This Is Why I’m Still in Kuala Lumpur

VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

I landed in Kuala Lumpur over a week ago… and I’m still here. What have I been doing? In this casual behind-the-scenes podcast, I talk about the surprising reality of daily life as a travel YouTuber—which involves a lot less exploring and a lot more troubleshooting. At least that is the reality on Planet Doug. Your planet may differ.

From camera shake on a hotel bed to accidentally ordering gadgets online, I walk you through the never-ending journey of Planet Doug tech problems that eat up my days. I also catch up on everything from sensory overload in Bukit Bintang and roti canai dilemmas, to the surprising truth about using Indonesian e-wallets in Malaysia, and why some YouTubers go viral while others don’t.

TOPICS:

– The Never-Ending Tech Setup (Olympus camera struggles)
– My Lazada Ordering Disaster
– A GoPro Subscription & Battery Miracle?
– Sensory Overload: Returning to Kuala Lumpur
– Food Adventures with Daryl (Roti Canai & Bukit Bintang)
– The Truth About QRIS & GoPay in Malaysia
– Daniel the American Hobo’s 1-Year Journey
– The Language Barrier: Why “Just Ask a Local” Often Fails
– Could There Be a “Planet Doug English” Channel?

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning and welcome back to the Planet Doug podcast for Sunday, January 18th. I’m still here in Kuala Lumpur and I’m in Planet Doug studio, aka the Crossroads Hotel, just sitting on the bed in my hotel room. And let’s get the technology taken care of right out of the gate. I’m doing something different right now with my camera again because I’ve been relearning how to use the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II camera. And I recorded my last podcast with that camera. And what I did, which made a lot of sense, is I used my 12 mm lens, which is 24 mm in 35 mil equivalent. So, it’s basically a standard wide angle. So, the camera can sit right here very, very close to me. And then the tripod sits on the bed, but then that’s very convenient because I can reach the camera. I can’t right now for reasons I’m getting to. So yeah, the camera’s right here. I can handle all the controls. I can look at the screen. I can see the battery level. I can sort of see whether it’s recording or not. So yeah, that kind of works out okay. But then the tripod is sitting on the mattress and if I move in any way at all, of course the mattress goes up and down and then the tripod shakes and the camera shakes. So one of the great things about Olympus cameras is that they have the best stabilization in the business. This has been driving me crazy for a long time because I bought the original OM-D E-M5 back in 2012 and that camera, the Olympus 2012, the first in the line, had better stabilization than any camera you can buy today. Right. And this one is the Mark II which came out in 2015. So this camera is 11 years old. It has better stabilization than any of the most expensive cameras you can buy today. You know, I challenge you to go out to a camera store, take out $10,000, and buy the best camera gear you can get from Sony, Canon, Nikon. This camera has better stabilization than any of those, like IBIS, sensor shift stabilization. And of course, part of the reason for that is this is a micro four thirds camera, so the sensor is smaller, so it has more room to move around. Full-frame cameras with bigger sensors, they don’t have as much room, and it’s harder to move that sensor to compensate for camera shake. So Olympus and Panasonic micro four thirds cameras have an advantage because they’re using micro four thirds sensors, but at the same time their technology is just better. And I keep waiting for Sony and Nikon and Canon to catch up, but they never have. So, all those cameras out there that you can buy, even the ones that are supposed to be, you know, dedicated vlogging cameras, you’re walking around with them and then you can see them like shaking and jittering all the time because the stabilization isn’t as good. So, I can put this Olympus camera on a tripod on the mattress, turn on stabilization, and it will actually compensate even if it’s moving around on the mattress. So, that’s fine. But when I was using this camera in the past and I had it on a tripod and I had stabilization turned on, something weird happened to the camera. It seemed to be breaking down and I couldn’t quite figure it out, but I was suspicious that the problem was I had stabilization turned on. So the stabilization motors are, you know, working and yet the camera was sitting on a tripod on the ground and not moving at all for hours because I was recording like 2-hour podcasts, three-hour podcasts. And by the end of that time with the stabilization motors running trying to compensate for movement that wasn’t there because it’s perfectly stable on a tripod, I felt like I was damaging the camera. So, I kind of forgot about that when I did my experiment using the 12 mm lens on the mattress here because I had stabilization turned on most of the time and I forgot about how this damaged the camera in the past, but today I decided, yeah, if I’m going to be talking for one or two hours with the Olympus camera, maybe it’s better if I put it on a tripod on the ground. And if it’s on a stable surface, then I can turn off stabilization. I can turn off sensor shift and I can turn off digital because it doesn’t need it. The camera’s not moving unless there’s an earthquake. The camera is perfectly stable on the tripod, you know. So, I can move here all I want and then the camera is rock steady. But in order to do that, I have to put the camera on the floor on the far side of the bed. It’s no longer sitting on the mattress. So, that changes a lot of things. I can’t use this lens anymore because with this lens, you’re gonna have super wide angle. You’re going to have the entire room in the video frame. So, I’m using my telephoto zoom. So, I’ve zoomed in a little bit, but the camera is, I don’t know, 7 ft away from me. I can’t reach it. I can’t really see the screen. So, that’s a little bit annoying. Plus, what I like to do in these situations is use a lavalier microphone, a corded microphone, because this doesn’t require a battery. I just plug it into the camera, and then I put the lav mic here, and I’m done. And then it just plugs into the camera. And I can do that if the camera is right here. But now that the camera is 7 ft away, this cord doesn’t reach it anymore. I actually have an extension cord for this purpose, but I don’t have it with me right now. It’s packed with my bicycle down in Port Dickson, so I don’t have my expensive extension cord. So, I had to use my Rode Wireless Go microphone system. So, I’ve got the microphone here and the receiver on the Olympus plugged into the Olympus because I can have this set up far away. But now of course I’m draining the battery of my microphone and it makes the setup more complicated. So if you’re a bit of a tech head, perhaps you followed all of that. Basically I’m using the Olympus camera, but I’m using it with my 12 to 35 mm telephoto and I’m zoomed in a little bit and it’s mounted on a tripod on the floor with stabilization turned off, which is what’s happening right now. When I recorded a podcast the other morning with the 12 millimeter on the bed, the very first section, I did an experiment where I turned stabilization off because you can also stabilize in your editing program. So I thought, you know, to avoid damaging the camera, I’ll turn stabilization off. So you do get jittery movement and the camera swaying from side to side. And then I thought I could fix it in the editing program. In DaVinci Resolve, you can stabilize the clips one by one. So that’s what I did. But it turned out that didn’t work at all. For one thing, it takes a long time. You take one clip, it will take 3 minutes to stabilize the footage. So you’re just sitting here waiting and waiting and waiting, and that’s really annoying. The other problem is that type of stabilization is designed to correct for jitters, micro-jitters. It’s not designed to correct a swaying motion like you’re on a sailboat and when the camera is sitting on the bed on the mattress, it might like if I really shift my weight because you don’t see me all the time when I’m filming. There are times where I’m not speaking to camera, but the camera is still recording and I lean over here to grab something or lean over here to comb my hair or make another cup of coffee. And when I lean way over, the mattress like sways like it’s the mast of a sailing ship. And then the editing program tries to compensate for that. So, its stabilization is so extreme, you end up with this crazy wobbling, you could see this headboard, the line of the headboard wobbling all over the place. So, I can’t use editing program stabilization when the camera is sitting on a bed. So, that’s why I’m using this new system. And we will see how this works out. Another technology experiment. This is kind of funny. Like I said, the camera is so far away from me that I can’t really read the screen anymore. So I can’t see any of the details. Like even is it recording or not? You get a red, it says like record in red letters down in the bottom right hand corner of the LCD screen. But from here I can’t see it. But I realized I could use my smartphone. So, I’m zooming in on the LCD screen on the Olympus. And now I can see all the camera settings. Oh, yeah. Okay. It’s recording battery. Well, I can’t see battery level because when you plug in a microphone, the microphone jack covers up the battery level indicator which is on the top left corner. So, from a video point of view, everything about this Olympus is quite badly designed. The UI is not very good. But from here, everything looks okay. Yeah, exposure. I’m assuming the exposure is fine. And the framing I could zoom in closer or farther away. I have no idea what exactly is the best thing to do.

Yeah, technology on Planet Doug. It’s a never-ending journey. And I had another technology adventure this morning which was interesting because I was on Lazada, Lazada Malaysia. As I said, I ordered an extra battery for this Olympus and I was very successful with that because it was delivered to a collection point and it was like, I can just see that being, you know, I hate the phrase game-changer because it’s overused, especially in camera reviews. They’ll, you know, a new camera will come out where they moved a button half an inch to the right and someone will say, “Oh, this new button placement, it’s a game-changer.” Like, “Oh, you know, give me a break.” I mean, you got to reserve game-changer for something that really is big and dramatic. And people overuse game-changer. They use it for everything. You know, whoa, this new spoon for stirring my coffee, this is a game-changer because it’s longer or thinner or, you know, who cares? But in this case, me being able to order something online and have it delivered to a like mailboxes, etc. location, that is a game-changer because I’m so hesitant to order anything online because having anything shipped to your hotel is just kind of nightmarish, especially when you’re talking about a low-budget hotel where they lock the front door and they’re like there’s no way to get in. I mean, if you’re staying at the Hilton, of course, you know, the courier just goes into the lobby, walks up to the front desk where there’s a bunch of courteous staff in nice uniforms waiting for them and says, “Oh, I have a package for Mr. so and so in room such and such and they drop it off at the front desk or they call you and yeah, things work smoothly when you’re wealthy. But when you’re staying in a low-budget hotel, yeah, they lock the front door because they have one person on the front desk and that person is often not at the front desk because they also they do double duty. They staff the desk and they clean the rooms and they take out the garbage and they do everything. So half the time they’re not even there and then the delivery person comes up to the hotel and the door’s locked and they try, they look for the doorbell. They can’t find the doorbell and they give up and they go away. So hotel delivery can be problematic. But now that I have figured out collection points, it is a game-changer. So this morning I was thinking while I’m here in KL, I was like is there any other little doodad, any other little gadget that I could use right now, take advantage of this collection point stuff. And so I went into Lazada and there was like a little item, a mounting apparatus I need for my GoPro and I was thinking yeah why don’t I order one of those and if I can get it delivered like within a couple of days to a collection point, let’s do that. But then something went wrong because with many items on Lazada or many merchants, some of them don’t have collection points. So some of them do, some of them don’t. And then if they don’t, then you have to give them a shipping address. And currently the shipping address I have loaded into Lazada is my old hotel, the Raja Boat, because that’s where I was staying. And that’s the address that from my last delivery of my tripod, that was the address I used. So, it was still listed in Lazada. And then I was going to when I got to the checkout point under checkout, you pick and then it shows up. Oh, we have collection points. You can choose one of these. But you don’t see that until you get to checkout and then you choose your payment method. That sort of thing. So, I put something into my Lazada shopping cart and then I wasn’t ready to buy it or anything. I was still thinking about it. Just a little thing, not expensive, but I wasn’t sure whether I wanted the hassle of a delivery, all that stuff. So, I thought, well, let’s see if they have a checkout point, a collection point. And I hit the checkout button. My order was submitted. It was just like automatic. It was like one-click ordering and payment because my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet apparently at some point I linked it to my Lazada account and this merchant had one-click ordering turned on. I don’t really understand it. I assumed I would have control over it, but I couldn’t find afterwards I couldn’t find any settings for this. But apparently if you have an automatic debit payment loaded in as your default and then you have a shipping address as a default and then you hit checkout, it just happens. There’s no confirmation page. So I didn’t even want this thing yet. I certainly didn’t want it delivered to the hotel where I’m not even staying anymore. But as soon as I hit the checkout button, boop, it placed my order and paid for it. And it’s like, ah, technology drives me crazy. Luckily in this case I was able, I wasn’t sure whether I could cancel it or not. In my experience in the world they don’t really let you cancel things very easily. There’s always oh it’s too late, you know, this that or there’s like a 50% charge for cancellation. But I did find my order in Lazada and there was a cancel button and I just cancelled it and I got a refund right away. So no harm, no foul as they say. But now I wanted to figure out how to prevent this from happening in the future. And when I tried some, I remember a previous experiment hitting checkout and then I get the confirmation page and I could see that it had Touch ‘n Go e-wallet as my default payment. And apparently maybe some point in the past I turned on one-click ordering as a possibility. I don’t remember where it is. Anyway, I looked and I looked and I looked. I found I could not remove Touch ‘n Go as a payment method. I could not turn off one-click ordering. I went to all the menus one by one by one. I looked everywhere. Went around and around. I went online. I did searches. How do I remove a payment method? My AI buddies all told me, “Oh, it’s easy. So easy to remove a payment method. You just click on account, click on settings, go to payment methods, everything will be listed there and then you can just delete it.” But of course, I live on Planet Doug where these things never exist. The guide, the manual, the online forum, the AI, they will all tell me, “Go to this menu, click on that button, you will see this item.” On Planet Doug, those items never exist. So, yeah, I found I could click on my account, I could go to settings, I clicked on payment methods, and there’s nothing there. There are no payment methods listed, nothing to delete, nothing to turn off, nothing to remove. So, I went back to all my AI buddies and I went back to the internet and I said, “Yeah, what I’m trying to do is get rid of this Touch ‘n Go e-wallet one-click automatic payment.” And then my AI buddies went, “Oh, okay. Okay, okay, now we understand what your issue is. What we were telling you was how to get rid of a credit card or a debit card. But Touch ‘n Go, an e-wallet is different. That is authorized on the Touch ‘n Go side. So, ah, what you have to do is open your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, go into this menu, and then you find pre-authorized debits, and then you click on that.” And there it was. I had Lazada in my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet as a pre-authorized payment. Just let it happen. Don’t ask for confirmation. It was in Touch ‘n Go, not in Lazada. Maybe I set it up originally in Lazada. I have a vague memory now where Lazada said, “Okay, now we did something. Now you have to go to Touch ‘n Go and authorize it.” So, I probably did it at some point, but now I knew how to turn it off. So, I no longer, I think I no longer have the danger of accidentally ordering and paying for something because what I need to be able to do is put something in my shopping cart, click on checkout, look whether there are collection points as an option, then I can place the order. But if I have to ship it to my address, then I can’t do it. So, I need to be able to check each time I hit checkout. Is there a checkout? I mean, collection point. Oh, no. I have to find another store that offers delivery to a collection point. So, that was that. All happened this morning, right? I often wonder like where does the time go? Like I cannot believe I’m still here in Kuala Lumpur. Like where did the time go? But it’s things like this. I wake up in the morning and I’m going to hit the ground running and I’m going to get things done. I’m going to do this, do this, and then it’s 1:00 in the afternoon because I’ve been fixing all of the technology problems that appeared overnight. Every morning I wake up with a list of tech things I need to troubleshoot and solve and entire days go by that way. Anyway, and it really is 1:00 right now. I said that off the top of my head, but it just turned right now. But yeah, where does the time go? Like when I changed hotels, I told that whole story in my last behind-the-scenes podcast. That took the whole day basically because you have to wait until noon before you can check out and then you have to wait until 2:00 before you can check in. And the way I like to do things, I’m not a multitasker really. I find it difficult. I guess someone could say, “Oh, if you want to go off and do something in the morning, well, you can just pack up at that hotel, pack everything into your bags, bring them down to the lobby, and just leave your bags there, go off exploring, shooting video, doing stuff, and then come back at noon, or actually, no, then go to the other hotel at 2, check in, then go back and get your bags. But I can’t do that. And I don’t know, you’ve paid for a room for the whole morning, so sort of packing up and leaving that room at 7:00 a.m., I don’t know. Because at the midday I like to go back to my room and take a shower, use the bathroom, plug in my batteries. I need a base. So I can’t do things like that. So if I’m changing from one hotel to a new hotel, that’s a whole day operation. I build my day around that and then I’m editing video in the morning doing all this technology stuff and I just work in my hotel room until noon and then I bring my bags down to the lobby. Anyway, takes the whole day. So in my mind once I start adding up all the days like where did the days go? Then it starts to make sense. Oh yeah, that whole day I spent the whole day trying to fix my Lazada Touch ‘n Go problem. You say, “Oh, that whole day was just changing a hotel. Oh, that, you know, this, then the days start to add up.” And I guess you have to be more efficient with your days.

Another technology story is quite an interesting one because a Planet Doug subscriber reached out to me and they told a very interesting story where they had a GoPro. I think they had the GoPro Hero 11 or 12. I’d have to look at the messages, but it’s either the 11 or the 12, probably the 12. And it had a failure. It stopped working. Something broke in the camera that was not related to damage or anything like that. It basically failed and they reached out to GoPro support. This person lives in the United States, so they have more options than we do here in Malaysia. They can send cameras back under warranty and get replacements. They have access to all these things that we don’t have here in Southeast Asia. So, I think that GoPro was out of warranty, but they contacted GoPro and then GoPro said, “Well, you know, we can’t do anything under warranty because the warranty period is over, but we do have this GoPro subscription, which you pay a certain amount per month or per year, and it’s an amazing deal. To be honest, I’ve often thought I should have gotten a GoPro subscription, and I probably would have in the past, except a lot of the benefits they offer aren’t available in Malaysia. You only get those benefits in certain countries, and all these countries in Southeast Asia are not eligible. But in his case, GoPro support said, “Well, if you sign up for the GoPro subscription now, you get two $99 camera replacements per year. Like, no questions asked. So, if your GoPro is broken, you broke it or like it fell off your motorcycle and shattered. I think that’s how it works, you can get a brand new GoPro for $99 to replace it. So, in his case, he had a GoPro Hero 12, let’s say, that just wasn’t working anymore. And then he got the GoPro subscription and then they said, “Yeah, $99, we’ll send you a new Hero 12.” But then when the dust settled, they said, “Actually, we can send you a Hero 13. What do you think of that?” like we can send you the latest greatest model if you want to upgrade for $99. And that’s what he did. So, he upgraded from the 11 or the 12 to the 13. And now he had a bunch of GoPro batteries and accessories he doesn’t use or need anymore because the GoPro 13, they redesigned it. GoPro in their wisdom redesigned the 13. It uses a different battery, different this, different that. So, he had a bunch of batteries. And then he heard me talk endlessly in my videos about my struggles with GoPro batteries because here in the heat of Southeast Asia, the batteries swell up and then they can’t go back in the camera anymore. So, I’m constantly buying new batteries or figuring out ways to get a battery out of the camera because it’s swelled up and is stuck inside the GoPro. So, he reached out to me and said, “Hey, do you want them? I’ve got extra batteries I don’t need anymore. Can I send them to you?” So, we were chatting online and yeah, so they’re going to send me the extra batteries, four of them. I’m very excited about that. Four. And the batteries are probably from my perspective brand new. Like myself, as the kind of YouTuber I am, when I’m using a GoPro battery, I use it like I run it day after day after day. Charge it fully, empty it, charge it, empty it, like dozens and dozens and dozens of times in a very short period of time. But the average person who isn’t a YouTuber, they might use their GoPro once in a while, like once a month or once every couple of months when they go on holiday, they go scuba diving, they go skiing, whatever they’re doing. Oh, I’m going to use my action camera, but they’re not like using it day in and day out. So, I’m pretty sure that these batteries are going to be practically brand new and have a great life. So, I’m very excited about that. I don’t have them yet, but they’re going to be shipped to me here in Kuala Lumpur. So, I’m in contact with this guy and we’re talking about things. And then he told me the whole story about the GoPro subscription. And then he says, “You know what? This might be something for you, this whole GoPro subscription thing because my GoPro, looking around if I have it here.” Yes, I have it here. My Hero 12, the rear LCD screen is still broken. I told that story many times where like almost right after I bought it. It was a birthday present again from a Planet Doug subscriber, bought it for me for my birthday and then I picked it up here in Kuala Lumpur brand new. Took it to Vietnam on the first trip and because of the overheating, I think it’s because of the overheating, the rear LCD screen basically just stopped working. I can put a picture or a little video clip up here. You can see what happened to the screen and that’s how I’ve been using it ever since, for a year and a half, two years, longer than that. How long have I had this camera? And I brought it back to the camera store, showed them the problem. They sent it to the distributor, but the distributor refused to do anything. Even though it was under warranty, they insisted there was nothing wrong with the camera, and they just sent it back. And I’ve just used it this way ever since. And it isn’t a huge problem for me because I’m not monitoring the video from the rear screen. I actually turn off all the screens and I’m just holding the GoPro like this. I don’t like being distracted by seeing myself on an LCD screen, so I’m just holding it like this and just filming, and the screens are on like a 30-second timer. All I need to be able to do is play back the video and confirm that it was recording. I don’t need to see the video clearly. I just need to see, okay, it was recording and okay, it’s recording audio. Cool. And I need to be able to change menu settings. As long as I can just barely make out the menu and change settings, I can live with this LCD screen. But my new mystery benefactor said, “Hey, this GoPro subscription, maybe brand new camera through that.” So with his help, we looked into this very, very carefully. Contacted GoPro. Lots of emails going back and forth, back and forth, and yeah, it was a real possibility that for $99, brand new GoPro Hero 12, or they might even send me a brand new GoPro Hero 13 because the 12s, they won’t have as many of them in the warehouse anymore. So, hey, do you want a 13? I don’t know whether I’d want a 13 because I have so many accessories for the 12, but who knows? So it was looking pretty promising but then when it came down to the wire then they said oh not in Malaysia. It’s like ah of course you know they had a list of countries where they can ship you a replacement camera under this program and all the countries of course are in North America, Western Europe. You know, the usual suspects, they get all the benefits from GoPro. And then here in Southeast Asia, none of these countries are listed. So, even though you could get a replacement through the GoPro subscription program, not in Malaysia. They will not ship, they will not accept a camera from a Malaysian address, and they won’t ship to a Malaysian address either. So, that was kind of an interesting GoPro rabbit hole that I went down. And who knows, that might have taken up a day or two where I was kind of dealing with all of this and thinking about it and researching and maybe that’s where another couple of days went. So I think overall that might be the end of the technology stories.

So far, this little experiment with having the Olympus so far away. Yeah, it’s working out pretty well. I like this a lot. It just makes it a lot easier. I feel like I have more energy, too, because when the camera is sitting on the mattress on a tripod, you really have to hold yourself stiff. I can feel myself being much more relaxed now because I can just kind of move around and do whatever I want. And I don’t feel like I have to hold my stomach muscles tense like don’t move the camera. Don’t move the camera. Of course, I wonder if there’s an Olympus. I must have looked into this in the past. I don’t know if there’s any kind of an app that I can control the camera. I don’t think so. There might be a like a remote control out there in the world. You can buy an accessory, but I don’t know. I don’t mind getting up, going over to the camera, check that it’s still working, replay the last video clip, make sure I’m still getting audio, that is vaguely in focus and not overly bright or overly dark, and then I can just restart recording and then come back and sit down again. It’s not such a huge deal. I don’t absolutely need a remote. But yeah, this I’m digging this. And once I get reunited with my extension, I should be I could still use a lav mic because I just need an extension to reach the camera. So yeah, that’s kind of working out pretty well, I think. So yeah, what have I been up to?

Of course, I landed here in Kuala Lumpur. I told that whole story, the flight from Banda Aceh to KL and then my friend KY, he picked me up at the airport and I talked about this sensory overload that hit me when I landed and I’m still going through it now. I was out, the reason I think the reason I started recording this podcast is that I went out last night with Daryl from the Wander Eats YouTube channel. Daryl had some errands to run and then if he has that, he often contacts me. If he’s like going to drive somewhere or go somewhere, he knows I’m like a faithful puppy dog. It’s like, “Oh, I’ll come. I’ll come.” You know, if he comes, especially if he’s driving and if he’ll drive up to the hotel, I just hop in the passenger seat and while he’s running his errands, maybe I can do some of my own little things I need to do here or there. Anyway, it’s just a lot of fun to hang out with Daryl and go out and do things. So, we went out to Bukit Bintang last night and we didn’t go by car because it’s easy to get there by monorail from here. I’m right on the monorail line. He came down by monorail and then we just hopped on the train, went to Bukit Bintang and he had to do some stuff there and then we had something to eat and something to drink and just packed with people. I mean, it’s been ages since I’ve been there during the day, let alone at night, like on a Saturday night. And talk about sensory overload. I’m just sort of like, ah. I was thinking about going there with my Olympus camera one night just to take video of the scene. Make a Bukit Bintang video, just capturing little clips, you know, no narration. I wouldn’t be in the video, but just recording life in Bukit Bintang. So, I was thinking about going there anyway, but I ended up not bringing the Olympus because I didn’t want that getting in between just chatting with Daryl. I didn’t want that distraction, you know? So, I just wanted to be very present for talking with Daryl and not be constantly, “Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I’m listening with one ear and playing around with my camera with the other.” So, I left the camera behind. I didn’t bring the GoPro. Thinking I should have because I’ve been a very bad YouTuber lately since I got so deep into non-vlog topics like e-wallets and tsunamis and historical things, you know, making videos a little bit different from the norm that I got out of the habit of recording my daily life. And it’s hard to start up again once you lose that habit. So, I didn’t I haven’t used my GoPro to record daily life activities since I’ve been back in KL. And I feel a bit bad about that because I have done like last night would have been very interesting to record. We did a lot of interesting things, went to interesting places, saw a lot of interesting things. But again, it’s one of those YouTube things where yeah, the recording is easy. I could have taken my GoPro and just recorded hours and hours of footage, but then it’s okay. Now you got two days working to edit that video. And is that video subject worthy of a day or two days of editing? And the answer really is not really. So anyway, I didn’t bring my GoPro and because I haven’t been recording my activities on the GoPro, that’s kind of what inspired me to fire up this podcast again so soon. So yeah, going all the way back to getting picked up by KY. As I mentioned previously, he has a favorite satay roadside spot that he loves and we’ve been there a couple of times and we stopped there to get something to eat. That was my arrival in Kuala Lumpur. That was really enjoyable. And I was just having that sensory overload, the traffic and the people and the skyscrapers and whatnot. I shot some other video with my Olympus here in Chow Kit and I sent a copy of that. I actually I originally shot it intending to send it to a friend of mine. I wasn’t even going to put it on YouTube. I shot it with my friend in mind. So, I recorded all that and then I sent a copy to her and she was watching it and then she wrote back to me a message saying, “Oh, I didn’t know KL had its own CN Tower because I recorded just a short clip of the KL tower at night filming it with the Olympus and then panning down to street level.” And then she said, “Oh, I didn’t know you had one of those towers in KL.” And then I wrote back to her and I pointed out, well yeah you know KL depending on how you define skyscraper has is one of the most skyscraper-heavy cities in the world. If you consider metropolitan Kuala Lumpur, like not just KL downtown but you include all the satellite cities like metro Kuala Lumpur. Kuala Lumpur is number six in the world. Number six in terms of the cities with the most skyscrapers. The only places that have more are places like Hong Kong, you know, which is the clear leader. They have double what every other place has. But yeah, it’s amazing. And again, people are not really aware of that if they’re not familiar with Malaysia and they never been here. They just had no idea how big the city is, how modern the MRT system is, the hotels, the restaurant opportunities. Yeah, just the it’s I always call it the land of giants. And I really felt that when I arrived this time, just, you know, driving in on the highway system with KY. And the closer we get to downtown, you know, more and more of these skyscrapers start emerging. And it was like, wow. You know, I was kind of overwhelmed. And I’m, and two weeks later, I said, has it been two weeks? Maybe 10 days. I’m still feeling that way. And one of the first things I did was meet up with Daryl, actually. I’ve had a weird time being back in KL this time. I met KY at the airport. Then I met Daryl the next morning for breakfast. And then since then, he’s the only person I’ve met. So I’ve been here for 10 days and I’ve lived in like total isolation. I don’t know how or why it happened. It just happened. So I met Daryl again yesterday to go to Bukit Bintang. And I said to him like, “Yeah, you’re going to have to forgive me if I’m a little bit out of it right now. I kind of got, you know, I’m not used to being out here in all the chaos and talking to someone.” And he says like, “What do you mean?” And I says, “Well, you’re the only person I’ve seen.” He’s like, “What do you mean?” So, well, you know, when we went out, we had breakfast, we had roti canai, and he says, “Yeah, well, that’s the only time I’ve talked to another human being.” So, this is I’ve only seen you since I’ve been back. But anyway, so yeah, Daryl contacted me when I first landed here or I contacted him and he suggested meeting for roti canai and we went to a place here in Chow Kit, which has a really good reputation. And that was a really good meal. Though I have to say I’m not a big fan of roti canai to be honest because of the mechanics of eating it. I like food to be simple. Give me a bowl that’s full of food and one utensil and then I can just eat it. That’s food paradise for me. And then roti canai. Of course you get this beautiful bread. This place makes a really good roti canai. It comes on the plate. Their specialty is like a ground beef with egg kind of roti canai and then you get all the little sauces, all these little bowls and bowls and bowls of all different flavored sauces. But now you’re in this whole thing where I don’t know, I guess you’re supposed to tear it off with your hands and then dip it in the sauce and then eat it. But I have a few problems with that. One is I don’t like sticky fingers. I’m usually handling my smartphone or a camera or doing something and I hate having gooey sticky fingers. So, I don’t like eating with my hands to begin with. And then even if you do, you’re not getting enough sauce anyway. Honestly, you’re peeling off some bread and then you’re kind of dipping it in the sauce and you get a little bit, but you’re not getting enough. So, what I like to do when I have roti canai, I eat the sauce like a soup. So like I’ll I might tear off some of the roti, some of the bread and I pop the bread in my mouth and then I take a spoon and I spoon in a couple of spoonfuls of the sauce. I eat it like it’s a soup. Then you get enough sauce. So that that’s how I eat roti canai. The normal way, you know, peel it off and then kind of dip it in, it’s just a mess and it’s everything gets, you’re dripping all over the table. It’s just too much work. And then when Daryl and I were there, in fact, we we ate our, I noticed Daryl was eating his with a knife and a or spoon, I think, and he was like cutting pieces with his spoon. He wasn’t eating with his hand either, I don’t think. And he was like tearing bits free with his spoon. So I that gave me permission to do the same thing. So instead of using my hands, I just grab my spoon and I’m ripping out pieces of roti and then putting it in a sauce and scooping it up like a soup. But yeah, really, really, really good roti canai and I vowed I would go back there again and again and I went back there to test an e-wallet but I haven’t gone back there to eat since then normally because I wake up in the morning and I don’t know I’ve got things to do. I’ve got Lazada problems to solve. So the first thing I do is fire up my laptop and have a cup of coffee. I don’t go out for breakfast is what I’m saying. But I really should anyway. So even that was sensory overload because it was still very, very early and you know crowded local traditional area and all the people and all the activity, the variety of food, the variety of people, how they look, how they dress, how they behave. And I was so accustomed to a certain sameness in Banda Aceh. Everybody dressed the same, everybody kind of looked the same, behaved the same. There was not much variety in the food, especially if you’re just walking along the street. I mean, if you work hard at it, you could travel across the city and find a restaurant that serves this or serves that. But I would just walk outside my hotel and look for something to eat. And it was always the same. I am pigget and then here oh I am pigget and oh there’s fish and there just wasn’t a whole lot going on in terms of the food and here in Kuala Lumpur it’s just like so many options it’s it’s bewildering really and it’s all so good so that was how things started with me.

And then my first project I may have talked about this a little already. I wanted to make a video, another e-wallet video, this one about using GoPay in Malaysia. So, I shot quite a big video in Sumatra. Can you use Touch ‘n Go in Indonesia? And I shot that video. And then I wanted to do the reverse because I still had the Indonesian e-wallet GoPay on my phone and I had I think 200,000 rupiah in my e-wallet and then I was going to go around and do a test. Interestingly, you know, the idea and the video title, like I’m trying to attract mainly an Indonesian audience with this video because they they would largely be the only people that would be interested, maybe a sprinkling of foreign tourists, but I think it’d be pretty rare for most foreign tourists to go to Bali and then set up an Indonesian e-wallet and then travel to Malaysia or Thailand or Singapore and want to continue using their GoPay e-wallet or their other e-wallet. Pretty rare. So, I think most Indonesians, they would be interested in the video because they’re very proud of their e-wallet system, the QRIS system. So, the title of the video from the very beginning was always going to be something like, “Does QRIS work in Malaysia?” or like questioning it. How well like, does QRIS really work in Malaysia? I test it in real life. Something like that. But that title isn’t really accurate. And that gets me into some semantic problems because when you’re doing this test, you’re not actually using QRIS. You’re using an Indonesian e-wallet and you’re using Malaysian DuitNow. So, you take your Indonesian e-wallet, you scan a Malaysian QR code, and then if it works, then the payment goes from DuitNow to QRIS to GoPay, right? So, the payment goes through QRIS, but you’re not actually using QRIS. So, the question, does QRIS work in Malaysia? The question doesn’t make any sense. The real question is, does GoPay work in Malaysia? And does the link between DuitNow and QRIS, does that payment link work? And how well does it work? But then you’re getting into very complicated things. And so anyway, the title of the video will probably be, “Does QRIS really work in Malaysia? I do my own testing to find out.” Something like that. So, I went out on the very first, now that I think about it, yeah, I think I met Daryl on the second morning because the first day, the very first thing I did was go out with GoPay and I was going to test the e-wallet. And that first day, it seemed to fail all the time. And I figured out what was happening eventually, but at that time, I didn’t really know what was going on. But I went to a place where I always get my fried bananas and I said in the video, “Oh, they have a DuitNow code. Let’s try it.” And I scanned the DuitNow code with GoPay and it wouldn’t work. I had to use Touch ‘n Go. So it didn’t work there. Then I went to a bunch of shops where they have to scan your code like 7-Eleven and I went to KK Mart and both places failed. So right out of the gate it was like ah yeah it doesn’t seem to work. Oh and I went to an apam balik place and they had and again in the video I said oh look they have a DuitNow code. Let’s see if GoPay works. So failure, failure, failure, failure. And then I thought, oh, I guess GoPay doesn’t work. QRIS doesn’t work. But then I went to Mister Donut and I said on the video like maybe Mister Donut is different because it’s a big international chain. And it did work at Mister Donut. They had what I called a DuitNow QR code on the sign and I scanned it with GoPay and ta-da it worked and I concluded that okay DuitNow will work but only if the merchant has turned on the international payment portal or whatever the language is. That was my conclusion but I was very negative about using the Indonesian e-wallet in Malaysia. I even filmed a conclusion. I went to this little park area and I sat down and I filmed a conclusion to the video saying basically no QRIS and GoPay, you can’t really use it in Malaysia, you know, maybe at Mister Donut but in general no, you can use Touch ‘n Go in Indonesia that works great but the reverse is not true. That was my conclusion. But then the next morning I met up with Daryl and we went to the roti canai place and they had a QR code there and I scanned it doing a test and ta-da it worked. It’s like oh okay and I’m so amazed at that is because this roti canai place was also very small, very local, just like my fried banana place. It wasn’t a big international chain. It was just a small one-person operation, family-run operation maybe. And yet GoPay and QRIS, it worked. So I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And then Daryl and I tracked down a coffee shop, a nice one. It was called Delhi Brothers, kind of a new fancy, boutiquey kind of expensive coffee shop. And we went there to get a coffee and sit and just chat. I was really out of it thinking back, that whole morning having roti canai and then at the coffee shop I was kind of out of it. Part of it was I brought the Olympus with me at that time and I was playing around with it. So, I didn’t give Daryl all my attention, which was not a very polite thing to do, which is why I didn’t bring the Olympus last night. But, I was also still really tired. I just wasn’t I don’t know. I just was out of it. But we’re at the coffee shop and Daryl had paid for our breakfast. He had paid for our roti canai, all of that. So now we’re at the coffee shop. I wanted to do a test with GoPay. So I said, “Oh yeah, let me get the coffee.” And they had a QR code, DuitNow QR code. I scanned it with GoPay. Ta-da. It worked. I could see that I was able to pay and then I made a mistake because I actually said, “Okay, confirm.” I knew already that I don’t actually have to pay to confirm that it works. I only have to take it to the second screen. And if I get to the second screen, oh, it works. I don’t actually have to pay. But then I says, “Yeah, okay. Confirm.” Ta-da. And then the payment went through and then I went, “Ah, dummy. I shouldn’t have done that.” Because I only had 200,000 rupiah in my e-wallet. So, I needed to conserve that amount of money for when I’m actually filming because when Daryl and I were at the coffee shop, I wasn’t filming it with my GoPro as an official test. I was just we were just there to have a cup of coffee. But I ended up using like half of the money in my e-wallet to pay for this coffee that we were having. And it was like, ah, I shouldn’t have done that because what I what I could have done was just scanned it. Oh, it works. But then I could have cancelled it and then use Touch ‘n Go to actually pay for the coffee because I can add money to my Touch ‘n Go account. I can top it up, but I can’t top up GoPay. So, whatever money is in my GoPay e-wallet, that’s all I can use for testing. That’s it. I had like after I paid for the coffee, I had like 80,000 or 90,000 rupiah left. And that was all the money that I had left. It was like, ah, you dummy. But I Yeah, I just accidentally hit the confirm button and went, “Yeah, pay.” Oh, we have deducted 100,000 rupiah from your, I was like, “Oh, no, no, no, no. I forgot. I forgot. I shouldn’t do that.” That was kind of funny. But anyway, after going out with Daryl for breakfast, and it worked in two places, a local place and a coffee shop, I thought, “Huh, maybe I should continue my testing.” So the next day I went out again and then I did a whole bunch of testing because I knew I didn’t need to actually submit payment. All I needed to do was scan the QR code and then hit like authorize payment and if I got to the next screen I knew it worked and I could go ah ta-da it worked and then I would cancel the payment because as soon as my balance went down to zero I wouldn’t be able to do any testing anymore. So I think I went to 15 places maybe 20 places, I’m not sure. And everywhere that I saw a QR code, I tested it. Ah, it works. It works. It works. It works. It works. Almost everywhere I went, now it was working. So, I had to rethink my entire conclusion. And then I figured out what was going on. And what was going on is that every time it failed, it was because that was a Touch ‘n Go QR code, only Touch ‘n Go. It wasn’t a DuitNow code, but they look identical. And the reason I got confused is that the Touch ‘n Go code, it says right on it, Malaysia National QR. And I thought, well, Malaysia National QR, that’s DuitNow. What else could it be? But it turns out that if you want to use an Indonesian e-wallet in Malaysia, you only can do it if the sign says DuitNow on it. Like at the top you’ve got the QR code and at the top of the QR code if it has the DuitNow logo and the DuitNow text then it will work. But if you see the QR code and it says Malaysia National QR, but it doesn’t say DuitNow, it won’t work. So that’s the key to this whole Indonesian e-wallet business. Works beautifully. Works really, really well. But it has to say DuitNow on the sign and then it will work. And that so then I had to reshoot the conclusion to that video. And then of course the next day I spent the whole day editing that video and then I uploaded the video, did all of that. I just haven’t posted it yet because I wanted to give people a break from the e-wallet videos because I posted so many of them in a row. And as I’ve talked about before, it kind of made sense to do that because my original Touch ‘n Go e-wallet video, it’s probably up to 80,000 views by now and that’s the equivalent of 40 normal Planet Doug videos, right? So it’s sort of it kind of takes the wind out of your sails in terms of recording your day-to-day life. I enjoy doing it. I connect with people through those videos, my personal vlogs. I like doing it. But if I wanted to shoot 40 Planet Doug daily vlog videos, that would take me at least 120 days, 4 months, right? Because one day to shoot it, two days to edit and upload. So three days per video in terms of the workload. And if I wanted to do 40 of them, that’s 120 days, 4 months, and I would get 80,000 views out of four months of work. One e-wallet video also gives me 80,000 views. So, it’s sort of, you know, the balance there. And then when I was in Banda Aceh, I decided to, yeah. I mean, I did the using Touch ‘n Go in Banda Aceh video and that got like 50,000 views by now, I think. And then I shot a behind-the-scenes video because shooting that video using Touch ‘n Go in Banda Aceh, that was a real adventure because I was dealing with all the blackouts. They had that huge flooding from the storms and all the damage, all the landslides and the power was knocked out. So, there were blackouts constantly. And every time I tried to do an e-wallet payment, it would fail because I was in a neighborhood where there was no power. And when there’s no power, there’s no mobile internet. So, I wanted to tell the whole behind-the-scenes story. And I shot a whole video about that. And then I got a lot of comments to my e-wallet videos. And I shot another video just replying to comments about e-wallets. And those videos were not super, super popular. But even those videos which I could shoot in one hour over a cup of coffee, they would get 4,000 views, 6,000 views, which is double or triple what, well sometimes even five, six times what a normal video gets. Yeah. If I went out in Banda Aceh and just went exploring in a new neighborhood, a new market, went down to the coast or did something, that video would probably get like 1,000 views. So, I’d have to make 40 of those to reach the same level as one of those e-wallet videos, or I’d have to make, you know, five or six of them just to equal the popularity of a replying to comments video. But anyway, so when I was in Banda Aceh, yeah, I was focusing on these e-wallet videos and I did some experimenting with kind of science-based topic based videos, things like that. Yeah, I really missed shooting the daily vlog videos though. And as I said already, once you get out of the habit of shooting those, it’s really hard to get back into them. Yeah, I really enjoyed shooting that GoPay e-Wallet video here in KL. I learned a lot myself about how things work and GoPay ended up working much better than I expected. So, as I said, I had to reshoot the whole conclusion because my first conclusion was quite negative, but then later on things just got better and better and better. And then once I figured out that trick, look for the DuitNow logo, then it works. If there is no DuitNow logo on the QR code, it’s not going to work. So that’s the key. And of course, it won’t work in any of the places where they have to scan your code. That’s not going to work. And that was the same for Touch ‘n Go. So when I use Touch ‘n Go in Indonesia, if I’m scanning a QRIS code, it worked beautifully most of the time, but it would not work in a convenience store where they have the opposite system where they scan your code. So it was kind of a mirror image using Touch ‘n Go in Indonesia was very similar to using GoPay here. One big difference though is Touch ‘n Go is definitely a more elegant e-wallet app, more feature-rich. So, for example, when you go to another country with Touch ‘n Go, you can change the country settings at the top level, and you can just say, “Oh, I’m in Indonesia now.” And then the whole layout changes, new buttons, new languages, and it shows you the Indonesian currency and Malaysian equivalent currency, you know. So, it shows you both rupiah and ringgit, and it’s all very clear and very well organized. When I started using GoPay here, I was surprised when I turned on GoPay here in Malaysia, it looked exactly the same as it did in Indonesia, including having your balance in Indonesian rupiah. So, I was very confused at the very beginning because I thought, well, how does that work when I pay for something? Because I have to enter the amount in ringgit and yet it doesn’t seem to change to ringgit. So if I scan a QR code now, do I have to calculate? Do I have to do the currency conversion in my head? And I didn’t know how it would work. So I had to do my own testing to even figure that out. And then I was very happy to find that the very first place I went to, the fried banana stall where payment failed, I was able to scan the code and then when the payment screen came up, it was asking for Malaysian ringgit to input. So I was like, ah, okay. So that’s how it works. And yeah, so yeah, everything worked out very well in the end. I don’t know when I’ll make that video public. Maybe I’ll post this one and then I’ll wait a couple of days and then post the e-wallet video and then my loyal subscribers won’t be quite as annoyed. It’s like, ah, another e-wallet video. What’s up with this guy? Right. So, I’m trying to space it out a little bit and give people a break from e-wallet videos. And until I go to another country, this will probably be the last e-wallet video because there’s nothing else for me to test. I mean, if that using QRIS in Malaysia video goes viral and there’s hundreds of comments with interesting input, I could do a replying to comments video, but there’s really nothing else for me to test unless I go to Singapore or Thailand and then I can test their local e-wallet and I can find out, you know, does Touch ‘n Go, how does it work in Thailand? How does it work in Singapore? And then I can try the Singaporean e-wallet, the Thai e-wallet. You know, I could add to my collection. But for now, now that I’ve tested GoPay in Kuala Lumpur, I’m pretty much done. There’s no other way to, there’s nothing else for me to test. So, there will be no more e-wallet videos until I go to another country.

I mentioned that last night I went out with Daryl from Wander Eats YouTube channel and the way it ended up being, the original idea was that he was going to drive somewhere and then I was going to hop in the car like a faithful puppy, stick my head out the window, you know, and just enjoy going out into the world. But then it turned out he needed to go to, I got to get the pronunciation right here, Sungai Wang, Sungai Wang Plaza, which is right in downtown in Bukit Bintang. And to go there, it doesn’t make any sense to drive because then you got to park the car and there’s a that’s a huge hassle. So, we went there by monorail and that was a lot of fun. Daryl sent me a WhatsApp location sharing link. So as he was coming down, he came down by MRT and then transferred at Titiwangsa to the monorail. And I realized later I could have gone earlier and gone up to the platform and waited for him on the platform and when his train arrived, I could just hop on the same train and then off we go. But I didn’t think of that for some reason. So, he had to get out of the train and then he was waiting for me inside the station. And he actually took a picture of me. Here’s the picture of me walking to the monorail station. You know, I’m walking fast. And I didn’t bring a camera with me as you can see. No Olympus, no GoPro, no GoPro around my neck, nothing at all. And then I went up into the MRT, the monorail station and I realized I think that was the first time since I’ve been back that I even went into the public transit system. So the whole you know power of Touch ‘n Go to beep in and beep out again. I think that was the first time I’d done it because I just haven’t gone anywhere. I haven’t done anything special. I haven’t gone shopping. I just I’ve just stayed in the Chow Kit area this whole time. So I was like, “Oh, that’s kind of weird.” You know, this all feels very unfamiliar. How does this work again? It was almost like, “Where is my Touch ‘n Go card?” I was like, “I’m going through my wallet and like where is it? Did I bring it with me?” And then I found it and then getting into the MRT, not the MRT, the monorail with all these other people. And yeah, again, it was like sensory overload. And as you head towards Bukit Bintang, especially on a Saturday night, the train is going to get more and more and more crowded because lots of people go to Bukit Bintang and a lot of foreigners. So, I was doing that whole bule thing again. I was like an Indonesian person. Every time I saw another foreigner like me, another white dude or a group of white people, I’m like, “Oh, bule. Oh, bule.” You know, it’s like, wow, bule everywhere. I was so excited. And then the streets in Bukit Bintang were just jammed with people with traffic, the sidewalks, and yeah, very much a sensory overload. And we went into the Sungai Wang Plaza. And going into that shopping mall was like crazy which is kind of weird when you think about it because that shopping plaza is one of the oldest ones I think in Kuala Lumpur. It’s an old traditional one and yet there was nothing like that in Banda Aceh. They had like one very small mall that basically was built around one supermarket like a grocery store and then there was a KFC, a coffee shop, one or two smartphone shops, a Japanese noodle place, and that’s it. That was the whole mall. It was like nothing at all. And like the one that Daryl and I went to, the Sungai Wang Plaza is considered one of the older malls here. But compared to my life in Banda Aceh, it was like 10 Disneylands jammed into one. It was like, whoa, all these stores. And it is a bit of a confusing shopping mall. Anyone that goes in there, it’s like you got to leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Like, how do you get in? And then once you’re in, how do you get out? And then the elevators and the escalators. It’s an adventure going into that mall. So we went in there. Daryl had a couple of errands to take care of. I popped into a camera store and it was like one of these small, you know, shopping mall camera stores, like not a big professional place, but it had a really nice selection. They had a display of GoPro accessories. They had Fuji. They had Sony, they had Canon, they had Nikon, they had a whole range of microphones and adapters and grips and yeah, I mean they were it was a very, very well stocked shop. I was really surprised. So while Daryl was running his errands, I spent my time like drooling as I’m looking at all these cameras like ooh ooh ooh. And I haven’t been paying attention to cameras lately. So, for all I know, Sony in the last few months could have released like the greatest vlogging camera of all time. Or Fuji could have or a new one from Nikon or Canon, I don’t know. But I didn’t see anything there that I didn’t recognize. The camera market has been pretty quiet lately. So, yeah, but I enjoyed that. And then we wanted to get something to eat. And it turned out that there was some sort of a food court there up on the fourth or fifth floor. And it looked nice. We saw posters, lot of nice restaurants. Daryl had heard about it and he had never been there. So we thought, “Yeah, let’s grab something to eat up there in the food court.” And to get up there, we wanted to go by escalator. And just finding the escalator was challenging. And then as you go up, you go up one level and then you got to walk around like the entire mall to get to the next escalator to take you up. And then around, you know, and then you finally get to the very top. And the escalator at the very top was completely broken and you had to climb up the escalator stairs. And then that food court was just a ghost town. It was like the zombie apocalypse. Maybe it’s busier during the day and at night everything shuts down. But yeah, it was like it didn’t smell good. It had a terrible smell in the air, like wet dog or something. And everything was closed. There was like nothing there. So, I was like, “Okay, that yeah, let’s not eat here.” Like, we could have gotten, there was like one or two places we could have gotten a meal if we were starving, but yeah, there was nothing special about it. So, we went all the way back down and then we crossed the road to Lot 10 and then you go underneath underground to Lot 10 and that’s an amazing food court down there. I’ve been there a couple of times. I’ve been there with Daryl in the past and I’ve been there with Planet Doug subscribers as well getting a good meal and yeah, I love going out with Daryl too when it comes to food because he understands my inadequacies and I guess it’s kind of an advantage I have as well is that everything is interesting to me. Everything is going to taste good and I’m going to enjoy it. So, we just basically found a table and then my job is to sit there and keep the table and protect our bags. So, Daryl can dump his bag there. I could put my bag there and I just stay at the table and then Daryl, he just goes off and his job is to just order a bunch of stuff and whatever pops into his mind that oh, you know, Doug will like this and like this and then he’ll get a bunch of things and then all the food comes to our table and we had an amazing meal there and we talked about all the problems in the world. We solved all the world problems and yeah over a really good meal that was really, really nice.

And then we came back up the escalator back to the main street jammed with people. Wow. Bukit Bintang was like out of control last night. So busy. Just walking down the sidewalk and trying to talk with Daryl was next to impossible because, you know, you had to navigate the crowds. And we came across a roti kind of place. Daryl actually had to go into another bakery because he’s a very good husband and father and good friend. As a friend, he’s taking care of me. As a good husband and father, he’s taking care of his family. So every time we go out, he forages for me. But then before he goes home, he contacts his family and says, “Okay, I’m out here in Bukit Bintang. You guys want anything?” And then his family places their orders and then he has to go to all these different shops and get all these favorite foods that they like. If they haven’t had dinner yet, he’s got to get dinner. So, he brings food back home to his family. And while he was in a shop getting some food for his family, I happened to be standing beside this roti place and it really caught my eye because the smells like, “Oh, that smells so good.” And I saw the guy making the roti, like making like this long dough thing, flattening it and flattening it and making it longer and then kind of wrapping it up and filling it with all kinds of vegetables and chicken and beef and different types. So I’m sort of staring at that and then I look at Daryl in this other place and then Daryl kind of he’s like, “That’s a good place.” You know, he indicated to me with his face that yeah, those good. So, while Daryl was getting food for his family, I ordered two chicken rotis from this place, paying with Touch ‘n Go. The power of Touch ‘n Go. I’m very excited to be able to use Touch ‘n Go again. It’s so much fun, so convenient. And yeah, got a couple of these chicken roti things. One for him, one for me. And then we were munching on this as we walked around, taking in the sights. On one of the corners, they have one of those like it looks like a three-dimensional wrap-around screen where it looks like whatever is on the screen is three-dimensional. You see videos of these all the time on YouTube where you get like dragons. It’s like they’re coming out of the building and ah, you know, looks very, very cool. And then Daryl said, “Oh, do you want to get a soy milk?” And I was like, “Sure.” And then we walked down this street, but it turns out the soy milk place that he knew about was gone. It had been replaced with something else. And right beside it was a Kung Fu Panda place. And for whatever reason, Daryl and I went into the Kung Fu Panda Cafe and I got a milk tea and he got some sort of a tea, rose blossom something. They had all these very fancy poetic names. Pretty expensive place where your rose blossom tea could be like 17 ringgit, a milk tea could be like 11 ringgit. And the place was just filled with Kung Fu Panda stuffies, like stuffed animals. They were just everywhere, small, big, medium, large sizes. And they had tiny, tiny little chairs. But yeah, there Daryl and I, you know, we popped in there and ordered a couple of drinks and we sat down in these tiny chairs. Daryl took a picture of me with a Kung Fu Panda plushy. You can see the pictures here. Yeah. And we just sat there. All the problems, the world problems that we didn’t solve over dinner, we talked about them while we’re drinking at the Kung Fu Panda Cafe. Solved all the other problems. Talked about he has an upcoming trip to Jakarta coming up. Going back to Java in Indonesia. Talking about my experiences in Banda Aceh, YouTube camera gear, you know, the things that we always talk about. That was a really, really good night.

And then yeah, we walked around for a little bit longer, hopped back into the monorail and I came back to my neighborhood and he brought the food parcel back to his family. So that was yeah, that was quite enjoyable. And I’m telling the story in depth partially because I feel guilty that I didn’t record any of that on video. A good YouTuber. I should have recorded that because we ended up seeing a lot of interesting places, eating a lot of good food, having a lot of fun, and I think that would have been an entertaining video for my YouTube channel. But I wasn’t back in the groove yet of shooting a daily, you know, just basic what I do in my life, videos. I’m hoping that’s going to kick in any minute now.

Perhaps one last overall topic for this podcast and it’s a bunch of little stories maybe but all kind of centering on language. So starting with a YouTuber Daniel the American Hobo. Today is actually a very special day for the American Hobo because it’s January 18th, 2026. And he began his YouTube channel on January 18th, 2025. So today his channel is, today is his one-year anniversary for his YouTube channel. And when he started shooting video, he also he started shooting video riding a bicycle and he had a commitment to record a vlog every single day for one year. That was his goal. That was his commitment. That was his project. So today is one year later and he did it. So for the last year he has cycled from northern Vietnam all the way through Vietnam, all around Cambodia, through southern Thailand into Malaysia, Sumatra and now Java in one year. And he didn’t post a video every single day but nearly, I mean he almost did post a complete full video every day. I mean maybe 90% of the days, I haven’t done the math, but he did shoot video every single day. So, every day of the last year is accounted for in his YouTube channel, in his videos. And he went from shooting on a smartphone, very simple, very rough around the edges and he graduated to a Pocket 3 and then now lately he bought a DJI Action 6. And he’s gone through three bicycles, two relatively inexpensive ones, and then the third one, the one he has now, he bought it in Kuala Lumpur, and it’s like a moderate. Like, it’s not an expensive bike. He’s not out there buying $1,500 touring bicycles or anything like that. So, even the bike he has now a big step up from his first bike, but I think it still cost like $200 at the most, something like that. But yeah, so he’s had he’s had quite the year, a lot of experiences for him. Big achievement. I can tell you that to shoot video every day for a full year while riding a bike on a budget like extreme low budget. And I forgot to mention is sleeping in a hammock and in a tent the majority of the time. So, it’s just crazy that he managed to do it and he’s kept it up all the way until today basically. So yeah, congratulations to the American Hobo. It’s quite the feat. Maybe he’s I don’t know if he’s going to do like a celebratory live stream today or something like that. I don’t think so. Let me check his channel to see whether he has a live stream coming up. No live stream scheduled, but he did post a short that says one year on YouTube. Let’s see what he says. Hey everyone, I’m back out on the road here just making my way through Indonesia and I just wanted to pause for a second and say we made one year. This has now been one year since I first started this journey in Vietnam. And which started as just one country ended up being two countries, three, four, up to five countries now. And I set the goalpost as my challenge being one year of every day doing a vlog regardless if that was more than one day put together. I at least filmed a little bit each and every day. And yesterday, I guess technically was the one year, but if it was my birthday, this would be the one-year anniversary for when I first started this filming for YouTube and uploading my very first video. So, go back to my Vietnam one and you’ll see it at the top of the playlist. It’s the first one there. Congratulations, everyone. Thank you for everybody that’s actually subscribed to me, joined me since the beginning, and the ones that came along later on. I appreciate all you and we made it, guys. What’s going to change? Probably nothing. I’m just going to keep on filming and keep on moving. All right, peace.

Yeah, I enjoy that very much because of course I spend a lot of time with Daniel here in Malaysia when he was in Kuala Lumpur. He was getting all geared up for going to Sumatra. And it’s sort of like with Daryl, I love going with other people when they’re living their lives. It kind of gives me more pleasure to help them do whatever they’re doing than doing my own thing, you know? So, I like being involved when he was buying the new bicycle and getting it outfitted and he, you know, bought a new tent and new gear, new camera stuff. So I spent a lot of time with him and actually I posted a lot of videos to Planet Doug where I spent the day with the American Hobo as he was going out running errands, shopping here in Kuala Lumpur. So yeah, that’s very cool. He’s actually becoming quite famous in a way in Indonesia because they have this thing in Indonesia. There are these YouTube channels that look for foreign YouTubers that are traveling in Indonesia. No, nobody’s ever found me to do this. I’m not interesting enough, apparently. But one of these channels found Daniel’s channel, and they basically did a complete summary of his journey. So, what they do is they go through all his videos and take out clips, little 5-second clips, and then put them all together into a new video and then tell his story in their own words, like in Indonesian. And they’ll just say, “Oh, there’s this American cycling around Indonesia.” And it’s usually the point is that Indonesian people are wonderful and kind and amazing and helpful because, like in Daniel’s case in all his videos there are little moments here and there where he’d meet local people and they’d give him some food or some snack or help him find a place to sleep or he would ask can I set up my tent here and the local people say sure. And so basically they’re highlighting all the times that local people gave him some assistance in some fashion or another. And then that YouTube channel will post this summary of his journey and that video will get millions of views like millions and millions of views. And then one channel did it for Daniel. But the thing is, I’ve noticed this and people have commented on that. Even though they’ve taken all the content from his videos, told his story, there’s no link to his channel. Like, there’s no shout out like, “Oh, go subscribe to the American Hobo. Here’s a link to his channel.” Nothing at all. They just basically take all the content and they don’t attribute it. They don’t specify where it came from or provide a link or any in any way, which yeah, it’s a little bit skeezy. You know, it’s not a great thing to do. I think Daniel’s fine with it. You know, at least somebody some people are going to watch that video and then even if there’s no link, they’re going to figure out, oh, American Hobo, and they’re going to search for his channel and he’ll get new subscribers and get some attention that way. A lot of Indonesians will hear about him through these videos anyway, but at the same time, you know, it would be nice to at least have a shout out or a link, you know, picture of his homepage and then in the description link to his channel, but yeah, they don’t do that. And then since that first channel did it, I think three more have done it. And every time one of them shows up, someone in Indonesia notices and then copy and pastes it into Daniel’s social media, says, “Oh, you’re being featured in another video.” And like one of them really focused on one moment where Daniel was riding over a bridge over a river and he’s taking like, “Ooh, look at this beautiful river.” But then down below was a massive garbage pile which you see all over Indonesia where you know bridge river, local people think garbage dump, you know it’s just such a convenient, you just go and buy on your scooter and you got your bag of household garbage and then you as you zoom across the bridge, you know, they just fling it over the railing and if one bag goes down there then other people see oh now it’s a garbage dump and then everybody starts throwing their garbage. And then it turns into this huge pile and yeah, just it looks disgusting and smells and yeah, you don’t really want to see a huge garbage pile like that seeping into this beautiful river, right? It just really looks bad. So Daniel pointed this out in one of his videos and then these Indonesian compilers focused on that, you know, in his video and yeah, so they will focus on something like that or focus on how nice the Indonesian people have been to him. So that’s kind of interesting. As I said, you know, when I when I went to Sumatra the first time, I guess the first time as a YouTuber, I posted, I don’t know, more than a hundred videos. I was there for maybe 6 months and I rode my bike from Dumai. I took the ferry across to Dumai and then I set off to ride my bike up to Bukittinggi. But then my right knee gave out on me. So I spent pretty much the first month just down in the lower areas, you know, Dumai, a small little village and Pekanbaru and then because I had to get my visa extended and then another village and then I eventually my knee got better and then I did ride my bike up to Bukittinggi and then I flew out of the country, came back in on a new visa and I shot all kinds of videos exploring the village and doing this and rented a scooter and went all over the place to, you know, featuring a lot of the biggest tourist attractions there down to Padang all along the coast. Yeah. I mean, I posted a lot of videos. As far as I’m aware, no one in Indonesia ever became aware of me and my YouTube channel. I, you know, it’s one of those mysteries of YouTube. You start wondering why that is. Like I’ve been talking a lot about the Let’s Go Cycling YouTuber Usfan from Morocco. His videos are very, very popular. He was a big deal in Indonesia. Daniel the American Hobo. He’s being picked up by local social media. All of these compilers getting millions and millions of views. I don’t know. Did no one ever stumble across one of my videos? And maybe they did and then they just freaked out because every one of my videos was like an hour long and it’s me just, you know, talking and talking and talking. Maybe they went, “Ah, we can’t handle like we don’t have the time to search through these hundreds of hours of content, all these words, you know, like 20,000 words per video. We don’t have time. No one has time to deal with all that. So maybe they maybe somebody saw my videos and just thought, “Yeah, there’s no point.” And this guy’s he’s old and he’s boring anyway. So nah. So nobody bothers. But anyway, yeah, my videos never seemed to become anything in Indonesia. Nobody noticed them. Nobody compiled them. I never I hardly ever got comments from Indonesian people. No Indonesians watched my videos for the most part. What are you going to do? But anyway, the reason I started talking about Daniel is because you know I relate to so many things he’s doing, the cycling, the YouTubing, this that and the other. And I’ve noticed, I mean he struggles a bit with language. I’m sure he’d be the first one to admit it. Language, spelling, foreign languages are not his strong suit. So I think he doesn’t really even try that hard because it is not one of his, it doesn’t come easily to him. So it does happen a lot where he’s showing up in a city or a town in Indonesia, but he doesn’t know how to pronounce the name of the town and he’ll take a stab at it or even the name of a hotel and he’ll take a stab at it, but he generally gets it wrong. The most recent one kind of brought a smile to my face because he was on his way to Yogyakarta. And of course, when you look at Yogyakarta, I’m sure I’m not saying it properly either, but then the spelling starts with a Y. So obviously if you’re an American or a Canadian, you see a Y must be Yogyakarta, right? But it’s it’s got a little bit of a J sound in it, Jogjakarta. But of course, he was pronouncing it in all kinds of weird ways. And then he will get comments in his video, not criticizing his pronunciation, but saying, “Just ask the local people like, “Dude, just ask people how do you pronounce this?” And every time I see one of those comments, I want to reply on Daniel’s behalf because I know that asking local people does not help because they don’t know what you’re asking. It’s they tell you, “Yeah, Indonesian people are so helpful. Just ask for help. They will help you do everything.” But I know from experience that asking for help can sometimes be one of the worst things you can do. And when it comes to like how do you pronounce this word or what do you call this in Indonesian? You think that’s a very simple sentence, very easy to grasp, but local people don’t know what you’re saying. And my theory is that well these are people that don’t travel. So the very concept of going to another country where you don’t know anything about the language, they haven’t experienced that for themselves. So the very idea that this person doesn’t know what this is called, it doesn’t compute. It’s like it’s not a question that makes sense to them. So the meaning doesn’t get across and then they start making assumptions like that, well I think this is what this foreigner is asking, but they never answer the question because they don’t know what you’re asking. Like I’ve got a computer mouse here and if I was in Indonesia and I wanted to talk about this or I wanted to go buy one in a shop. So I want to know like what do you call this in Indonesian? And even if I say in Indonesian to an Indonesian person, what do you call this in Indonesian? I’ll never get an answer. Never get an answer that makes any sense at all because they can’t seem to grasp this idea that I don’t already know. They don’t get the point of the question. Because I would go into the markets all the time and you’d think it’d be the I want to learn the names of the local dishes, the food and the drink. So I see this dish, this food and I, oh, what do you call this in Indonesian? Never get an answer that makes any sense at all. So I whenever Daniel gets these comments, just ask people and I kind of want to say, “Yeah, that doesn’t really work as well as you think it does.” And the same thing with pronunciation where in this latest video, like the latest set of videos where he’s in Yogyakarta, he did say in this latest video, I’m in the middle of watching one. He knew he was saying it wrong and people left comments, you know, dude, you know, just ask people. So, in this video, he met a local person, like a subscriber to his channel, reached out to him and said, hey, you know, I’m a cyclist and I have a guest house. When you come to Yogyakarta, I’ll meet you and you can stay for free at my guest house. So Daniel met up with this guy and one of the and he thought, “Wow, I got a local guide. He can answer all these questions.” And they’re both they’re walking along the sidewalk. They’re both pushing their bikes. And then Daniel because of all the input he’s getting, he turns to the guy and says like, “How do you say the name of this city?” Like he wants to know, “How do you say Yogyakarta? How do you pronounce? And then the guy had no clue what he was asking. And then Daniel, he pushed really hard because the guy started talking and talking and talking and Daniel’s like, “No, I I I don’t think that’s the answer.” No. And he said, “No, no, no. This place, this city, because you can’t really say, “How do you say,” and then mispronounce the name because the other person’s not going to know what you’re asking about or maybe you don’t even know where you are. So you end up asking how do you say the name of this city? You know where here this place what is the name and you they go around and around and around and he never as far as I know he never got an answer like the it never occurred to the person to say oh how do you say Yogyakarta? This is how you say it. It did he never got an answer and asking this guy just led to a long confusing circular conversation where neither side had any idea what they what the other side was talking about. Right. Yeah. That that happens all the time. Even from Let’s Go Cycling, it’s very interesting. I don’t know why he does it to be honest. I’ve commented quite a few times that he doesn’t talk a lot. He doesn’t speak very much in his videos, but the one thing he always does in every video is ask people for the name of the place where he is. Like he’ll set up his tent at night and then he wakes up in the morning and he’s packing up and then he’s rolling his bike and he’ll meet a local person and he always asks them, “What is the name of this place?” He wants to know the name of the little village, the barangay, like wherever he is, the city. And he asks person after person after person, what is the what what is the name of this place? And he never gets an answer that makes any sense because for the local people, it’s like asking like what is this planet called? You know, it’s this is where they live. This is where they grew up. It’s just common knowledge. They’re trying to guess what this foreigner is asking. And it never occurs to them that the foreigner just doesn’t know where they are. Like, how can you not know where you are? Everybody knows where they are. It’s like, well, yeah, but this village, I just slept on the beach here. I don’t know the name of this village. There’s no sign. So, what is the name of this village? And Usfan, every video he asks somebody, what is the name of this place? And I don’t think he ever gets an answer that makes sense because I’m always trying to figure out where he is, too. So, I pay attention to these conversations and I turn up the volume and I put in earbuds and I’m like listening and I try to hear what the villager is telling him so I can put that into Google Maps and figure out where the heck this guy is. But what they say to him, they never actually tell him the name of the village. And even if they did, these villages have 10 different names, short, long, different versions. And from a like a western perspective, it can be very confusing. I’ve never been able to figure this out either. I mean, if I’m in somewhere in Canada and I’m in any city in all of Canada, coast to coast, and you said to me, “What’s the name of this city?” I would say, “Halifax, Toronto, Vancouver.” It’s there’s never any confusion about it. Brampton, Guelph, Waterloo, you know, B. But then when you’re when you’re in a place like the Philippines or Indonesia, even Malaysia, you ask a local person, what is the name? You’ll get five different answers. If you ask five different people, you’ll get five different answers and you have no idea what’s going on. So anyway, I just found that amusing where Daniel has listened to the feedback telling him like, “Dude, just ask people.” And he’s like, “Okay, okay. I’ve heard. I’m going to ask.” And he finally gets around to asking. And it’s just a complete dead end. He still has no idea how to say Yogyakarta. Yeah, I don’t even know how hard you’re supposed to hit the J because it is a Y, but Jogjakarta. Anyway, he’s trying. He’s trying. So, that’s sort of the language side of things.

And that connects with kind of a Planet Doug topic. Just I’ll talk about this briefly. I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time. I mean, I have a strong interest in the English language because most of my career has been as an English teacher overseas and then as an English editor and writer, but I was editing and writing for an English teaching publishing company. So my job has been heavily steeped in English grammar, English vocabulary, English phrases, teaching English basically. And I love the English language to begin with. So I’ve always had this idea percolating in the back of my mind that I could have a YouTube channel about English, teaching English in particular. And in the past, I played around with connecting that with Planet Doug videos. If you’ve watched my videos for years, you’ll probably remember there was a time when I even incorporated an English lesson into each video because when I was editing the video, I heard myself using all of these English idioms, English phrases, English phrasal verbs. And every time I heard myself use one of them, my English teacher brain would light up. Oh, that’s an interesting expression. I could teach that. So, as I was editing the video, I opened up a little text box and every time I heard myself say something interesting that would be a good teaching point, I started making a list. And then I actually put that list into the video as a title card like when you watch this video, listen for these phrases. You know, you can study English while you watch my video. And at the end of the video, I would give a definition for each phrase, a sample sentence, you know, full-on teacher mode, which makes no sense at all. I mean, if you’re going to be traveling around the world, making travel videos, combining it with an English lesson, it seemed to make sense to me at the time because I did get a lot of comments. I got a lot, but I would get consistent comments from people saying, “Wow, you speak English so clearly. I can understand you. Like I meet an American on the street, I have no idea what they’re saying. I meet an Australian backpacker, no clue what they’re talking about, but you in your videos, I know what you’re talking about, and I use your videos to learn English. So, thank you very much. So, I thought, huh, there’s kind of an interest here. There’s a market here, perhaps. So, yeah, I’ve often thought about incorporating that into my YouTube life. And the impulse comes and it goes. And the impulse returned recently. And how it returned is kind of interesting because I’m probably going to hop on my bicycle and do a little two-month bike ride around Malaysia, something like that. And I would like to learn Malay, like basic simple Malay. When I was in Indonesia, I learned a fair amount of Indonesian, like very basic vocabulary, but it was extremely useful and I enjoyed it as a product, as a project. But the only reason I was able to do that was because I found a podcast for teaching Indonesian. And this podcast was amazing. It wasn’t perfect, but it was really, really good. And as I’ve discovered, that is very rare because again, I have experience as a teacher. I think about teaching and when I wanted to learn Indonesian, I had very specific needs. I needed to learn simple words. Teach me the numbers. Teach me greetings. How to say good morning, good afternoon. How to say how are you? How to say how much does this cost? How to say where is the train station? I don’t need to be able to read Kierkegaard in Indonesian. I’m not writing philosophical treatises in Indonesian. I just need the basics so that I can go outside and just do very simple things: buy food, buy water. So, I need to know the numbers. And when you’re teaching, there’s a very clear distinction between actually practicing and teaching and just talking about the language. And this is what drives me crazy because whenever I would look for any kind of a podcast about learning a local language. So for Malay like when I went searching for learning Indonesian, learning Malay I would find these podcasts and people would even recommend them. Oh, there’s this amazing podcast. And you start playing the first episode and all they’re doing is talking about the language. They’re not actually helping you learn anything in any way. And a lot of the English YouTube channels, like teaching English YouTube channels are the same way. Like I mean I haven’t done a deep dive into this so I could be wrong about this but all the ones I’ve come across where you have an English teacher with a YouTube channel teaching English they might teach an expression like I always use caught my eye as an example because whenever I make a video about going to markets or doing a five snack challenge I always end up saying oh there’s something that caught my eye. And if I ever came across a YouTube channel, an English teaching channel where say they’re going to teach an expression like caught my eye, and you want to learn about this expression and practice it and whatnot, and you click on that episode, the teacher, the English teacher will have like 3 minutes of talking about themselves and talking about their channel and talking about what we’re going to learn today. So, I was like, “Oh, welcome welcome to the English classroom and I’m very glad you could be here today.” And yeah, we’ve got, you know, they could go on and on and on and on. And then today we’re going to be learning an interesting expression because as you learn English, it’s very important that you learn some of the idioms and you learn about some of the phrases and some of the slang that native speakers use. And the more expressions you learn and this and that and then you can communicate and they go on and on and on and on. And I’m like, well, just get to the point. And then they finally get to the, okay, our expression for today is catch one’s eye. Now, what does this mean? What this expression means is, and then they go on and they talk about the expression and they talk about what it means and they talk about the language, but they never actually teach it. Like, they never create an environment where the student can practice it. And that’s really the most important thing. So I I’m always very frustrated if I come across like an Indonesian learning podcast or Malay or whatever language I might be struggling with. And if that teacher does the same thing, it’s like it’s just a waste of my time. But I found this Indonesian language learning podcast which was exactly what I was looking for. And so I think about that all the time that if I made an English language YouTube channel, I would like to do the same thing where I’m actually just creating a video that helps you practice from a very basic level. So in my case for Indonesian when I click on the first episode and it just says you know there’s a very brief introduction and then today we are learning numbers and then they just go listen like if this was in English and I want to teach the English numbers from 1 to 10. I mean, I think I would want my video to start like this, you know, like, welcome to Planet Doug English. Today we’re learning the numbers from 1 to 10. Listen. And then, you know, so you have a listen section and I just read I just say the numbers like listen and then would it would have a structure. So listen. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. Now listen and repeat. And then I would say you know one and leave a pause. So the student copies my pronunciation. 1 2 3 4 and then go through all the numbers and at the end you go good good job. Now a little bit faster one two you know. So it’s basically listen, listen and repeat, listen and repeat again, and then I would do it backwards. So, okay, now let’s go backwards. 10 9 you know, and then you count down and then I would do a little bit of a pronunciation in the middle of it like just like a pronunciation note like note three, th three, because most non-native speakers of English that’s one of the sounds they cannot reproduce and they just never get in the habit. So I might when I’m teaching the numbers I might insert just a little pronunciation for like th for three and then five the f and the v, vvv, fv vv vv vv vv vv vv vv five. So like basically a little note but essentially it would be guided practice. I’m not going to sit, I wouldn’t make a video where I’m talking about numbers like oh English numbers are fascinating. Did you know they began with the Romans back in 300 BC and you know and then you know talk about numbers. No like the video starts. We’re just practicing the numbers. Repeat after me. 1 2 3 4 and then Yeah, that’s it. So all of my videos would be practicing where if I made a Planet Doug English teaching, I would aim it at beginners, aim it at practical travel. So you teach all the numbers 1 to 10, then 10 to 20 would be lesson number two, then numbers from, you know, 1 to 100, and then you go on to greetings. And again, I’m not going to make a video where, yeah, English has many ways to greet people. We greet people politely and we have a different greeting for our friends and a different one. No, quit. Don’t tell me about greetings. Let’s just practice them. So, you just dive right in. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. How are you? And then they repeat after me and then you have a little conversation, you know, like guided practice is what my approach would be. And I was also thinking about that because KY he gave me a book long ago because he he knew I was interested in learning a bit of Malay. I know Malay is very similar to Indonesian like the numbers are the same. So I already know the basic numbers but there are differences. So I can’t study Indonesian and then just use Indonesian in Malaysia because there are a lot of differences in terms of vocabulary. So KY, he gave me, he found this book at like a used bookstore. And at first I was like, “Whoa, wow, that’s amazing. Standard Malay made simple.” And I thought, “Wow, this is going to be great.” You know, because I couldn’t find what I wanted in a podcast. And I thought, “Okay, I can do it by myself.” So, you know, I’m turning to page number one, and I’m hoping chapter 1 is going to be numbers, you know, just teach me 1 2 3 4, you know, and then teach me good morning, good afternoon, and then instead I was looking at these page after page after page of elaborate conversations. And this is supposed to be, you know, standard Malay made simple. But right out of the gate, I’m lost because it’s too complicated for me. A sentence like, “I am glad to make your acquaintance.” And it just like it’s a conversation where two people meet and eventually somebody says, “Oh, I am very glad to make your acquaintance.” And I guess in Malay, it’s something like sangat gembira berkenalan dengan anda. And actually, it’s the same in Indonesian. Very, very similar. But I’m like, I’m not ready for that yet. Like, just teach me the colors. Teach me time of day. Teach me simple questions. How, when, where, why, what, you know, I I I I don’t want to dive into a fully realized conversation. Anyway, so

my feeling is that if I made a Planet Doug English YouTube channel, that’s what I would focus on. And so I was thinking about that over the last few days. I actually that’s where some of my time went. I actually spent a couple of days here in Kuala Lumpur sketching out plans for that. How would it work? Things like that. So one thing that really worked well for me in terms of learning Indonesian was that it was an audio podcast, not a video. So I can just call it up on my phone and play the podcast. So while I’m taking a shower, shaving in the morning, when I was in Indonesia, I just have my podcast phone. I have it queued up on Learning Indonesian and I just play the lessons and I’m just, you know, as I’m cleaning the room, as I’m eating lunch, eating dinner, I’m just constantly listening to this podcast, playing in the background and it’s allowing me to practice, you know, and where the guy is saying, you know, satu and I say satu dua tiga, you know, and then like it gets into my dumb brain. I don’t need some guy talking about Indonesian numbers for 20 minutes. I just need guided practice. Listen and repeat is what I need in a podcast. But there’s also a question of well how do you if I did it how would I do it? Because my original idea was well I wanted to be on video because I’m a YouTuber. But once you introduce video, it makes it 10 times more complicated. So if I had an audio only with like it could be a video, but it could be like audio with graphics, then I can have a script. I can actually outline the lesson on my laptop and I just have the laptop open on my lap and then I have my microphone and then I can just go through the lesson and I can follow it, you know, 1 2 3 listen and repeat and you know without if I’m doing it on video then I have to have everything memorized and I have to worry about lighting and audio quality like in terms of the room and if I’m constantly changing hotels. It’s just really it would make it 10 times more difficult to shoot video. So, I was thinking to start off anyway, I would do audio only, but then I don’t know anything about podcasting. I’d listen to podcasts all the time, but I don’t know how you make a podcast. So my idea would be to have a YouTube channel for teaching English, but I want it to also be a podcast that people, however they get their podcasts, they could somehow get my YouTube videos as a podcast, video or audio only. But I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know the technology. So anyway, that was what I was thinking about a little bit. I probably won’t do it because I won’t have the time to do it, but I was thinking I could do it in my spare time. Like, if I’m not shooting a regular Planet Doug video, I’m not editing a regular Planet Doug video and I just have some downtime. Well, oh, let’s do an English podcast about colors. And then I’ll sit down and do a script about English colors, blue, yellow, red, or whatever. And then moving on to phrases. How much does this, how much is this? And standard travel English. And just sort of see where it goes from there. Kind of doing it in my spare time, assuming I have any spare time.

And with those random thoughts about a Planet Doug English podcast or Planet Doug English YouTube channel, that brings me to the end of this Planet Doug behind the scenes podcast. Yeah, I just wanted to give an update kind of since I didn’t shoot any video of meeting Daryl for roti canai or meeting Daryl for going out for food in Bukit Bintang and things like that. I just wanted to talk about these things and give a little update on what I’ve been doing with all my time lately. So, there are some examples of where my time has been going. So, that is it. Shutting down for this afternoon and I’ll see you in the next video.