hopefully Malaysia lets me in.

And my plan at the moment is still the same because again I don’t want to get into this whole long story, but the last time I went back to Malaysia I was going to ride my bicycle around Malaysia. That was probably going to be my last hurrah on YouTube.

And things didn’t work out on that trip because I had to get a new passport. Took a lot longer than I expected. I had to edit a lot of videos from Sumatra. That took weeks longer than I expected.

And then I was invited to go on a car tour with some friends of mine around Malaysia. And then I waited for them to show up in the country. And then I joined them on this trip around Malaysia.

So that three-month visa that I was supposed to be cycling around Malaysia — I never did it because I did some other things.

But my bicycle is still in Malaysia. It’s still waiting for me down in Port Dickson where it always is.

So when I return to Malaysia this time and they let me into the country, you know, I hope so. It is Visit Malaysia Year. 2026 is like a tourism promo year for Malaysia.

And maybe they’ll let me in. I can use one of the scanners at the airport. I just put my brand new passport onto one of the scanners. Zing. Welcome to Malaysia.

And I don’t have to get dragged into an office with an immigration officer who gives me a lot of questions and interrogation. It’s like, what are you doing in our country? Why have you come back so many times?

I’m hoping to avoid all that and I get back into Malaysia one more time with a 90-day entry stamp.

And the idea right now is to finally — whether it makes sense or not logistically, financially, whether terms of the weather or time of year — I hope to hit the ground running, hop on my bicycle and ride around Malaysia for a couple of months at least and shoot videos about that experience.

So that’s how 2026 is going to start.

And what happens after that? I have no idea.

I imagine I’ll be leaving Malaysia and I imagine I’ll be looking for a job.

So here’s my message to anyone watching this video. If you know of a job in an interesting part of the world, I want to go somewhere new and interesting, but I’ll go anywhere.

Yeah, I need a job somewhere.

But so that’s probably 2026 to be honest. A bike ride around Malaysia and then I have to fly somewhere to get a job to earn money. I don’t have a choice.

So yeah, the savings that I’ve talked about are pretty much gone. So we can’t rely on that anymore. We’re going to have to start at my advanced age. We’re going to have to rejoin the workforce.

So that ought to be another interesting adventure. We’ll see how things go.

So that’s yeah that’s how 2026 is looking right now.

So that was the AMA portion of today’s podcast.

Moving on to the Planet Doug videos section.

Yeah, I’ve got a few things to talk about here.

Yeah, talking about YouTube. Yeah, YouTube is always full of surprises.

I was just talking about my videos from Bangladesh and I remember one of the videos that I shot in Bangladesh. I got a haircut. I mean, it’s a classic traveler’s video, right? You see it on every YouTuber travel vlogger’s channel where they whatever country they’re in, they find a local like street barber or something and they get a haircut and they take video of it.

So I did that in Bangladesh and it was actually a pretty intense experience. This yeah I went into this local barber and it was just such a strange crazy experience with the massages and the pounding and the all kind you know neck cracking and the whole process of the haircut was so unusual for me and then it was a kind of a funny video.

And then when I edited the video I put in some music, the Barber of Seville. And I did that because as far as I understood things classical music was copyright free. I mean it’s centuries old, right? All this music from Beethoven and Mozart and Bach and whoever composed the Barber of Seville.

So I put it in there and that was like seven years ago. Perfectly fine. Nothing ever came of it.

Couple of days ago I got the classic YouTube email saying, “Oh, your video cannot be monetized. It has been claimed.” And it was this Bangladesh haircut video was claimed by some big music agency or corporation in Germany and they say they have the rights to Barber of Seville.

And I guess the loophole here which I’m aware of it now but I wasn’t back in Bangladesh that the music itself is not copyrighted but a specific performance of that music can be copyrighted.

So I guess the computers that these music companies use to make money out of us poor YouTubers is getting more and more powerful. So now when they listen to a recording of the Barber of Seville, now they can tell which symphony orchestra performed it.

And if they can match the symphony, the Barber of Seville in your video with a particular performance done on a certain date by say the New York Philharmonic and they have the rights to that performance. They claim the video and then the video no longer belongs to you. It belongs to this corporation.

I hate it when that happens. I mean financially of course it doesn’t matter. I haven’t looked at that video in particular but I’m sure if I clicked on the analytics it would tell me that it earned ten cents in the seven years that I’ve had it on the channel.

I mean you don’t make any money from these videos unless you go viral with hundreds of thousands and millions of views. Anything less than that you’re going to earn 50 cents at the most.

So the fact that this shadowy corporation in Germany now says, “Oh thank you very much. We now own your video.” It doesn’t bother me financially but it’s just a personal slap in the face that this giant corporation, Google, YouTube, worth billions and billions of dollars with tens of thousands of employees and music companies and corporations and they come after somebody like me after working so hard on a video like that and then you get hit with a copyright claim.

It just feels wrong. You know what I mean? It just makes you angry with YouTube. It’s not their fault. It’s just the way the world is.

And I mean of course you understand copyright law as it pertains to musical artists and performers. Yeah. It’s protecting musicians in theory. They create this music and they don’t want people stealing their music and profiting from it. Sure.

But come on. My little haircut video from Bangladesh and you’re going to go out of your way to give me a legal notice that they’ve claimed my video because I had this little bit of music in it from a piece of music that was written 200 years ago.

It’s just it just annoys little YouTubers like me. It just feels like it’s another symbol of the end of YouTube as it existed, that YouTube has undergone a fundamental change and there’s no room anymore for YouTubers as they used to be in the past.

And you really see the effect of this music copyright claim, this censorship is everywhere where if it’s a small YouTuber like me, we’re scared to death. We don’t dare do anything anymore.

If there’s like a word that we said that we think maybe the computers will pick up on it, we bleep it out. Like we self-censor. No music. We’re so careful to keep everything out of our videos. And it’s getting kind of ridiculous to be honest.

But yeah, that’s the power of these computer systems now. They find everything. It took them seven years to find the Barber of Seville in that video from Bangladesh, but they found it eventually.

They’re going to sniff it out someday.

And then a few days later I got a second copyright claim because after Bangladesh I returned to Malaysia and I got a haircut in Kuala Lumpur and I shot a video of that haircut. And then just for fun I used the same recording of the Barber of Seville in my Kuala Lumpur haircut video and that was claimed by the same company.

It took them a couple of days longer to find it but their little bloodhound Content ID computer systems just sniffing all over YouTube finding anything it can. This is ours. This is ours. Oh that’s ours. Oh that’s ours too.

It reminds me of the classic speech from the original Terminator. Kyle Reese talking about the Terminator. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t eat. And it will not stop until the Terminator gets you.

And the new Content ID systems. Yeah. Day and night, 24 hours a day, never stops, doesn’t need to take a break. It will find every little thing on YouTube that it can claim and eventually it’s going to track it down and take it away from you.

It’s just a very — it leaves you as a YouTuber with a very negative feeling inside. You just want to just all right, forget it. I’m just going to not do this anymore. If that’s the way YouTube is now, I don’t even want to be a part of it anymore.

It’s moved on out. It’s turned into something else. It gets that feeling building in you, you know? You just can’t help it.

But yeah, talking about changes on YouTube, I did a little bit of an experiment of course with my own Planet Doug videos and it started with my e-wallet videos where I was in Malaysia getting ready for this trip actually because I had to leave the country because my visa was expiring and I had become very fond of the Touch ‘n Go e-wallet.

I used it in Kuala Lumpur for everything. All over Malaysia I used Touch ‘n Go constantly. It was like a cornerstone of my life. And I’m just fascinated by them. I just think they’re really interesting.

And I had this idea that foreigners from the West may not be as familiar with them as we are here in Asia. So I thought, huh, let’s make a video about that.

So I made a video about using Touch ‘n Go in Kuala Lumpur. I think I called it something like How I Use My Smartphone to Pay for Everything in Malaysia. And the theme of the video was essentially that I never use money anymore. I don’t even need my wallet. I don’t need money because I pay for everything with my phone by scanning QR codes.

That’s what the video was about. And it was a very rare Planet Doug video because people watched it, you know. It’s like wow, an unusual Planet Doug video. People actually watched it.

And I don’t know what it’s at now. Let me check right now. See how many views the video has now.

So it has reached 76,000 views, 661 comments. So that’s a very unusual video for my channel.

Yeah, and you can’t help but do the math on something like that.

So when I came here to — I flew to Banda Aceh and then I shot kind of a typical Planet Doug daily vlog video where I woke up in my new hotel here in Banda Aceh and I went out with my GoPro and went walking around talking, telling stories, showing how the local bus system worked and my neighborhood.

And I dropped by a place that I thought was fascinating in my neighborhood there. I found a soy processing center which I’ve seen before and I always find them fascinating.

And I went inside this place where they’re boiling soybeans and then making tofu basically. And I went in there and I filmed it and I did research about it and learned about it and took pictures. Put all that into the video and then it took like two days to edit that video and then I posted it.

A typical Planet Doug video and how many views did that video get? Okay, it’s now been over a month and it has two and a half thousand views.

And at the time when I posted it for the first week or whatever, the first two or three weeks, it had like one and a half thousand views. Let’s say two thousand. Let’s call it two thousand.

And that’s normal for a Planet Doug video to get two thousand views.

And then I think I’m not a big chaser of views. I’m not out there going, “Oh I gotta get as many views as possible.” I’m not do I don’t do clickbait thumbnails, clickbait titles. I don’t do any of that. I don’t think of myself as somebody chasing internet fame from that point of view.

But you do have to do a bit of math at that point. An e-wallet video 76,000 views. A typical video two thousand.

So if I’m now thinking about, well, I want my YouTube channel to be a success financially so I can keep doing this. The math starts to look pretty obvious.

If I kept making my typical traveling around Sumatra videos, every video gets two thousand views. I would have to make 35 of those videos to equal one e-wallet video because people are interested in that topic, right? 35 of them.

And now we’re talking about one day to shoot a video, two days to edit and upload. So you’re talking about three full days for each video.

Now you’re talking about making 35 of them. So you’re talking about nearly four months of work to equal one video.

And my original visa for Banda Aceh was only 30 days. And to make the equivalent of that one e-wallet video I would have to spend between three and four months making 35 normal videos.

So when I landed here in Banda Aceh it kind of just took the wind out of my sails. It was like ah, I worked so hard on that video. I find it so interesting. It really is about me, my personality, the backpacker life, this interesting soy processing center, you know, and two thousand views after many many years. That’s all my videos ever get.

And I’m really interested in e-wallets. I find them fascinating. And I planned to test Touch ‘n Go when I got here anyway.

So I switched focus a little bit and instead of going out to film my day-to-day life I thought, huh, let’s make a video about using Touch ‘n Go in Banda Aceh. Like Touch ‘n Go works great in Malaysia and you’re supposed to be able to use Touch ‘n Go in Indonesia, but does it really work? I wanted to find out for myself.

So I set off and I started filming myself using Touch ‘n Go in Banda Aceh. They have the system here called QRIS. That is their QR code system. In Malaysia it’s called DuitNow. Here it’s called QRIS.

So I went out and I intended to shoot a video about hey does Touch ‘n Go work in Indonesia? So I made that video and it wasn’t quite the same as my original but I can see now it has 45,000 views.

So that’s the equivalent of over 20 normal videos.

So again I can make one video like this or 20 videos that nobody is going to watch. You know the math starts to look quite compelling.

And then I switched over to the Indonesian e-wallet because I wanted — I tested Touch ‘n Go. It had certain limitations such as I couldn’t use it in Indomaret or Alfamart because they can’t use international e-wallets. So that even though Touch ‘n Go works really really well it has certain limitations.

But what about if I get an Indonesian e-wallet? So I restarted and I downloaded Gojek. Well I didn’t get GoPay at the time. I got the Gojek app and GoPay e-wallet is built into Gojek.

And then I shot a video about and I called the video QRIS and e-wallets in Indonesia. Should tourists use them? And I did craft that title hoping to trigger interest because I know that QRIS is a big topic in Indonesia. People here are very proud of it. And if they see QRIS in the video title people might be interested.

So I made sure to put QRIS in the video title. And that video has 40,000 views which is 20 times a normal video for me.

And in the meantime I mean I was still doing Planet Doug things. I made a video about riding all the local buses in Banda Aceh that reached 3,000 views.

I made a video about all the blackouts here because we lost power and there was like a big storm and I didn’t know how big it was but I was living in the dark while it was raining and I wanted I needed to go out and get something to eat.

So I thought well I might as well record what it looks like. And I brought my GoPro and I made a video about that. That was about two point eight thousand views.

I went on a big road trip down the coast of Sumatra to this offshore island. And in normal travel video culture a video like that should be popular. And I worked really hard on it.

I shot video with my GoPro. I shot video with my 360 camera. It took me an entire day just to reframe the 360 video. So an entire day of just preparing the 360 video. That isn’t even editing yet. That’s just reframing 360 video.

And I’m not talking about 9 to 5. Like when a YouTuber says “I worked all day on this video” they’re not talking about an office job. I started at 7:30 when they woke up and they stopped at 11:30 midnight, 1:00 a.m. when they finally turned off the lights and tried to go to sleep. We’re talking 18-hour days for a YouTuber.

And that you know then I still needed two days of editing to finish it. I mean I put so much time into that video. That was four weeks ago. Two point three thousand views.

Two point three thousand views right? And that was between four — I mean if you include the day right, the day of going on the trip and I shot video with how many different cameras? Four cameras.

I shot video with my GoPro Hero 12, my GoPro Hero 9, with the 360 camera, and with my smartphone. I used audio from three different sources.

The amount of work that goes into just organizing that amount of material and then putting it all together. Yeah. Probably five days in total for two thousand views.

Then of course you know I’m still doing Planet Doug things. I’m interested in history, culture, art, geography, science. So I started visiting the museums and I went to the main history museum. One point eight thousand views. That was at least three days of work to make that video.

I tried to go to the tsunami museum, the main one, and it was closed every time I went there because of the blackouts, but then I went to the PLTD Apung Museum and that one was one point five thousand views. Nobody cared about that video.

On and on and on. I returned to the PLTD Apung Museum and I love that video. I find it fascinating because the exhibits inside the museum were so interesting about this ship that floated ashore during the tsunami.

I mean I find it intriguing and I did a deep dive into the history of it. Worked really hard on it. Again another three days of work. One point three thousand views.

I might as well have just finished making that video and just deleting it.

And then I went to the tsunami museum, the main one. It was open when I finally got there. One thousand views right?

So there you are, the math right? I have a nice selection here of e-wallet videos where an e-wallet video will get between 20 and 35 times the number of views compared to a regular video.

So that’s kind of what’s been going on here in Banda Aceh which is kind of an interesting experiment.

And then I did one more kind of an experiment because I’m also interested in like science and culture. Like one of my favorite podcasts is the Radiolab podcast. And for YouTube channels my favorite YouTube channels tend to be more science-based and history-based like RealLifeLore, Veritasium.

And when I went to all these tsunami museums and I’m talking about tsunamis I wanted to know what I was talking about. So even before I went to these museums I was doing research.

You know you have to factor that time into these videos as well. I did a lot of online research into tsunamis, earthquakes, the various big tsunamis in history and I came across all these videos online on YouTube.

And there’d be like this little video like what causes tsunamis and it has like a thumbnail of a giant wave and the video might be four minutes long or ten minutes long and it will have eight million views.

Or you see a video like how far away is the nearest star to our solar system, six point eight million views. Like all these little science videos that I enjoy watching they’re unbelievably popular on YouTube.

And I’ve noticed that over the years you know and I keep thinking well I wonder if I made a video like that. You know I’m interested in these things. Actually I end up talking about science all the time. I used to anyway in these podcast videos.

I’d hear about some sort of a medical topic, a science topic and I would talk about it because I heard about it on a podcast and I would talk about it in one of these podcasts. I just have a natural instinct in one of the interests in one of these things.

And I thought you know just for fun why don’t we make an actual video about one of these things?

And something drove me crazy while I was here in Banda Aceh. And this is everywhere I went. Everybody I talked to, every museum, every article, every single thing about the museum they all said the same thing that the tsunami that hit Banda Aceh was 30 meters tall.

Everybody says it. Scientists say it, YouTubers say it, podcasters say it, the museums in their exhibits they say it and everybody believes it’s true that when the tsunami hit the city of Banda Aceh it was a wave 30 meters high, 100 feet.

And this drove me crazy because I know it’s not true. I’ve been doing research into tsunamis for well over a decade maybe my whole lifetime because I’ve been interested in these things.

And you can go online and you can watch the tsunami that hit Banda Aceh there’s video of it and the tsunami that hit Japan that hit Thailand that hit Sri Lanka and you can watch all of those hundreds and hundreds of hours of video and I challenge anybody to show me a 30-meter wave hitting the shore.

It’s nonsense. It does not exist. It did not happen. Yet everybody repeats it over and over and over as fact.

So I thought huh this is kind of an interesting little hook for a video. And I have all this knowledge in my head anyway. I hardly even have to research it because I’ve already done all the research.

And I made that video called How High Is a Tsunami? It’s Not What You Think.

And I see videos like this all over YouTube, little science-based videos, and they all say the same thing. Here’s a commonly held belief but it’s not true. And then everybody clicks on the video. It’s like oh what is it really about? And they get millions of views.

So I thought I don’t know let’s make one of these.

And my tsunami video I posted it a week ago. One thousand views. That’s all. One thousand views.

And the funny thing is when it came to this video is I kind of knew it was going to fail. And I knew that one way I could help it is if I put a thumbnail of a giant tsunami destroying a city that might get people interested in clicking on the video.

But I couldn’t do that because my entire video was about how that tsunami is nonsense. Tsunamis do not look like that. The thesis of my video was that Hollywood tsunami you know 200 feet high wiping out skyscrapers. That is a Hollywood fable. That is not what a tsunami is.

So I couldn’t put that in my thumbnail. So I just did my usual screenshot, just me sitting at the table going you know while I’m talking about something getting very intense.

And then I put words you know tsunami how high are they? What did I put on the thumbnail? Oh yeah. I put the word tsunami. How high? Because it’s an honest thumbnail.

If I put in a picture of a real tsunami it doesn’t even look like anything because in real life a tsunami is like a tide. It’s just a tide that comes in. A normal tide comes in, stops, and 12 hours later it goes back out again.

But a tsunami basically is a tide that comes in and then it doesn’t stop. It just goes in and in and in and in and floods, wipes out the city. That is a normal tsunami.

And if you put that in the thumbnail people will just look at it and there’s nothing visual.

So my choice was between the Hollywood tsunami which is a lie, a real tsunami which is boring, or just a normal Planet Doug thumbnail, a screenshot from the video with a word on it.

So I just went for that. And one thousand views.

Yeah I can’t tell. But anyway I’m pretty sure that this video with one thousand views maybe if I’m lucky it would have earned one dollar but that’s on the high side. It’s probably more like 75 cents.

And the irony there is that I’m shooting that video at Solong the local coffee shop and a good cup of coffee there costs — when you convert 15,000 Indonesian rupiah into US dollars — one cup of coffee is 90 cents.

And I was there for so long that I ordered two cups of coffee. So in fact I paid one dollar eighty for my coffee in order to earn like 70 cents.

So anyway the video didn’t even pay for the cup of coffee I had while I was making the video let alone the probably you know ten cups of instant coffee I drank here in my room while I was editing the video let alone covering the cost of paying for the room so I can have internet and a place to work you know on and on and on.

So yeah that’s the behind-the-scenes look at the finances of a Planet Doug video.

And yeah I made another one. It’s again one good thing about this is that I come at these topics from an honest point of view.

I mean I’m fascinated with e-wallets. I love testing them. I love learning about technology. I love walking around my neighborhood, exploring a local soya processing center, making videos about that, riding on the local buses.

You know I’m fascinated by just about everything when I’m in another country or in another city. Everything is interesting to me.

And topics like this are interesting too. A tsunami you know come on. I love learning about stuff like that.

And then I went on to make a video about alcohol proof. And I tried to do something a bit different with that video because the main topic that caught my attention was this idea like the history of the concept of proof when it comes to alcohol.

Like 100 proof means 50% alcohol. I’ve known that my whole life. I mean I’ve always known you know 80 proof. The normal whiskey in Canada would be 80 proof which is 40% alcohol. I’ve grown up with those numbers. I’m very familiar with them.

But I never knew where it came from. Like the idea of proof. Where does that word come from? I didn’t know.

So I started reading about it. And what I found out I thought was so interesting. I decided to make a video about it. The history of proof.

But I did something a little bit different with that video because in my mind it really connected with traveling.

Because as a backpacker, as a true backpacking kind of traveler like a cyclist you often get invited to join the local people for a drink. And it’s often like the local locally distilled strong alcohol like a clear vodka or gin or rum something like that you know and then you start thinking about how strong is this alcohol and then you start getting into this idea that as a backpacker you have to make a judgment call about whether it’s safe to drink this.

Can I trust these people offering me the drink? Can I trust that the drink isn’t tainted with methanol which is a real concern when you’re overseas? Methanol poisoning is not uncommon and it’s very very serious.

So as a backpacker you’re looking for proof that it’s safe to have this drink. And yet we have this idea of a hundred proof.

So I made that connection between the history of proof and the modern-day backpacker looking for proof. It’s a little bit of a tenuous link you know it’s not a one-to-one. It’s not a strong bridge but the bridge is there.

And I tried to fold that into the video. And it’s an interesting topic for me. And it connected with another YouTube traveler Florence Ryan who was in Ethiopia and I’m very familiar with Ethiopia because I cycled through Ethiopia myself.

So that’s where that video came from.

And if I go back into my YouTube Studio how many views did that video get? I posted it two or three days ago and it has reached 643 views and I still think it’s a really good video.

I’m quite proud of it. I think the information is accurate. I think my telling of the story was half decent. A lot of work went into that video. I can tell you that it was a labor of love.

So I’m proud of it as a video on my channel but 600 views is not even it won’t even pay for one cup of coffee let alone two cups of coffee.

So yeah that’s the reality of YouTube at the moment.

This topic is actually part of the Planet Doug videos section of the podcast but it’s such a big topic I thought I would separate it out and then talk about it on its own terms.

And that of course is if you saw the title card the use of AI in videos.

And in this alcohol proof video that I made for the very first time I did a deep dive into using AI to get graphics for the video.

And again I was trying to live up to the level of channels like RealLifeLore or Veritasium like when they make one of these science or history explainer videos. They’re actually pretty casual when you look at them but they do have graphics to illustrate what they’re talking about.

And my original idea was just to sit at the coffee shop and tell the story. I might have a screenshot from Florence Ryan’s video. I might have an image a picture that I took myself from Ethiopia but that’s about it.

But then as I was making the video I thought well to really test whether a video a subject-based video like this could be a popular segment for my YouTube channel why don’t we give it a good chance of succeeding and let’s try and get graphics that illustrate what I’m talking about.

And normally what you do I mean as a small YouTuber like me you take your own photos or you try to find copyright-free illustrations but I mean that would just takes days and they just don’t exist.

I mean a channel like Veritasium or RealLifeLore they make enough money they can just pay for stuff. They can buy things. They can pay artists. They can pay graphic artists to sit down in Photoshop or some program and say oh can you make us a diagram that shows this scientific principle? And they just make it in-house.

I can’t do that because I don’t know how to do it. I don’t have the skills or the technology to do it.

But then we have AI now. And one of the amazing things about AI is that it can produce almost any kind of image you want.

So I dipped my toe in that water. I hadn’t really done very much of this in the past other than just a fun goof from you know a little bit here and there just as a joke or something.

And I thought well I’m talking about history. And the main part of this video was about the gunpowder test where British sailors back in the 1700s they take gunpowder put it on some kind of I assume metal plate mix it with rum and then they try to light it on fire.

And depending on how it reacts whether or not the gunpowder burns or not that tells them whether or not the rum has been watered down. That’s the gunpowder test.

So I went to Gemini because I’d heard about Imagen. Imagen is supposed to be the premium image generator.

And then I said to Gemini yeah I’m making — I treat all these AIs like a good friend of mine. I have a conversation. I don’t just give instructions.

I say yeah hi there. I’m making a video for my YouTube channel about the history of the gunpowder test and proof in the British Royal Navy of the 1700s. And I’m thinking I’d like to illustrate this with a historic representation of a British sailor performing the gunpowder test. What do you think?

And then before I know it boom 30 seconds later I have it. I have a graphic showing a British sailor in the 1700s on a sailing ship in the hold of a sailing ship performing the gunpowder test.

And my mind literally was blown. It’s like I had no idea it was this powerful. It’s like that is crazy.

And I was so fascinated by what it could do that I went deeper and deeper into it.

And then I’m editing the video. I’d already edited the whole video. I put it together like a normal Planet Doug video. And then as I was going over it again every time I said something about the history I stopped and I thought oh what could illustrate this?

And then I would go over to Gemini and say oh this is what I’m talking about in the video right now. I’m talking about how the British 100 proof was 57.15% alcohol but the modern American 100 proof is 50% alcohol.

And normally if I wanted to illustrate that I would make something in my video editing program. And all I can do basically is put words up on the screen and draw arrows. That’s all I know how to do in terms of graphics and it would take me hours to do it and it would look horrible.

But I said to Gemini yeah this is what I’m trying to illustrate. Do you think you could make something that shows this? Boom. An amazing graphic with nice coloring, nice layout. All the information was accurate. There were like one or two little things that were not appropriate. And I just said to — and they use Imagen to do it.

And I just said to Gemini oh that’s amazing. I love it. But that thing in the corner can you remove that? They remove it and it was done.

And it’s just like mind blown. Seriously I could not believe what I was seeing. I didn’t think it could do stuff like that.

And then I went to the rest of the video and I came to something else where there was the story of Black Tot Day. July 31st 1970 is the last day the British Navy gave daily rum to the sailors.

The tradition lasted for over 300 years maybe 400 years but in 1970 they stopped it because they can’t have drunk sailors anymore.

And then so I wanted to show that and I thought you know what the way this is talked about it’s kind of like the sailors leaned into the humor of it where they treated it like a funeral and they put on black armbands the last day they got their rum.

And I said to Gemini yeah I’m telling the story about Black Tot Day and I want a graphic to illustrate this. Can you make some kind of a cartoon to show that the sailors were sad?

And that’s pretty much all I wrote. And boom I got a cartoon like an actual comic strip showing the information was perfect.

I didn’t even tell Gemini what Black Tot Day was. I didn’t explain it. I didn’t say it was on July 31st 1970. I didn’t explain the tradition. I just said Black Tot Day. That’s all I said.

And Gemini did the research and it knew it was on July 31st 1970. It put it into the cartoon. And then it showed a barrel of rum on the deck of the ship.

And then it changed the sailors to look like modern sailors because this was now happening in 1970. And it looks funny you know the sailor — I can’t I don’t have it in front of me right now. I can’t remember. It’s not the best cartoon ever made or anything but it would not look out of place in a history book or in a magazine.

I mean it’s a professionally done cartoon showing these sailors getting their last rum and they’re like oh no. You know they’re crying and everybody’s sad.

And it was like on my own as a small YouTuber I can’t make something like that.

Like I mean I have one friend in Canada who’s an artist. I could send an email to him and pay him 150 dollars to work on it for a day and make it and he might make a mistake and I have to write back to him ah that’s not quite what I’m looking for you know and wait another two weeks for him to redo it you know.

I can’t do stuff like that. Like I said the video made 50 cents. I can’t pay my friend 150 dollars to make a cartoon for me.

But Gemini with Imagen can do it.

And one thing I learned that was really fascinating was the limitations. Like there were times when Imagen made a mistake and then like it wouldn’t give me what I wanted and then I would try to correct it but no matter what I did it couldn’t make the correction.

So for example I asked for an image of some backpackers drinking tej. And tej is this Ethiopian honey wine. And I’ve had this in Ethiopia many times. It’s amazing stuff.

And if you see photos of it in real life the yellow wine it’s thick it’s heavy and it’s so bright. The yellow is so vibrant. It’s like a rich thick liquid with a bright yellow color. It’s really quite something.

But then every time Imagen made this image for me they just made this thin yellowish water basically. It looked like yellow wine.

I was like ah I love everything else. The backpackers look great. The Ethiopian hut looked amazing. I mean everything looked so good and so accurate. It blew my mind.

But the tej it didn’t look right. It’s like so it’s like can you change it? Keep everything the same but make the tej a brighter richer yellow.

But no matter how many times over and over and over and over I gave new instructions. Could never fix the problem.

And I got into this area where I was thinking about the language you needed to communicate with the AI because there were enough problems in the images I was getting that I could tell I’m not expressing myself properly. I’m not speaking in a way that the AI can understand.

So I went to another AI. I went to ChatGPT and I told ChatGPT my problem and I says yeah I’m trying to use an AI image generator to make this image but — and I described the image I wanted to ChatGPT and says but no matter how many times I give these instructions I’m not getting what I want.

And then ChatGPT says well you’re not speaking the right language. The way you’re describing it is how a human would think but you’re not speaking with a human. You have to put things in words the AI can understand.

So I said to ChatGPT okay you’re an AI. I’ve just described the image I want. How would you tell another AI to make this image?

And then ChatGPT wrote the instructions for me. You see the logic here? Mind-blowing.

And I copy and pasted ChatGPT’s instructions into Imagen. And then it created the perfect image.

So Imagen could make the image I wanted but I had to speak in its language.

And the really amazing thing is I didn’t have to use ChatGPT. So what I would do after that is I go to Gemini and I would say to Gemini like a conversation you know hi Gemini me again Planet Doug sorry to bother you but I’m working on this video and I’m talking about — and I describe the scene.

For example there was a time when this British admiral watered down all the rum and as a policy and this is a very famous moment in British Royal Naval history and I said yeah I’m talking about this moment in history and I want to make an image showing this.

So I want to ask you to make this image but how should I ask you to make this image?

And then Gemini read the description of the image I wanted wrote instructions to itself and said okay use these instructions to get that image.

And I copied and pasted those instructions back into Gemini. And then Imagen created the right image.

Just like what is going on here?

And it turns out that Gemini is different from Imagen. You think they’re kind of built together. Like if you ask Gemini to create an image you can ask Gemini to make the image but then it switches into Imagen and Imagen makes the image but they use different technology.

ChatGPT and Gemini they’re like large language models they work differently from an image generator.

So I had to do it in two steps: describe the image to the large language model, ask it for instructions to create this image, it gives me the right instructions to feed into the image generator and then I got the right image.

It was just crazy.

So anyway I had a lot of fun doing it. I think I got some very interesting images but of course out there in the real world I’ve noticed it on YouTube in particular there is a real backlash against anything AI.

I mean I’ve already leaned into it. Like earlier in this video I was talking about how YouTube is filling with AI slop and it’s very very real and very true.

I’m looking at my YouTube feed and I don’t know 50% of it now is garbage created by AI.

So AI has a very bad reputation.

But the key there to understanding this issue is that the AI isn’t doing it by itself. These are humans all over the world who are trying to make a buck.

And they realized oh I can use an AI to create thousands of crappy videos, flood YouTube with all these crappy videos. They all make a little bit of money and I can earn an income.

They don’t care about the quality. They’re just deliberately using AI to produce as much junk as they can to flood YouTube and then make money.

So it’s the people that are creating the junk not the AI.

So that’s kind of like how I approach it where AI is a tool. And you can use the tool to do good work or you can use it to create junk. It’s not the tool’s fault.

You know simple example would be like a hammer. A hammer is just a hammer. And a skilled carpenter can use that hammer and a saw to make a gorgeous functional sturdy house.

Me not being a carpenter I could use that hammer and saw and the house I would make would look ugly and it would fall apart in the first heavy storm because I don’t know what I’m doing. I would create a junky house using the same tools.

It’s not the fault of the tools. You see what I mean?

So and there is the question of what kind of video are you making? So for this video that I made about the history of proof and alcohol the gunpowder test video in my mind it’s not the same as a travel vlog.

So to I really have a strong distinction between those two. And for this historical explainer video I don’t really have an issue using AI to create an illustration.

And in the video you noticed I put a little caption on each of them saying illustration. I think I used illustration colon gunpowder test.

So it’s basically a historic reproduction of the gunpowder test and it was created by an AI. And you can tell that because it’s got the little Gemini logo on it so everybody can tell it was AI generated.

I didn’t say AI illustration because really that’s irrelevant. Like I could have gotten that image from a graphics company. Like maybe there’s a company out there that sells historic illustrations and you could buy it for 100 dollars and they give you the copyright and I could copy and paste it and someone drew that drawing ’cause 1700s nobody’s taking pictures nobody’s taking video.

So the only way you can have these images at all is someone has to create them with either hand drawings or a graphics program.

So I could buy them from a company and insert them in the video. But because we have Imagen I could actually ask for my own. And Imagen makes a historic illustration.

And I just put illustration gunpowder test illustration Black Tot.

But this is in a historic explainer video and that seems fine to me. But I wouldn’t do that in one of my personal travel videos because then it starts to feel like it’s fake. Like, for a historic video, well, yeah, it’s fake because nobody had a camera to record the gunpowder test, but it’s not really fake. It’s a historic recreation, an illustration of the gunpowder test from the 1700s. But if I go out with my GoPro today and I go to a local restaurant and I make a video about some food or coffee or whatever it is here, I’m not going to ask Nano Banana to, oh, create an illustration of me having coffee at this coffee shop and chatting with some local Indonesian people. I mean, why would I? I have video of it. So, in my own travel videos, I’m only going to use video that I shot and photos that I shot of what actually happened in real life, right? So, to me, yeah, that makes sense. And if suddenly you see an AI-generated image, like, I visited this soy processing center and everything in that video was 100% real because I shot it with my GoPro and I took pictures with my smartphone. Well, yeah, that is the pact I have with viewers of the video. You click on the video and I say to you, “Oh, this is an honest true account of my experiences that I shot myself. Everything that happened in this video really happened.” And we have that trust. And if I start putting in AI-generated images, I’ve broken that trust, right? It’s like, oh, how do we know? How could we believe anything you’re doing? Because you could be making all of this with AI all of a sudden. So yeah, a historical explainer showing something from centuries ago or making a point about something, it seems okay to me to use AI in that situation where I wouldn’t use it in a travel video per se. But anyway, it was a very interesting little experiment in using AI to create these images. Another aspect to it maybe is that for this video, I think the reason I’m talking about this at length is because the thumbnail for that video, I used two of my AI-generated images. I mean, my first instinct was just to use a standard screenshot because it’s me telling the story and I was sitting at Solong Coffee and, you know, I have all this video of me looking just like this talking into the camera and I could just take a screenshot and then I put a graphic in the top right-hand corner and I’m going, you know, that is the standard Planet Doug thumbnail and that was what I was going to do originally and I thought, well, all of my last seven videos, the thumbnail is me sitting at that coffee shop table ’cause all my videos were shot there and it’s just like exact same screenshot, screenshot, screenshot, screenshot. All my e-wallet videos, for example, and it just starts to get very boring. It just repeats basically the same image over and over. So for this video, I took two of these AI-generated images. One from history, one from modern day because I linked the historic gunpowder test with modern backpackers drinking the local alcohol with local people. And I put one image on the right, one image on the left, put the word “proof” and “trust” and put an arrow. And I basically made the thumbnail without a screenshot. Posted the video and then longtime viewer and supporter of Planet Doug, Dominic, he wrote a comment saying, “Yeah, I don’t really like that thumbnail.” Like, I don’t like AI-generated thumbnails, you know, basically saying, “I don’t like that, but I mean, if it gets you more views, yeah, I can understand why you’re doing it, but yeah, I don’t like it.” And it’s a very understandable reaction, a very common reaction I think out there. Even I have it to be honest. If I’m watching a travel vlog and the AI nature of the thumbnail just jumps out at me, I just don’t like it. But again, that’s a different kind of video where if somebody’s traveling around the world on their motorcycle and they’re having a big adventure and then the thumbnail is an AI-generated image, I kind of don’t like that. Yeah, I wouldn’t like it either. But for a historical explainer, as I’ve been talking about, I think it’s fine. I don’t have a problem with it. But I think one thing people react to is it feels like you’re cheating, right? And that’s where Dominic kind of hinted at that. Well, you’re just trying to get views by cheating. And the idea is you’re not doing the work. Like you should be doing the honest work and then you make the thumbnail and it’s real and then you deserve the views. But if you’re cheating by using AI, I don’t like that. But the funny thing is, I think most people have this idea that if you use AI, it’s faster. That boom, you just do it. You’re cheating because you’re doing it with the power of a computer and it’s much faster. But in this case, it’s the exact opposite. It took forever to make that thumbnail because yeah, it’s a much more complicated thumbnail than what I normally make. I would normally just screenshot, big word, screenshot, I’m done. There’s the thumbnail. But this one, of course, I had to use a graphics program. I had to go online, find a kind of graphics program that I can use, put one image in, make it fit the dimensions and the aspect ratio to fill that side and then another image on this side. I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me. It took me forever to get those two images lined up, filling half and half and then a word at the top and a word at the bottom and then an arrow and choosing the color of the arrow and the shape and the width of it. I mean, an entire morning was spent making that thumbnail. Of course, it was one of the first I’d ever made like that. So, it’s a learning curve. But if the idea is you cheated making that thumbnail, you know, you didn’t actually do the work, the exact opposite is the reality because it took far longer to make that thumbnail than if I had just taken a screenshot as I normally do. That would be done much much more quickly. So from in terms of the workload using AI is definitely not cheating. In most instances it takes longer. You’re just ending up I think with a better product in the end. But again you’re just using a tool. And I replied to Dominic in a long reply on YouTube. You can see what I wrote there talking about this a little bit. And then I kind of laughed a little bit about the comment about I’m just trying to get views by using AI because then I could point to you know what I’ve already talked about that well if my secret strategy was to use AI to get the views well my strategy was definitely not very well thought out because at that time the video had I think 400 views. So, like if my strategy was to use AI to get the views, I failed at that too. So, yeah, that didn’t really work out for me in terms of using AI. But yeah, it was just a fun thing to do. I really enjoyed experimenting with it, learning the language of an image generator, seeing what it could do, things that it understood. That was fascinating too, because you start to think that an AI must be geniuses. They know so much, but then they’ll occasionally do something that shows they have no common sense at all. They’re not as intelligent as a 5-year-old child in many ways. So, again, I think I wrote to Dominic about this that if you look at one of the images of the sailors doing the gunpowder test that I actually used in the video because I put it in the video, used it as a graphic and I never thought anything of it. But then later on as I was doing final edits, I noticed that the sailor who was sitting down, there was no chair. He wasn’t sitting on a chair. It was just empty space beneath him. The AI, it never occurred to the AI that it needed a chair. So, it’s like, oh, for Pete’s sake. And then if I try to tell the AI, oh, can you put a chair in? It doesn’t work because it just puts the chair in all these random places. And I cannot convince the AI that, well, this sailor who looks like he’s sitting down, he’s not sitting on a chair. He needs to be sitting on a chair. And the AI just cannot fix that problem. It just doesn’t think in these terms. It has a different way of understanding. So, yeah, that was kind of funny. And again, I think as I explained to Dominic, there was a funny moment when I asked for an image. And the image I got had a sailor with an open flame near big barrels of gunpowder, which obviously is a bit of a safety hazard. So I thought, well, that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. So I asked the AI, can you keep the picture? I like the photo exactly as it is, but can you remove the flame? Just take the flame out. And the AI removed the flame, but along with the flame, it removed the sailor’s arms and hands were just completely gone too. So now we had an armless, handless sailor just standing there on a ship. And I was like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Like, the AI doesn’t even understand that it can’t remove the sailor’s arms. That’s weird. You know, like, so then I had to try and tell, you know, can you put the arms back? You know, it’s like you shouldn’t have to explain that to a genius, but this is just how AI processes information. So, yeah, it was a fascinating experiment.

Moving on to the YouTube stories of my podcast. I would often do this in the past. I haven’t shot a podcast like this in a long time. I’ll try to go through these quickly if I can because there are some YouTube travelers that I’m following and I just wanted to do an update basically on what they’re doing. American Hobo. So American Hobo, he’s still out. He’s still here in Indonesia. He had a 60-day visa when he arrived on a bicycle. He arrived in Tanjung Balai by ferry just as I always do and then he rode his bicycle through Sumatra to Jakarta and that took him 2 months and then his two-month visa was expiring and then he got an extension and interestingly rather than get the extension himself he used an agent which I’ve never done and in fact, he used an agent based in Bali, which I didn’t even know that was possible. I just assumed if you used an agent, they would have to be local because they would have to visit the local immigration office near you. But that doesn’t appear to be the case with an agent. The agent can go through the immigration office near their office. So Daniel contacted an agent online. One of his subscribers linked him up with this agent and the agent on Bali processed his visa extension, did everything for him and he had to pay I think 1,350,000 rupiah. It’s 1 million for the visa extension and then like 1.4 million fee to the agent to take care of it for him. So he didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t have to go to an immigration office. He didn’t have to submit anything to immigration. He didn’t have to do anything. The agent took care of all of it. So that that’s kind of cool. And now he just set off from Jakarta and he’s going to continue. He’s got 60 days now. He has a 60-day extension and he’s going to ride his bike through Java and then onwards from there. And while he was in Jakarta, he bought a new camera because his Pocket 3 is suffering from some rain, some water damage, and he wanted to get a waterproof action camera. And he bought a DJI Action 5 Pro. And now he’s using that camera for the first time. And there’s probably going to be a learning curve for him because he’s very used to using the Pocket 3. And the Action 5 Pro is a very different form factor, a different way of using it. So yeah, so that’s what he’s doing right now. And he’s back on the road now. I just watched one of his new videos where he’s back to cycling again. And while he was in Jakarta, he upgraded his camping gear. He bought a new tent, a new sleeping pad, and a sleeping bag. And he didn’t even have those things before. He didn’t even have a sleeping pad or a sleeping bag. So the back of his bicycle, I was quite amused to see this. The load on the back rack is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Mainly because, well, the sleeping bag is a bit puffy. The tent is a bit bigger and heavier. And the sleeping pad he bought is not one of these blowup bags that, you know, you can stuff down to a small package. It’s actually more like a foam thing that folds up and it makes this big square. It’s very lightweight, but it has a lot of volume. So, he stacks that on top. He’s got now the two panniers on either side of the rack. Then his backpack on top, and then the tent and the sleeping bag. And now on top of that, he’s got his sleeping pad, this big rectangular thing. And then in the rubber straps holding this all together, he stuffs all his water bottles in there. So everything he’s carrying is now just sort of piled up on the back rack and it’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger, which kind of goes against his travel light philosophy. But as I know from experience, if you’re bike touring, there is a tendency over time to get more and more gear. It’s just inevitable. Extra tubes, extra tires, camping gear, and if you’re shooting YouTube videos, you need mounts and grips and tripods. And you can fight off the gear creep, but it’s really hard to do over time. You can start off with I’m going to travel super super super light and you can really hold to that but it starts to be hard to do over time and you can see the amount of gear getting bigger and bigger on the back of his bike. Anyway, that is the American Hobo and what he has been up to. 

I’m also following Harry from We Hate the Cold. To be honest, I don’t actually watch most of his videos. I kind of skim them. I scan them. I see what he’s up to. The latest I think one of his latest videos, I watched the whole video. But watching the whole video kind of reinforced for me why I don’t watch them, why I don’t actually enjoy them. But he’s been doing something very different. And this goes all the way back to when he was in Nepal. Before Nepal, he was shooting standard travel videos with a history and military bent. He’s interested in military history, World War II, CIA, secret airstrips and Japanese occupation and resistance fighters against the Japanese. Anything to do with sort of military history. He kind of focused on that while he’s riding his 125cc scooter basically. But then he landed in Kathmandu. This was months ago now. And he arrived there by coincidence just as there were these street protests by students and young people, huge protests against the government. It actually toppled the government and a lot of students were killed in the protest. It was a big big event in Nepal and he captured it on video and I guess he was one of the few people to do so and his Nepal videos just went super viral. You know, tens of millions of views and he became something of a celebrity in Nepal and everywhere he went, people recognized him and knew about him and he got a lot of you know he gained millions of subscribers I think because of those videos, millions of views and because of that he stopped focusing as much on the travel videos and he started to think of himself more as an investigative journalist, sort of a gonzo journalist on the ground reporting from the world’s hotspots. You can see he saw what happened with his Nepal videos and he went, “Hm, I think I’m on to something here.” So, he kind of leaned into it. So he went to Dubai and he made a video about the labor camps there like immigrant labor in Dubai because there’s this longstanding story that these workers build all these things in Dubai in the Middle East in general. They have all this money and they’re building these mega cities of the future. But the people actually doing the work are immigrant laborers from Pakistan, from Bangladesh, from Sri Lanka, from India, from all these countries. And their treatment is the focus of a lot of journalism. How are they being treated? Are they being treated well? And everybody’s looking for scandal in this world. So he picked up on this as a story and he visited one of these he calls it a labor camp and in the thumbnail he used the word slavery. So he’s basically leaning hard into this idea that he’s investigating the wrongdoings, these concentration labor camps, modern-day slavery, that sort of thing. And it’s all very kind of breathless outrage at these terrible conditions in these labor camps. And then he went to Iraq and he shot a couple of videos in Iraq. And his latest one is the one that I watched. Like I watched the whole video from beginning to end and it’s called the title is alone wild camping in the world’s most volatile region and he opens the video this way the camera is shooting and then he walks into frame kind of leans into the camera and he says I’ve got a confession to make to you right now we’re about to go do the most stupid and dangerous thing I’ve ever done on this channel. And then he goes into the video where he’s in Iraq and what he wants to do is camp outside in Iraq and he wants to investigate stories from the Iraq war, of course. So, you know, he heard about some sort of a big gun market in this city. So, he’s wandering around the city, going up to people and using Google Translate, saying like, “I’ve heard there’s a gun market here. Can you direct me to the gun market,” and then he tries to camp outdoors, but he’s got to go through all these military and police checkpoints. And then they really don’t want him to camp outside. And anyway, that’s kind of what he’s doing with his videos right now. And they don’t really speak to me. There’s a lot of it feels like insincere bravado about how dangerous everything is. And I don’t know, it just it’s not my kind of thing. It doesn’t feel sincere or realistic in terms of his experiences. Leaning too much into the drama of all these situations that he’s in. And it always seems like a little bit of a shame to me because when I watch the videos that he makes, it does seem like there’s a good story there. I mean, he really is doing something interesting. Like far more interesting than a Planet Doug video. I just walk around my local neighborhood. He’s actually in Iraq, which people see Iraq like, whoa, what’s happening in Iraq? It resonates with people. He’s riding a scooter into Iraq, dealing with police checkpoints, going to a place where few people go, visiting historic ruins like Saddam Hussein’s palace which has been completely destroyed. So he’s got an incredible story going to interesting places, interesting visuals, and if he just told that story as it really unfolded, I think it would be really fascinating as a good story to be told there. But he chooses to package it as a narration, trying to elevate it to a level of investigative journalism where his life is at risk. He could be shot and killed at any moment. And look how crazy and wild and dangerous this is. And it all feels a bit artificial to me when I’m watching it. But yeah, so I don’t really watch a lot of these videos. They just feel off to me. But what’s interesting about this particular video, and it connects to what I’ve been doing, is that in this video, he used AI, but he used it in a very different way than I used it. And he got a lot of criticism. So, if you go through all the comments to this video, maybe I don’t know 40% of the comments were saying, “We hate the AI. Please don’t use AI in the future. We don’t like AI. Please don’t use AI.” Because what happened in his video, he went up to like a police checkpoint and then when he got to the police checkpoint, they told him, “No cameras, no cameras.” So he turned off his video camera and he didn’t record any of his interactions with these police or soldiers. So he doesn’t have video of it, but he wanted to include that in his story. So he used AI to create kind of a comic book series of images showing him interacting at these police checkpoints and like smoking out of a hookah with these soldiers. And these were all AI-generated images like a comic book almost. And then he narrated the story over top of it. So he’s saying this really happened, but I don’t have any video of it. So I asked an AI to recreate it in this sketchbook form, and I’ll tell the story while these images go across the screen. And people really didn’t like that. And I can understand why. It even bothered me when I was watching the video. It’s like, ooh, this is weird. I mean, I can understand his argument. He spoke to people. He replied to their comments and he said, “Well, I don’t have any video of this, so why not use art? And who cares where the art comes from?” And that’s kind of the argument I was making as well, like what if he had asked his artist friend to sketch these then would it be okay? And is it only because AI created these images? Or is any drawing. It kind of breaks the contract with the viewer where we’re watching your video and we’re enjoying it because we believe you that everything you’re saying is true and everything actually happened and we can see the video. But now we’re looking at recreations of your own experiences as AI-generated imagery and people really don’t like that. He got a lot of negative feedback and criticism saying to him, “No, Con, like in the future, no more of this AI stuff.” So, I’m curious what Harry will do in the future. Because his replies to all of these comments, he never said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.” He kind of replied with, “Hey, I didn’t have any video, so I used this. There’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing.” So, maybe he will continue to use it in the future. But yeah, it could be an interesting thing to see what happens in the future. 

I’m having trouble with my voice and my throat this morning for some reason, but I will soldier on and finish this little podcast. I have some other YouTube stories I want to tell. I also was following a cyclist. His name is Bernardo Bacalhau. I don’t know how to say it. I think it’s a Portuguese name. And Bernardo, anyway, he’s a cyclist. I’ve known about him for many, many years. He’s a true filmmaker. He’s not like a casual off-the-cuff vlogger, but he set off from Singapore with a friend of his and they were going to ride bicycles all the way back to Portugal where I believe he’s from. So, they set off from Singapore and then they rode through Malaysia, through Thailand, and to Bangkok and then they were going to continue from there. And his videos were not like daily vlogs. He would wait weeks and record all of this video and then put it together into more of a film, like an actual documentary, a travel film. And very high quality. His camera gear is top-notch. He cares about audio quality, video quality, and he tells a really good story. They’re not really my type of videos again because I prefer the rough daily vlogs. I want the behind-the-scenes stories. I don’t want a cinematic polished travel film. That’s not really what I’m interested in. I’m more interested in the real personal stories, but he doesn’t post a lot of videos. So, I’ve watched all of them. And then he disappeared. He stopped posting videos and then he posted an update and it turns out he quit the journey and the reason he quit the journey is quite interesting to me and that’s mainly what I wanted to talk about because it’s a very common thing with cyclists long-distance cyclists when you sit on a bicycle for many hours a day and you rest the palms of your hands on the handlebars. It cuts off the nerves in the palms of your hands. This is very very common. And you lose feeling in the tips of your fingers. They start you get tingling in your fingers and then you lose sensation. And this started to happen to him in his last video. I don’t know the name of it, but in the last video that he was posting from Thailand, he was talking about it as a problem that was developing. And then he did basically what everybody does. I’ve had to do it. All cyclists have had to do it. You start feeling this tingling and you lose sensation. You try and fix your hand position to ease the pressure. And one thing you can do is raise your handlebar stem. So basically, you try to get your handlebars, raise them higher so that you’re sitting back putting more of your weight on the saddle and you’re putting less pressure on your hands. And then he took some socks and he bundled up these socks and put them on the handlebars to make like a soft cushion for his hands. And he was trying all these things, adjusting the seat height, the handlebar height, making his handlebars softer, trying to get rid of this problem. And I guess it didn’t go away. And then when they arrived in Bangkok, he went to a whole bunch of doctors. He went to see doctors. He went to hospitals. He got a lot of testing done like actual medical diagnostics where they’re I don’t know exactly I guess I didn’t pay that much attention but they did tests you know and then this is where the story kind of becomes interesting for me because I don’t really have wonderful feelings about doctors and seeing doctors because it’s almost like their job is to find something wrong with you. Right? So, if you go to a doctor and you tell the doctor, “Well, I’m cycling and I’m losing sensation in my fingers and they’re tingling.” The doctor is going to give you the worst-case scenario because it’s their job to do that. And he basically based on the doctor’s advice and how he was feeling, he decided to quit the journey. Well, no, he didn’t. Actually, he didn’t quit the journey yet. He took it so seriously, he flew back to Europe. So, he flew all the way home, I guess, to Portugal. And then he wanted to get a second opinion. He wanted to go to hospitals in Portugal and visit doctors there and get tests done there. And he in his update video he showed some graphs showing all kinds of results of tests that they did and then he came to the conclusion that the journey is over and he can’t continue because of what was happening to his hands. And I have to say that when I was watching that video and then I heard the update and heard about all like going to the hospital, seeing all these doctors, getting all these tests, flying all the way back to Europe, going to more hospitals, more tests. I had a little bit of a grumpy old man reaction where I was thinking kids today they’re such wimps because every cycling trip I’ve ever gone on the same thing happened to me that it’s just what happens to cyclists. So I remember in Ethiopia in particular, I did quite a bit of cycling in Ethiopia and back in those days, this was like 1999, 2000, the roads I was on were all unpaved for the most part. They were rocky, rough roads. So long days in the saddle and my bike was not a very good one. It had like a straight handlebar. It didn’t have many hand positions. So my hands are like resting on the handlebars with a lot of weight going on them because I don’t think my bike is fitted very well to my body, my height and my reach and everything. So I was putting a lot of weight on the handlebars and then it was like banging and crashing on the rocks and the same thing happened to me. I just lost all feeling in my fingers. It was like they weren’t even there anymore. I’m just like pinching my fingers. I don’t even feel anything. You can still use them. I mean, there’s tingling and you can do anything normally that you would do with your hands, but you just can’t feel them anymore. And then, of course, I mean, I knew about this cuz I had had the same feeling. I rode my bike many, many times in my life, long distances, and on every single trip, I lose sensation in my fingers. It’s just what happens to cyclists. So maybe he made the wise decision that to quit the journey so he didn’t do permanent damage. But at the same time, I had this, like I said, a grumpy old man’s like, “Oh, what a wimpy kids today.” Yeah, quitting as soon as they get this tingling feeling in their fingers. And that’s like, well, that’s just normal for cyclists. I had that over and over. You go cycling, you lose sensation in your fingers. You lose sensation in your nether regions as well because when you’re sitting on the saddle, it pinches nerves down there and you lose feeling there as well. And then months and months and months after the cycling trip, the feeling will gradually come back and then a little bit of a residue might last for years until full feeling comes back. To me, that’s just normal. But then for Bernardo, I don’t know. He treated it like it was so serious. And I had that grumpy old man perspective. Like I’m like, was it really that big a problem? I think you could have continued your cycling journey. It wasn’t really that big a deal. Certainly in my case. I mean, I never went to a doctor. I never went to a hospital. I certainly wouldn’t have flown back to Canada to have tests done on my hands. I just kept riding and thought, “Oh, well, the feeling will come back after I finish my cycling journey.” So, and I’m not a tough guy. I’m not saying I’m a tough guy in any way. I’m quite the opposite. I’m very much a wimp, but I was able to deal with this without any real problem.

The other thing that jumped out at me though was his bike was unbelievably perfect. He and his cycling companions had clearly put a lot of thought, a lot of effort, and a lot of money into their cycling gear. They had the best bikes money could buy. The best panniers, the best pannier racks, the lightest tents. I mean, you look at their bicycles, they were works of art for long-distance cycling. Beautiful, beautiful machines with the best of everything money can buy. And yet, it had a straight handlebar and then there were a couple of extensions, but the extensions were jammed into the handlebar bag. So, like what I mean by extensions, like little poles. I forget what you call them now, but you could hold on to the handlebar here, but if you need to adjust hand position, you can grab hold of these little things. But he couldn’t grab his because they were too far in the middle and they were jammed into the handlebar bag. So, as far as I could tell, he only had one hand position. He had straight handlebars and he put his hands here and they never ever moved. And that’s the worst thing you can do as a long-distance cyclist. It’s going to cut off the nerves and you’re going to lose feeling in your fingers. That’s just what happens. So, most people that are dedicated cyclists, they buy specialized handlebars like these butterfly bars are very, very popular. They’re shaped like a figure eight, almost like an infinity sign. So, you’ve got so many hand positions. You can keep moving your hands all day. You can hold it here. Then, you can lean forward and hold onto the top. You can hold onto the side, onto this corner, onto that corner, and basically all day long, you just keep adjusting your body position and your hand position to relieve the pressure to move the pressure around. So, I was puzzled by that why he didn’t do that. He didn’t talk about it in the video. He talked about raising his handlebars, but the first thing I would have done, and I assumed he based on the amount of money he was spending on the journey, he could easily have gone to a bike shop and swapped out the handlebars. That would be the very first thing I would do if I had the money to do it. It’s like, listen, you go to a nice bike shop and say, can I get these new specialized touring handlebars placed onto my bike? And you kind of have to fiddle around a bit with the gear shifters and the brake handles cuz they don’t always adjust from a straight bar to a butterfly bar or something. You got to mix and match with your gear and make some adjustments. But yeah, that’s the first thing I would do is just change out the handlebars. But he never did that. Like my bike as well, like I said, it has straight handlebars, but over the years I’ve added hand positions, but not the way he did it. Like I have these little I can’t remember the name for them where you can hold on to the handlebars like this, but I put them on the end of the handlebars rather than jammed in the middle like where the handlebar bag is. So mine are accessible. So I could put my hands here and then when they start to feel sore, I move them over to here and it completely changes the pressure on the palms of your hands. And then I added a third position with these other specialized bars that go up and then across. So I essentially created my own butterfly bars because I’ve got this position, the side position, and the forward position. And a corner position because my bike I looked into getting butterfly bars for my bike, but because of the geometry and the brakes and the gears, how they work, I couldn’t you couldn’t do it. You can’t swap them out. So, I basically bought little accessories. So, I had hand position on the end, hand position forward, hand position on the corners, and then down here. So I could all day long I’m always moving my hands around so I don’t experience the problem to the same degree. So it kind of surprised me that he didn’t do that. So anyway, his journey is over. I don’t know about his companion. He was cycling with a woman. I have a feeling that they were doing this together and without him she wouldn’t continue the journey on her own. Maybe, you know, just being a woman, she wasn’t comfortable cycling on her own, perhaps all the way through Asia, you know, all the way back to Europe. But I’m guessing that she also quit the journey, but we don’t know because she doesn’t post the videos. He edits and posts the videos, I guess. But anyway, Bernardo’s journey is done.

And I’m still following Usvan from Morocco. His channel is called Let’s Go Cycling. And he was cycling in Malaysia, then Sumatra, and then he took a ferry to the Philippines to Mindanao. And then he started cycling through Mindanao and is on his way to Manila. So, I’ve been watching his videos and I don’t have a whole lot to say about him. He doesn’t include much information in his videos. So, you pretty much have to be Sherlock Holmes and analyze everything in his video. You have to look for street signs, business names of businesses, put them into Google, like Google searches to try and figure out where is he, like what’s the name of the city, what’s the name of the island. You can’t figure out where he is. He doesn’t give any indication of time passing. So, one video he can start filming and you don’t know how long it’s been since his previous video. And then you’ll see an opening sequence where he wakes up in the morning, gets out of his tent and drinks a cup of coffee. Then he’s riding his bike and then the scene changes and he’ll say, “Oh, it’s 5 days later now.” Or he’s coming out of a hotel. Oh, I’ve been staying here for five nights and now I’m going to. And it was like I don’t know. You have no idea where he’s going, the route he followed, how long he spent here, what he did while he was there, cuz you would often say something like what I just said. Yeah, I’ve been staying here in this town for 5 days, but he didn’t film any of it. So, I have no idea what he did for those 5 days. He only takes video when he’s pedaling and then mainly when he’s waking up in the morning coming out of his tent. And he doesn’t say much either. He doesn’t talk. I think it would be interesting to meet him in real life because I’m wondering just how much his YouTube persona matches his real life persona because on YouTube he doesn’t ever seem to say much. Of course, English is not his first language, so you have to take that into account, but his most popular word is wow. He says wow most of the time where he gets out of his tent and he’s got his camera on a long selfie stick and he shows the scenery around him and he always poses the same way. He holds the camera way out to the right and he takes his left hand and it’s like displaying what’s around him and then he looks around. Wow. Wow. That’s all he ever says. And then he’ll be on the bike and he sees some scenery and he aims the camera. Wow. That’s pretty much all he says. And it might be a little bit little note here and there that he says something about the weather or the rice fields around him or the mountains or the roads, something, but he speaks very very little. And oddly enough, he does spend a lot of time with other people like Filipinos in this case. He’s in the Philippines. He does meet up with Filipinos and they sit around having meals together and drinks together. But I have no sense of any conversation. I’d like to have because he doesn’t really film long stretches of time. So we don’t actually hear him conversing. So I’m wondering does he ever converse like even with Filipinos. I’m curious. He was obviously there for a couple of hours with these people and then like what did he say during that time? Does he just say wow and that’s all he says? I have no idea. So the guy is a complete mystery to me and I am curious if I ever met him in real life and like I meet him in Kuala Lumpur and we hey hey Usvan let’s go get a cup of coffee I want to hear about your journey through Sumatra in the Philippines. Would he suddenly turn into a storyteller? Would he just start talking and just all these stories would come out? I have no idea because he never talks on camera. So, I don’t really know. Maybe that is his personality and he never speaks. So, that’s kind of interesting. But, I still follow his journey because he’s a cyclist and he’s in very adventurous areas and I like to look at the technology that he’s using, the tent, the bike, the panniers, all the flat tires he gets. He has a lot of mechanical breakdowns. He’s carrying a huge heavy load on his bicycle. And I just like following his journey. And his latest video, the one I just watched it this morning actually, is called, and this is very common for his videos. He likes to focus on this. When I had nothing, this is how Filipinos treated me. And that’s a very common title for his videos. He does it over and over and over. Just changes the name of the country. So when he was in Malaysia, this is how Malaysians treated me. And of course, when you click on the video, what he means is the Malaysians were very nice to him and very generous and they gave him food and they gave him water and they gave him a place to sleep. And then he goes to Sumatra, this is how Indonesians treated me. Video after video, this is how they treated me. And implying again that they were all very nice to him. And now he’s in the Philippines and once more this is how Filipinos treated me. And again, it’s because they were very very nice to him. And I do find that kind of an interesting theme in travel videos because when a traveler goes to a new country, there’s an instinct to sort of suck up to the people in that country and say how nice they are, how friendly they are, and it’s always specific to that country. But in all the traveling I’ve done around the world, I’ve never been to an unfriendly country, right? I mean, I rode my bike across Canada and I met lots of amazing people in Canada. They were very friendly. And people always want to help. And if they see somebody riding a bicycle, their brain automatically triggers this thought. Ooh, that must be so hard. They must be tired. They must be hungry. They must be thirsty. And people everywhere in the world, they want to help. So even if you don’t even need any help, like when I was riding across Canada, I had food and I had water and I was feeling fine and I didn’t really need any help at all. But people would, you know, stop at the side of the road in their car and they give me a cold drink. And of course, I really appreciated it. I was like, “Cold drink? That tastes so good.” And so that happened to me in Canada. Every country I’ve been to. People are nice, people are friendly, people are helpful, people are generous. So I do find it amusing when you see travel videos where they focus on this one country and then I keep waiting for anybody to go anywhere and then leave that country and go, “Oh, those people. They were horrible. They were so mean to me.” I haven’t seen it yet, but yeah. Anyway, I find that kind of amusing. And with Usvan, I end up noticing something else, too. This has happened a few times with him. And in this video, it happens. He woke up in his tent and then he did the wow wow wow. It’s so amazing here. And then he made his cup of coffee. He’s got this little gas canister thing with a little thing on top and he boils water in this tea kettle and he makes a morning coffee and then he starts riding his bike and then as often happens he started going to ATMs and as often happens the ATMs rejected his card and it turned out that once again he had no money like nothing at all. He didn’t have any money and he was going to these ATMs and oh this one won’t work this one won’t work this one won’t work and then he went to ATM after ATM out of service out of service and basically he was stuck he had no money and he couldn’t get any money and then this has happened to him before it happened to him in different places and then the local people will step up and help him out and then he’ll say, “Oh, people are so kind and so generous. Look how everybody helped me.” But of course, I keep thinking, “It’s not that hard to have money.” I mean, the first time I saw it happen to him, I’m thinking, cuz it was a real problem. He just crossed over from Indonesian Borneo to Malaysian Borneo. He’d crossed the border and he didn’t have any Malaysian ringgit at all. So, he couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t buy food. He couldn’t buy water. He couldn’t stay in a hotel. He couldn’t do anything. And he went to ATM after ATM after ATM. And he couldn’t they wouldn’t work. None of his cards would work. He couldn’t get money. And again, I’m thinking again, grumpy old man, a bit of an old-timer. Well, reach into your bag, get your emergency US $100 bill, and go to the money changer. I mean, there’s nothing that screams common sense, particularly in the modern world, more than have at least a hundred bucks in cash tucked away somewhere. Why wouldn’t you? I don’t get it. I’ve seen it online all the time. I’ve talked about this in the past. I’ve seen so many YouTubers land in a country at an airport or whatever crossing the land border and they walk over to the ATM, get out their card and oh, I can’t get any money and then they’re stuck. And I keep thinking like, you know, I’m no financial genius. If I had to classify myself, I am a financial doofus. But I always have some emergency cash. It makes sense in different denominations, even in different currencies. Like sometimes you don’t even need $100 US. Like you’re at the airport and they hit you with this surprise departure tax and you need money for that, but you’ve spent all the local currency now you’re stuck and you don’t want to break a $100 bill. Well, so you go into your emergency cash wallet and you take out your American $5 bill, $10 bill, something like that, and you just change that and you have enough. That’s how I’ve lived my life from my very first trip overseas. You always have emergency backup cash. It’s just common sense. But he never does. So in this case, he was stuck again. And then there’s one moment in the video where he went up to a he was he went to all the ATMs, couldn’t get any money, and he rode his bike up to a sari-sari store, like one of those little convenience stores in the Philippines. They’re everywhere. People build them into their homes, right? It’s like the front room of their house. They turned it into a little shop and they put bars in the window and there’s someone kind of behind the bars and you buy chips and coke and cigarettes basically. And but again what he always does and I’m still trying to figure this out. He’s on his bike and he’ll ride up to some kind of a window at a little shop or a ticket window whatever wherever he is. But then he stays on his bike and then he’s 15 ft away from the window and even before the bike comes to a stop like at this sari-sari store he kind of said in English you have rice and I’m looking around in the video like who are you talking to like what do you mean do they have rice? I mean I think you got to be more specific than that. It’s a place where you get cigarettes and chips. It’s not a restaurant. It’s not a food stall. So, exactly what are it’s not a grocery store. And then he just kind of You have rice. And he speaks so fast and so low. The people in the shop, I don’t think they can hear him. And he spoke so quickly. And it’s such an odd request. Like even if they understood him. What do we have rice? What do you mean? Like it’s not a restaurant. You mean cooked rice you want to buy? some cooked rice from us or you want a bag of rice that you can cook. How much? I don’t know. There’s questions. Again, I’m I picture what I would do. I ride up on my bike. I get off my bike and I put on the kickstand and that I think that might be part of the problem. And I’ll get back to that in a minute. And then I in the Philippines, you can rely on English. So, I may not have Google Translate ready to go, but I’ll go up to the window, the bars, and I kind of look inside and oh, I see someone there and oh, hello. How are you? And then, you know, they always ask you, oh, where are you from? And you have a small chat. And then you get around to, oh, do you have any rice? And then at a sari-sari store, they’re probably going to go, what do you mean? And a bag of rice that I can cook. and they’ll probably say no because we don’t have stuff like that. I don’t know. It just feels like such a normal social interaction. And then Usvan comes up and you have rice. You have rice. Like I’m not quite sure what you’re looking for, Usvan. And I keep wondering like why he does this all the time. And again, it gets back to his language and the way he interacts with people I’m very curious about. But I think one of the problems is what I was going to refer to. His bike doesn’t have a kickstand of any kind. So he always has to lay his bike down flat on the ground or lean it against something. So, I think that’s why this happens so often because in my case, yeah, I ride up on my bike and I put down the kickstand and then I walk up to the window. But he wants to stay on his bike because it’s such a hassle to get off the bike. He’s got to find a tree to lean it or he’s got to lay it down on the ground and the ground might be muddy. So, he often just rides up to a place, stays far away from the window and then kind of calls out, you know, You have rice, you know, always makes me smile. And in this case, they gave him rice. And it was kind of interesting because again, I thought maybe he was asking for rice that he could cook. And as he said in the video, he only had 15 pesos left. That’s all the money he had. Well, I guess that’s like 20 25 cents American. So, he had like 15 pesos, which is next to nothing, and he was hoping to buy just enough rice that he could cook it at his campsite cuz he still had his stove and he had gas, you know, so he could or build a campfire. He often cooks over a campfire. So, he was really just trying to get 15 pesos worth of rice just to get him through the night. and then the next day he can go back maybe ride his bike to the next city and try more ATMs until he can finally get some money. But anyway, the people at this store, they kind of I guess they had some kind of an interaction and then a woman came out with a bag of cooked rice and oh this foreigner just kind of is asking us for rice. I guess he’s hungry. So then they went to their kitchen or whatever and they filled up a bag with cooked rice and said, “Yeah, here here’s some rice.” And maybe he gave them the 15 pesos for it. I’m not actually sure. And then he was about to ride away. And then the people, the Filipinos at the shop came out with a bag of other food. I think some chicken and some other stuff and basically gave him a meal and said, “Okay, here here’s rice and here’s some chicken and here’s some food.” And then he had that as his dinner when he was camping out. And that’s where the this is how the Filipinos treated me. I had nothing and people were so kind and so generous to me, which I mean I applaud the sentiment. As I said, people everywhere are nice in my experience. And if you’re hungry, people will help you out. And that’s all well and good, but it does seem to me like if you are an adventurer and a world traveler, there’s a little bit of due diligence. You shouldn’t automatically switch to I have nothing and I must depend on the kindness of strangers. You got to kind of do your part first. For example, when you do have access to an ATM that’s working, well, take out enough money that’s going to last you for a long time. And of course, you got to have your emergency stash of American dollar bills. To me, that’s just common sense. So, I don’t know. I wouldn’t switch into I have nothing and the local people saved me if you haven’t done your part of the bargain. Like sure there can be situations where you as a traveler yeah you are in big trouble. Maybe you got robbed and your emergency stash of money is gone, your ATM card is gone and you really are stuck and then the local people step up and okay, you know, we’ll help you until you can get your life back together. Yeah, that’s great. But anyway, yeah, I’m not trying to be heavily critical or not. I just like watching his videos, seeing the story as it unfolds, and kind of putting myself in their shoes. And I do find it kind of entertaining. Like I said, with yeah. You have rice, you know, kind of. Yeah, it’s kind of a funny story. So, he’s on his way to Manila, and this video ended, as all his videos do. They just stopped. There’s never an ending. Stuff happens. And he also had another meal. He met up with these Filipinos. They may have been connected with a church. I think it was a church group. It was like a coffee shop, a cafe, and they had a big tent in the back with tables and they had lots and lots of food there. And then Usvan was invited to join them for a big meal. And again, I was wondering what the conversation was like. I’d like to have heard it. And yeah, he had a huge meal with them and I think maybe he slept there at night. He put his tent up there and then the next morning, you know, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And he rode his bike away. And he said it’s 200 km to Manila, but the video just stops. So I don’t know, does he have money now? Like the video. In the beginning of the video, he had 15 pesos and I guess he spent it on rice and now I think according to the video he has nothing like no money at all and he still has 200 km to go to get to Manila. But at the end of the video he didn’t say anything. He didn’t sum it up. He didn’t say, “Oh, I still have no money and my ATM card didn’t work this morning and I have to ride to the next city and I will try again at new ATMs or you know, I did this to solve my problem and hopefully I can do this here.” He didn’t mention it again. The video just stops. And nobody ever complains in the comments like no one ever says, “Well, you know, why did your video just stop? Like what happened? Did you get money? You know, finish the story.” Nobody ever says that. So, everybody seems fine with that kind of storytelling. But anyway, Usvan is on his way to Manila and as far as I know, he has no money. And I don’t even know when these events took place to be honest because he’s very loose about that as well. These videos could be months and months old. He could be two months behind, three months behind, four months behind. I don’t really know. Sometimes he drops that far. And you get the impression that this is happening in real time, but he could be thousands of kilometers away. He could be two countries away. He could have finished his Philippines journey and gone on to two more countries by now. You know, we just don’t know. So anyway, that is the story of Usvan in the Philippines. 

There’s another YouTuber that I’m kind of following. I have to admit, I don’t actually watch his videos these days. The channel is called Una Moto, and I pop in, scan his videos, and might fast forward through a couple just to see what he’s doing. But what he’s doing is riding a motorcycle inspired by Itchy Boots. He’s a Canadian and he was inspired to ride his motorcycle all the way from like Alaska, the most northerly point in North America and then all the way around the world through Europe, Africa, and then Asia. Maybe he’s skipping South America, but all the way to Australia, New Zealand. He’s basically on an around the world motorcycle journey and he finished North America and then he went to Europe and when he went to Europe I kind of stopped watching his videos. I’m not sure why. But he just recently finished his Europe journey and then he crossed by boat over to Morocco. So now he’s beginning a journey through Africa and I’ll probably watch all of his Africa videos very carefully because I’m much more interested in Africa. I’m not so interested in Europe. So Africa will get me back into his channel, I think. But yeah, Una Moto is quite interesting to me because his motorcycle has been so central to his videos. I mean, he makes really good videos. I’ll say that out of the gate. He’s a great guy. He’s good on camera in a way. Is a little bit awkward sometimes when he’s on camera. People have pointed out that he does a lot of this giggling, like his speech is peppered with giggling after every sentence, and people don’t really like that. I think he’s tried to stop that behavior, but it’s sort of built into his personality. And he was a brand new motorcyclist. He wasn’t experienced. So at the very beginning his videos the journey started with him taking a course learning how to ride a motorcycle buying a motorcycle outfitting it riding it learning it. So, a lot of people following his channel were interested in motorbikes and of course they were just filling his comment section with advice telling him how to improve his technique. And then when he had tons and tons and tons of mechanical problems with the motorcycle and people would tell him how to fix it, how to do this and giving him tons and tons of motorcycle technical advice, repair advice, and technique advice. So that’s a big big part of his channel. And then when he went to Europe, it seemed like his motorcycle continued to break down, break down, break down, break down, and constantly replacing parts. He’s got boxes coming in from all over the world filled, you know, putting in a new clutch, new this, new that, new brakes, new a lot more than I’m accustomed to seeing. So someone like Noraly on Itchy Boots, occasionally there will be this video like when she did her Africa journey and then she knows her bike is due to be serviced and she knows according to the calendar when that has to happen and she’ll plan ahead in some city in Africa. She knows there’s a motorcycle professional shop there where she can get the work done and then she has boxes shipped in with all the spare parts and new camera gear that she’ll need and then she’ll it’s kind of like a resupply stop. But I don’t see Noraly constantly fixing her motorcycle. It’s not like every video something leaks or something breaks and she has to get parts and always working on the motorcycle, but on the Una Moto channel, it just sort of feels like he’s always repairing it. And then you start to wonder whether that motorcycle is just underpowered for what he’s doing or is he taking roads that are far too rough because he is trying to emulate a lot of the things that Noraly did where like even in Africa there’d be a perfectly fine perfectly smooth paved road going to where Noraly wants to go but instead of taking that road she’ll look at her maps and find a small road going through the jungle and the mountains and then she’s basically looks for the roughest road she can find to get to where she needs to go because it makes more interesting video. And then Una Moto does the same thing. So he’s always looking for the toughest road rather than the main road that’s going somewhere. And yeah, so maybe that’s why he’s always repairing the motorbike. It’s just not built for that kind of tough treatment. I don’t know. But what I’m getting at is that when I see all of this, all of the repairs, I end up wondering how he manages to pay for all of that because when I look at Noraly’s Itchy Boots channel, obviously she has all the money in the world. She can afford to do whatever she wants. The numbers are there. No matter what video she throws up, it’s going to get, you know, a half a million views overnight and it’s going to top off at about a million views. So, and she has all her sponsorships and brand deals and on and on and on. So, money is not an issue. But when you look at Una Moto, it’s more of a standard travel channel where the videos I don’t know what the average view count is, but maybe 30,000 views per video, which is in the modern YouTube era, that’s quite good. If you’re getting 30,000 views per video, you’re doing well. And he gets, you know, it goes from 30,000 maybe to 80,000 kind of up and down. And I don’t know much about analytics in YouTube. I don’t know much about all the I don’t even know what to call them. CPM and like all these acronyms that people use, how much money you make based on a thousand views depending on where those views are coming from, what country, you know, there’s all the number crunching you can do. I don’t know anything about that. But somehow my general sense is that if you’re getting 30,000 views per video, you’re not making a lot of money even at that level. So I do end up wondering how in the world is he paying for this trip through Europe, which is a very expensive place, and this constant flow of new parts and repairing his motorcycle. It just feels like it would cost a lot of money. It’s not like he bought the motorbike and then rode it for 3 years. It’s like it’s constantly pouring money into the motorcycle to keep it on the road. And when I look at the views of his videos, I don’t know. I guess people on YouTube make more money than I realize. I don’t know how they do, but maybe they do. And he’s able to pay for the journey because now he’s really in a way setting off into a brand new world. Much tougher than what he’s accustomed to. Canada, United States, Europe, that’s not Africa. Going through Africa on a motorcycle. I mean, I would want to have a little bit of a cushion like in terms of money and being able to fly out in an emergency or yeah. You don’t want to go into Africa just blindly, oh, you know, I have no money and I have no security. I’ve got nothing but I’m going to have this big adventure in Africa. Ride my motor. And he’s not messing around either. Most people who head into Africa, they tend to do one journey north to south like Cairo to Cape Town is a very popular one or Cape Town up to Cairo. He’s doing the whole continent starting in Morocco going all the way through North Africa, West Africa, all the way to the tip of South Africa and then all the way back up again to Egypt. So, I mean, he’s doing the whole thing according to his map. And I’m like, wow. I mean, that is going to be something else. And I’m thinking I hope his YouTube funding from his videos is there and is solid and is enough to get him through whatever that journey is going to entail. But anyway, I’m looking forward to following his journey through Africa. I think it’s going to be a big change for him from Europe. Maybe it will be too much for him? We’ll find out. But yeah, so that is this kind of an update on Una Moto heading into Africa. 

Just one more random YouTube travel video thought to end this video and that will be the end of the podcast. And this is not a story about a YouTuber because I don’t know this YouTuber at all. I haven’t watched her videos before or I don’t know anything about her other than I believe she’s British. I don’t know anything about her YouTube channel. I’ve only watched one video on her channel because it popped up in my feed, but it really jumped out at me. So, the channel is called Nahana and it’s not a big channel. It doesn’t have thousands of videos or anything like that, but this video popped up in my feed and the title of the video is India sucks. Don’t ever come here. And it jumped out at me because I’ve seen so many videos like that. It’s almost a separate genre where every YouTuber sees how popular these videos are. So everybody goes to India, puts themselves into the most difficult, challenging, uncomfortable places they can, riding on the most crowded, cheapest trains, staying in old neighborhoods in cheap hotels, and then they post their video. Oh, India sucks. I’m never coming back to India ever again. Like I said, there are so many videos like that that it’s its own genre on YouTube and so anyway, so here’s another one and I thought, okay, here’s another India sucks video. I don’t have a lot of patience for them because if you go to a country and the only thing you have to say about that country is it sucks. I think the evidence is you suck. It’s not the country. You’re the one doing the sucking. You know what I mean? Sort of like that old joke about if you go through your entire day and every single person you meet is a jerk. Chances are you’re the jerk, right? You bring that with you and it’s you. So not India sucks, you suck. You just went there with this preconceived idea and you created this and I mean if you I mean India my gosh it’s a huge country massive I mean it’s you know I’ve been to India myself once on a student exchange long long time ago I’ve never gone back since then but I have a certain insight into India because I have been there and I know how tough it can be and I’ve watched a lot of travel videos, people who ride their bicycles through India, who go backpacking, who ride their motorcycles, and they have a lot of the classic trouble that everybody has in India. It’s a given. It is a tough place to go traveling, but it’s an astonishing country with so much variety in the north, the south, the east, the west, the history, the languages, the culture. And if you just slow down, settle in, take the time to get to know the place, meet some local people, you’re going to have a wonderful time in India. I mean, to say India sucks is like it’s so dumb. It would be like saying Earth sucks. Like an alien comes down to the planet Earth and visits one place and then they leave and they go back to their home planet and people, oh, how was Earth? He’s like, Earth sucks. I mean, that’s ridiculous on the face of it. A place as big as the Earth with so much variety. You can’t just say, “Earth sucks.” And you can’t say, “India sucks.” So, that jumped out at me about this video and I wanted to watch it because I wanted to see, well, what was wrong in her case? How did she go to India? Why was everything so bad for her? And of course, I was going to see, oh, it’s entirely her fault. If India sucks, that’s your fault. But anyway, I start watching the video and she lands at the airport. I’m waiting for everything to start sucking, everything to go wrong. Nothing happens. She lands at the airport. It’s like any other airport. It’s a new modern looking airport. Next thing we know, she’s at her hotel. It’s not the greatest hotel on earth. It’s not five-star luxury, but it’s a perfectly fine hotel. Nothing sucks. And then she goes out into the city, hops into like a tuk tuk to take her to the local train station. She’s in Mumbai. I didn’t say that, but she went to Mumbai, big city. And the Mumbai train station is a famous attraction for its architecture and its history and the role it plays in modern transport in the city. So she went there to take a look at it and make a video about it. So she went there and then she went all through the train station. She took video of everything, talked about the history, the architecture, some of the stats about how many trains per day, how many people per day, and I’m still waiting for something bad to happen. I mean, it looked amazing. The train station is stunning. It’s a gorgeous historical building. The architecture is incredible. Inside the train station, you can go anywhere you want. The platforms are open. You can walk right onto the platforms, go into the trains, take video. All the there’s lots of people around, but everybody’s perfectly normal. So, I’m like, when is this place going to start sucking? Like, there’s nothing wrong. You just went to the train station and you shot some video and it looked like a perfectly fine experience about a very interesting place and then she went into the subway system and took video of what the subway was like. Here are the tickets. This is how you go in. Here’s the train. Looked like a modern subway system. Nothing bad happened. And I’m still waiting. It’s like when are the bad things going to start happening? I couldn’t figure this out. It was such a puzzle. And then she ended her tour of the transportation system of Mumbai. And she went back to her neighborhood. And she was back in her neighborhood heading back to her hotel and the video ended. And I’m like, “What the heck? India sucks. Never come here.” But the video made India look like a wonderful place to visit a fascinating interesting place and there was nothing bad in the video. So where you know what where did the title come from? It was so confusing to me. So I’m doing a bit of a deeper dive and I look at her video description and in the video description she says, “Oh, by the way, the video title, I’m just kidding.” So the video title was a joke. She was leaning into what I was talking about how every YouTuber goes to India and they in order to get views they use the clickbait. You know India sucks. It’s the worst country. I’m never coming back here. So, she saw that, I guess, the same way I did. And she thought, “Oh, I’ll make that my video title as well, even though nothing bad happened in her trip.” And then she put in the description, “Oh, by the way, just kidding.” But what strikes me about that is it is really the most cynical video I’ve ever seen because there are levels of cynicism at play here. If you go to India and okay the honking bothers you, you go to some tourist sites and all these people are bothering you to buy tickets and be their tour guide or you get sick to your stomach because the hygiene in the streets and then you show all these things in your video and of course nothing is really that terrible. But in order to get people to click on your video, well then you put clickbait in the thumbnail and in the title and then you put in nightmare. I almost died. India sucks. And then because of that clickbait, everybody watches your video. So that’s one level of cynicism. But this woman, Nahana, she took it to another level where she used clickbait. It’s exactly the same as every other video title. India sucks. Don’t ever come here. And because of that video title, hundreds of thousands of people clicked on the video just like me. It worked on me too. And then all the comments clearly seemed to be from people who had never watched the video. They saw the video title, India sucks, and all the comments were like, “Yeah, India. It’s a disgusting place. It’s horrible.” And they’re all trashing India in the comments, but clearly none of them actually watched the video because in the video you can tell, “No, India looks amazing.” So, she chose the clickbait title in order to get the clicks and to get the views, but then she put just kidding in the video description to sort of say, “Well, I didn’t really mean it.” Do you know what I mean? It’s like she used the clickbait, but then she made a joke like, “Wow, I was just kidding.” But she still used it. So, it’s like a double layer of cynicism. So, and it’s kind of understandable. I mean, the last time I checked on her video, it had 300,000 views. It’s probably up to half a million views by now. And that’s huge for a YouTube video. And it’s all because of the video title. Imagine if I made that video and I put a Planet Doug title on it. The Planet Doug title would be as boring as you might imagine. Exploring Mumbai’s transportation system, the historic train station and subway, something like that. If she used that title, nobody would click on it. Like, who wants to watch a video about the history of the train station? I do. I mean, I found the video interesting. I was glad I clicked on it because I enjoyed the video. I think India is an amazing place. This building was a big part of Mumbai’s history, colonial architecture and all that. I love videos about transportation systems. I find them interesting. So I enjoyed the video. If I saw a video that said, you know, a deep dive into the transportation, the public transportation system of Mumbai, I’d like, oh wow, that sounds interesting. I’m going to click on it. But me and 300 other people are going to click on it. So that video with that title would get 400 views maximum. But because she put India sucks in the title, it’s like 300,000 views right out of the gate. And you look at stuff like that, you get really cynical about YouTube. You get cynical about people really. Of course, we don’t know how many people actually watched the whole video. Maybe all these people as soon as they clicked on India sucks and then nothing terrible happened and it’s actually about the train station, they might go, “Oh,” and then they just stop watching. So maybe 300,000 clicks, but nobody actually watched the video except for me. I don’t know. But yeah, it does make you feel very cynical because I mean I love Sumatra. I love Malaysia. And the next time say I fly into Malaysia, I could put on, you know, it’s a typical Planet Doug video. Boring, you know, in-depth narration about the whole experience from the beginning of the day to the end of the day, going to the airport, the flight, leaving the, you know, the whole day in video form. And it’s just a very nice experience going to a country and a place that I like and enjoy. But I put in the title, Malaysian nightmare. Horrible place. I’m never coming back again. And then I put in the video description, “Just kidding. I love Malaysia.” I mean, that’s what she did. And I guarantee if I did that, I would get a lot of views on the video. And I don’t think anybody would criticize me for it. It feels like people are very accepting of that. This India sucks video. I mean I haven’t checked for a while but in all the comments I never saw anybody say hey what’s up with that title all they said in the comments was agreeing with her yeah India sucks because of this and this and this and this so nobody cared and it’s a way to make money and in this modern world if you want to keep traveling you have to make money so maybe my next video Malaysian nightmare. Horrible country. Worst place I’ve ever been. Never going back. That’ll be the next the next title of my next video. And then of course the video will show Malaysia for what it is. A wonderful place full of kind, intelligent, nice people with great food, great scenery, interesting places, interesting history. That’s what my video will be about. But I’ll put Malaysian nightmare in the title. Ah, just kidding. I didn’t mean it. Yeah, YouTube is getting nuttier all the time, I think. And with that, it is time to shut down this podcast. I do have another section that I wanted to get into in depth, pop culture, because I’ve watched a couple of TV shows that I really wanted to talk about. The main one is Pluribus. I watched Pluribus, loved it. Right up my alley. I could really do a deep dive into that. And I watched some other things I didn’t like as much. I could go through all the TV shows that I’ve watched recently and movies. I got the same mixture there. I watched Poor Things with Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone. Yeah, Emma Stone. Loved it. I loved Poor Things. Again, right up my alley. It’s like a movie designed for me. I really enjoyed that. I could talk about that for a long time. And then I watched one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen called The Electric State. It was just absolutely awful. So yeah, I’ve got a whole bunch of other movies that I’ve watched. Weapons, which I liked. Sinners, which is good, but I don’t get the hype. Like people thought Sinners was like masterpiece. I thought it was very entertaining, but I’m not quite sure why it’s considered as amazing as it is, but I could talk about Sinners. I watched Final Destination Bloodlines. I watched The Long Walk. Yeah. So, I could talk about a whole bunch of TV shows and movies, but from my throat and my voice, I just can’t keep talking. And I’m just going to shut it down here. So, that’s it. Planet Doug podcast to bring you up to date.