VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Welcome back to the Planet Doug podcast! In this episode, I’m sitting down with my morning coffee to catch up on all the behind-the-scenes chaos of running a YouTube channel and navigating daily life in Port Dickson, Malaysia.
In this episode, I dive into:
– Camera Tech Talk: Why I’m filming with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II, my ongoing struggles with manual focus and exposure, and how I’m trying to get the perfect shot.
– The Great Tent Rescue: A deep dive into my battle against tropical humidity. My tent’s waterproof coating turned into glue! I tried isopropyl alcohol, 48-hour soap soaks, and a full DIY restoration. Did it work?
– Technology Begets Technology: When the tent failed, I needed a bucket. When the bucket failed, I needed glue. A classic Planet Doug tech rant about the Sea to Summit bucket that couldn’t handle the heat.
– Lineup Etiquette & Personality Quirks: A philosophical rant about why I can never win in a grocery store lineup, sparked by an incident at 99 Speed Mart involving coffee, creamer, and a mysterious missing tube of glue.
– The Double Hotel Booking Mystery: A stressful morning at the hotel front desk. Did I accidentally book two rooms? Was my Agoda account hacked? Why can’t hotels see payment info? A true tech-mystery thriller.
– Making My “Chinese New Year” Video: An inside look at why I switched from event coverage to “explainer” videos. I discuss using AI for graphics (and the hilarious struggles of getting it right), dealing with “well, actually…” comments, and why the title “What Westerners Get Wrong About Chinese New Year” got conflicting reviews from Grok and ChatGPT.
– Preview of My Next Video: A sneak peek at my upcoming video, “There Is No Dark Side of the Moon,” and why it fits into my series of correcting lifelong misconceptions.
Plus, the usual tangents about Ramadan, Chinese New Year traffic, and the unique chaos of life in Malaysia.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to the Planet Doug podcast for Wednesday, February 18th. I have my morning cup of coffee as always. And for those who are interested in technology, I’m shooting with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II camera again. Yeah, I’ve sort of worked that into my daily routine and I quite enjoy it because of the higher video quality, the ability to use different lenses. So, I’ve got a like a medium telephoto lens on there. So, I can zoom in and out and put the camera farther away. The camera has a lot of flexibility that a GoPro or a DJI Action 5 doesn’t have. So, it’s a nice tool to have in your arsenal. But, of course, I’ve been struggling with a few things to do with it. Mainly focusing, as many people pointed out in the la— not many, maybe two people pointed out in the last video. For the first 10 or 15 minutes I was completely out of focus and I explained that happened because I tried to use manual focus and I used a technique to focus on something that was like a stand-in for my face and then I would focus on this object, lock focus and then come here and sit down and in theory I would be in focus. But whatever happened, I made a mistake and it didn’t work. So, it’s too much hassle. You know, if you’re only one person, how do you manually focus on yourself? I mean, even if I had elastic arms and I could reach all the way out to the camera to adjust the focus ring, I can’t see myself on the screen anyway. So, I can’t tell even if I’m adjusting the focus ring. I don’t know whether I’m in focus or not. So, you’re basically in manual focus. It’s really hard to do unless you have a studio and you spend a day locking it in and you write down the numbers and get everything very precise. But cameras today have continuous autofocus and that is what I’m using. But of course, it doesn’t work that well in video mode for this model of Olympus camera. So anyway, it will go in and out of focus a little bit, but overall it should stay in focus and I’ve struggled with exposure as well. I’ll look at the LCD screen, adjust the exposure, and think, “Oh yeah, that looks pretty good.” But then when I look at the video while I’m editing, it looks way too bright. Like my face is just like blasted white and it’s like whoa. Okay, that’s way too much light. So, it’s kind of hard to judge lighting as well. But anyway, this is what it looks like this morning. Going to drink my coffee, talk about some technology stuff, some Planet Doug rants, some Planet Doug video stuff, and I’m hoping not to talk very long this morning. I don’t have a lot of time. So, yeah, let’s dive into the first topic.
I stopped recording just now so I could get up and walk over to my camera and then replay that first chunk of video just to double check. I’ve got audio, the framing looks okay and the lighting I think looks okay. Focus. The focus will change over time, but anyway, you can tell me how does this look in terms of lighting and framing? If you’re going to be watching a video, a talking head video, do you want the person, you know, their face bigger in the frame? I kind of like this. I don’t need the camera like zoomed up on my face, head and shoulders. I like to be, you know, a little bit expansive, have some room for my hands to wave around, I suppose. But anyway, the very first topic is another technology topic about my tent. I’ve been talking about my tent for a while and tents in general and this basic fact for me that modern lightweight tents have a lot of coatings in the material. So rather than making a tent out of waterproof material, which is heavy and doesn’t really fold up that nicely, they now make tents out of lightweight cloth, as light as they can make it. And then they apply a whole bunch of fancy technological coatings, all kinds of fancy chemicals to make it more durable and waterproof, resistant to sunlight, you know, UV degradation. Who knows how many coatings they add to these things, but in my experience, every tent I’ve ever had that I used outside of Canada falls apart very quickly because of the heat and the humidity. In Canada, they work fine. I’ve used tents in Canada for years. You put them away in your garage for a while, in your attic, in your basement, get it out a year later and the tent is in perfectly good condition because the air is dry and relatively cool. Here, the heat is just destroying everything. So, with my most recent tent, well, all of the material, the coatings degraded, but mainly on the tent body and on the tent floor, the coatings just turned into glue. Just became gluey and sticky. And I’ve been posting pictures about this to Planet Doug Patreon and YouTube posts. If you go to the YouTube post page, you can see some updates there. And I take pictures of whatever it is that I’m doing. And yeah, so then I went out looking for isopropyl alcohol because I read online that you can use isopropyl alcohol to clean these surfaces. Specifically, they said if your tent material is sticky, you can use isopropyl alcohol to remove that gooey layer. And I wasn’t aware of that. So I went out looking for some alcohol. I didn’t do a big shopping expedition. I only went to one pharmacy and then I went in there and they had, you know, five different types of alcohol in their first aid section, but they had no isopropyl. And I’m accustomed to going on these huge shopping expeditions and never finding anything that I need. There’s like, I have trouble locating things. So, I just gave up at that point. And I just said to myself, well, let’s not go on a targeted shopping expedition. Let’s just go about my normal life. And at some point in my life, I’ll pass by a hardware store, a paint store, another pharmacy, and when it’s right there in front of me, then I’ll just pop in and, “Oh, do you have this? Oh, no. Okay.” So, it won’t be like a big time commitment, right? So, that’s what I decided to do. And then a friend of mine, KY, gave me a call. Next thing I know, he showed up at my door and handed me a big bottle of isopropyl alcohol. Here it is here. It’s now half full because a couple of days ago, I used this to try to clean my tent. And I put it off a few times because I knew it was going to be a big job. It was going to be hot and sweaty and uncomfortable because really the only way to do this would be to go outside into the real world where the sun is beating down and then set up your tent, like actually put in the tent poles in place, set up your tent, open the doors. My tent has two doors, like one on each side, and then climb into the tent, get out a rag or a sponge and, you know, soak it with isopropyl alcohol and then scrub. And I knew it was going to be really hard because you’re not scrubbing a— Yeah, I better put this down on the floor. You’re not scrubbing a hard surface. It’s a flexible tent floor and it just scrunches up. So, what you have to do is physically get inside the tent, put your knees down far apart, plant your knees, and then lean way over and put your hand down at the top of the tent. And then you pull that section of tent floor taut between your hand and your knees. And then you try to, you know, scrub that section. But the only place the tent material is tight is between, like, right beneath your hand and then over on the edges it starts to get crinkly and then it’s really, really hard to do and within 2 minutes sweat was just pouring down my face, dripping off my nose, my shirt, my shorts, whole body. I was just drenched in sweat as I very slowly, small piece by small piece by small piece, I went through the whole tent and gave it a good wiping, a good scrubbing with isopropyl alcohol. And at the beginning, it didn’t seem to have any effect. Like after I wiped it up, wiped it down and then I would touch it with my hand, it was still sticky. But I thought, well, who knows? Because by that point, my entire body was covered in glue. This coating had covered my arms and my hands and my face, everything. And now when I, my hand was sticky. So it was really impossible for me to judge whether the tent floor was sticky or not because maybe it’s my hand that’s sticky. You know, everything is sticky. But anyway, I didn’t know. So I just persevered. I did the whole tent floor. And then what I often do in these situations is I go overboard because it’s such a big job to go out, find a place where you can set up the tent, set it up, get all your material ready, and then do the cleaning. So, if you’re going to go to all that trouble, make sure you do it properly. Because if you don’t do it properly the first time, then you’re going to have to do it again. And you have to repeat going out, setting up the tent, doing all this over and over. So after I did it one time, I just let the tent sit there for a while ’cause this alcohol dries very, very quickly. So, I let the whole tent dry, cleaned it all off with paper towels, and then I did the entire tent a second time, scrubbing the floor and the walls of the tent from the whole thing, corner to corner, section by section by section, moving through the tent. And then I did it a third time. Went over the whole tent three times. And I used up half a bottle of this isopropyl alcohol. What I did, in fact, because this bottle has a giant opening, it’s hard to control the flow, I poured the alcohol from the big bottle into one of these small ones that I carry. I carry this around for shampoo and detergent and laundry, dishwashing soap, things like that. So, I had one of these. I filled it with alcohol, and it has a tiny little spray, like a squirt gun almost. So, I would use this to put the alcohol on my tent so I’m not wasting it. You don’t want to pour gallons of it out. So, I just use this on my tent and on my sponge. So, then whenever this was empty, I would refill it again and then continue. So, I did all that. Didn’t seem to do anything. Everything just seemed as sticky as before. And then I thought, well, why don’t we try washing the tent now? Like maybe I’ve loosened the goo, but maybe now we need soap. So, I did a hand washing here in my bathroom. I have a portable bucket that I use for hand washing my laundry. And I got out my portable bucket. I got, like, heavy duty, like laundry detergent, not like a soft soap, but strong laundry detergent. And normally you’re not supposed to do that if you have a brand new tent. Yeah, you do not put it in the wash. You don’t use laundry detergent because then you’re going to damage all the coatings. But in this case, I’m trying to remove the coatings. So, I figured, well, why not? I can use laundry detergent. Doesn’t matter at this point. So, I put it in this bucket, filled it with water, filled it with soap, and I’m just pounding it and pounding it with my hand and my fist. And I just let it sit there for 48 hours in the tub. And then every time I went into the bathroom, I would take another two minutes and just go, you know, start gushing and frothing like I’m the wash cycle of a washing machine. And then I just let it sit there for a couple of more hours. And I go back in, add more water, agitate it some more, let it sit for a few hours, go back in, more agitation. And I did that over a 48 hour period just to make sure I gave it a chance to work. And then I rinsed it and rinsed it and rinsed it and rinsed it. And then when I was finally done, I set up the tent here in my room. Here’s a picture of my tent in my room because I really wanted it to dry. Like as soon as I finished washing it, I didn’t dare put my hand inside and feel the bottom because I didn’t want to be disappointed. I thought if it’s— I wanted to give it the best possible chance to be dry and smooth and non-sticky. So, I didn’t want to touch it while it was still wet. I didn’t want to have this sense of, “It didn’t work.” So, I set up the tent and I just left it here in my room with my air conditioner running to dry the air. And I let it sit for an entire day, an entire night, half of the next day, just sitting here in my room, taking up most of my bed. I was sleeping on the bed, like lying against the edge because the tent was taking up, you know, more than half of the bed and it basically filled my whole room. And then finally I thought, “Okay, now let’s check.” And I put the tent down flat on the bed, opened the zipper, put my hand inside, and it was dry and it was smooth. There was no stickiness at all. In fact, I put the tent here so I could show you. I don’t know why. I haven’t shown it yet. Probably because I’m busy drinking a cup of coffee. But here’s my tent.
And it’s most of it, like the top part is all mesh, like most of it is mesh and then it has this white material that is also— it’s not waterproof at all. This has no coatings on it. So this was all absolutely fine. It was this red part which is on the bottom. So this part touches the ground and then on the inside touches your body and everything. And even like the outside, the part that touched the ground, this was like sticky, sticky, sticky as well. So when you set up the tent and then you put it on the ground, it makes a huge mess because all the leaves and the dirt, bugs, everything is sticking to the bottom of your tent. So that was a problem as well as the inside. But right now, it just feels so good. I cannot believe how well this worked. And then if I turn it inside out so that I can get to the— Oh, it is. No, no. Yeah, if I turn it inside out. Oh, that’s right. Trying to open the zipper, but I was on the wrong side of the zipper. So, if I open up the door, go to the inside. This is the floor of the tent. Same thing. Nothing. And I’m still— I’m not claiming total victory because we’re still inside an air-conditioned dry room. Maybe outside when you’re camping or something, it’ll get a little bit sticky again. But my hopes— I’ve got hope that this is normal, that this is how the tent is. And there is some discoloration. There’s some whiteness here that could be from the alcohol, could be from the detergent, but obviously I don’t care about that. This is not a showroom tent. And whatever waterproofing was here, obviously it’s gone. It’s completely gone. This is just cloth now. But you can deal with that by putting a ground sheet, which is what you do normally with a tent anyway, right? You put a ground sheet down on the ground to protect your tent and you put the tent on top of this ground sheet. And this is more or less, it’s not fully waterproof. Nothing is fully waterproof anymore. It’s all designed to be water repellent so that if it’s sitting like this, the water hits it and then it turns into little water droplets and then the droplets run down and fall off. But if it lies flat, water will still seep through. And that was the same for this tent as well. Like this floor, even when it had all the coatings, it wasn’t waterproof. It was just sort of, eh, you know, a little bit water-resistant. So, it was never waterproof to begin with. So, the fact that it has no coating at all anyway, it’s kind of cool. My tent fly that is supposed to be waterproof, right? It goes over the tent. So, if it rains, you really need that to be waterproof. And it’s a little bit gummy, a little bit sticky, but not nearly as much as this. So, I can leave that alone. It’s okay. I’m just hoping it’s still waterproof. I haven’t tested it for a while ’cause I haven’t used it for a while. I’m hoping it still works. Anyway, that is the story of my tent. And this tent involved my water bucket. And that is my next technology story. Call it a Planet Doug technology rant.
One of these stories always leads into the next one because I use one piece of technology to work on another piece of technology and then each piece fails in its own unique way. So here is my laundry bucket. It’s from a company called Sea to Summit from, I think it’s from Australia. Anybody that goes out buying camping gear, outdoor gear, you’re going to know Sea to Summit. They make all kinds of gadgets for outdoor life, traveling, camping, kayaking, mountain climbing, whatever it is you’re up to. So anyway, I like to do my laundry by hand most of the time because I don’t have a lot of clothing and laundromats can be problematic and it’s nice to have a bucket. You can use it for many, many different things. But the problem again is a lot of this technology fails. So almost as soon as I bought this— I brought it in Kuala Lumpur actually years ago— and as almost as soon as I brought it back from the store and I used it for the first time and, wow, this is kind of cool. It’s not the greatest system in the world because it’s not a true bucket. So if you fill it with water and then you put it on the ground, it’s going to collapse and all the water drains out. So you sort of have to hold the strap with one hand when you’re doing laundry and then you put your hand inside and then you’re like, you know, washing, washing, washing. Or you can hang this on a hook. I mean, if you’re camping, you can use it to get water from the lake or from the river. You just go down there and scoop up a bucket of water, carry it back to your camp and pour it out. You know, it’s a very handy, useful thing. I’ve used one of these a lot. But anyway, it has seams and almost instantly the seams let go. So, this part where the handle holds on is held in place by glue and it just tore off the glue in the heat. Again, it’s the heat. It would work fine in Canada, but here the heat and humidity dissolved the glue and then this handle just came right off. So, I had to buy my own bonding agents and another Planet Doug shopping expedition trying to figure out what’s going to work and what isn’t. And then I made a decision. Okay, this looks like the most powerful stuff I can buy. And then I reglued it with this bonding agent. And that has held up pretty darn good, I must say. But it also has a seam here. And that seam on the side completely let go. So I’ve had to reglue this seam over and over again because it just doesn’t stand up to the heat, the tropical heat. And then as I was working on my tent, washing it and leaving it in there for 48 hours, way down at the bottom, the seam let go again. So, whatever material I used last time to reglue this seam, it seems to be reaching the end of its life. But I don’t know, it might be just down at the bottom. I’m hoping in my repair attempts this time, I can repair this like inch or two at the bottom. When I pull on it, I don’t know. It seems to be holding from that point to the top. So, I’m not going to go crazy. I’m not going to rip the whole thing open. I’m going to leave the whole top as it is, hoping that’s going to stay. And then I’m just going to reseal the bottom here. And you need special— you can’t use like Elmer’s glue, you know, your child’s glue that they use to glue paper together. That’s not going to work. You need special bonding agents for that. So, I actually bought something this morning. I don’t know whether I’m going to use it or not because I know it’s not exactly the right material. I might make a trip out to DIY, like to a hardware store, and get the good stuff that I know will work. Of course, I mean, in the modern age, what you should do is just buy a new one, right? Buy this. Maybe it lasts for, if you’re lucky, 6 months. If you’re really lucky, a year and when the seam falls apart, throw it away, buy a new one. From a human perspective, that’s the smart thing to do. Same thing for my tent. Trying to fix an older tent, you’re really just wasting your time. You’re costing yourself money, time, effort, energy, and really just buy a new tent, right? That, that anyway, but at the moment, this is the bucket I have. This is the tent I have and assuming the repairs is not like totally crazy expensive or time-consuming, really give it a try. You know, I can keep you— if I manage to fix this even temporarily I can use it until I get a new one. Right. Anyway, a stop gap measure. So I am going to do this. So for this technology I had— which failed. I had to use this technology which failed. And then to fix this I had to buy more technology. It also failed but in a funny Planet Doug rant kind of way. And that is going to be my next story.
In switching to this next topic, I got up again and stopped the camera, checked what I was recording. Everything looks okay. It did look a little bit bright to me. Again, my face is too white. Yeah, I haven’t been out in the sun a whole lot lately, but I don’t think I’m quite that brilliantly white. Felt a bit overexposed. So, I did a little bit of an experiment. Again, this is for anyone out there who’s super technical into cameras. I normally shoot when I’m doing one of these videos in program mode on this Olympus. If I’m taking pictures, I’m a big fan of aperture priority because I like to control the depth of field and the focus. So, yeah, you shoot in aperture priority. That’s my go-to mode. But for video, I don’t really care what’s going on. I’m not dialing in fancy stuff. So, program mode gives me less stuff I need to worry about. And I just let the camera decide the aperture, the shutter speed, the ISO. But just for fun, I change the camera to aperture priority. So, if it looks different now, that’s why. And I set it to, I think, F9. One thing about this Olympus camera as well, I find it really hard to get information. So, like even if I’m shooting in program mode in video, I can’t see the settings. I mean, the camera is choosing the settings and I’d like to know what settings it chose. Like, okay, what aperture are you using? What shutter speed, what ISO, etc. But I can’t figure out a way to find that out. It’s just not on the display. And then, yeah, so it’s kind of frustrating. So when it’s in program mode in this room, I don’t even know what aperture it uses. I have no idea. So when I change it to aperture priority, and I can choose the aperture, I don’t know whether the aperture I’m choosing is smaller than what the camera chose or bigger. I don’t know. Anyway, just playing around as I do. And now we’re in aperture priority. And yeah, f9, which is pretty tiny. It’s a small aperture. There’s actually a lot of light now because I figured out a way to uncover the window. There is one small window here. And in all my previous videos, it was closed because it has a blackout curtain and you can’t move it to the side. So I didn’t even bother with it. But this time I figured out a way to take the blackout curtain and hang it way off to the side. So the window is exposed so a lot more light is coming in which that made me think I can probably, you know, reduce the aperture. And then of course I can increase the depth of field. Someone left a comment on one of my videos or one of my posts and I was talking about this a little bit and, for someone who’s into photography of course, you know aperture priority, shutter priority, program, all these modes are very familiar and then what happens when you, you know, make your aperture bigger or smaller, you know the effect that has on the video or the photos. That’s pretty common knowledge to anyone that fiddles around with a camera like this. But if you don’t, you may not even know about aperture and depth of field and that kind of thing. But anyway, that’s what I was fiddling around with. So, the story is tent technology. To fix it, well, I needed isopropyl technology and then I needed a bucket to clean it and now I need glue to fix the bucket. And I just came back from 99 Speed Mart. I had a couple of— I had to buy coffee. I had to buy coffee for this video. So I went there to buy a couple of items, coffee and coffee creamer. And then while I was walking around, I saw, oh, they have some household goods, right? And they had this, which is Aar Rubber Plastic Shoe Adhesive. And like I said, I’m pretty sure this isn’t strong enough for what I want to do. I kind of know what it is I want. But I thought, it’s sitting right there. Let’s just grab this. Even if I don’t use this to fix my bucket, I like having glue. Like I always have a little bit of— I have a tool kit with me for my bike, of course. But then I also have a stationery kit ’cause I love to have my own pens and scissors and Scotch tape and white out. You know, I got a little bundle where I keep all that. And then I have, you know, the other tool kit containing glue and stuff like that. And so even if I don’t use this to fix the bucket, it’s still a useful purchase. I’ll throw this into my little tool kit. And then if I’m fixing, as they say, a bag, a racket, a belt, or a shoe, then I have this available. And I always have super glue. I didn’t realize it until just now, but it comes with a free— it comes with a pen. I don’t know why it comes with a pen. I didn’t see that in the packaging when I bought it, but a red pen in case I needed one, which I don’t. But anyway, there you are. So, we’ll see if this works or not. Ideal for bonding leather, rubber, PVC. You know, it might actually work. You know, I’ll probably give it a try since I have it. It’s— you again with this— you really have to be careful what you’re doing. They get a lot of products, I find they give you guidelines and you can kind of ignore them a lot of the times, but for this stuff I find you really have to follow what they say because what they say is counterintuitive but if you don’t do what they say it doesn’t work. So, for example, they say, you know, the surface has to be dry and clean. And what they mean is it really has to be dry, like as dry as it can possibly, like bone dry. If there’s any moisture in there at all, this is not going to hold. So, if you’re going to go to all the trouble of using one of these, a tube of this to fix something like this, don’t rush. Set like— it was wet like this morning. So, obviously I can’t do it now. But I’m going to have to set this aside. Open this up so that it’s open to the air. And then yeah, maybe I can use my red pen for that. Stick that through there to separate it. Get some air flow through there. And just leave it for as long as you can leave it. Get it as dry as possible, as clean as possible. And then the instructions say something very counterintuitive. It’s similar to fixing a flat tire on a bicycle, which is why I’m so familiar with this. You put glue on both sides and then you leave it. So you apply glue on one side and then you apply glue on the other side. Make sure it’s all spread out. But then you don’t put it together. You leave it sitting there and you let it sit until the glue dries and becomes just a little bit tacky. And when it becomes tacky, that’s when you put the two sides together. And it feels so counterintuitive because we’re used to applying glue and then you put the two pieces together and then the glue dries and holds it together. That’s glue. But this kind of stuff is like a chemical bonding agent and it works differently. So you put it on each side equally and then just leave it. And it’s really hard not to, you know, mash it together ’cause you, oh, the glue is drying. It’s drying. It’s drying. It’s not going to work, but you want it to dry. And when it finally dries, that’s when it bonds together. So anyway, a little bit of a technology aside there, but into this technology story, I’m going to fold in a Planet Doug rant. And I wouldn’t even talk about this except it is part of a pattern that I’ve seen in my entire life that has taught me one lesson. And that lesson is I can’t win. Just give up. Basically, I can’t win because my basic personality handicaps me. I can’t do what other people do. So, that may make no sense at all. But the thing is, I went into 99 Speed Mart. I had three items. Instant coffee, coffee creamer, and this. Right. So, I’m going up to the counter, and there is a group of people ahead of me right now. Port Dickson is actually busier than before. In my Chinese New Year video, which I’ll talk about in a minute, I was talking about how there isn’t a whole lot going on. You look out the window, doesn’t look like a big holiday, but now that we’re in midweek, Port Dickson has filled up. Hotels are full. I can feel it. It’s kind of a weird combination that everything is closed and yet there’s more people than normal. So, when I go into 7-Eleven or 99 Speed Mart, it’s like, “Oh, wow. There’s actually people here.” And you can look at the things they’re buying. And the things they’re buying tell you, “Oh, they’re not local people. This is a family that came down for Chinese New Year.” And you can see all the items they’re buying are part of their holiday snacks to go back to their hotel room. This, that, okay, these are outsiders. So anyway, the people ahead of me were outsiders. That has nothing to do with the story really except that they were a larger group of people and they were buying a variety of items. Right? So there they are at the counter. I’m standing behind them in line. People are in line behind me. And these people, they’re normal people. And by that I mean they look out for themselves. They do what they need to do to get what they’re trying to do done. They’re not worried about other people. They’re not thinking about me. They’re not thinking about the people behind me. They’re making a purchase and they’re just going to do it and they’re just ignoring everything else. So, there they are making their purchase and then, like, I was waiting for it to happen and I was like, “Please no, please no.” And then of course it was the woman making the purchases. And then the woman at the cashier totaled everything up. “Oh, that’ll be 75 ringgit, please.” And then the woman, the customer went, “Oh, by the way.” And then she starts talking. And I’m like, “Oh, here we go.” ‘Cause she wants to know about some other product that she forgot about. And now they have this long conversation. Oh, yeah. They weren’t speaking in English, so I didn’t understand them. But yeah, you know, we have that. We carry that. And oh, where, what ones do you have? Oh, we have this one and this one. Where can I find them? Oh, they’re down there. So, now the woman leaves. She’s mid-purchase. Everything’s been totaled. So, now the lineup is at a standstill. She leaves completely oblivious to me and everybody behind me and then just goes off shopping, more shopping. And I could never in a million years do that. If I’m in the middle of a purchase and then it occurs to me, oh, I need milk, I don’t walk away and go get it. I complete what I’m doing, make that purchase, then I go back in, get the milk so that the line can keep moving. So that’s what I mean by I can never win in these situations because I can never do what most other people do. So anyway, so this woman, she was gone for a long time. Even the cashier started to feel bad about it. She kind of went, you know, she’s like, “Where did she go?” But this woman, of course, yeah, she doesn’t care. And then she’s out there shopping and shopping, and then she finally comes back with something. And of course, now we’ve got to talk about coupons. Now we’ve got to talk about deals like, oh, if I buy one— oh, you buy one of this you can get this for 50% off, buy two get— you got to have that whole conversation which goes on forever. They finally deal with that. Then her husband comes up. He has new things he wants to add and he has to talk to the woman about this. “Oh, this one, like, is this the only one you have or do you have other version?” You know, so now he’s trying to add more items to their pile. While he’s talking the woman thinks of something else she needs. She leaves. We were there so long. At least it felt so long to me. And this to me is a very common experience. And most other people have the self-confidence, the assertiveness to do this. They’ll make you wait because they don’t care. It’s not even that they don’t care. My theory is this woman and her husband and then the kids and everybody else aren’t— they don’t see me. Like I’m waiting behind them with my little purchase but they’re not— they don’t even know that I’m there. Like it never even enters their vision that there are people behind them in line. They’re doing something and they just take care of it and do whatever they need to do until they’re done. And I’m pretty sure that if after they left the store, I went up to them and just interviewed them. It’s like, “Hey, you know, I’m really, really curious. Like when you did all of that stuff at the counter. Did you know everybody was waiting for you? You made everybody wait so long? Like were you even aware of that?” And I’m positive she would look at me and, “What are you talking about?” Like she wouldn’t even know what she had done. So, I go around my life generally waiting in line for people to finish one of these purchases. And I’m pretty sure that they don’t even know that they’re inconveniencing so many other people. And you can talk about driving with that as well. How people park. I mean, if they need to park right in front of a store to go in and just pick something up, they’ll just stop the car wherever they are and then run in. And their car can be in the way of 20 other people. But then in their mind, they don’t think of themselves as being rude. Like if I went up to them and say, “Oh, by the way, you know, when you parked your car here, did you notice you blocked the way for everybody trying that? Everybody had to try and get around you.” And they would look at me like, “What are you talking about?” It’s like, oh no, I never even noticed that. Huh? You know, I think they would just be completely oblivious because it doesn’t even occur to them. But anyway, in my case, like I said, I always am going to lose because I could never do that. And I was thinking about that in this lineup and then I had the chance to prove it to myself. I had an actual moment that demonstrated how I would normally handle this because I had coffee, I had creamer, and I had glue. And then finally, another cashier actually came and opened up another cash register. And then she’s like, “Oh, we can help you over here.” So I turned, I went over there and now I’m the very first one in line. I put down my coffee, put down my coffee creamer, and that’s all I had. The glue had disappeared. I was like, I was so puzzled. It was like a complete mystery to me. It’s like, hold it. What happened to the glue? And now I’m really worried because I’m thinking, did I put it in my pocket by accident? Did I put it in, like did it fall out of my hand and go into my pocket? So now I’m thinking, I had it. It was right here and now it’s gone. And I was worried that I was going to walk out of the store and then someone’s going to arrest me. It’s like, “Oh, you, you know, shoplifting, you know, empty your pocket, sir, and I’m going to find the glue in my pocket.” So now this woman is toting up my coffee and my creamer. And she, you know, she’s going to be expecting payment. I got people in line behind me. And now I have this whole glue mystery. And I’m like, you know, I’m digging in my pockets. I’m like, where is the glue? And I eventually concluded, okay, there’s no glue in my pockets. So, the glue is gone. And again, if I were a normal person, because I want the glue at that point, I would have said to the cashier, “Oh, wait a minute. I wanted to buy glue.” And then I would have left the line, gone back to the display, got another tube of glue, and brought it back. Right? But of course, I can’t do that. I don’t want to make her life more difficult. The people are waiting behind me. I don’t want to delay the lineup. So, here I was in the exact situation of this woman and her husband, but instead of holding up the line, my instinct— I didn’t even— well, I said I was thinking about it, but at the time I didn’t even think about it. My instinct was, oh, make this purchase, deal with the glue later. So, I bought the coffee, I bought the creamer, and then I left the store and I stood outside the store and I went over my pockets again and I was thinking, “What happened to that glue?” And then I still didn’t know. And I looked back at the— and there was the glue on the ground underneath the display from the cashier. It had fallen to the ground and I didn’t notice and it kind of fell underneath. So then I went back into the store, picked up the glue, and I got back in line, waited my turn, and then I paid for the glue separately. So my purchase took a very long time because I had to wait for the woman to handle hers and I was unwilling to hold up the lineup to go correct my mistake and do, oh, wait a minute. I need glue. You know, just everybody wait, wait, wait. You know, go get glue, come back. Oh, no, no, no. I need to get a pencil, too. And I, you know, I’m not going to do that. So, in my entire lifetime, yeah, I can never win when it comes to a lineup. Lineups will always take five times longer for me than other people because, yeah, it’s just a personality thing. Anyway, I do have the glue and then once this is fully dry, probably tomorrow, maybe the day after, I’ll give it a long, long time to dry, I think I’ll give this a try. I have confidence it might work.
My next story is about the most recent video that I posted about Chinese New Year. But before I dive into that, one more small Planet Doug rant to tie into that. All that other previous stuff, because when I went to 99 Speed Mart and bought the glue and went through with that whole thing and I came back here, I was called over to the hotel front desk and they kind of signaled me to, “Oh, can you come around? Come around to the back, sir.” And I’m thinking, oh, that can’t be good. Like if they’re calling you to come around to the back so you can see the computer screen. Oh, you know something’s wrong. And I’m like, “Oh no, please. This is not how I wanted to start my day.” And so they showed me on the computer. They wanted to confirm my name. They had their hotel listing open. A very complex screen. I am very hard on hotels when it comes to customer service and I probably don’t factor in the complexity of bookings, right, in the modern world. In a way, it’s kind of a miracle that it works as well as it does when you think about it because here they have a hotel and you think, “Oh, we have 20 rooms, 20 guests. These ones have booked. Here’s their names. Oh, we’re all full. But you’ve got reservations coming in from Agoda, from Booking.com, from Travelloka, from who knows how many different online booking sites. And you’ve got walk-ins and, you know, keeping track of that, having a computer program that shows you all of this information, that’s a major task. It really is. It’s an undertaking. So yeah, I do understand that. But anyway, in this case, they called me around and said they called up the big screen that shows everything. He says, “Oh, so is this your name?” And I went, “Yeah, that’s my name.” And they says, “Well, you’ve booked two rooms.” I’m like, “Oh, no. Did I?” ‘Cause I just rebooked this room for two nights. And I thought, “No, I sure hope I didn’t.” So now, of course, I’m diving into my phone, going into my email where I get— I book through Agoda and I get email notifications for the confirmation and the payment, all the receipts and everything. And I’m panicking now like, “Oh, did I accidentally book two rooms? How could I have been that dumb?” So, I looked in my email and I had one email from Agoda about this booking and I opened it up and it said, “Yeah, you booked for two nights, one room,” and it had the payment. The payment was clearly for one room, not for two. The amounts worked out. I thought— I checked the junk folder, the spam folder. I checked my other email. I mean, I looked everywhere I could think of, and as far as I could tell, I’d only booked and, more importantly, only paid for one room. But there on their computer it said, “No, you booked two rooms.” And I was thinking then we got into a difficult area that I’ve never been able to figure out though because here on the computer screen they said I had booked two rooms, two nights each for two rooms. But the information— what they don’t have is information about payment. And I’ve run into this in so many hotels where we’ve had a discussion about payment, payment issues, other ones, and the tourism tax, things like that, and they always say to me, he’s like, “Well, we can’t see any of that information.” I’m like, “Well, that’s never made sense to me.” And I’m like, “What? You can’t see whether I’ve paid or not or how I’ve paid?” And they say, “Yeah, that’s right.” And that makes no sense to me because, well, then why are you letting me stay in the room when the system doesn’t— you don’t even know whether I paid or not? For all you know, I booked the room and I didn’t pay. Your system has to tell you it’s paid and how it was paid and how much was paid. But every hotel clerk insists, “No, we have no access to that information.” And that’s been driving me crazy for years. So in this case as well, there’s two reservations. So now what I want to know is, well, I want to know where the second one came from because I didn’t make it. But more importantly, if somebody else made it, they’re using my identity. Well, who paid for that room? Did they also have access to my credit card now? Has somebody hacked my Agoda account and now they’re booking all these rooms using me, my name and my payment? So that’s what I want to know. So I’m asking them, so okay, well I can see on your computer two reservations in my name. I know I only made one of them. So can you tell me, like, the second one? Has there been payment for that? And they said, “We don’t know.” And I’m like, “Oh, come on. Really?” Like you have to know, like, even if you don’t know how much was paid, can’t you see the payment method? Did somebody pay for that with a credit card? My credit card? And they’re like, “Oh, we don’t know.” And that always drives me crazy. But anyway, we had to leave it that I would come up to my room because my banking phone is a different phone. I don’t walk around with my banking phone. And I have a second phone for that. And in order I wanted to check my credit card transactions to see, right, what’s going on. So I came up here and got out my other phone and fired it up and logged in. Went through all that. And of course my bank before it would allow me to check anything I had to update the software. You have to— oh, “This we no longer support this version of the app. Please update to the latest.” I was like, “Ah, you guys always pick the worst times to do these updates ’cause I’m in a hurry. I’m panicking here.” And so anyway, I had to update and I’m always panicking every time I look at anything to do with credit cards or a bank account. It means there’s trouble. There’s always trouble. So, it’s never a good thing. So, I’m all— my heart is pounding. I’m short of breath and I’m like, “Ah, I did not want to log into my bank today. I don’t need to start my day this way with all this tension and stress.” So anyway, I had to, you know, update the app. And I was worried that when you update the app now, you’re going to be logged out in such a way you’re going to have to go through like 10 security measures to get back in. But luckily, my old login method still worked. So I was able to log in and check. And I guess I’m a dummy. But even when I go to my credit card and bank account listings and I go to the transaction, I have trouble understanding what I’m seeing. The way they list things, the dates, the identifiers, it’s always a little bit like, what does that mean? Because the day that I booked it and paid for it, the payment on my credit card is a different date. It’s off by one day. And I guess that’s because of the time difference between here and— in Canada. So that’s confusing. And then it has pending. So the combination of the day being off by one and the pending, it confused me a little bit. So I wasn’t exactly sure. I’m doing a Sherlock Holmes routine. Okay, this payment is that, this payment. Okay, that lines up. And I’m trying to find out whether I paid two times for this two-night booking, but as far as I could tell, I didn’t. There was one charge for the room that I booked and paid for. This second booking, I didn’t see a payment for it. But then again, because of this pending, for all I know, I did get charged for the second room, but that charge just hasn’t shown up yet or it’s in another pending. I don’t know. But anyway, as far as I could tell, I didn’t pay for a second room. So then I took my Agoda phone and my banking phone and I got them both open. Then I’m walking back down to the desk again. And I’m thinking, “Yeah, this is not how I wanted to start my day. This is too much. It’s too stressful.” And I think the poor woman wasn’t expecting me to come back. I thought it was pretty clear where, oh, listen, I’ll go upstairs and I’ll check on my phone to see whether I got double payment or not, and then I’ll come back down and we can finalize this. But I think she thought I was gone for good. So when she saw me coming down the stairs holding two phones, I think she panicked. It’s like, uh-oh, the foreigner’s upset. Ah, you know, she was like, “Ah, what? What? What? What?” No, no, no, no, no, nothing, nothing wrong. I told you I was coming back, but I guess she didn’t understand. And then I said to her, like, “Yeah, as far as I can tell, I did not pay for another room.” And it was again, it was kind of a funny interaction because we had two different priorities. Her priority was, do we need to hold this room for you or can we free it up and sell it to another guest? That’s what she was thinking about. I don’t care about that because that isn’t my problem. My problem is, have I paid twice? Like, I mean, if I’ve paid for a second room, well, maybe I’ll go sleep in that room tonight. Like, I don’t know. Maybe I can use it. You know what I mean? I’m worried about, what did I pay? Did I pay one time or two times? So, that’s what I keep talking about, but she’s not really listening to that because all she wants to know is, well, do you need this room or not? Is this a real booking? And if it’s not, we’ll cancel it. So, from her point of view, it’s pretty simple. Well, you didn’t book this room. Okay, we’ll cancel it and then we’ll give it to another guest. We can make more money. But of course, my problem is very different. It’s like, well, I want to know whether I paid for that room or not. And she wasn’t really helping me out with that because that’s not what she was thinking about. And again, I pushed it a little bit with her. There were two people that I was dealing with. First, it was a guy, he disappeared, and now it was this woman. And then I said to her, it’s like, “Well, can you look at the system? Can you tell me, have I paid for that room?” And she said, “We don’t know.” Again, I’m like, “I don’t believe you. You have to be able to tell. I mean, if this is a reservation, as a hotel, you have to know whether it’s been paid for or are they going to pay at the desk when they check in, you have to know whether or not the room has been paid for, right?” And she says, “No, we don’t know. We can’t tell.” I’m still like— I always want to, when people are on their computer and telling you something that you feel in your bones is wrong, I always want to push them aside and let me look and then I want to get down on their computer and, oh look, right here there’s a column, like there it is. And I always feel like they’re just not looking in the right place. I want to do it myself but of course you can’t do that. So anyway, at this point, she was happy because her problem was taken care of. She confirmed with me, “You don’t want the second room.” I’m like, “No, I have no use for a second room.” Good. Cancelled. And then my problem, how did I end up with two reservations? Who did it? Was it an Agoda mistake? Was it a hacker? What happened? And was I paid— what was I charged for that room that I never— I so far I don’t have a clear answer to that. So now I’m back to living in fear of all these computer problems that I just seem to run into all the time. Yeah, I haven’t gotten any new emails about credit card charges going through. Yeah, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing going on. And not to go too deep into this, but when I was looking around to try and figure out on your inbox, of course, for your email, sometimes you have focused email and other, like, less important emails. And I check both. And this time when I went to other, there was an email from Agoda that I’ve never seen before. I’ve never gotten one of these emails before. I went all the way back through my history. They have never sent me an email like this one before. And it says “Agoda Customer Service Customer Receipt from a booking.” And then when I click on it and it says, “Here is the PDF copy of your receipt for this Agoda booking.” And it gives me a booking number and there’s, like, a PDF that just says receipt. I’ve never gotten one of those before. All my other regular bookings, I get an email, but it goes to my main inbox and it looks completely different where it’s like a booking confirmation and then it gives me two PDFs: confirmation for booking and Malaysian tourism tax receipt. That’s what I’ve always gotten. And for the first time ever, I got another email containing just this random PDF. So, I’m pretty sure this email with the PDF is connected to the second room reservation, but I don’t know how it’s all— when I click on the PDF, I opened it ’cause it was a PDF and it is from Agoda, but it has no information. It just says “Here’s your receipt.” And so, mystery, complete mystery again. I just have to wait and just see if anything bad comes out of this in the long run. I’m pretty sure it will. But anyway, so yeah, that was my Agoda hotel booking story. I was going to fold it into my Chinese New Year video story, but I think I’ll leave this as a separate section. In this next section will be the Chinese New Year’s Eve video.
So, the main video that I posted to Planet Doug that kind of fits the time of year and all the events is just this Chinese New Year kind of explainer video that is on my channel. So, I mean, I didn’t go out into Port Dickson to dive into the celebrations. I didn’t find a temple with fireworks and ceremonies and film all of that. I’ve done that in past years and then those videos land with a thud. Nobody seems to care that much about them. So, I didn’t have a huge incentive to go out and sort of do that again. And lately I’ve been experimenting with a different type of video because I find myself interested in a lot of different topics. And some of my favorite YouTube channels tend to be science-based, culture, history-based, more like TV shows or documentaries. So for example, there’s a channel called Veritasium. And then just this morning I was watching a documentary from them about asbestos. What is asbestos? The history of asbestos, the problems with it. You know, basically a deep dive into everything to do with asbestos and I really like those sorts of videos. And then I listen to a lot of podcasts and come across a lot of different topics. And then I thought, you know, it’d be kind of fun to make similar videos to that. And I see videos like that on YouTube all the time. And they can be quite popular. People enjoy them. It always surprises me because I do tend to think of a YouTube audience as not being that interested in any in-depth analysis. I mean, if you look at all the most popular videos in your YouTube feed, they’re going to be rage baiting, click baiting, you know, exaggerations, crazy crime stories, anything that gets people to go, “Whoa, click, click, click, click, click.” I mean, that is what YouTube does best. It is designed to get people to click. It hooks their attention. Celebrity stories, you know, kind of surface level nonsense really. So, it always surprises me when I stumble across, like, a little 5-minute video talking about how big is the Milky Way galaxy, something that I would be interested in, and it has like 9 million views. I’m like, wow. So a lot of people are interested in this little video talking about the physics, the scale of the Milky Way galaxy. So I mean there’s interest in that sort of thing out there. So, you know, recently I kind of played around with that a little bit when I was in Banda Aceh. You talk— you learn a lot about tsunamis. You go to the tsunami museum, the what are tsunamis and the impact of them. You go to all the museums, at least I did. It’s mainly why I went there. And then I came across a very interesting— quite a few interesting facts about tsunamis. So I thought, hey, why don’t I just make a video about that? And there was one thing in particular that stood out to me. One fact that everybody seemed to get wrong. That one fact that everybody misunderstood. Not just normal people but scientists, journalists, even museum displays misrepresent this one thing about tsunamis. So I got very interested in that topic and then I did a lot of reading about it, a lot of research, deep dive into the science of tsunamis, the measurement, how everything works. And then by the time I was done, I thought, huh, why don’t I set up my camera, my GoPro in this case, and just talk about it for a while. So, I went to a little coffee shop where I hung out in Banda Aceh, set up my GoPro, an amazing little place where I could sit, not bother anybody, kind of a nicer background than just my hotel room. And then I just talked about this one thing about tsunamis that everybody gets wrong. And I thought, huh, yeah, let’s just make this video. I wasn’t out on location. I mean, that’s the difference between my video, say, and Veritasium. Veritasium is a full-scale company and they go on location. So if they made a video about tsunamis, they would go interview tsunami researchers, put a camera in their face and say, “Oh, what about this? What about this?” And they would go into their laboratories and see all of their experiments and demonstrate them. They would go on location to where tsunamis hit Banda Aceh and show the effects, you know. So it’s a much bigger scale, more complex production. Me, I’m just sitting in a coffee shop. It’s a talking head video. But then I tried to find some graphics that I could put in to try to make it as visually interesting as possible. So I thought, huh, you know, I enjoy making these this type of video. I enjoy learning about these topics. So what would happen if I post one of these to Planet Doug, mix them in with my travel videos. And of course, if you go back and look— I haven’t looked at that tsunami video for a while, but yeah, it landed with a huge thud. Nobody cared. Nobody was particularly interested. And even most of the interaction with people that I had about that video indicated to me that nobody even had a clue what I was talking about. Right? I was trying to correct this one fact that everybody gets wrong, but anybody who talked to me about that video were still hammering at that one fact from a different point of view, which means, you know, they didn’t watch the video or they didn’t understand what I was saying. They didn’t pay attention. So yeah, it was just a nothing video that went nowhere, nobody cared about, and nobody understood anyway. So yeah, maybe it’s because the graphic side of it, like a Veritasium video, is very high production value, very well-shot, very interesting and then it’s very compelling. Listening to me talking like while I’m sitting here can’t compete with something like that. But then again, I did see other tsunami videos that were on the same level as mine in terms of production value. And in fact, the other tsunami videos in terms of the information they provided practically provided none. They were just like empty videos. Had no real content, nothing of interest, but millions of views, hundreds of thousands of views. So I thought, well, even if my video has very low production value, I’m talking about something that I think is really interesting. It’s a valuable content, but YouTube disagreed with me and, yeah, nobody watched it and even the people that watched it for the most part didn’t even seem to understand what I was saying. So, I guess I didn’t explain it properly. And though to be honest, what I think happened is that the thing that everybody gets wrong about tsunamis is so ingrained in our pop culture brains that when I say this image from pop culture is not accurate, it doesn’t even register with people ’cause when they think tsunami, this is a tsunami. This is what they picture. And I’m telling them that that picture is wrong. They’re still— they’re like, “What do you mean we’re talking about tsunamis? This is a tsunami here.” And anyway, nobody really got what I was talking about. So that was one of my attempts at making one of these kind of explainer videos. And my Chinese New Year video kind of fell into that same topic because I was thinking about, you know, grabbing my GoPro, figuring out when the temples here are going to have a big ceremony, go record it, and make the typical foreigner during Chinese New Year video, which we’ve all seen a hundred times. But I wanted to have the facts straight in my mind. So I did a lot of research. I was doing all this reading and I found what I was reading really interesting. It was like fascinating information. Most of it I already knew. I’ve come across— I’ve done the Chinese New Year thing for the last 20 years ever, you know, every— I’ve been living in Asia for a long time, so Chinese New Year is not exactly a new thing. And as an editor of an English teaching magazine, that was my job in Taiwan. I wrote articles, many articles about Chinese New Year. I wrote stories about Chinese New Year. I wrote little plays. Like for the company that I used to work for in Taiwan, we would write dialogues. And one of the— every time Chinese New Year came around for my magazine, I had to write another dialogue about a foreigner going to a Chinese family’s home for Chinese New Year. So I would write all these characters and you create the character of the foreigner and they go to somebody’s home and then they have a traditional Chinese New Year meal and the local people, the family explain everything to them. Oh, this is why we eat fish. This is why we eat dumplings. This is why we have red envelopes. Why we wear the color red? Why we set off firecrackers? And then for my company, after I write the dialogue, of course, my co-workers, they’re all from Taiwan, they would fact-check it, make sure that everything I said was accurate, and then we hire actors, and we had a film crew, and they would find a set, and they would film the whole dialogue. So, as a movie, it would be like a mini movie with four parts, part A, part B, part C, part D. And then we would use that dialogue, that movie to teach English. So I guess what I’m saying is I know about Chinese New Year. It’s not exactly a new thing for me. So there’s not a lot of inspiration to go out into the world and learn about it because, yeah, and shoot video of it. So I thought, huh, now that I have all this refreshed knowledge in my brain, I was looking at it from the point of view of a Canadian, say, who’s never heard of Chinese New Year or, you know, they know it exists, but they probably have all these preconceived ideas about what it is, and most of it would be wrong. And I was thinking about the year of the horse. What is that all about? Because I didn’t know anything about the year of the horse characteristics. So that was kind of new information. So anyway, so I thought, oh, what I’ll do is I’ll make an explainer video, sit down here, Planet Doug Studios, and I’ll talk about Chinese New Year, all the traditions, the dates, the calendars, how it works, how long it is, what everything means, and then post it to Planet Doug. More like a Veritasium video where you’re basically telling people about Chinese New Year, its significance, its history. So that’s what I did. That’s why I made that video. And one interesting aspect to that video, well there’s maybe three interesting aspects for me. One is I created a lot of graphics ’cause I knew it was just going to be me looking at the camera. Not very interesting. So, as I was editing the video, every time I said something like, “Oh, the Gregorian calendar, which is based on the Earth going around the sun,” I thought, okay, that’s a good spot for an illustration. So, I went to Nano Banana, which is the— well, yeah, it’s an image, an AI image generator. So, I went there and just said, “Hey, I’m making a video for YouTube about Chinese New Year, and I’m talking about the Gregorian calendar. Can you make an illustration that shows the Earth going around the sun and label it Gregorian calendar and put this and this and this?” And then the AI created an illustration for me and I put it into the video. And then when I got to the lunar calendar, “Oh, can you make an illustration about the lunar calendar?” And I put that in. And then as I went through the video, every time I had an idea, it’s like, “Oh, you know, this could use an illustration or a graphic,” I used an AI to make one. And it’s a pretty amazing thing when you think about it. I know that in general, for whatever reason, particularly on YouTube, if you mention AI, people just, “Ah, I hate AI. Oh, AI is horrible.” I don’t know where this is coming from. Well, I guess I kind of know where it’s coming from, but if you’re someone like me and all I’m doing is making a video about the history of Chinese New Year, the ability to create your own professional-look graphics, it’s incredible. It is an amazing tool. And I think when it comes to like a tsunami video or a Chinese New Year video, it doesn’t matter that it’s an AI generated image. Like, who cares? You see it in my video. It doesn’t matter where it came from. Maybe I found it on a website or I found it on a copyright-free website and I just type in Chinese New Year and then they give me all these illustrations that I can use in my video. I copy and paste them into my video. Or I have a friend who’s an artist and I ask my friend, “Hey, can you draw something to illustrate, you know, Chinese New Year, the year of the horse?” And my friend being a nice person, “Well, yeah, I can make one of those for you. Here you are,” and gives it to me. Nobody would have a problem with that. But now I have AI at my disposal and I can say, “Oh, can you make an illustration about the year of the horse?” And then 2 minutes later, boop, here you go. It’s like, “Oh, I’m looking at that illustration. Looks pretty nice to me.” Okay. Copy and paste it into my video. So, for me, it’s just another tool in your video editing toolbox to use AI. And of course, you can get into trouble because AI is not a human. They don’t have common sense. They’re very, very powerful, but they can make mistakes that a normal human would never make. And in this case, for my, like, Gregorian calendar illustration, it kind of went further than I wanted. It went too far. They gave all these little technical terms around the edges. And I don’t have the time to fact-check every one of those little vocabulary items. And I don’t think anybody’s going to care, but they could be wrong for all I know. Like little details can be slightly off. The basics were there. Here’s the sun. Here’s the Earth going around the sun. And it says Gregorian calendar. Fine. That’s all I wanted. And then when it comes to anything to do with the Chinese New Year, lunar calendar, lunisolar calendar, the solar terms, the AI has a habit of putting in Chinese characters. And I don’t know what those Chinese characters mean. So maybe some of those Chinese characters don’t make any sense at all, but I left them in anyway because the thing is with AI, it gives you an image and if there’s one thing wrong with the image, you can ask the AI to fix that one thing, but it just can’t. That’s one thing it really can’t do. So once I’ve got my year of the horse graphic and I like it, I think it looks fine and down at the bottom it has some Chinese letters. If I say to the AI, “Please remove the Chinese letters,” it can’t do that. It’ll try, but it will destroy the whole image. Like you get into this weird loop where it misinterprets what you want it to do and it removes the Chinese characters, but then it deletes the horse. You’re like, “No, no, no, no, no. I like the horse. It’s all about the year of the horse. Leave the horse, but just remove the Chinese characters.” And then it’ll take the Chinese characters, remove the horse, put the Chinese characters in the middle of the image. I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” You know, you go in this endless loop and the more you try to fix it, the worse it gets, the worse it gets. So, you do end up as a YouTuber without a lot of time on your hands. The first image the AI gives you, you tend to go with it because trying to fix it, it’s just going to take forever. You kind of have to start all over from the beginning. And then I will say, okay, I’ll just wipe out everything and give new instructions. Okay, I want a graphic of the year of the horse, but no Chinese lettering. You give it those instructions and now the image it gives you will have nothing in it that looks Chinese at all. Like all the Chinese elements, the red lettering, the blossoms, anything to do with Chinese New Year, it will just remove everything to do with Chinese New Year and you’ll just get a picture of a horse. I’m like, well, no, no, no, no. What I want is the Chinese New Year traditions and the motifs. I want it to look Chinese, but I don’t want Chinese characters. And you can do this for the rest of your life and you’re not going to make much progress. So there is a tendency for mistakes to be in there. So maybe the Chinese characters are not quite right. And a Chinese person will look at that and go, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense.” But I left it in anyway because I know how hard it is to get these minor adjustments. So, I did use AI to make the illustrations for this video and that’s one of the interesting things about it. Another interesting thing about this video overall is that you have to make a decision where to draw the line and you know you’re going to get in trouble no matter what you do. So when you’re talking, for example, about calendars, to be honest it was probably, in terms of a YouTube video, I think it was my mistake from the beginning to include a lot of information about calendars because for YouTube popularity I should have just stuck with year of the horse, year of the fire horse, firecrackers, the monster Nian. Done. Right? Just talk about Chinese New Year, the fun stuff, make it fun, make it interesting. But as soon as I started reading about Chinese New Year, all of that is common knowledge to me. It’s not that interesting. Even the calendar stuff is common knowledge to me because I’ve thought about this topic for years and years and years, for decades. But as soon as I started refreshing my memory and doing some reading, I just started thinking about again the Chinese calendar, you know, the lunar calendar, the lunisolar calendar, and the Gregorian calendar. So, at the very beginning of my video, I went off on this big tangent about calendars. And I find all of that very fascinating. You get into the mathematics of it, the astronomy of it, it’s all very fascinating stuff. Particularly when you have something like the Chinese New Year which is kind of based on both calendars. It’s a hybrid lunar and solar calendar and, you know, these things can get quite complicated and that leads you down the path of talking about the leap year, for example, where our calendar is not perfect and we have to keep adjusting it. And the Gregorian calendar, we have leap years where every four years we add an extra day and it, you know, syncs the calendar back up again. We have to correct it. And then every calendar, the lunisolar calendar has to do the same thing. And then you talk about the lunar calendar, a pure lunar calendar. It goes out of sync by 11 days. Not just, you know, the Gregorian solar calendar will go out of sync by 6 hours every year. We need that correction. But when you think about the lunar calendar relative to the solar, the lunar calendar goes out of sync by 11 days, more or less. And then you have to adjust for that. So anyway, I find all of that fascinating and I was talking about that. But even going that far into it, you’ve only covered the surface layer, right? So you have to make a decision about how far to go into it. And where I drew the line was right there. Leap year and then the leap month, you know, with the lunisolar calendar and I decided, okay, I don’t want to go too far into it. So in a way, by talking about it at all you’re shooting yourself in the foot because you’re going to get in trouble in two ways. By talking about leap years and calendar adjustments to begin with, most people are going to lose interest. It’s like, “Ah, that’s too technical. I don’t care about that stuff. I hate your video. Your video is boring. Goodbye. Unsubscribe.” So, talking about leap years at all annoys most of the people. But then if you only talk about it part way and then you don’t get into the nitty-gritty details, like the real details, now you’re going to be annoying the people who know what you’re talking about and they’re going to be angry with you. It’s like, you know, your video is wrong. There’s— I’m talking about this, of course, because there were a couple of comments on the video. One in particular coming from a person, I assume someone of Chinese heritage who knows everything about this topic down to the tiniest detail. You know, the math gets very complicated, you know, the 24 solar terms, the adjustments, the— you know, the math is very complicated. So this person wrote as a comment to my video, “Wrong, you know, just wrong,” and then just listed a bunch of terms: 24 solar terms, this, this, this, this, this, and just listed a bunch of random terms and said, “Your video is wrong. These are important terms.” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, I know all those terms. I read about all of them. I know what you’re talking about, but wrong, like, what exactly is wrong?” I’d love to talk to you about it. I’d love to engage. Of course, even in the video at the end of the video I talked for quite a long section where I did a mea culpa where I said, okay, I’m not an expert in any of this so I’m sure I made mistakes. I’m sure I left things out. There’s information I may have left out on purpose because it’s too complicated, you know. I don’t want to talk about everything, so sort of things that I know that I left out. There are things I overlooked because I’m not even aware of them. So, any of this information, yeah, put it all in the comments. That’ll be amazing. We can talk about it. And if there’s a lot of really interesting comments, I’ll make another video replying to comments. So, I was inviting all this feedback. Yeah, let’s talk about Chinese New Year. I’m sure you guys are the experts. You know more than I do. So, yeah, get into the comments and let’s talk about it. This will be interesting. And then of course, you know, it’s like, “Wrong,” and then a list of random terms. And I must admit that in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been feeling a little bit ornery. I’ve been feeling a little bit spirited. I normally get, you know, if I get— if there’s a comment that, to me, the tone is a little bit off, I set it aside for a day, I just let it sit and then I’ll come back the next day and then I read it again and it’s like, “Ah, yeah, whatever.” And then I’ll just say, “Oh, thanks for your comment.” I take the high road, basically. But lately I’ve just sort of been tired of the high road. So, when I get a comment like that now, I’m moving fast. I’m doing a lot of different things. And I read and he said, “Wrong.” And then I— so I was a little bit more abrupt than I normally am. And I wrote back to this guy and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I mean, if you want to, you know, expand on what you mean by this, like what was wrong and what do you mean by these terms? And I, you know, what do you mean by all these random terms? Yeah. Like just tell me what you mean.” And then he wrote back like, “Oh, these are not random terms, you know, use AI.” And I’m like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, you know, now you’re getting on my nerves.” So, he was like commanding me. He listed a whole bunch of words that I know. I know about the 24 solar terms. I know the names of the months that they use in China. I can’t pronounce them, but I’ve got the list. I, you know, I’ve gone into this topic in depth. I know about all these things. So, I’m like, I know all those terms, but you just sort of threw them at the screen in a random pattern and just said “wrong.” Like, what exactly are you focusing on? You know, let’s have a chat. And then he just said “AI.” I was like, “Well, I don’t need to use AI to learn about these terms. I know what they all mean. I just don’t know what you’re trying to get at here.” And then I had a little bit of a back and forth with this guy. And I was a little bit less patient than I normally am ’cause I was just tired of being patient. And how did that one eventually end up? I can’t remember exactly what the last comment was, but I just kept repeating the same thing that, you know, I know what those terms mean. So, you don’t have to educate me about any of those terms. I’m just trying to get at what it is you’re talking about exactly. Like, you know, explain it to me. Like, use your words, use sentences, verbs, subject, verb, object. I mean, you got to write it out. I don’t know what you’re saying here. And then he would just say, “AI. Just use AI.” And I’m like, yeah, okay, whatever. I’ve had enough of you. If you have something to say, say it. If you don’t have anything to say, you know, move along with you, you know. And this guy, he’s probably a perfectly nice guy. And from his point of view, yeah, he’s an expert in the Chinese calendar and everything to do with the history and the complexity of it and the mathematics. That’s great. Tell me about it, you know, tell me what you’re trying to say, but don’t just throw a bunch of words at the screen and then “AI.” It’s like, all right, dude, calm down. Calm down. So, yeah, like I said, with a video like this, as I said, you usually annoy everybody by saying anything about the Chinese lunisolar calendar. You’re annoying people who don’t care about that kind of detail. And then if you only include some of the detail, then you annoy the people that know a lot about the subject and then they’ll start correcting you. It’s like, “Oh, this is wrong and this is wrong and this is wrong.” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, I know.” You know, I’m not going that far into it because— yeah, there was another comment. You can see it there from— he’s a longtime follower of Planet Doug and he basically kind of said the same thing. It starts— you can recognize it because he starts with “Muckadoo,” you know, just joking calling me by the wrong name. And in my video I was talking about the solar calendar and then I said that every four years we add an extra day to a leap year to correct the drift of the calendar. And I even said in the video, when I’m talking about how much time it is, that we have 6 hours left over and then after 4 years, 4 times 6, you know, we have a day. And I said, well, it’s not actually an exact day, it’s off by a little bit because nothing is perfect, but we kind of nudge it back into line every four years. And then I know about the next level of how we handle this topic, but that would have been too complicated to get into. So I only took it as far as the leap year every four years. And then the next level I just ignored that ’cause, yeah, I’ve gone into it far enough. But anyway, this guy who called me McDougall, he’s basically saying, “McDougall wrong. What you said about four-year leap year, you’re wrong about that because it isn’t exactly one day. It overcorrects. So now we have this, you know, every year that has a four in it and a century, this is a leap year and then that isn’t a leap year.” He said, “You’re wrong.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I know about all of that stuff, but I’m not teaching an astronomy course here. A 4-year pattern, leap year. That’s good enough.” You know, it’s not an astronomy course. So that’s kind of what I mean. And I did something interesting with that comment which gets back to like an AI topic because I was kind of curious about this where someone leaves a comment on YouTube and then the tone is like that. You know, the tone is a bit condescending, a little bit combative, a little bit hostile. They’re trying to win an argument with you rather than have a discussion. You know, you can feel it. You know, we’ve all seen these comments on YouTube. Now, I was curious what an AI would feel. So, I took this comment and I copy and pasted it into ChatGPT. And, you know, ChatGPT knows me quite well at this point that I’m a YouTuber and Planet Doug. All that information has been fed into ChatGPT. And I was like, “Hey, ChatGPT. I posted this video about Chinese New Year and I talked about the Gregorian calendar and the lunisolar and the lunar and, you know, leap years and this and that. And then I got this comment. What do you think of this comment?” And I just sort of posted the comment and then ChatGPT kind of did it and did an analysis and then, yeah, it broke it down for me and it says, “Yeah, this is a really condescending comment.” And it kind of isolated every word in the comment, you know, “Oh, by calling you McDougall, that’s a dominance play, you know, trying to act superior to you, and because of this word, that’s condescending and saying that you’re an idiot and you don’t know what you’re talking about. And this phrasing was chosen to do this.” And it kind of broke down the whole comment line by line, you know, word by word and kind of analyzed it like, what is the tone of this comment? And I thought it was pretty interesting because, you know, as a human, you read a comment, you get an instinctive feel for the tone of the comment and then the AI kind of broke it down word by word, sentence by sentence. And I thought that was kind of interesting. And again, because I’m feeling ornery these days, I’m not trying to be diplomatic at the moment. So, you know, with this guy, I just said, “Hey, you know, by the way, your comment, I fed it into an AI and this is what its analysis of your comment is.” And yeah, I put it into the YouTube comments. You know, you can read it there. And then I went one step further and I said to the AI, “Hey, you know, we’ve been talking about this. Can you rewrite this comment from just a normal perspective? Like, imagine you are someone who’s just a nice person who’s interested in the topic and wants to add new information and wants to expand on this and just have a dialogue with you in the comments. How would you take this information and write it in a sincere, nice comment?” And then the AI just went, “Sure, I can do that.” You know, there it is. And it rewrote the comment, but in a way without all the condescension and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, I put it into the comment thread as well. It’s kind of interesting where, you know, it starts off using my name, you know, so like, “Hey, Doug, great video about Chinese New Year. Your discussion of the leap year is really interesting. And did you know that when we do the leap year every four years that actually overcorrects and now we have to correct for that overcorrection and this is how we do it and this year and this year and the number four and that and it’s like, yeah, I find that really interesting.” Like, yeah, that’s what I was looking for, you know, rather than the sort of “you’re wrong and I’m going to debate with you and show you where you made a mistake” kind of approach. So yeah, anyway, I just thought that was kind of interesting, the power of AI to analyze a YouTube comment. Something else of interest about this video, at least of interest for me as a YouTuber making a video and making decisions, perhaps the third thing that I was thinking of when I started talking about this is that when the video is done now, you kind of have to package it. And one thing I’ve learned is for this kind of video in particular, it’s really a good idea to know what your title is before you make the video. ‘Cause quite often I’ll make a video and then I get to the end and then I really struggle with a video title and video description because my video kind of rambles, goes all over the place. Might be about 15 different events, 20 different topics and then it’s like, well, what’s the video about? And it really helps if you start with your title. Write your title first. That’s the focus, you know, the hook, per se, and then it even helps you film the video because you open with the title. So, you might say, uh, you know, I don’t know, whatever. I was trying to think of an example off the top of my head, but I can’t think of one. But if you have like a really catchy title, that’s the hook for your video. And then your first line in the video is repeating the title and that hook. And it helps you focus your thoughts. And in this case, I didn’t do it. I just sort of, you know, what I had basically was, as I was reading about Chinese New Year, I was keeping notes. And then I had, like, you know, it’s a huge document. I’ve got in Google Keep, Google documents. I got these many, many, many pages long, everything that I was thinking about with Chinese New Year and, “Oh, that’s kind of interesting,” and I’ll make a note, make a note, make a note. And by the time I have all the information then I’d look at it and it’s like, oh yeah, what would I start with? And basically I just look at it from, okay, what do I open with, this topic, this topic, this topic, conclusion. And then I just have a rough outline of what it is I’m going to talk about. So that’s what I did and then I didn’t take it any further than that. I just turned on the camera and started talking. Topic number one. And then when I was done with that topic, topic number two, topic number three, and I got to the end. But I didn’t really look at the whole thing before I started. And then when I was done now, I had to come up with a video title and I was a little bit lost. But then as I went over everything I was talking about, I realized that without even intending to, I developed a theme of a western person having misconceptions about Chinese New Year. Like just pick some guy in Canada, has a wheat farm in the middle of Saskatchewan, lives in a very small town, and he just never really thinks about Chinese New Year. He’s never traveled, never gone anywhere. There’s not a big Chinese community where he lives. So, and then he hears about Chinese New Year. What would be his thoughts about Chinese New Year? And then I kind of had that theme going throughout my whole video. And that was sort of the structure that I used. I didn’t plan it that way is the point I’m making. It just sort of happened. So for example, talking about the name of the holiday, you know, in Canada we call it Chinese New Year, but of course in China that’s not what they call it, right? They have their own name for it. We call it Chinese New Year because we’re thinking of it from another country’s point of view. But in China, they don’t think of it as Chinese anything. It’s just what they have. So, it’s the Spring Festival, sort of thing. So, a farmer in the middle of Saskatchewan might think, well, Chinese New Year, that’s just January 1st. But in China, it’s how they celebrate the new year because he may not even know that they have a different calendar because that would be so outside of his realm of knowledge that it would be a surprise to him to even learn. Like, “What do you mean they don’t have January?” He’s like, “Well, not for Chinese New Year. It doesn’t follow that calendar. It follows a lunisolar calendar, a combination, right?” And that would be a big surprise to this person. Oh, so like when does it happen? You know, it doesn’t happen in January. He said, “Well, no, it’s like—” and you get into the dates of when it happens and the different calendars and things like that. And as I went through all of the different topics, that idea came up again and again. Well, this farmer in Canada, he probably thinks, well, Chinese New Year, if they have a different day, okay, that sounds interesting. I understand. So, they celebrate New Year on this day. And I’m like, well, no, not exactly. It’s actually 15 days long. Chinese New Year is not just one day. It’s stretched out over, over two weeks basically and it ends with a big festival and begins with a festival and— and then to a farmer in Canada that’d be like, “Really? Oh, I never knew that before.” So that was sort of the approach that my discussion took but I didn’t plan it from the beginning. So now that I reached the end of the video, I had to come up with a title. You know, I gave it the title that you can see. Basically thinking, what would interest people? Instead of, you know, “I explain Chinese New Year” or “I talk about Chinese New Year,” that’s not very interesting. I wrote “What Westerners Get Wrong About Chinese New Year.” And I thought, oh, that’s kind of an interesting angle. That can be a YouTube hook. It’s not clickbait, but it might interest people. It was like, “Oh, okay. Here’s the angle on Chinese New Year.” And I chose that title and I ran it by Grok. I think I had— I just happened to have Grok open on my laptop and I told Grok about this video and I’m thinking about using this title. “What do you think about this?” And then Grok was like, “Wow, best title I’ve ever heard. It’s so effective.” And Grok broke down why it’s such an effective title. It’s amazing. It’s great. It’s wonderful. It’s going to do this and this and this and this and it does this and— and I’m like, wow. For a change, I came up with a pretty good title. And I’m patting myself on the back. I post the video, of course, and as these videos do, it landed with a giant thud. You know, nobody’s really that interested in it. It didn’t get a lot of views, particularly right out of the gate. It’s just sort of— it just sort of sits there. Nobody really noticed it. We’re not talking about a viral YouTube sensation. So, I’m looking at it going, “Well, all right.” You know, you gave it the college try. I thought everything was interesting. I think the video is interesting. I did my best. I came up with what I thought was a catchy title, but then I was thinking about how, yeah, the video was really not that interesting to people. What did I do wrong? And I can come up with a dozen reasons, you know, what I did wrong. But then I went to ChatGPT and I said, “Yeah, this, you know, the video that I’ve been working on about Chinese New Year, nobody really cares about it that much. It’s not getting a lot of attention on YouTube.” And then I said, “Yeah, this is the title that I gave it.” And when I told ChatGPT the title, what I was saying was, “Yeah, and I even had this really great title and it didn’t even work.” That was my perspective. And then ChatGPT went, “Well, there’s your problem right there. That’s one of the dumbest titles I’ve ever seen. No, that’s a horrible title. It’s not going to work at all because of this and this and this and this and this. What you should have done was this and this and this.” And I’m like, “Oh, come on, guys. Make up your mind. You know, Grok told me it was the greatest video title in the history of the universe. You’re telling me it’s the worst title you’ve ever seen. You guys got to like— who do I believe now?” Right. Anyway, it was kind of interesting that Grok and ChatGPT were just like completely opposite perspectives on that title that I chose. You know, one of them told me it was the best thing since sliced bread, and the other one told me it was like the worst idea he’d ever come across, right? So, I was like, “Oh, good grief. My AI buddies, they’re letting me down.” You know, they can’t even make up their minds. Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny. One more thought about this video to wind up is that one perhaps controversial point in the video might have been one of the points I made, which is that, okay, Chinese New Year is called Spring Festival, right? And you tell a farmer in Saskatchewan, yeah, there’s a festival called Spring Festival. He’s automatically going to think it happens in May. From a Canadian point of view, well, that’s when spring is, May. And if I told him, “No, no, no, no. It actually happens in February, right? Around February 4th, sort of somewhere around that date.” And the farmer in Canada would look at me like I’m out of my mind. “What? It’s a spring festival. So why are they having it in winter?” Right? So I talked about that and how from a western point of view we hear Spring Festival and we’re going to think, oh, springtime, it’s going to happen in May, and it might come as a surprise to us to learn that no, it actually happens when it’s still winter time technically. So, I thought that was an interesting angle. And then, of course, that led to some, you know, YouTube controversy because from the Chinese point of view, the Chinese calendar, well, that is the beginning of spring. Like, if you look at the Chinese system, when does the spring season begin? That is when it begins. And that month is even called, when you translate the Chinese, it’s called Beginning of Spring. So, you know, people will say you were completely wrong about that. It does begin with spring. So Spring Festival, that’s a perfectly acceptable name. But of course, the Chinese solar terms, the 24 solar terms, are very specific and very different from the western concept of the four seasons. You know, that’s as far as our brains go. We’ve got spring, summer, fall, winter, four months each one, and then, you know, February to us that’s still winter. And then I talk about that in depth in the video about— I don’t go into the solar terms exactly because I made a judgment call that that was too complicated. That was going too far. But I talked about how from the Chinese perspective and the way they’re looking at the seasons, this is the beginning of spring, but it’s more in the sense of this is when the seasons start to shift. We’re at the beginning of spring in the sense of leading from winter into spring. And if you look at the 24 solar terms, again, I could be absolutely wrong about this, so don’t get upset with me, but each of the four seasons has six parts. So there’s six solar terms for spring, six solar terms for summer, for fall, for winter, etc. And then the beginning of spring starts much, much earlier according to the dates because of how the solar terms are laid out. And the spring season from the Chinese point of view begins way before the western spring season begins. So they date it from when the shift begins. So the very first month of the solar term anyway is Beginning of Spring. So of course it’s the Spring Festival, but then it has many, many different stages. It has six stages before it gets to the month of May when actual spring weather has occurred. So if you talk to a farmer from Canada and say spring, he’s thinking about spring weather. But the Chinese approach with the 24 solar terms is much more detailed and it starts much, much earlier. It’s talking about the technical definition of their spring season, not when spring weather is fully upon us. Right? Anyway, I found all of that quite fascinating. But of course, as soon as you start saying something like, you know, the name Spring Festival doesn’t make sense from a Canadian farmer’s point of view, what the internet hears is me saying, “Oh, Spring Festival, that’s a dumb name because it’s not spring yet.” And obviously that’s not what I’m saying, but that’s what people will hear. And then people have to explain to me that, no, no, no, it makes perfect sense because spring begins on this date and this and they get into all the solar terms and all of that kind of stuff. So yeah, it’s a very— it can be a very touchy sort of topic that way. And I had fun with that. Again, this is getting back to AI. I had this idea of illustrating what it looks like in a humorous way from a Canadian point of view. And I went to the image generator Nano Banana and then I said— I gave very simple instructions. It wasn’t even very detailed. And I said, “Can you make a cartoon that shows a typical Canadian on a frozen lake, like outside on a frozen lake, and this Canadian is wearing ice skates, holding a hockey stick, and then he has a speech bubble with a question mark that says ‘Spring Festival’? And then in the corner, put a calendar that shows that the date is February 4th. Can you make this cartoon?” And as far as I’m concerned, the AI did an amazing job. I gave it almost no instructions. And when I saw the cartoon, I laughed aloud. I did because it was perfect. It showed this Canadian in typical Canadian clothing with a hockey stick and a hockey puck. And he’s looking at the calendar that says February 4th, the dead of winter. Everything’s frozen. He’s still playing hockey and he’s going, “Spring Festival now? Wow, that’s funny.” Like, that doesn’t make any sense at all. And I thought the cartoon was really quite funny. And I posted that to YouTube, the YouTube posts. I posted it to Patreon, to Substack, to Buy Me a Coffee, across all my social media because I thought it was really funny. And then the AI said, you know, like, “Would you like me to make another panel? Like, what happens next?” And I said, sure, you know, I don’t have an idea for what you’re thinking of, but if you have an idea, sure, I’d love to see it. And then the AI made a second image that to my mind was almost equally perfect because it showed this Canadian. He now has the hockey stick over his head like he’s celebrating. He’s like, “Yay!” And all around are Chinese New Year celebrations. In the background, we see a dragon dance. We see dumplings. We see all classic Chinese New Year imagery. Even the hockey puck is giving off fireworks like firecrackers. I just thought it was so funny and it was so interesting. I thought that is absolutely, that is really funny, you know, that now we’ve got this Canadian hockey player like, “Yay! Chinese New Year, Spring Festival!” with all these elements. I thought it was really clever, but what I noticed was the hockey stick. It was missing one part. It had the stick, but now that the Canadian was holding it over his head, the blade of the hockey stick was missing. That was the only thing that was really wrong with the image. I mean, you could fine-tune it and say, “Oh, make this bigger, make this smaller, change this.” But overall, I thought it was fine. I thought it was a really good job, but the hockey stick didn’t look like a hockey stick anymore. So, I did try to correct it. And this gets back to what I was talking about earlier that AI systems don’t have a lot of common sense and it’s really hard to get it to correct anything. It can make it from the beginning, but then if you ask for an alteration, things start to go wonky. And I did write to the AI and said, “Oh, can you put on the blade of the hockey stick?” And I tried to keep my request very, very simple. I didn’t want to confuse it and just said, “Add a hockey blade to the hockey stick.” That was like all I said. And then the AI recreated the comic, but instead of adding the blade to that hockey stick, it added a second hockey stick. So now the Canadian was holding a stick above his head, but now there was another hockey stick floating in the air on the ice that had the blade on it, the actual blade of the hockey stick. So you see what I mean about AI systems. It’s very, very powerful, very intelligent, but the way they are now, it can still make very basic mistakes. And now if I tried to say to it, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not what I wanted. I don’t want two hockey sticks. Take away the second one. Just all I want you to do is add a hockey blade to that other hockey stick.” And if I tried to do that, the AI would try to do it and it’d probably give me a hundred hockey sticks. There’d be like a blade sticking out of the guy’s head or sticking out of his hand. Like all kinds of weird things could happen. So quite often if you ask it for an illustration or a cartoon or an image or like a photorealistic image, the first one you get, hopefully it’s a good one, because if you try to ask for corrections it usually just gets, you know, worse and worse and worse and worse. So anyway, that is the story of my Chinese New Year video.
One last topic for this morning is my next video that I’m posting to Planet Doug. Yeah, don’t get so excited. Well, by the time I post this behind-the-scenes video, this other video will already be on Planet Doug. And it’s just another one of these experimental explainer videos that I’ve been playing around with. And this one was actually an idea that I had long ago. Way back when I was in Sumatra, I started thinking about this phrase, “the dark side of the moon.” And I made a whole video about that. I had a whole— I made a whole bunch of notes about it long ago, but then my, you know, like my tsunami explainer video, couple others that I made were just relatively unnoticed on YouTube. So, when it came around to the dark side of the moon video, I kind of set it aside and thought, “Ah, I’m not going to even bother making that video.” But, you know, I just had some energy and some time. So, I sat down here in Planet Doug Studios. I had my dark side of the moon notes open, kind of just organized by topic, and then I just drank a cup of coffee and I talked about the dark side of the moon. And of course the basic idea, this is actually one where I had the video title first. So that’s what I was talking about with the Chinese New Year video. It works better if you have the title and that really focuses you on what the video is about. Whether I managed to stay focused or not, probably not because I just go off on all these tangents. But I think the title I had in mind and the one that I used was very simply, “There is no dark side of the moon.” And this fits into a whole bunch of topics that I’ve been talking about lately. Things that I spent my whole life believing and knowing to be true and then I suddenly find out decades later, no, that was completely wrong. That isn’t true at all. This thing you believed your entire life. No, not true. So, of course, you know, we all have this idea that the moon, not to repeat my entire video, but the moon is hanging up there in the sky, and we always see the same side of the moon, right? From our perspective, it’s not rotating. It’s just sort of sitting there unmoving. So, we see a light side and our brain automatically thinks, well, the other side is dark. We only see the light side. We never see the dark side. So there is a dark side of the moon that is always dark. And there are all these things in pop culture, in science, in writing and in the Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon, that just reinforces this idea that there is a dark side of the moon. But of course, as soon as you start reading about it and thinking about it, a light bulb should go off and then you suddenly realize, actually that’s not true at all. There is no dark side of the moon. And yet, what’s happening? Like the moon is just sitting there. There’s a light side. The other side is always dark when I see the moon. So anyway, there’s a mystery there. A mystery to be solved, a mystery to be figured out. So that’s what I made the video about. And I think it’s similar to the Chinese New Year video in that once you start talking about it, things can get very technical because you’re talking about orbits, the orbit of the moon around the Earth, the orbit of the Earth around the sun, the interaction of the moon’s orbit with the Earth’s orbit, and the astronomy there, the orbital calculations, what exactly is going on can very quickly get very complicated and it’s like your brain struggles to comprehend all of it. So when you’re talking about that topic, you have a choice. You have to decide where to draw the line in the sand. How deeply do I go into this topic and then where do I stop? And then when I was talking about it, I made that choice. So now you end up offending the same two groups of people. Of course, there will be the average person out there. As soon as you start talking about orbits and things like that, they’re like, “Yeah, whatever. Skip, unsubscribe.” It’s just too complicated. Those details are not engaging enough. So you’ve offended all those people just by talking about this subject. And then when you only take it so far and don’t go further and really get into the weeds, really get into the details, now you’re going to be annoying all the people for whom it is interesting. And they know the complex side of things. And then they’re going to tell me how I’m wrong about everything because you didn’t talk about this and you didn’t talk about this. And then I’ll have to say to them in the comments, “Well, I know about all those things. Trust me, I read everything I could possibly read about this topic. All of these terms you’re throwing at me, I’m familiar with. I just decided not to go that far with it in the video.” So, yeah, we’ll see what people think of this video. To be honest, I don’t think I have anything more than that to say about it. Probably because it hasn’t been posted yet. It’s not on YouTube. It’s not on my channel yet. It’s scheduled to go live today at 5:15 or something like that. 5:15 Malaysia time. But yeah, the most interesting thing for me about “Dark Side of the Moon” as a topic, and I hope that comes across in the video, is that the origin of the phrase goes all the way back to the 17 and 1800s. And back in those days when they said “dark,” they meant “unknown.” And that’s the key to the whole mystery. That they talk about the dark side of the moon. What they meant is we don’t know very much about it. Astronomers, they’re smarter than the average person obviously and they know that the moon rotates. It doesn’t look like it’s rotating to us, but it is rotating. And it has night and day and all parts of the moon are lit up by sunlight. It has like two weeks of nighttime, two weeks of daytime and that takes place all over the moon. So there is no dark side of the moon. Astronomers know that. But in the past they talk about how the far side of the moon we can’t see it from the earth. It’s never presented to us. So historically the other side, the far side, is unknown to us and that’s why they called it the dark side, because we don’t know much about it. And I talk in the video about how they used to talk about Africa as the dark continent and that had nothing to do with sunshine. It had nothing to do with lightness and darkness. It was only that people didn’t know very much, or Europeans didn’t know much about Africa. They knew a little bit about the coast because their ships would go by the coast, but the interior of Africa was largely unknown at that time. So they called it the dark continent, a continent that is unknown. And the dark side of the moon falls into that same category. So yeah, as I said, I don’t think I have much more than that to say. There’s no comments on the video, so I don’t have anything there that I can talk about. But yeah, I’ve always been fascinated about the moon. I mean, everybody at some point in their life becomes fascinated with the stars, the sun, the moon. And in the video, I talk about that. And I try to make a connection with traveling, that talking about the moon is not completely inappropriate for someone who’s traveling or a YouTube travel channel. The moon is important in travel as well. I talked about how when you’re traveling, you often find yourself in small villages way out in the countryside and suddenly there isn’t as much light pollution. So for the first time maybe in years you’re looking up at the sky and it’s like, “Whoa, look at the stars, look at the moon.” You’re seeing all these things for the first time because if you’re living in Kuala Lumpur or Toronto, you never see the moon or the stars very clearly because of all the light pollution. So you don’t really think about it that much. And then you go off on your holiday and you find yourself in a very remote part of South America or Africa or whatever country you’re in and suddenly you start thinking about the moon for the first time and then you get out your binoculars and you look at the moon and you see all of the craters or you get out your smartphone and zoom in and take a photo. And anyway, the moon just sort of lives in your brain when you’re traveling more than it does when you’re just living a normal life, going to school, going to work, going home. So, I tried to make all those connections in this dark side of the moon video. So, hopefully it isn’t too long, not too rambling, and I don’t think I put in too many graphics. I did use AI image generator, I think, to create a few images. Most of what I was talking about, I think, started to get a little bit technical, a little bit complicated and that’s very hard to show in a graphic image. So I don’t know how many I included in that. But anyway, we’ll see. I hope you enjoy or I hope you already enjoyed my Dark Side of the Moon video.
And that’s it for this behind-the-scenes podcast, shutting down. Yeah, very interesting time right now in terms of just daily life. Got Chinese New Year. We’ve got Ramadan. I mean, there is a lot going on. It’s a very unusual time. I was outside my hotel this morning and as I expected, everything was closed. I mean all the little shops in my neighborhood, all the little restaurants just sort of closed, closed, closed. So yeah, I mean Ramadan on top of Chinese New Year, it’s just— it’s going to be a very— the upcoming month is going to be a very unusual month, but that’s just the way things are. A country like Malaysia in particular has a lot of holidays from a lot of different cultures. Every time you turn around, it’s a new holiday, something new to think about, and it has an effect on the world around you. I can actually see a little bit of the road out there out my window right now, and it’s just gridlock. Just filled with traffic and nobody’s moving ’cause there’s so many people on the road right now. Going back to KL or just arriving from KL or going back where, going back to their hotel, going to the beach and back. Yeah, there’s a lot of activity now out there. So that’s it. Shutting down and I’ll see you in the next video.