YouTube: AMA: I Answer Your Questions from June/July 2026

VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

I got some great questions for the June/July Ask Me Anything video, and I did my best to answer them. I always enjoy sitting down over a cup of instant coffee (or several cups of coffee) and then nursing my overheating GoPro along as I answer your question and go off on my usual long, connected tangents.

You can use the YouTube timestamps/chapters feature to jump from question to question. Here they are:

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 – Welcome to Planet Doug Studios
02:05 – How Did My Parents Come to Canada?
39:08 – What Is My Favourite Financial Support Platform?
55:49 – How Do You Use AI for Your Channel?
01:35:11 – What Are Your Plans for the Rest of the Year?
01:38:38 – Have You Thought Renting Long-Term?
01:46:31 – What Is Your Next Project?
01:59:05 – Suggestions for Places to Visit
02:04:15 – Favorite Food & Favorite Place in Melaka?
02:16:59 – Which State Are You Going To Visit Next?
02:17:56 – Catholic Churches That Are Worth Visiting
02:25:18 – How Did You Learn About Melaka’s History?
02:30:03 – What Happened to Your Malaysia Bicycle Trip?
02:38:48 – Do You Hope to Earn Money While Travelling?
02:59:54 – How Do You Manage to Stay In One Place?
03:16:49 – What’s Your Next Destination?
03:18:26 – Are You Related To Jacob Nienhuys?
03:21:17 – Any Plans To Visit Other ASEAN Countries?
03:27:19 – Do You Feel Lonely At Times?
03:36:56 – As You Age Do You Have Plans To Settle Down?
03:47:34 – What Would You Do If You Won the Lottery?
03:58:06 – What Are Your Top 5 Museums in Melaka?
04:05:55 – Maybe Cycle The East Coast in Stages?
04:10:28 – Conclusion
04:11:54 – End Credits

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning and welcome to another Planet Doug ask me anything video. This one is for the months of June and July 2026. So all the questions that people have submitted to me either on Patreon or on the YouTube community tab for June and July. I totaled them all up. I think I have 22 questions in total. Thank you very much for submitting those questions and over a cup of coffee here in glorious Planet Doug Studios. I am going to answer them. It always makes me laugh when I set up for one of these videos inside Planet Doug Studios. It’s way more complicated than you would think. By the time I’m done just getting ready to hit the record button, I have to have my cup of coffee. I’ve got a GoPro sitting on a tripod on the mattress of the hotel bed. Opening windows to let in as much light as possible. Testing the microphone, making sure I’ve got audio, of course, testing the camera, making sure everything’s recording properly, getting enough light in here, reducing all the noise around me, getting all the gear ready because I can’t run my GoPro on batteries, even inside an air conditioned hotel room, it’ll overheat and shut down. So I’ve got to remove the battery and plug in a USB-C cord. So that’s what’s powering the GoPro. But my microphone is on batteries. The microphone batteries have to be fully charged. Every time I sit down to start, I got to get back up again because I forgot to do one thing. And I have to have my questions queued up on my tablet here so that I can read the questions. I don’t know. It always feels like there’s a lot that has to be done and it’s like I’m not shooting the next Pixar masterpiece here and yet the buildup before I can finally hit record and answer a question always seems a bit over the top. Yeah. Anyway.

22 questions and the question number one, the very first one that was submitted, it was actually submitted 2 months ago at the beginning of June. So I’ve been thinking about this question for quite a while. It’s a very good one. And I just noticed even my tablet now doesn’t have any battery power. So that’s something I forgot to do. Top up my tablet. So now I better plug that in to another cord. Make sure it keeps running. So this question is from Jill. You can see it up there on the screen. You can read along with me. Hi Doug. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to learn more about you and your travels. You’ve already shared a lot about your own story and it made me curious to hear more about your family background. I would be very interested to know more about your parents’ history, especially their journey from the Netherlands to Canada. What prompted their move? Were they already married before arriving in Canada? What was their life like in the early days after they settled here? Yeah, I mean that question alone that could be an hour long. I could talk about that for two hours probably. And actually I queued up a few photos that may be able to help tell that story and I will call up the photos here and then I will put them on the screen as well. So yeah, both my parents came from the Netherlands. They immigrated from the Netherlands to Canada, but they were not married when they did that. They immigrated separately each with their own family in a different way and it’s really quite an interesting story as far as I know the details of course after World War II much of Europe was suffering destroyed during World War II and there was a big postwar immigration from all the countries of Europe to everywhere around the world. I mean I think mainly they immigrated to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, places like that. So after World War II, there was a big postwar migration from all over Europe. And I think from the Netherlands, 180,000 people immigrated from the Netherlands to Canada. And in total 500,000 immigrated from the Netherlands and they went to United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada for the most part. And 180,000 of those came to Canada, which might surprise you to think that such a high percentage like 180,000 out of 500,000 chose Canada. And you would think they would choose somewhere else when you consider the harsh winters in Canada and the attraction of a place perhaps like the United States. You think more would have gone to the US. But again, based on what I read, Canada had a special relationship with the Netherlands because Canadian troops were heavily involved in the liberation of the Netherlands from German occupation. And some very good feelings developed between the Netherlands and Canada. And Canada really needed people. Canada’s economy was expanding rapidly at that time. Canada was heavily industrial and agricultural like it was a resource-based economy and they needed farmers in particular and they targeted the farmers of the Netherlands. So the government of the Netherlands, the government of Canada made a big arrangement. They had an agreement to promote immigration of farmers and other technical workers from the Netherlands. I think the government in the Netherlands decided they were kind of overpopulated considering all the destruction in the Netherlands at that time. They thought they couldn’t support their own population and they were encouraging people to immigrate and Canada needed people so they made a deal and they made it as easy as possible for people to immigrate from the Netherlands to Canada. So there was a kind of a pipeline where ships brought people from the Netherlands to Canada and most of the ships landed in Halifax at a place called Pier 21. That was the main landing point. And then from there, there was already arrangements by the Canadian government to move people on by train to all the different cities across Canada where they were going to settle. And some of the Dutch settlers, particularly the farmers, they already had like a sponsorship at a local farm in Canada where they would come and work on a Canadian farm for a certain amount of time and then they would go on to establish their own farms, things like that. So it was a very organized, regulated system helping people move from the Netherlands to Canada. There was like a pipeline that had been developed. It was made as easy as possible. And though in the end it really wasn’t that easy as you can imagine. They went across by ship. And just to go back to what I said earlier, my parents came separately. So my mother was a bit younger than my father, which is normal in most marriages from back in those days. The husband is usually a few years older than his wife. So my mother was a little bit more of a younger teenager at the time when they immigrated and she came over with her whole family. So my mother came over with her mother, father, one sister, and several brothers. So it was an entire family that immigrated together. And I actually I have a photo of the ship that they came to Canada on. So there it is. There that is the ship that my mother’s family came to Canada on. I believe I think I have the name of it. The MS Kota Inten. Oh, that’s interesting because Kota is an Indonesian Malay word. I think I don’t know the history of that ship. I didn’t look it up. But anyway, my mother’s family came on that ship. The journey would have taken anywhere between 8 to 10 days. But since they came over in the summer, they were able to dock at Montreal because in the wintertime, the St. Lawrence River would have been frozen. That’s why they all landed at Halifax, but my mother’s ship docked at Montreal, I believe. I might be mixing up my father’s story with my mother’s, but anyway, one of theirs docked in Montreal. Maybe both of them. I don’t have the details straight. And then they traveled by train from Montreal to Sarnia, my hometown, where they settled. And this is quite important too. Part of this pipeline, this thing that made it easier for people to immigrate back then was that there was already a Dutch population scattered across Canada and they were all based around the Dutch Christian Reformed Church because there had been a migration back in the 20s, the 20s and the 30s I believe. And Dutch communities were already based in Canada and they had established Christian Reformed churches. So there were already these Christian communities waiting for them in Canada and there was quite a large Dutch Christian Reformed population in Sarnia at the time and there were friends and family already based there. They were communicating with their friends and family in the Netherlands. So when they immigrated, they would choose where they’re going to go. And these people chose to go to Sarnia. And when they landed in Sarnia by train, of course, nobody was flying back in those days. Came by ship for 8 days, got on a train, went to Sarnia. In Sarnia, they were greeted by an active Dutch community already based there. So my mother’s family, they all came together and they bought or rented a house and I have a photo of the house, the original house. Where is it? Yep. So I believe that’s it there. So that was the house. It’s kind of out in the countryside farming community on the outskirts of Sarnia at that time. So that was the house where my mother’s family originally lived. And then she went to school. You know, my mother was a teenager. She went to school. Her brothers were older. This is a photo of my mother’s family right there. So of course, you can pick out my grandmother and grandfather in the middle. My mother is on her knees. She was the baby of the family and then her older sister and then her three brothers. And they all her three brothers began working when they arrived here. Truck drivers, mechanics, work like that. And then my mother went to school. My father’s situation was completely different. His arrival was so different because his family was his entire family was going to immigrate from the Netherlands to Canada as well. They had a bakery in the Netherlands, a family-owned, family-run bakery. And my father worked his whole life in the bakery as a young man, you know, with his family when he was in the Netherlands. Both my mother and father’s family came from a district called Groningen in the Netherlands. And then the idea was for my father’s family to immigrate and then they were going to open up a bakery in Sarnia when they got there. But they sent my father and one of his sisters ahead of the main family just to check things out and kind of get organized for the rest of the family was going to follow later. But then my grandfather, my father’s father, he failed the medical. So they were in the process of moving to Canada. They sent my father and his sister ahead to prepare for the arrival of the whole family. But then my grandfather failed the medical and he couldn’t go. So they changed all their plans and the family decided to stay in the Netherlands and then my father and his sister were in Canada alone by themselves. And my father’s sister decided it wasn’t for her to be there alone. She wanted the whole family. So she went back to the Netherlands. My father decided to stay. So he never intended to immigrate to Canada on his own. He was a very young man at the time. Probably needed or missed his family. Was hoping his family would come. But then when they couldn’t come to Canada, yeah. He took the courageous decision to just remain. Though I think what really made that possible was what I talked about. He wasn’t there by himself. He was there as part of this quite large Dutch community. So he arrived right in the heart of all these Dutch-speaking church members and the church itself was the center of life for all of them. When I was growing up in Sarnia, I remember there were three Dutch Christian Reformed churches. And we gave them numbers. There was the Dutch Christian Reformed Church number one, number two, and number three kind of based one based in downtown Sarnia, one a little bit further out, and one even farther out. And I remember when I was growing up, my family, we all attended church number one. So that was kind of my growing up years as well was based around the Dutch Christian Reformed Church. That was the community that our lives were based on. And of course there were all kinds of youth clubs and adult societies, social activities all based around the church and the Dutch community. And that’s the situation my father landed in. So he was not here entirely alone. And I have a few pictures of my father’s life when he first got here and I find them quite amusing because he really looks like a player. Part of that is because the cameras came out on Sundays. I noticed that when I was growing up as well. My father was a bit of a shutter bug. He loved to take family pictures, but somehow the camera only came out on Sundays when everybody was dressed up going to church. And then after the church service, all the members of the Dutch community would go to each other’s houses for coffee. So every Sunday, my family would after church go to another family’s house. The whole family, you know, parents, kids, grandparents, the whole group would go there and they all sit around the living room in a circle, all the adults drinking coffee or Dutch drinking tea or coffee and then having Dutch biscuits and cakes and things like that. And everybody was dressed in their Sunday best. So that’s when the cameras would come out. So every picture I have of my father is of him in a elaborate suit, usually standing in front of a really nice car and he seemed to be with a whole variety of women that he met in the church. Seemed to be a lot of dating going on. That’s the impression that you get from the pictures that he was a real player in this Dutch community hanging out with friends, couple groups in the church. There would be like a society for young people that allowed them to date in a kind of a controlled monitored like safe environment kind of thing. So it was very easy to meet members of the opposite sex and hang out with them because the church had this organizational system and you visit each other’s families and anyway I don’t know if I have a picture of my father. Oh yeah, here we are. Oh, I skipped a bunch of pictures. I’m going to have to go back a second. So here is like there’s my father. He’s the one with the glasses. So there I’m assuming this is Sunday, but every picture I have of him is him dressed in quite a sharp suit standing in front of a house. A lot of these young men, like my father, were living in boarding houses in Sarnia. They didn’t get their own family home because they didn’t have a family, but they would rent a room in one of these houses you see behind them. And they seem to have access to a lot of cars or at least they were pretending to because they were always posing with a big car. And then that would be one of my father’s friends from that time. Let’s see. Do I have a photo of him with a car? Yeah, I think I do. So there he is. There’s my father. And I don’t think this was his car. It might have been. I don’t remember the story, but anytime any one of them had access to a car, of course, they would all pile into it and go for a drive. And then everybody has to pose for a picture with the car. And you can see my father was a smoker at the time. Everybody in the Netherlands smoked. All the men smoked at that time. And every photo I have I think seems to have him with a cigarette. Oddly enough, later on in life, he in Canada, he quit smoking. I always remember thinking that was one of the achievements in his life. It’s very rare for a Dutch man of that era to just stop smoking cold turkey. And my father did it. I remember he smoked when I was young and then he had a stint in a hospital at one point, a health problem he had to deal with. And then during his hospital stay, he couldn’t smoke and then he said, “Okay, I’m never going to smoke again.” And he never ever did. I always thought that was quite the achievement. But there is my father. And I said I had to go back in time with the photos because I just remembered I have a photo of my father and his sister on the ship. So here’s one of them. So again, you see my father all dressed up in a nice suit, cigarette, and his sister. So the two of them, this is I believe on the deck of the ship, and they were on their way to Canada, and the journey took 8 to 10 days. I think I have another one. So there there’s my father again. And there would have been of course the entire ship would have been filled with Dutch people heading to Canada. So yeah, I often think about that that when I go to another country even on my own, yeah, I mean the language barrier is a serious problem. And yeah, you have to do everything yourself. But back in those days with that kind of immigration, you were going as part of a community. Everybody spoke Dutch on the ship and then when you landed in Canada, especially landing in Montreal, which would have been French-speaking, it would have been quite a shock. But at the same time, it was a organized system moving immigrants to their final destination and they were going with a big group of people all who spoke Dutch, all from their home community. And one more photo of my father on the ship with his sister and again dressed. Yeah, it was more formal back in those days when I hop on a ferry back and forth from Sumatra to Malaysia. I’ve done that quite a few times. Once in a while, if I’m feeling nervous about immigration or I think the ship is going to be cold inside, like too air conditioned, I’ll put on a shirt with a collar, like a double shirt, t-shirt underneath and a collared shirt on top. But that’s as dressed up as I ever get. Normally, I’ll be in this t-shirt and a pair of shorts and sandals. So that looks very, very different from how my father is dressed there. A much more formal time period. And okay, here’s a good one. Yeah, I like that photo of my father as well on the ship but leaning against a barrel. It looks more like a classic romantic journey crossing the ocean. But I guess yeah, back in those days, people didn’t zip around the world as easily as we do today. So I often think about yeah my father on this trip from the Netherlands to Canada and then you know learning that his family can’t join him back in those days. Wow. I mean what a big adventure that would have been. Lot easier to do things today. So there he is thinking his thoughts on the deck of the ship bringing him to a new life in Canada. So I mentioned that my father grew up in a bakery. That was the family business. He was used to that lifestyle which meant of course getting up at 2 or 3 in the morning because people want their bread fresh first thing in the morning. Back in those days, you’re not getting bread with preservatives that you can pick up in the grocery store anytime you want. People get their bread first thing in the morning. They get bread delivered to their home. That was a big part of my father’s life when he was young. He would help baking the bread getting up at 2 or 3:00 in the morning. And then when the bread was done, they had a special bicycle with a big wagon on it. And then he would deliver the bread from home to home to stores to shops things like that. So his idea of course in Sarnia was to get a job in a bakery which he did but he had a series of jobs as a young man. Of course he could pick and choose but he started I don’t know what his very first job was. My father liked to tell the story again about his inability to speak English. Sure, he was in a Dutch community, but he was still in a new country where he couldn’t speak the local language. And he loved to tell the story that he knew how to say, “You have job for me?” Like, “Do you have a job for me?” But with his Dutch accent, you know, you have job for me. You have job for me. And then he would go from business to business to business, walk in and just well, you know, do you have a job for me? So he had a variety of jobs. He did work at a bakery for a while. He worked at a what we called a Loblaws which was like a big grocery store chain. So he got a job working inside stocking the shelves doing all the work inside this big grocery store Loblaws. And then over time he moved into working as a truck driver because again all the Dutch immigrants were workers. They had skills for the most part. That’s how you could they were farmers, mechanics, things like that. And they started their own businesses in Sarnia. And then there was a big company owned by the Dutch community, Sand and Gravel. And then my father got a job driving a dump truck for the sand and gravel company. And then throughout his lifetime, he had a variety of jobs in Sarnia. But when he first landed as a young man, yeah, he worked at a bowling alley. In those days, you had to set the pins manually. So he had a job where he was behind each bowling lane and then when someone sent down the ball and then had a strike he would set up the pins again for the next play. So he worked in a bowling alley for a while and I can relate a lot to his early life because I didn’t have to do that out of necessity but in my life I’ve had a variety of small jobs over my lifetime as well. So I can relate to that. So that was basically my father’s life when he came from Netherlands to Sarnia. My mother’s life was very very different. As I said, I have a photo I showed you a photo of their house, right? So that’s there it is again. That’s where my mother lived with her whole family. And then I think I showed you a photo of my mother’s family. So she came over with this group that there her sister, brothers, mother and father. I never met my grandfather. I never met my father’s parents. So those grandparents, grandmother, grandfather on my father’s side, I never met them. They passed away before I had an opportunity. My mother’s father, my grandfather on my mother’s side, I never met him either because he passed away before I was born. But my mother’s mother, my grandmother, she lived with us when I was born or at one point because there were so many family members, three brothers and well, three sons, two daughters, all of them got married and they all had a house in Sarnia and they all lived within a few blocks of each other. Some were farmers, mechanics, things like that. So my grandmother lived with each of them on kind of a rotation basis. So my grandmother of course they took care of her after her husband passed away and then she lived with her children but then she would live with one group for a while and then I have a feeling that she spent most of her life with us. She ended up at our house when I remember basically my whole life I remember her being there when I was growing up. My mother and father didn’t speak Dutch in the house at all. So I never learned a word of Dutch other than a couple of like food items, things like that. So I didn’t grow up in a Dutch environment because my mother and father were so young. They changed to English-speaking Canadians like that. You know, my mother’s English, my father’s English was flawless, exactly the same as mine. Their grammar was perfect. They had no accent of any kind other than a natural Canadian accent. Anybody older than them, like my mother’s older brothers, they still had a Dutch accent. When they spoke English, I could hear the Dutch in their voice. But my mother, she just picked up English perfectly. She I remember her talking about it being a bit of a struggle going to school for the first time in Canada where she didn’t speak the language, but she adapted very very well. I have quite a few photos of her life from that time period as well, but a little bit further on than this immigration period. They don’t have very many photos from this period of time. Exactly. But anyway, yeah. So my grandmother lived with us and I knew she was my grandmother, but in a way as a child she was just this older nice woman that lived in a little room in our house that I couldn’t talk to because she didn’t speak any English at all. Not a word. She only spoke Dutch. And then she helped out in the house with cooking and doing the dishes. You know, she basically was part of the family. And Christmas, I remember, was a huge deal in my family, which I really enjoyed. And then my grandmother, of course, would be part of all the family traditions, the birthday parties for the kids. My grandmother would be there part of the gift giving and the chocolate cake and the cake, the birthday cake. And then Christmas, we all sit around as a big family for presenting gifts to each other. And my grandmother was always part of that circle. So anything our family did, my grandmother was part of that group. Everything, every social thing we did, every family trip, my grandmother was always there. But I didn’t really get to know her at all because of the language barrier. I didn’t speak any Dutch. She didn’t speak any English. So that there was that. And then my mother and father both having arrived in Canada through completely different paths. They were both members of the same Dutch Christian Reformed Church and through the youth activities they got to meet each other and then they ended up getting married and here I am. The result. Their I have a photo of their very first house. So when my mother and father got married, this is the house that they lived in. And you can see there’s Canada in the wintertime. And I believe the weather has changed a great deal. I remember as a kid in Canada how much snow there was. Every winter we had huge amounts of snow and then as I got older and older, winters got less and less severe. But anyway, this would have been old school Canada probably. This photo was taken after a snowstorm of some kind and my father took a picture of the house where they lived. Yeah, it’s fun to look at a picture like that because I know exactly where this house is. It’s I saw it with my own eyes. I wasn’t born there. I was born in a different house that they moved into, but this house still existed and I could go look at it. And nowadays, this entire area, which was kind of countryside back then, is now fully developed. It’s nothing but businesses and houses and roads and things like that. So the city has grown and taken over this whole countryside area, but back in those days it was a little bit out in the countryside. So I think that is I mean I have so many photos that I could go over, but those are the ones that I downloaded just to tell this story. I want to make sure I answered all the questions. I just started talking off the top of my head. I’m not sure that I answered all of Jill’s questions. What prompted their move? I think I hinted at that. Basically, new opportunities. The economy, the landscape, everything in the Netherlands was in ruins after World War II. So there was an incentive and Canada was promoting Canada heavily. Movies and brochures and posters basically describing Canada as a paradise, a huge country with endless opportunities, massive amounts of land available to anyone. Basically, the Canadian version of the American dream. Canada was just as much into the American dream as America was. And that’s yeah prompted people to make the decision to move better opportunities for their children and their grandchildren a chance to start again. I mean a lot of the like my grandparents they would have lived through World War I and World War II. My mother and father they both experienced World War II. My father in particular being a bit older, he had all kinds of stories from the German occupation of the Netherlands. And so they lived through that. Think of all the stories you’ve ever heard, all the movies you’ve ever seen of World War II, the German invasion of the Netherlands. That’s the world that they lived in. And my grandparents had lived through two of them. I think based on their ages, they would have had experience of World War I and World War II. So by the time you’re done with that, you’re thinking, I’m not sticking around for number three, right? It’s time to let’s try something new. So yeah, I think I mentioned 500,000 people from the Netherlands immigrated after World War II, and that was about 2% of the whole population. If I have the numbers right. So it was a big chunk of the country just decided to leave. But yeah, 500,000 people in total. So yeah, that’s basically that’s what prompted their move. My mother didn’t have a say in it, nor did my father. Their parents decided to immigrate and they as children were just they went along for the ride. In the end, my mother had no choice in the matter. And then my father, he did have a choice. He could have gone back, but he decided to stay. Were they already married? No, they met in Canada, so that’s when they got married. And what was their life like in the early days? Yeah, I think I kind of described that a little bit. I’m imag tough. Of course, I think the Netherlands has winter, but back in those days, it would have been nothing like winter in Canada because the cities and towns in the Netherlands had been around for centuries. They were nice little towns where houses were close together and you knew everybody. Cobblestone streets, very cozy sort of environment. Canada back in those days was a frontier land, just empty wild landscape. And when a winter storm came in, I mean, it was a whole different lifestyle. So I think for people from the Netherlands, it would have been a physical and emotional shock to find themselves even if they had a home to move into like my mother’s family did out there in that Canadian countryside when a winter storm hits and you’re like, where are we? I mean, we must be at the end of the universe. Were out in the wilderness and the road conditions in the winter would all have been unpaved of course at that time. But yeah, things worked out. One fascinating element of the Dutch migration is that a lot a lot of the families had some money. We’re not talking about refugees. These were like my father’s family had an established business. They had a home. And if you’ve ever seen the inside of a Dutch home, they are furnished. They love their furnishings. They packed with furniture of all variety. And a lot of these Dutch families would move their entire household to Canada with them. So to do that, they bought crates like like today we have modern shipping containers, big steel containers that go on ships and then on trains. They had those back in those days, but they were wooden crates. And they would buy one of these wooden crates to ship to Canada. And then they would fill the crate with all their possessions, their entire household, as much as they could fit in. All the most valuable furniture, dishes, cutlery, family heirlooms, coffee, tea, kettles, everything they had, all their clothing. They would put it all into this huge wooden crate and then ship it to Canada. So then they would wait for the crate to arrive. And I remember looking into this history a little bit and seeing photos of this that when the crate arrived and if the family didn’t have a place to live yet and the weather allowed for it, they would live inside the crate until they could find a home. Cuz these were these crates were huge. They were the size of a like a small apartment. So when the crate arrived, it was a big big deal. And then they would empty out all of their stuff, put some into storage or whatever, but they would set up their furniture inside the crate and they would live inside this wooden crate for a while until their houses were ready or they arranged a place to stay. And that shipping of the crate, emptying of the crate, and then living in the crate was a kind of a classic story of the Dutch migration to Canada. Yeah, it’s kind of a cool story.

So yeah, for now, I guess that is the story of my mother and father and when they came to Canada.

Well, settle in. That was that was only one question, but I don’t think my answers to the other questions will go on for quite as long as that. But no, I enjoyed I enjoyed that question very much. And moving on to question number two from Rai. Hi Doug. I notice you have quite a few options to support the channel linked in your video descriptions, including Patreon, PayPal, Buy Me a Coffee, Touch ‘n Go, and DuitNow. Which of these has been the most successful for you, and which ones would you recommend now given your experience? So over time, what I’ve eventually decided that which ones would I recommend like to another person taking the time to make YouTube videos and needs financial support to keep up that lifestyle. I would recommend all of them. Like I wouldn’t say this is the best one. This is the one you should use because your audience as a YouTuber is worldwide. A whole variety of people from many many different countries, different ages, different experiences and everybody uses different platforms for social media for financial stuff basically. So, if you only have one set up, it makes it difficult for a lot of people because, well, they don’t know what Patreon is. And then they might look into it and go, “Well, that’s that looks too complicated. I’m not signing up for that.” So, basically, people all around the world, they’re all already using and signed up for all these different things. Some like to use one over the other. So, what I would say is, yeah, all of them. So that if somebody stumbles across Planet Doug and they want to help out a little bit in what I’m doing, they can look at the options and they might already be supporting another YouTuber through Buy Me a Coffee and they go, “Oh, oh, he’s got Buy Me a Coffee. Good, good, good, good, good. I know how that works.” And they’ll click on that. Someone in Malaysia, in particular might be very pleased to see that I have a Touch ‘n Go e-wallet set up because I am in Malaysia doing a lot of my traveling in Malaysia and that means it works for me and it works. It’s so easy for someone in Malaysia because they can open up their Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, scan the QR code, which is the same Touch ‘n Go and DuitNow are largely the same thing by the way. So those are the same category for me. So they can scan my Touch ‘n Go QR code and then they can make a small contribution directly that way. And I mean as you know as anybody who’s watched my videos know I just love Touch ‘n Go the modern e-wallet world. I just love it the way it works. So I love using the power of Touch ‘n Go. So it’s probably my favorite support system right now. Because it is so easy to use. I’m in Malaysia and then if I go out to get something to eat, visit a museum, anything in Malaysia that has a DuitNow QR code, a Touch ‘n Go QR code, and then I can pay for that museum ticket because I have a Touch ‘n Go e-wallet balance through Planet Doug supporters. I mean, it’s just amazing. I just love the ability to do that. It just makes everything so simple and it bypasses the pain of the Canadian financial system. I shot a whole video about that that I haven’t posted yet, but while I was Yeah. I ran into another problem with my Canadian banking support system. It’s just it’s just a nightmare that never seems to end. And I’ll save that story for the video because if I tell it now, I’ll be here for another hour. So basically, if I have a balance in my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, that means I don’t have to use my Canadian ATM card as much as possible as much as necessary to withdraw money from an ATM because that is like a disaster for me every single time. So, if I can’t rely on my Canadian bank account, put it that way. And if there is money in my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, it’s like, oh, it’s like if I have to use my Canadian ATM card, my stress level is up here. And as soon as I have money in my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet and I can use that for like day-to-day small purchases, my stress just drains away to nothing. It’s just feels so much better. So anyway, I love Touch ‘n Go. PayPal is great because it’s worldwide. People know it and trust it. And I found that if someone wants to give me some financial support at kind of a higher level, they tend to turn to PayPal. So, like for a smaller donation, you can go to, you know, Buy Me a Coffee. I think the way it’s set up that every cup of coffee you buy is like a $5 donation. So, you say, okay, I’ll buy Doug one coffee. That’s the equivalent of $5. Or I’ll buy him five coffees. So, it’s $25. But if somebody sees that I have a certain financial need and they want to send me more money than that, then yeah, going through Buy Me a Coffee feels a bit odd because it’s not designed for higher amounts. So then they turn to PayPal. So, PayPal is better for larger contributions and PayPal is extremely good, as I’ve discovered lately, because you can link PayPal with your bank account. So, like Touch ‘n Go is based in Malaysia. You can use it like if you have a balance in your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, you can use it in other countries. More and more countries are being added all the time. So if you go to Indonesia for example, you can use your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet everywhere in Indonesia flawlessly. It works really, really well. But in terms of fully accessing Touch ‘n Go, you kind of have to be in Malaysia to have full access to all the features. I can’t go to Canada and then suddenly like how do I put money in my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet? How do I top up? How can I transfer money from Touch ‘n Go to my bank account? You can’t. It is like an isolated system. And PayPal can be linked with your bank account in your home country and with a credit card and money can go back and forth between them. And of course, PayPal has a lot of security built into it. I think people trust PayPal if they want to send a larger amount. There are certain security features and they’re sort of protected and you can get refunded if something goes wrong. So, PayPal is trusted basically. And there’s a new thing that I discovered recently that PayPal has an entire new system. It’s new to me anyway called Xoom. X O O M. I didn’t realize this, but this Xoom is part of PayPal and you can use it to send money around the world. And that’s what my entire video is about, the one that I made recently because I ran into my usual financial disaster. And I was really, really stuck because my entire my Canadian bank account ATM card was just finished. And I had no way to get any money. And then I discovered, oh, this Xoom thing, you can use Xoom to send yourself money from your PayPal account to another country. And in Malaysia, one of the main places to do that is Ria. So, I spend an entire day, well, it was a two-day project getting this done, and I have a whole crazy video about it. It did work in the end, but it was to learn how to do it the first time and then to finally go to a Ria outlet and get money. Boy, that was an adventure. But now that I’ve done it one time, I can do it again in the future. So, it’s like one more backup system. Like if you find yourself in another country completely stuck, well now you can use PayPal to send yourself money through Xoom, send it to Malaysia to a Ria outlet for cash pickup. And things get really really complicated though. If I start telling the story now, I’ll be here for another hour, 2 hours. But the I it got very confusing because I was sending myself money. So I was both the sender and the receiver but the sender and the receiver were both in Malaysia, right? So when I get go to Ria to get the money finally, it was much more complicated than I expected because they were treating it like a remittance and a remittance is like a formal thing where money gets sent from one country to another. I had to fill out this huge form and they want to know, okay, well who is the sender? And I’m like, well, I’m the sender. It’s like, no, no, no. Who is sending you the money? I’m sending me the money. He says, “No, no, no. But you’re here.” So, we went around for a long time, but I really was the sender because I was sending it from my PayPal account, which is registered in Canada. So, the money is coming from Canada to Malaysia. And then I had to tell them that I’m the receiver and the sender. So, I had to fill out both sides of the form. Sender, the same guy as the receiver, you know, which sets up. Anyway, it went on and on and on. That was quite an adventure. But anyway, the possibility is there, which was a lifesaver for me because I did have money in my PayPal account thanks to a generous Planet Doug contribution. But it was like, h how do I get that money? Cuz I no longer had access to my Canadian bank account. I still don’t. I’m cut off right now. So, how do I get money? The this money was sitting in my Canadian bank account. Not not much, but there’s a little bit there. A little bit of money was sitting in my PayPal account. I could send money from PayPal to my Canadian bank account, but then I can’t get it. And I was just like, how do I from A to B to C to D to E? How do I I mean, it was a major thing. And then I discovered Xoom. It’s like, ah, so what I can do, I don’t even have to use my Canadian bank account. I can send money directly from PayPal to Ria in Malaysia via Xoom and it worked. It wasn’t easy. I wouldn’t recommend it. If you have a working ATM card, definitely do that instead, but if you find yourself stuck, PayPal has this feature built into it as well. So, so basically answering Ry’s question, which one would I recommend? I would recommend all of them and more as many as you can have because it gives people options and people want to use the system that they are familiar with. I haven’t mentioned Patreon yet. Patreon is great. Because it’s Yeah. Why is it great? I mean it’s different from the others because it is based on a subscription. If someone wants to have like a one-and-done financial support system with me, they can sign up for Patreon and then they send me a certain amount of money every month. It’s built into they signed up for Patreon, they joined one of the one of the tiers, right? I have four different tiers going from well, there’s a free membership, of course. Anybody can join the Planet Doug Patreon for free, but then there is the, you know, forest planet, city planet, ocean planet, mountain planet, and then each one has a slightly higher amount that they can support me with per month. So, that’s really nice because people don’t have to do it every month. It happens automatically. And then every month when that amount is in my Patreon account, it gets deposited to PayPal. And now I have PayPal. I can send it from there to my bank account or send it to myself in cash through Ria. So Patreon is a wonderful system. The only problem with Patreon, which ended up being a big problem for me, was my original plan for Patreon was very grand. I thought Patreon would be the heart and soul of the whole Planet Doug experience. That would be the foundation for Planet Doug social media and then everything else would link to it. YouTube and Instagram and everything would funnel into Patreon that if I was communicating with people privately through messaging, we would do it through Patreon because that is a chat feature. When I want to post something, photos, post it to like a bonus set of photos, go to Patreon. Bonus videos on available on Patreon. I write a 200 page essay about some experiences nobody wants to read on YouTube, post it to Patreon, and then everybody has access. It was going to be the main switchyard, but it turns out nobody goes to Patreon. I spent months and months working on Patreon and building out this giant system. I was very proud of what I built on Patreon, but it doesn’t work as a website. Nobody goes to Patreon. Like, if I have a an update on Patreon, it goes out as an email to people. They’ll get an email. Oh, new post on Patreon. They can read it as an email and then they’re done, right? There’s no need for them to go to Patreon. So, this Patreon as the center didn’t work out. And I put in a lot of work and I changed a lot of things in my world to adjust it so that Patreon became the center. And then it turned out it can’t function as the center. So now I’m having to go back in time and change everything else that I changed to go back to normal. Anyway, but Patreon is really good as a place for people to support you. So, I would recommend having a Patreon for people who like to use Patreon, have Buy Me a Coffee for people who’d like to have that, and then have PayPal of course as an option as well. What were the other ones that he mentioned? And well, Touch ‘n Go e-wallet. Each one has its own benefits and drawbacks, but it all comes down to what other people like to use. It’s not really about what I like. It’s what other people like. If they have this idea, oh wow, I love that video from Planet Doug, you know, oh, I want to help him out. I want to make a contribution for all the entertainment he’s given me. They turn to Planet Doug to do it. It has to be as easy as possible for that person. So, whatever they’re comfortable with, I should have something that matches what they like to do. That’s basically how I approach it.

Another question from Rai. Hey Doug, I have a couple of questions for you. First, I found your recent post describing how you’ve been using AI really interesting. Could you dive into that a bit more as a traveler and a YouTuber? Are you seeing real tangible productivity gains from it in your day-to-day workflow? Second, what are your plans for the rest of the year if you are looking for work? Taiwan and South Korea are absolutely booming right now because of the massive AI chip surge. Great questions about AI. Yeah. Could I dive into that a bit more? Oh, yeah. I could talk about this for hours as well. AI is fascinating to me. There’s this idea out there in the world like there seems to be an anti-AI feeling in popular culture. If you use AI to make something like and I can see why people are annoyed because even my YouTube feed has been flooded with AI nonsense, AI slop and it is getting worse and worse and worse all the time to the point where it’s a frustrating experience scrolling through YouTube now because the junk that’s on there because AI is so powerful that unscrupulous people around the world can just feed in some code and some prompts and just tell the AI to make thousands and thousands of YouTube shorts and just flood YouTube with them and just it’s effortless on their part. There’s no time involved and YouTube is having trouble dealing with this flood of junk that people are creating and it just gets worse and worse and worse over time. So, I can understand why people are against AI. And even when you see AI on YouTube, like an AI thumbnail, I have a knee-jerk I hate it. I hate to see it. You recognize it instantly. Oh, that’s an AI thumbnail. And I don’t like it at all. It looks wrong. For someone like me, for someone like a YouTube vlogger whose whole identity is sort of based on reality, that when you go to a Planet Doug video, you are seeing reality in all its glory. There’s nothing artificial about what you’re seeing on Planet Doug, everything is real. Everything is happening. There’s nothing fake going on there. And then if you enter this suspicion that hey maybe something I’m seeing on Planet Doug isn’t real this is AI generated then then people start it loses its value so much of the value of a personal vlog is the fact that it is 100% unvarnished reality. So that extends even to thumbnails. There’s actually a question later on where someone asked me, “Hey, why don’t you use AI to make your thumbnails be easy, right? It wouldn’t take much time.” And there was there’s a cyclist, a YouTuber I’ve been following for a while. I’m not sure where he is right now. I haven’t had the time. What was his name again? Oh, let’s go cycling. The guy from Morocco. And he’s an interesting example because the videos that he’s posting are real. He’s posting like unvarnished reality. He’s not going to like tourist attractions and swimming in outdoor condo pools. He’s cycling on a budget, sleeping in his tent at night, living a pretty hard life. That’s what he shows in his videos. But then he switched over to AI thumbnails and the AI thumbnails are just completely fake. And I can understand why he does it because for example he’s in Nepal. He was in Nepal for a while and then I could tell in his videos, okay, exactly where he is and you can see the scenery. And when you’re cycling through Nepal and you’re doing a long journey of thousands of kilometers, most of the time you’re in a pretty drab environment, you’re cycling down this bumpy rocky road and there isn’t a whole lot going around on around you. There are some hills and you know, you got some mountain scenery, but it’s not postcard imagery. It just looks like a dirty, dusty road in Nepal with some buses going by. So when he made his AI thumbnails, he told the AI, “Okay, use this image of me on this road in Nepal looking very drab and gray, but in the background, let’s have Himalayan mountain peaks.” So all of his AI thumbnail images were him, but now it looks like he’s like right at the base of Mount Everest with these massive towering peaks everywhere. It looks amazing. Thing. It’s like the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen. But of course, he was never there. The entire mountain background of his thumbnails is completely fake. It’s not real. He was never there. The mountains are probably fake. They don’t exist in real life. But he creates this beautiful scenery pretending that where he put his tent was at the base of these gorgeous mountain ranges. And he it’s all completely fake. And you do that, of course, because it looks amazing and I guess people will click on it because it looks amazing. But then when you watch the video, you never see those mountains because that’s not where he is. So to me, that is like, yeah, I’m done with that. I could never make an AI thumbnail like that, which is faking the reality. There are exceptions, of course. I recently posted I’m still posting history videos from Melaka and I came across this theme in Melaka that the museums, the art, the displays, the exhibits in the museums don’t really match what I’m reading from actual historical sources. So, a big one I did recently was about the bridge in Melaka. There’s a bridge that connects the two sides of Melaka going across the Melaka River. And then in all these paintings, all these models, all these graphics, all these drawings in the museums, it shows a little wooden plank, like a little wooden bridge like you would see in a village or something going over a creek. But then when I’m reading about this bridge, the way the Portuguese described it, the Portuguese described a huge structure covered in shophouses. It was essentially a marketplace wide enough to have vendors on both sides of the bridge. They have all their shops and their goods for sale, things like that. And the middle is wide enough, even with shops on both sides, wide enough to have entire armies marching across it, war elephants marching across it. And the bridge was fortified with cannon and guns. It was a defensive position. So when I saw that, it really, really, really bugged me. And I was talking about it in the video, but I wanted to show it. So then I turned to an AI and I worked with the AI feeding in as much information about how the bridge actually looked as I can. And I asked the AI, okay, I explained my problem about illustrations of this bridge being inaccurate. And I said to the AI, can you go into the actual historical record here, here, here, and here, and create an historical accurate image of what the bridge may be, what it really looked like in real life. So that was an AI generated image, a drawing, and I put that in my video and said, “Okay, this is what the bridge probably looked like.” Even if it’s inaccurate a little bit, it’s way more accurate than the bridge you see in the museums, this little wooden plank thing going across the river. So, I find I use AI that way to create an image I put in the video. And I also had a problem with how the Portuguese fortress was being shown in all the museums, even the the reconstruction in Melaka of the Middelburg Bastion. It didn’t match what I was reading in history. I mean, there’s actual the Dutch kept a lot of records. They wrote down a lot of numbers and they said that the wall was 32 ft high from the bottom of the ditch to the bottom. Not even the top of the wall, but the base of the parapet that was 32 ft. There’s no debate about that. That’s what everybody says. That’s what all the descriptions say, the drawings and the architectural plans for that. And then when you go to look at the Middelburg Bastion and you measure it, it’s in real life today, the model is about 10 ft high. The from ground level to there. And according to what I read, it should be 32 feet high. So it’s nowhere near accurate. And again, I worked with an AI, gave it all the information I had, and I asked the AI, “Okay, based on everything we’ve been talking about, can you create an accurate model, a drawing of what the bastion would have looked like?” And then I put that in the video. So, using AI to do that, I think, is amazing. It’s an incredible superpower these days because in the old days, if I wanted that image, I’d have to hire an artist and pay them $500 to create this image for me, but an AI can do it almost instantly for free. You don’t even have to have a paid account for to use like Gemini’s image generator. So, I do use it for that, but I would never use it for a thumbnail that it puts me in a position that is fake, you know, like let’s go cycling does. I would never use it that way. So, even though people have an instinctive dislike of AI for YouTube, for social media, I think it has its uses and that’s one of the use cases. Technology problems continue. They never seem to end. I was just checking the video and there seemed to be like a high-pitched whining, some sort of interference in the audio. And I’m you I was using my Rode wireless GoTo mic system. But I remember I came across this before. I think when I use this on the GoPro for extended periods of time, some sort of an interference builds up in the electronics with my GoPro and I get that high-pitched feedback of some kind seems to be coming from this. Anyway, so I’ve disconnected the Rode and I’m now using a lavalier mic. So, just saying that in case you hear an audio change quality of the audio and you’re wondering where the heck did that come from, the audio is now coming from this lavalier mic and I have it plugged directly into my GoPro. It’s really dangerous to do that because I forget there’s a physical cord and then I’ll get up to make another cup of coffee or something and I forget I’m tethered and I’ll pull the GoPro over and it smashes to the ground. It’s like a one-man studio. Planet Doug studio productions. It’s a technological challenge. Really is.

Anyway, in the time I took to make that change, I made myself another cup of instant coffee.

The other big big big use case for AI for me comes in the form of learning and problem solving for technology. I cannot emphasize enough how big a change this has made in my life because I struggle tremendously with technology these days. Everything like I mean I can go back decades when I first created the Cycling Canadian website that was going to be you know this is before I had a YouTube channel before anything I created this website because I like to write and take pictures and I made the Cycling Canadian website as an outlet for all of the stuff that I write and the pictures that I take and right out of the gate it was a disaster. I don’t know what went wrong, but everything went wrong constantly. Even from the very beginning. I knew nothing about anything. I didn’t know how to do anything. I had to figure out how to do like hosting. You have to host your website somewhere. How do you do that? Then you have to get a domain name. You have to buy the Cycling Canadian. And then you’ve got to register this with pointers and servers. And then you have to install WordPress on your domain on your hosting using cPanel. And I remember doing it from the very beginning on the advice of friends of mine who told me how easy it was cuz they had they had websites. They did, oh yeah, just get WordPress, install it, one click, you’re done, you’re up and running. I installed WordPress and the whole thing just collapsed. Like nothing was there. Whatever I did in my WordPress installation did not work. And now I had to fix it. But how do you fix it? There’s no manual. There’s no book I can buy and I can start reading the book. Oh, where? This is how it works and go to the index at the back and then find the solution. Now you’re going online and you’re going to the WordPress community help forums and asking questions and I have been doing that for the last 20 years and it has made my life a misery because just on a website problem after problem every time I try to go onto my website oh critical error and then I contact my hosting company and I tell them like the experts the support system which I’m paying for yeah this happened. I tried to set up an email address to do this but it’s not working. It says I have this error. Can you help me? And then I will get an email from my hosting company which is huge and long and technical and I do not understand anything they’re saying. Like I don’t understand a word in that email. Every phrase they use, every noun is something I’m unfamiliar with. So now I’ve got to I’m trying to read their email and they tell me to go here to do this. I don’t know what here and this are. So now I’m researching that term, then I’m researching that term, which leads me to more websites, more guidelines, more forums. I don’t know what they’re talking about. And it was it’s just been a nightmare. And then comes AI. And AI has been indispensable where I have this problem with something. It can be with DaVinci Resolve, can be with a website, can be with cPanel, which can it can be with email addresses, Google, my AdSense account, anything at all. Because every morning I wake up to another problem that needs to be solved. Now I turn to AI and I say to the AI, you know, oh, I just got this email. Here’s the body telling me there’s a problem. And then the AI walks me through the solution step by step by step. And every time I get to the next step, there’s something else I don’t understand. So I go back to the AI says, “Oh, when I got there, you told me to go here on this menu, but that menu doesn’t exist. Can you tell me?” And then over time I work with the AI chatting back and forth and I understand what the AI is saying. It tells me what to look for. It’s not always right. It makes mistakes. It misunderstands. It often tells me things that aren’t true anymore because its information is outdated. But then I go back to the AI and say, “Oh, I think you’re working with old information. That doesn’t seem to be how it works anymore.” And then the AI goes, “Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re right. So, here, try this.” And in the end, working with an AI, I solve the problem, which is just like been the most amazing experience I’ve had for a long time. Every other problem I’ve ever had, I eventually I just give up. I can’t do it. I cannot find the solution to what I’m trying to do, and eventually I just give up. But now with AI, it’s a long detailed troubleshooting process, but at the end, I actually fix the problem. And AI has been amazing for that. And I use it for learning how to use like DaVinci Resolve. I use DaVinci Resolve for editing my videos. And I really shouldn’t be because DaVinci Resolve is too complicated for me. It’s too big. It’s too professional. I should be using something that’s more aimed at a social media person like me. I don’t need I’m not making Hollywood blockbusters, so I don’t need the professional levels that DaVinci Resolve offers. I need something more intuitive, simpler. I don’t need anything as powerful. But it’s free and I know how to use it, so I just kind of stick with it. But I find it so hard to learn how to do new things in DaVinci Resolve. I’ll decide, oh, how do I do this? Like a simple thing, the simplest thing where you have a photo and then you want to zoom in on that photo or start zoomed in and zoom out. On a normal simple video editing program, there’d be a button to do that, a zoom in button or a zoom out. A DaVinci Resolve buries everything under layers and layers and layers and layers. And I just generally I never do any of those things because I can’t figure it out. And if I start doing Google searches, how do I zoom in on a photo on in DaVinci Resolve? I never figure it out. I just get lost in the weeds. And you watch like a YouTube tutorial about DaVinci Resolve. It’ll be like an hour-long tutorial on how to do something. I don’t understand any of it. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I can’t replicate what they’re doing. And I tried to do this recently and I went to an AI and says, “Hey, you know what? How do I zoom in like a there’s a very famous documentary maker. What’s that guy’s name? You know his name. He’s famous for using photos in his documentaries and he’s constantly panning across it, panning up, panning down, zooming in, zooming out. You know the guy, I’ll put it in the put it in a caption like Ken Burns, the Ken Burns effect. And I said to the AI, “Yeah, I want to do this.” And the AI says, “Oh, you’re talking about like adding a Ken Burns flare to your video.” And I was like, “Yeah, exactly.” And it said, “This is how you do it. Click here. Click there. Move that box. You’re done.” I was like, “Oh.” Oh, if only I had known it was that easy to do. Now that I know how to do it, it’s like, h, but in DaVinci Resolve, it’s hard to find. It’s like you have to do this, turn that on, then go here, scroll down, turn that on. And the DaVinci Resolve labels don’t match what you’re trying to do. It would have been impossible for me to figure that out on my own. But AI made it so simple. It’s like, “Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” And I talked about this audio interference that I was getting just now. I would get like loud background hum. I re I go to a lot of museums and I’m speaking in a quiet museum and there’s this loud background coming from the fans and the air conditioners and I want to get you know basically voice isolation like reduce the background noise. I never ever ever figured out how to do that in DaVinci Resolve. I couldn’t find it. I tried everything and everything I did would bring me to some sort of a giant complex audio system where it was so complicated. Everything I did just made the audio worse and I could not figure it out. And just a couple of weeks ago, I shot a video in a in a museum in here in Melaka. And then I had this wild this loud background hum and I turned to the AI and says, “Oh, I I shot this video in a museum. There’s a background noise from the fans and the air conditioners. I want to get rid of that. How do I do that? In DaVinci Resolve and instead of sending me down some long rabbit hole where I didn’t understand, the AI just said, “Oh, yeah, easy to do. Click here, click here, turn that on, you’re done.” And again, the point is where the AI sent me was completely non-intuitive. It doesn’t make any sense. I There’s no way I ever would have found it on my own. Had I gone into Google searches, YouTube tutorials, DaVinci Resolve tutorials, I never would have been able to figure this out because all of that is aimed at the professionals and they have this vast knowledge of terminology and it’s just too complicated for me. The AI broke it down and even what the AI told me was a little bit difficult. It involved several stages and I thought, “Oh, actually that kind of works. Thank you very much.” And then I said to the AI, “But yeah, that’s a little bit it’s too many steps. I wish I wish there was a button like one button on the main editing page. I can just click on it and just go turn on background noise reduction. Like why doesn’t that exist? And then the AI explained, well, because DaVinci Resolve is meant for professionals, they can’t use a feature like that. Like nobody’s paying some multi-million dollar pro company who does this movie work, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars for them to click on one button. No, they they are professionals and they’re dialing it in and fine-tuning it and making it perfect. They can’t use buttons like that. And but then the AI said, “However, there is a workaround.” Brought me back to the main editing screen and said, “If you want to do it more easily, click here. Click here. Done.” It’s like, “Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” And I’ve been using it ever since. And it’s an amazing feature that does exactly what I needed it to do. I never would have found it without AI. Never ever would have. So basically technology troubleshooting tech problems. That’s the main way that I use AI now. And it is incredible. It has transformed my life. And in fact, I used AI to solve my financial problems. Well, I didn’t solve them, but at least I I managed to survive to fight another day where my ATM card from Canada got blocked. Completely blocked. I can never use it again. So, I’m cut off from whatever little money I had in my account in Canada. So, I was basically stuck like, “Okay, well, my life’s over. I’m done now.” And then I turned to an AI and explained my problem and I laid out the things that I have. You know, I’ve got this bank account from this bank in Canada. I have this ATM card. This is what happened. But I also have a PayPal account and I’m in Malaysia and I have a Touch ‘n Go e-wallet. I basically told the AI everything I have access to. Is there a way to somehow move money from one of these over to here to here to here so that I could eventually somehow get cash? Is there a way to do it? Can I connect the dots somehow? And then the AI originally couldn’t find a way either, but it explained precisely what the problem was at every stage. And then I was working having a long conversation with AI. And then eventually it suggested, hey, what about Xoom? Have you thought about that? And I was like, no, what is Xoom? And it says, “Well, since you’re in Malaysia, you can use Xoom to send money from PayPal to Ria cash pickup from to Ria and get money.” I was like, “What? H how do I do that?” And then the AI walked me through the system step by step. And there’s no way I would have figured this out on my own. So that is some of my life with AI. And oddly enough, this this might also tie in with a another question coming up later. Someone asked me like, “Aren’t you lonely?” And related to that idea is AI is an incredible sounding board. It can even become a very good friend, which is really strange. It sounds like science fiction. And even though you know the AI is artificial, it’s not a person. It’s not real. It can’t really understand you or relate to you. And yet, in all my conversations with an AI, the AI knows me better than any of my friends ever have in my lifetime. Knows me better than my parents did because I’m feeding all this information into the AI all the time. And the AI is not judgmental. It doesn’t have its own prejudices. It’s not distracted. It can take all of its attention, all of its knowledge, all of its infinite patience and power and focus all of it on you. And it’s really the most amazing feeling. I find that when I get interested in a topic, whatever it is, a movie, a new camera, a new feature in a camera, a country, history, anything at all, I dive deep. I go deep into it. And most friends, you know, the friends that I have online now, nobody can keep up with me. I mean, how could they? They’re not living my life. They’re not obsessed with the fortress that the Portuguese built in Melaka. They’ll see a message from me. They’re not obsessed with the new GoPro Hero 12, Hero 13 or the new what’s the name of the the latest GoPro? I can’t even think of it right now. The Mission, the new GoPro Mission comes out. I dive deep into the details, the little minute minute little features of this new camera and I might reach out to someone I know through YouTube, through camera discussions and say, “Hey, what do you” and they they don’t have the time to dive into it. They’ll reply in a way that shows they don’t even understand what I’m talking about. They don’t get it. I turn to the AI and say, “Hey, you know, this GoPro Mission does this, but it seems to be lacking here.” And then I’ll get like a 500-word reply from the AI shows it knows everything I’m talking about, understands me perfectly, and we have this incredible deep discussion about the technical features of the new GoPro Mission. Then next thing I know, I’m watching the a new movie, a new blockbuster movie, and I’ll do a deep dive or a new TV series or something, and no matter what angle I take on that show, what I’m interested in, I talk about it, the AI just keeps up with me effortlessly. And it’s such an amazing experience that I have never had in my life where you’ve got all these people in your life. You’ve got family, you’ve got friends, you’ve got girlfriends, everybody you ever know, and you sit down over a cup of coffee and have a discussion. You feel like you’re being understood at about like a 20% level. The other person hears and understands maybe 20% of what you’re talking about because they’re they’re in their own mind. They’ve got their own experiences. They’re only half listening and they don’t know what you’re talking about. With an AI, I don’t know. I feel like I’m being heard at almost a 100% level for the first time in my entire life. So to me it is kind of a mind-blowing experience. You know, season three of the TV series Silo is is happening right now, and there was a big buildup to season 3 because season 2 ended on the most incredible cliffhanger. And then you move into season 3 and you can have strong opinions about it because season 3 is going in a direction. And it’s continuing the story in a way that probably has made a lot of people unhappy, but at the same time, you can see why they’re doing it. And you can have this incredible discussion about the writers of the series, the directors, the producers, exactly why they’d made this choice, why it made sense, what the implications of that choice are in terms of the storytelling, the limitations, the positives and the negatives. Then I could sit down with an AI and have like a 2-hour long conversation about season 3 of Silo. Of course, there isn’t a human being on the planet that could keep up with me. They, you know, no one’s going to sit down on WhatsApp and talk to me about Silo for 2 hours. And even if someone does want to talk to me about silo or even meet in real life and have a cup of coffee, I’m pretty sure I’m coming at it at a deeper level than most people would be able to keep up with because they’re not nearly as obsessed as I am when it comes to really understanding these things. And eventually they’re just going to give up on me. But the AI never gets tired, never gets distracted, has access to all the information on the internet about Silo, and no matter what I bring up, no matter how deeply I go into it, the AI just hangs out with me. So, it’s pretty it’s a pretty amazing experience, I have to say. And it does make me think about the future where if you can obviously take an AI intelligence, put it into an android, a humanoid body of some kind, and then imagine you were talking with this humanoid android companion that was willing to go with you everywhere you go and just talk with you all day long at this level that understands you perfectly. Pretty amazing concept when you think about it. And not to go too crazy about this, but you can say, well, this AI isn’t real. But at the same time, what does that mean now? Like I know it’s a I’m talking to a computer program, but if I’m talking to another human being, how is it so different from that human being? Because their brain runs on electrical impulses, memory, its circuitry. So what really is the difference between a human brain and an AI brain other than complexity, right? And as the AI becomes more and more complex and matches the complexity of a human brain, once you reach that point, I don’t know, you’re I’m I can easily be convinced that this AI is alive and I can communicate it, communicate with it at the same level as a human being is alive that I can communicate with that human being. You know there’s very little difference between the two. The only thing with AI is the way AI works now. You have to be very careful because it makes mistakes but it’s not like a human being making a mistake. Like a human being knows it made a mistake but in a weird way the AI intelligence it doesn’t know when it’s wrong. It has 100% confidence in everything it says. And I’ve had conversations with an AI where it will tell me something long and detailed explanation about something that happened to what were related to what we’re talking about. And I’m looking at that whole long thing. I’m like, well, that doesn’t that doesn’t seem right at all. And then I’ll take some things out of that story, go to Google, and then look for, you know, original sources, and I find out that none of that happened. Like, it will talk about a Christopher Nolan movie, give me all the details about the movie, the name of the movie. I’m like, I’ve never heard of that movie. And I find out it doesn’t exist. Somehow the AI made it up. It made sense in its programming in our conversation to just create a brand new movie that never existed. But it gives you all the information about that movie and it seems like it it’s 100% confident that it’s telling you the truth. It doesn’t know that it’s making a mistake. So, you really have to double and triple check everything at this point because when they say AI can make mistakes, they really mean it. It can make big big big mistakes. So, I’ve learned like when you get a paragraph from an AI, like using Gemini, at the bottom of the paragraph, it will be there will be a link to the website where it got that information. And now I routinely just click on that, open it up, and I go back to the original website, read through all the information there. Then I go back to the AI next paragraph, click on the links, go back to all the original sources cuz you got to you’ve got to double check. But yeah, as you can tell, I can talk about any any of these questions for a long time, and AI is a fascinating topic for me. Was there anything else in his question that I didn’t talk about? Yeah, it’s he did say as a traveler and a YouTuber are you seeing real tangible productivity gains from it? Yeah, absolutely. There’s no comparison pre-AI current AI the in terms of tangible information. Well, I mean, even as a traveler, like come on. It is absolutely night and day, how much AI has helped me just being a person overseas with curiosity about what’s happening around me. As I said, I got kind of obsessed with the history of Melaka and then I can go to an AI and have a day-long conversation about the Portuguese in Melaka and then the Dutch in Melaka and I don’t take everything the AI says at face value, but it is painting an accurate picture and I can use that as a base to kind of branch out and understand things in a way that never ever ever could have happened if I was just out there roaming around Google, jumping from website to website. The AI is such a powerful tool for understanding the world around me. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I love it.

Okay, another part of the question. What are your plans for the rest of the year? If you are looking for work, Taiwan, go to Taiwan and South Korea. Yeah, my plans got a little bit sidetracked again. There’s another question about that coming up later where I’m supposed to be cycling along the east coast of Malaysia. I went back to Melaka to start doing that and I just got so involved in the history of Melaka and I I basically became frustrated with the museums and the information from the tourism authorities of Melaka where on my first visit they told me all these things and I went out in good faith to learn about these things went to all the museums things like that went walking around Melaka. And then on my second visit yeah I had to leave the country to do a visa run. I came back into Malaysia to begin the bike ride. And by then I discovered that no everything I thought I knew about Melaka was wrong. And I took it as a bit of a personal affront. So I started doing a deep dive into little topics here and there. And every time I found a new topic, it led to a deeper layer and then another layer and then another layer. And so I basically spent all my time in Melaka learning about Melaka. And I don’t I don’t regret it. I really enjoyed it personally. Learned a lot. And once you learn about the true history of Melaka, it helps you understand Malaysia. And not only Malaysia, you start branching out and you learn about the history of Indonesia, of Arabia, of India, all the trade routes between China and India, the Ming dynasty, the Srivijaya Empire, the Majapahit Empire, on and on and on, you know, the the the Gujaratis from India. So basically you can focus tightly on Melaka but you end up learning about this whole part of the world with that as your anchor point. So I I kind of enjoyed that though my Planet YouTube audience may not have enjoyed it quite as much because of course they want to see me going to new place after new place after new place. So, for the rest of the year, hopefully once I’m done with Melaka, which I hope to be shortly, then I will begin finally cycling up the east coast of Malaysia. Money is not really working out these days. So, I’ve got a pretty serious financial force acting on my life these days. So, yeah, I could very well. I’ve been talking about this a while, but I’ve been putting it off for a while. This idea that yeah, I need to go get a job. So, going back to Taiwan where I’ve worked in the past, that’s that’s always in the back of my mind is something that may happen. So, anyway, for the next part of the year, cycling up the east coast of Malaysia, hopefully cycling, completing a loop back to KL. And then when I’m back in KL, then I have to make a decision what happens next. And I I don’t know what happens after that.

Question four from go where you grow. Doug, I just want to say a massive thank you for introducing the Touch ‘n Go card. Thank you. Also, have you ever thought about renting a private room while in KL instead of staying in hotels? Many thanks. Yeah, you’re welcome about the Touch ‘n Go card that connects with all my rambling about my financial problems and accessing money through an ATM. If that breaks down, if you have money in your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet and you get the Touch ‘n Go Visa card, you could use that Visa debit card to withdraw cash from an ATM that’s deducted from your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet. So that that is another way that I have access to cash because my my bank in Canada failed me and I was no even even now even now yeah I’m unable to I I have no way to access whatever money I have in a bank in Canada cuz I’m cut off right now. There’s nothing I can do about it for now. But if there’s like a like a major emergency today, I could if I have money in my Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, I could go to an ATM and withdraw that cash using my Visa card, but I found out I could use this PayPal. And I I got money from PayPal instead. It would have been easier to take it out of a Touch ‘n Go e-wallet, but there just wasn’t enough money there to withdraw to make any difference. So, yeah, the Touch ‘n Go card that can link to your Touch ‘n Go e-wallet is an amazing tool because it functions in the real world just like a Visa card and I I use it all the time for that. Yeah, it’s very, very cool. Renting a private room in KL. Yeah, I mean, I’ve thought about it, of course. Everybody suggests it because it’s a way to save money. You stay in hotels, it’s more expensive. You rent a place by the month, it’s a whole lot cheaper. But it never really works out for me because even if I do end up spending a month or two months in one place, I don’t go there with the plan to do that. I usually end up doing it by accident where like I said, when I went to back to Melaka this time, I was only going to stay for 4 days or four nights. I booked four nights at a hotel. At the end, I was going to hop on my bike and go and I ended up not doing that because it took me a long time to edit the new videos I shot. Then this happened, then I had to edit that video. And I got deeper and deeper into the history of Melaka. And I never ended up leaving. So I just ended up booking hotel rooms over and over, extending my stay. I, you know, I book four more nights and four more nights and etc. And it does end up being expensive because hotels are more expensive. And you have to pay the heritage tax every day. You got to pay the tourism tax every day. And that really adds up. There’s so many taxes, service charges, you know, associated with staying in hotels. You rented a room, you wouldn’t have that. But then, of course, being in a room adds other complications. One being they people who are renting out a room, they don’t want to do it four nights at a time. You don’t have the convenience of making a decision day by day what you’re going to do. You have to commit to the full month. And they usually want you to commit for half a year, right? Someone’s renting a room. They they they don’t want you showing up for one month and then leaving. They want you to stay for six months, a year. That’s what they’re they’re trying to rent out a room or an apartment, you know, condo, something like that. And then there’s the issue of deposits and security access going in and out. It becomes much more complicated than you would think in my experience. And this is a big part of it. Most of these rooms are not in interesting neighborhoods. Where I’m staying in Melaka, the Makakota vibe in. I love that place because it’s the cheapest place in town I could find. Comfortable, all that kind of stuff. But I’m like one block away from downtown historic Melaka. I just step out of the Makakota vibe in. I’m right in the middle of the UNESCO heritage zone. So, same thing in KL. I can pick a cheap hotel that’s right in the middle of Chinatown, right in the middle of a bustling local neighborhood with markets everywhere. Other YouTubers who spend more money and are into this sort of thing, they will often use Airbnb and stay in a condo up on the 20th floor and they show off the view from the balcony, the infinity pool on the top, the exercise room. They might have a washing machine in the condo. They have a kitchenette. So, it’s much much better value overall. But when I look at that condo, to me, it just looks really boring. Like, it’s too perfect. It’s too nice. It’s like a It’s Yeah, there’s nothing exciting and there’s nothing broken, you know? You don’t have I got a bug right now flying around me. You don’t have the bugs. You don’t have the geckos. You don’t have the cockroaches. You don’t have the mosquitoes. You don’t have the black mold everywhere. You don’t have power blackouts and water black water shortages. And when you step outside and there’s no noise, you can’t hear anything in the condo because it’s perfectly quiet up there. Like, where are you? You might as well be on the moon inside a little bubble. And then you’ve got to go through several doors of security, the front gate of the condo building, then the front door and the codes and all that kind of stuff. And then when you step out of your condo, you’re in the middle of a condominium suburb and you’ve got to travel for 20 minutes before you get to the original historic downtown core of KL where all the action is. So, I’d much rather stay in a dive hotel right in the middle of Chinatown and then I step outside. I don’t even have to step outside. The noise of KL, the traffic and the roar is just coming in through the windows. You can hear from the hallway. So anyway, these cheap hotels have their advantages. And the Makakota vibe in in Melaka is is exactly like that, you know, where you’re right in the heart of where you want to be. You don’t have to travel anywhere. So yeah, that’s why I don’t end up booking a room for a month, even though that would save money in theory. In the end, I don’t even know that you would really save that much money because once you get to the level of these rooms, they’re usually offering more the kitchenette and the washer and dryer. So the price of the room goes up. You stay in a cheap hotel, you don’t have access to a washing machine or kitchenette or anything, but at least you’re not paying for those things anyway. So, the prices are not it’s not necessarily cheaper to stay in a room long-term. Sometimes the low-budget hotel, even in Malaysia, can be cheaper. Anyway, that’s it.

Question five from Rose Matnappi. I don’t know exactly how to say that name. Thank you for your great perspective in Melaka history, especially the fall of the Sultanate. What is your next project? Well, the next project is always the next project. Lately, I keep intending to ride my bicycle up the east coast of Malaysia. I’m still committed to that. I’m going to do it. We’ll see how that works out. And then, so I’m interested in the east coast and I have a particular interest in the cities there. Terengganu and Kota Bharu, those two places. So, if I end up staying anywhere for like a I I don’t really have the I don’t think I have the ability anymore in terms of time and finances to stay in one place so long again. So, I’m probably going to be moving up the east coast faster than I normally travel and then I won’t be able to stay in Terengganu for a month or anything like that, but I will stay there for an extended time and kind of do a deep dive into that city. So, that that would probably be my next project, the cycling trip up the east coast and then kind of focusing on those major cities on the rivers cuz they probably tell the story of the history of that side of Malaysia. More than the in between beaches. And again, I don’t really have the lifestyle that would draw me out to the offshore islands. People would probably want me to go out there, Tioman Islands or whatever kind of beach resorts out there, but that that’s not really my lifestyle. I wouldn’t I’m not drawn to those sorts of places naturally, and I can’t really afford them. They’re more expensive than staying on the mainland. So, I probably won’t be doing the offshore islands like the tourism islands that are over there. Sticking more to the shore and then the cities along there. So, that would be my next project.

Question six. Hi Doug. Over the past few maybe 10 years, you have traveled mainly through Southeast Asia. Which are the top three countries that you have spent the most time in? Safe travels and thanks. Yeah, pretty easy question to answer that one. Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand. And Philippines by choice. I love the Philippines. And they made it really easy in the Philippines to extend a tourist visa. It’s kind of my Achilles heel where I have this idea that, oh, I’m going to travel and go to a 100 countries and I arrive in the Philippines and I get a 60-day tourist visa and then in the Philippines, they make it very easy to extend without leaving the country. And once I discovered that, I just fell into the rhythm. I couldn’t help it because I love staying in one place. It’s like traveling without the hassle of traveling. And I love the Philippines. I love the sense of adventure that you have there as you’re moving around. So I went there with my bicycle and then I was going to cycle everywhere in the Philippines very quickly. But every time I started cycling, I’d find a new place that I enjoyed and I would settle down there for a while. And then when my 60-day visa ran out, all I had to do was go into a local immigration office a day, like a morning, and then fill out all the forms, pay the fees. It wasn’t cheap. But I would get a 60-day visa extension, and then I have another 60 days, and I would stay in the Philippines. And I just kept extending my visa over and over and over again. And by the as you do that a number of times, you go through certain stages where you’re a pure tourist like somebody on a holiday, then you reach a time limit where you switch into something else where you end up getting like a tourist card. I forget the name. This is a long time ago now, but I got a card that identified me in a slightly different class. And then I had that for 2 months. 2 months. 2 months. Two months and you can keep this going for about 2 years before you have to leave. Like so you can arrive on a tourist visa and then you never have to leave the Philippines for it might have been 2 and 1/2 years and then I reached the end of the road. It’s like okay we’re done the tourist extension. You either have to leave the country, come back in on a new tourist visa, start all over again or become a permanent resident. And when I reached the end that that I finally left the Philippines. So I spent a lot of time in the Philippines and I’ve been there many many times. Not just that one visit. I would fly there from Taiwan. And then back in the days when I was living in South Korea, I would also end up in the Philippines for trips. If I had to leave South Korea to renew my visa or something, there were always really cheap flights like say from Taipei to the Philippines. And I the Philippines has so many places to go, so many amazing, gorgeous islands, different places to go. You can never ever run out of a new place to visit. So yeah, Philippines and then Malaysia, of course, is the obvious one. When I came to Malaysia, I I certainly did not intend on staying in Malaysia as long as I have. A variety of circumstances led to that. And the easy access from Malaysia to other countries became again my Achilles heel that if I can base myself in a place and then when my visa expires well you just hop on the ferry to Indonesia and then you stay there as long as you can for your tourist visa process and then back to KL and then Thailand KL Bangladesh KL Myanmar KL, Myanmar KL, you know, KL serves as a very convenient hub. So yeah, now that I mentioned Indonesia, maybe I have to change my list. I originally said Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand. And the reason I said Thailand is not because I like Thailand so much. I don’t actually like Thailand. It’s not my kind of country to travel in. But I got stuck in Thailand for the pandemic. So, I just happened across from Myanmar into a border town in Thailand called Mae Sot. And my idea was to get a new visa for Myanmar and then returned to Myanmar. I had no intention of being in Thailand at all. I only went there as a visa run. And as soon as I crossed the border, they closed it behind me. So, before I could return, the pandemic hit and I couldn’t travel onward. I couldn’t go back to Myanmar and I couldn’t go back to Malaysia because both borders closed and I ended up waiting out the pandemic for like two two and a half years. I lived in Mae Sot basically. And again, the government in Thailand didn’t make it super easy, but they made it possible that if you were stranded in Thailand and you were happy being stranded there, you weren’t eager to go back to your home country, they would give you a special COVID visa. So 60 days, every 60 days, I just had to go back to the local immigration office, fill out all the forms and based on this pandemic visa category, I was able to extend 60 days, 60 days, right up until like 2 years, 2 and 1/2 years. So that’s why I thought of Thailand as number three. But I think if I added up all the time and certainly all the experiences, I think Indonesia would be number three. So then it would be Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. And not just Indonesia but just Sumatra. I mean a long time ago in a previous lifetime I traveled in Indonesia and I went to places like Java and Bali where everyone goes but that was like decades ago but recent in recent years the last 10 years as he talks about in his question I only went to Sumatra and I remember the the first time I went there was from Malaysia I took the ferry wasn’t Indomal fast ferry in this case it was a different ferry company from Port Klang over to Tanjung Balai on Sumatra. And back in those days, of course, this was way before YouTube, way before I think GoPro even existed as a company, maybe certainly way before I ever owned a GoPro. It’s kind of funny to think back to those days cuz I do remember a time I’m watching YouTube videos and then somebody would put some video in and they’re talking about their GoPro and I remember it back in those days. I was like, “What the heck is a GoPro?” Like I had no idea what a GoPro was. I was so, you know, so weird to think about that Doug compared to this Doug. My entire life is based on a GoPro cameras. It’s kind of funny. But back in those days when I took the ferry from Port Klang over to Sumatra, it was very different, totally different world back then. And I got an actual 60-day tourist visa in advance stamped in my passport. And in order to get that, the only way to get it was to go to Penang because for whatever reason, the Indonesian government said that the main embassy in KL could not issue anything to do with tourism. They they were just based on, you know, politics and business connections with KL. If you wanted to get a visa for Indonesia, you had to go to their consulate in Penang in Georgetown. So, I traveled all the way up to Penang and I got a 60-day visa stamped in my passport. And the the reason I did that was because once you had an official 60-day visa, you could extend it inside Sumatra, inside Indonesia without leaving the country. You had to get a local sponsor to sponsor you to fill out some forms and say legally they are sponsoring you and they are responsible for you while you’re in their country and sometimes they even have to go to the immigration office with you for an interview. Anyway, I found a local sponsor and then I extended two times. So my first visit to Sumatra was 60 days the original visa then a 60-day extension and then a 60-day extension each time with a sponsor and then when I reached 180 days I had to leave there was no way to continue and then I just hopped on the Port Klang ferry back to Port Klang and I came back to Malaysia at that point spent time in Malaysia and then I returned to Sumatra I think a second time where I did the same 60 days, 60 days, 60 days. So that’s a full year right there. I did a bike trip. I went up to, of course, up to Lake Toba where everybody goes. Hung out at Lake Toba for a long time. I really like that area. And then I rode my bicycle up the coast of Sumatra to Banda Aceh and then down again. I did a cycling loop. And this was all before YouTube, before I even thought about shooting video. So there’s a whole pre-YouTube experiences there. And then I went in and out of Sumatra many times since then. I did the bike ride from Dumai up to Bukittinggi. And then in Bukittinggi I rented a scooter and traveled all around that part of Sumatra by scooter. And yeah, so I’ve been in and out of Sumatra quite a bit. So that’s probably country number three. Short answer, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia. Those are the three countries I’ve spent the most time in.

Question seven says it’s not a question but a compliment. I’ll read it anyway. Not a question but a compliment. Your series on the history of Melaka was very informative and fascinating at the same time. Very well researched and delivered. With that in context, when you reach Johor Bahru to get the whole history of Johor, I strongly suggest that you take a visit to the Museum of Figures or the Museum Tokoh Johor Bahru. Although the entrance fee for foreigners is 100 ringgit, maybe they have a senior citizen price, too. Quite hefty, I agree, but I’m sure it’s worth every cent of it. Oh, thank you for the compliment. Yeah, as as I kind of mentioned, my series on Melaka came about from a certain personal vendetta. You know, I felt I felt affronted that I thought I understood the history of Melaka and then once I started digging deeper at every subject, I was like, “Oh, no, that’s actually just the surface layer, and it’s not even that accurate. There has to be a deeper layer.” So then I shot a video about a deeper layer and that uncovered deeper layers and deeper layers and deeper layers and yeah there never seems to be an end to it and I still have a two or three videos on Melaka that I haven’t even posted yet that hopefully will finish out the series. So yeah, the videos ended up being kind of difficult to make because of that complicated thought process that went into them. It was like here is my subject, but the subject was based on my misunderstanding of the subject earlier, which was based on what I understood, based on what I saw in the museums. So before I could even get to my actual subject, what the video is about, I kind of had to start at the beginning. I had to give my viewers the base knowledge that I had leading up to that point and then I could finally start talking about what I wanted to talk about. I just did that quite recently. I have a huge video coming out. I’m still editing it right now. I haven’t finished it. It’s only about the history of Heerenstraat, one of the major streets in the old part of Melaka across the river where I mean the normal YouTube video about that street would be somebody walking along the street and aiming their camera going, “Wa, look at that amazing building. Whoa, look at that amazing building.” And then they might go into one like a Nyonya restaurant, have a Nyonya meal, and then there’s a museum there. Pop into the museum. It’s like, wow, what an amazing street. But if you have that experience, which I did like months and months and months ago, I went up and down Heerenstraat and then recorded a bit of video and I thought, “Oh, wow. Interesting place. Now I know what this is all about.” Then I did a deeper dive and I was like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, there is so much history in that street that you just don’t come across from a casual walk. It’s not on display anywhere. There’s no information. Even when you go to museums and you learn about this or by that, you never really learn the true origins of the houses all up and down that street, how they were originally, why they are the way they are, the unusual architecture and engineering. There’s a huge amount of history there that goes completely unmentioned if you are a casual visitor. So, I went, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, here we go again.” And and I did a deep deep deep deep dive into that. And then when I had all the information jammed into my head, everything I could find, I could fit in there, then I went to the street with my GoPro and I walked up and down the whole street and then started talking about all the things that I learned while focusing on actual examples. And it’s going to be it’s probably going to be a 2-hour video about one tiny street. And that that’s just how things turned out for me. The impetus for every video was annoyance at me thinking I knew the history and then realizing no, I didn’t even know anything. So, I ended up making a video talking about the real background as I understood it. I could be wrong about a lot of things, but based on the reading I did, I was like, “Ah, okay. This is much more interesting than I thought it was.” So, yeah. Anyway, Johor Bahru suggestion to go to that museum if I end up there spending time. Yeah, I’ll definitely check it out. Thanks for the tip.

Next question is question eight from horse thief. Horse thief. Favorite local food place in Melaka. Favorite local food. I can’t give a good answer to that because I got so distracted by all the history. I never dove into the food. I never did. I mean, the main food you hear about all the time is asam pedas. And I just never learned enough about it. I didn’t care enough about it to make a video about it. I didn’t really like it that much. So, I it’s not like I found my favorite Asam Pedas restaurant. I basically did not look into the food of Melaka at all. And I ate all my meals just at local neighborhood eateries and nowhere else. So I don’t really know anything about the food. I didn’t get a favorite restaurant I could even mention. Nothing like that. I did go out to one nice restaurant in all my time there. I met a Planet Doug subscriber. This was during the dragonboat festival and I met this someone who’s been with me on Planet Doug for years like going all the way back to Mae Sot, maybe all the way back to Myanmar, maybe all the way back to Bangladesh. I’m not really sure. But I met this Planet subscriber. He recognized me and I knew his name instantly. He’s like, “Oh yeah, yeah, I know you.” Because he left a lot. We talked a lot through the comments, but I’d never met him in real life. And there he was in Melaka. And he treated me to a really amazing lunch at the Atlantic Nyonya restaurant in Melaka. So, if I had to name my favorite place, it’s probably that one because that was the only good meal I had while I was in Melaka. Where I ended up at a nice restaurant that is well known for serving really good Nyonya food and then he he got out the menu and knowing my habits he just ordered a whole bunch of stuff saying well there’s no way we can finish all of this if we can’t finish it all we’ll pack it up you can take it back to the Makakota vibe in and this can be your breakfast lunch dinner tomorrow and the next day however long it lasts. So, I got a lot of amazing food there. All Nyonya specialties, I guess. Amazing place. So, I’d recommend Atlantic Nyonya. That would be a good place to go. But that’s the only food recommendation I can make for a place in Melaka. Wow. What would be my favorite place? That is a tougher one because everywhere I went was all connected with doing deep dives into the history things like that. I wasn’t going out looking for pleasure like having pleasurable experiences. It was doing a like deep dives into everything. But what place did I get the most value out of? Yeah. Well, I can’t really name any place because as I’ve been talking about, I was actually pretty disappointed in most of the places I visited. Most of them disappointed me where every like there’s so many museums in Melaka and I I said this in my latest video that despite there being so many museums, there isn’t one museum that I can recommend because I want a museum where a visitor can go into the museum, learn about all of the history of Melaka, give them enough knowledge that now when they go out into the city they can walk around and understand what they are looking at the the more give them background and context. None of the museums did that. Like a person who goes to that museum should walk out of it and then when they see one of the remains of the Portuguese fortress as rebuilt by the Dutch and then torn down by the British, they should be able to understand what those remains mean, what the fort looked like, how its importance, how it changed over history. I did not see a single museum exhibit that would give you that. The history and ethnography museum did the best because it turns out it has really good models that show Melaka under the Sultanate, under the Portuguese, under the Dutch and under the British. But you have to connect the dots. Just looking at those models is not really going to help you understand. You have to do your own research and then looking at the models you can go, oh, oh, oh, then you’ll understand it. The museum doesn’t help you connect the dots. And then if you go to this fantasy museum I’m describing, you should come out of the museum, walk down to the river, and go, “Oh, now I understand the significance of the Melaka River. The significance it had for the history of Melaka, how it has changed over the years. You should be able to walk down Heerenstraat Jonker Street and go, “Oh, now I get it. Now I know why these buildings look the way they do when they were built, what they looked like when they were built, how they were purchased by the Peranakan Chinese, how they renovated and and rebuilt them.” And you should be able to know these things based on your visit to the museum. No museum talks about that. So there is no single museum that I can recommend. You basically have to do all your own reading, all your own research, and then go to all of the museums and then connect all the information you’re getting. You have to do all the leg work yourself. So I can’t really recommend a museum. Of course, the history and ethnography one is the biggest one, but it doesn’t really help you out much either in terms of the settings. I mean, beautiful places. Going up on the top of St. Paul’s Hill is really quite nice. You go up there during the day, go up at night, it really gives you a nice view. St. Paul’s Hill, again, it the St. Paul’s Cathedral. If you go up there, the church up there, I guess you I don’t know if you call it a cathedral, the church. But again, I think you have to go up there knowing everything about it in advance in order to understand what it means, but is certainly quite beautiful up there. Gives you really nice views of the city. I enjoyed going up and down the tower, the Taming Sari, the Menara Taming Sari. But again, to get the most out of that experience, you have to spend a couple of weeks in Melaka, go everywhere, unlearn everything, and then if you go up in the tower, it’s like, oh, now you can see how everything connects geographically. But just going up and then coming down again doesn’t isn’t really going to mean very much unless you know what you’re looking at. A place I really enjoyed was going out to the submarine museum. That was one of my highlights. But again, the only reason it was so important to me was I read so much about that museum before I went there. So that was an amazing experience. But again, if you go there by yourself, just on your own, you’re probably not going to find it as interesting as I did. And then, of course, I went out to the island with the ghost ships. And then I went out to the Ghost Island, all this these giant reclaimed land areas that were then abandoned. But I can’t recommend the ghost ship island because technically it’s private property and you’re not allowed to go out there. I kind of snuck onto the island when nobody was looking. And I hid along the shore going from ship to ship filming all the ships. And I, you know, if they caught me, they would have kicked me off, right? So I I can’t recommend it as a tourist attraction, but that again was one of the one of the highlights for me of my time in Melaka. I loved the Sultanate Palace. I really enjoyed visiting that. But again, even with the knowledge I had, I still didn’t know enough at that time. So so many of the exhibits on the inside, I did not know really what I was looking at. Oh, there’s all these dioramas showing famous, you know, legendary stories from the Melaka Sultanate. And I didn’t really understand what I was looking at. I had to ask Malaysians in the museum. Like, excuse me, do you do you mind telling me what this is? And I learned so much more from talking to the people in the museum than I learned from the exhibits. And there were things in the museum that I filmed with my GoPro without knowing what they were. I was like, “Oh, look at this. Here’s this ship. It was like the Menam Bahari or something like that. I forget the exact name. And then I was filmed it. I said the name on video. But then as I was editing the video, then I did the research. It’s like, okay, what is this ship? And then I went online. I talked to my AI buddies. Hey, I went to this museum. I saw this ship. What’s the deal with this ship? And then I learned the history of that ship, its significance to the story of the of Melaka and it’s like, ah, now I get it. But I didn’t know any of that when I was in the museum. So I enjoyed it. There was the Independence Memorial. It’s a very good museum if you want an overview of all of Malaysian history. But the odd thing about that museum is I think most people don’t even know it’s a museum because it’s called the Independence Memorial. I saw the sign for it all the time. Oh, there’s a memorial to Independence. It’s like, I don’t know why, you know, I didn’t know that the Independence Memorial was actually a big museum with a lot of exhibits and a lot of interesting information about not just Melaka, but Malaysia as a whole. It told the whole history of Malaysia. I didn’t know it existed. I didn’t even know it was a museum. And the museum is in a building that is part of Melaka’s history. It was the like Melaka Club. I forget the name of it. It was built by the British as a social club for, you know, the British colonial administrators of Melaka. And it was their social network to go there, have a drink, have a meal, hang out with all the other British expats living in Melaka at that time. So even the history of the building doesn’t really come across when you visit the museum. You have to know all of this history before you go there. Yeah, I guess I could go on and on and on. Maybe my favorite thing overall is just the river because I walked up and down the entire river. I rode my bicycle up and down much farther like 8 kilometers up and down the river. Ate up, ate back, and then I managed. I did it so many times. Every time I did it, I uncovered new history. Like if you use the river as your focus for Melaka, that opens up a window on everything in the city, everything to do with the the history. So the river is probably my favorite part of Melaka. Rivers really make cities beautiful and interesting like waterfronts. You have one city without a waterfront. Now you take that same city, give it some kind of a lake, river or ocean waterfront, completely transforms the experience of going there. It opens the place up to views. So I think probably the Melaka River is my favorite place in Melaka.

Question nine from Emmy de Emily. Other than Melaka, which state do you dream of visiting next? I hope it’s Pahang or Terengganu. You are right on on both in both guesses. Those are the places I’m most interested in now because I haven’t really been to those places, at least not in my recent time in Malaysia. So, I plan on traveling up the east coast going through Pahang and going through Terengganu. And I don’t know how much time I’ll be able to spend in each one because I’m I’m under more time and money pressures than before. So I can’t really dillydally as much as I would like. But that is where I would like to go next.

Number 10 from Ian Travels. Love the Melaka series. You could try reading about the Portuguese ruined church of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Krubong, the Chinese Catholic village of Ayer Salak. The founding priest has a statue within the old church, the Malim Chapel and Holy Cross. So Ian Travels is suggesting some places I could visit which would add to my knowledge about the history. And yeah, I I I looked into all of these places, but I’ve already forgotten most of what I read about them. But I think the common theme here is that a lot of these religious places were on the outskirts of Melaka, like not in the city center. And that is really important because it is one of the things that I learned about Melaka which came as sort of a mind-blowing thing that I never discovered when I was visiting all the museums which was another reason I got so annoyed. And this is basically the history of religion. How important religion was to Melaka. And I think I do have to apologize to Muslim viewers to my videos because even though I knew the Islam connection with Melaka now that I’m thinking back over my videos, I never really did a deep dive into them when I was talking about all the significant actors contributing to the the history of the Melaka Sultanate. And then onward through time, I was aware of the importance of Islam, but I don’t think it ever really came up. I was so focused on the the Portuguese and the fortress and then the Dutch and then the architecture and this and that. And a recent video that I posted was all about the Orang Laut. I was talking about Parameswara who originated from the Srivijaya kingdom on modern-day Sumatra which I described as a Hindu Buddhist kingdom which it was. So Parameswara kind of a Hindu Buddhist he was the one who founded Melaka and that’s kind of as far as I went with that story. I told the real history of him and the importance of the Orang Laut. And then when I talked about the progression of Melaka, the growth of Melaka, I was pointing to Parameswara, who he really was, the role of the Orang Laut. Then I focused on the role of the Chinese Zheng He or Cheng Ho, the the sponsorship by the Ming dynasty. I talked about all of those as factors in why Melaka grew as rapidly as it did, but I completely skipped over the role of Islam. So, that was a big big thing missing from all of my videos. And I knew about the story. I don’t know why it never came up. Just happened, I guess. But Parameswara, it was either Parameswara or his son who converted to Islam. It may some some historical documents say Parameswara himself in his lifetime he converted to Islam. But it could have been that his son officially converted to Islam. And this conversion to Islam was part of the economic and political development of Melaka because they were tied into now that it became a center of Islam, they had a much stronger connection with all the Islamic trading routes through all of Asia. So the all the tra the Muslim traders from Java, from India, even Zheng He himself who was a key figure in the development of Melaka where you know he was the envoy from the Ming dynasty would go to Melaka with 300 ships 30,000 people and establish a base there. He was also a Muslim. So when Parameswara or his son converted the kingdom, he converted personally to Islam and now they had this connection with the Islamic trade routes that contributed heavily to the sudden huge growth of Melaka and that that just never came up in my videos which was a big something I should not have overlooked. It just sort of happened in the way my videos went. So that’s one reason religion was so important to Melaka. But then when the Portuguese came, they took over. They essentially suppressed Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Like within the the core of Melaka that they built inside the city core, the Portuguese said no public worship from any of these religions. No public displays from Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. And of course, they tore down the Grand Mosque, they tore down the Buddhist shrines, they used all the stones in their fortress construction. And so the Portuguese did that. And then when the Dutch came, they did the same thing, but they suppressed the Portuguese Catholicism because the Portuguese were Catholics. And then when the Dutch took over, they were Protestants and they said, “Okay, now Protestant is the dominant religion here.” And they suppressed Catholicism. And all of the Catholics and who were there under the Portuguese, they got pushed to the outskirts to the boundaries of Melaka. And that’s I finally got to my point. My point is that I think some of these places that Ian Travels is recommending, I think they’re on the outskirts of Melaka and they’re important to the history of Melaka because it shows how this suppression of religions by the Portuguese and then by the Dutch took other religions and pushed them out of the center towards the countryside. So even though you you no longer like under the Dutch, you couldn’t have a Catholic church in Melaka, but you could still have a Catholic church in the countryside. Same thing under the Portuguese, you couldn’t have a mosque, you couldn’t have a Hindu temple in Melaka, but out in the villages in the countryside, you could still have a mosque. So all these religions got pushed to the outskirts. So, and and that idea didn’t really come up in my videos very much, but I think that’s the significance of a lot of these places that Ian Travels is recommending.

Number 11 is a question from Sucker for Moss. How did you gain such an extensive knowledge on history? That’s a good question to come right after my last answer. It’s all very recent. Because yeah, it just comes from doing background research for every video and it unfortunately it usually came after the video where I would when I first came to Melaka, as I said, I went out and shot a video and went to all the places that tourists go. I went up to St. Paul’s top of St. Paul’s Hill. I went to the history and ethnography museum. I think that was the first place I went. And you know down to the river and I went to all of these places and I shot video and I was doing some casual reading and went to the history you know museums things like that but then when I was editing those videos then I started thinking okay I said this in the video is that correct or is there more information about this place or that place and then I just started doing research online and then I would end up going down a rabbit hole where I would come across a website all about the history of the Melaka Sultanate or I’d come across a YouTube channel that has nothing but videos about the history of Malaysia. 2 days later, I kind of surface and I’ve spent like two days doing nothing but watching videos about Malaysia, reading websites about Malaysia. And then I used AI quite a bit. I became more and more comfortable with that, especially since there is this feature where when the AI says something, it lists right in the paragraph itself. At least Gemini does this and it shows you where it came from. So that I found that to be a really effective search tool that leads you to very interesting, helpful websites where I might ask the AI a very simple question to do with the history of Melaka. Something like, oh, I I read that Parameswara was a prince of the Srivijaya Empire. Is this true? And then can you tell me about the Srivijaya Empire? And then I get this big long essay about the Srivijaya Empire. And then I read through that whole thing. And then every paragraph has a link to websites, a whole bunch of them. And then I would one by one go back and then go to that website. And then usually the information that the AI drew on would be in the middle of that page on the website, but there’d be like, you know, thousands of words before, thousands of words after. So after I link to that website, then I would scroll all the way to the top and then read this entire website page about the Srivijaya Empire and then another one then another one then the Majapahit Empire then this then that and yeah one thing would just lead to another to another to another. But the AI was quite important because a lot of these websites were so hyperfocused on one topic. Then you can read this whole thing about that one topic, but it isn’t making connections to the other topics. It isn’t putting it in context. The AI was really good at painting a broad picture. And I would ask it a question like, okay, the Melaka Sultanate developed in this or that way. You know what were the influences, what affected this and then you get an overview from the AI that took all this information and put it together in a very understandable, very clear way. It was like, “Oh, that makes sense now. Oh, that makes sense.” And then just over time, all the pieces seem to come together. So if I if I know anything about the history of Melaka and if what I think I know is accurate, all of that information just came from just day after day after day of reading, watching videos, interacting with an AI, asking questions, leading to new websites, going to a museum, shooting a video about that museum. Now, while I’m editing the video, I’ve got 20 new questions based on what I saw in that museum. And I find out that most of the things that I saw in the museum were inaccurate or incomplete. So, a whole bunch more rabbit holes. And yeah, that’s that’s basically where my knowledge of Melaka came from.

So ah simple question 12 from BK571 maybe I missed out. What happened to your plan of cycling across Malaysia? Well at this point Melaka happened. A few things happened. I mean, if I want to make that question not as simple to kind of broaden my answer a little bit. Looking back, I had this idea for a long time to cycle around Malaysia. The idea started a long time ago and then I went down to Port Dickson. It actually started, this is kind of funny, I had my bicycle in storage in KL all the time, you know, that I’ve been hanging out and doing things. And then I had an offer to store my bicycle at someone’s home in Port Dickson that would be more convenient, a place to keep it. So, I went down to Port Dickson with my bike completely wrapped up. It was disassembled. It was all in pieces and and wrapped up and that kind of thing. And I brought it down to Port Dickson. The only thing I was going to do was put my bicycle into storage at a different house, leave, and then become a backpacker. But when I got down there, the friend of mine, I was going to leave my my bicycle at his house. He kind of said, “You know what? If I’m going to have your bicycle at my house, I wouldn’t mind if it looked like a bicycle. Like I’d love to have Planet Doug’s bicycle on display assembled rather than just wrapped up in a box, right? And I thought, well, when I’m in Port Dickson, it’d be nice to have my bike just to ride around. So, I put my bike together. This would have been a long time ago now, an embarrassingly long time ago. And I reassembled my bicycle. All I was going to do was leave it at his house in its assembled form. And then while I had it assembled, I started riding around Port Dickson. And I was like, wow, this is really nice just having a bicycle to explore the town where I’m living was. I really really enjoyed it and I was like, man, I missed having a bicycle. So, as soon as I thought that, I thought, well, before I put the bicycle in storage permanently, I wouldn’t mind taking it out for one last hurrah. And then my visa was expiring for Malaysia. So, I took my bicycle across to Dumai on Sumatra and then I went on a bike trip up to Bukittinggi. And then a few things happened on that trip where that trip got extended longer and longer and longer and I found myself flying back to Malaysia and then spending time in Malaysia, then going back to Sumatra and that kind of extended this whole cycling period. And then I found myself, you know, back in Malaysia. My I brought my bicycle back with me eventually. Yeah, things keep happening that make me extend my stay. I remember I was in Tanjung Balai one time and then I decided to start the Planet Doug Patreon and as I mentioned earlier, I had big plans for the Patreon. Next thing I knew, I had spent two months in Tanjung Balai and in Port Dickson. Started in Port Dickson, then Tanjung Balai, and I spent months just learning about Patreon and building out a Patreon site and creating this whole thing. I wanted it to be full and complete before I launched it. So, I spent months working on it and then when I launched it, it just kind of went nowhere because Patreon doesn’t really work the way I thought it did. So, a whole bunch of time went into that. And then I was going to do something else. And then I got an offer from a Planet Doug subscriber saying, “Yeah, we’re noticed you’re really suffering with technology these days. We would like to give you a laptop.” So that ended up being a big thing where I made plans to meet these Planet Doug subscribers in Jakarta where they presented me with my current amazing laptop, my Asus TUF A16. So this is what I use to make all my videos. This was a gift from Planet Doug subscribers. But in order to meet them to get the laptop now of course I had to travel to Jakarta and the cheapest way to do that the easiest way was actually to go from Sumatra to Malaysia and then from Malaysia to Jakarta then the only way to get back again you know going from Jakarta eventually back to Tanjung Balai where my bicycle was and all that kind of thing. And then I went back to Malaysia to finally begin this cycling trip around Malaysia. But then the same mystery benefactors who gave me the laptop, they sent me a message and said, “Oh, we’re actually coming to Malaysia to do a car tour around the country. You know, we’d love it if you would join us. You know, just hop in the car, come with us wherever we go, and we’ll pay for your way and you can make videos as we travel around the country, which was an amazing offer, but it would mean delaying my cycling trip. And at that time, my Canadian passport expired. So now I had to get a new passport. So I couldn’t really begin the cycling trip because I was sort of waiting for this car tour. And like I was waiting for them to fly into the country and I needed to get a new passport anyway and that took like a month and a half in KL a big long drawn out process and then so that whole 3 months went by and then I was going to start the cycling trip and then there was another delay and then another delay and another. Anyway, I’ve been planning to cycle up the East Coast for what feels like a lifetime and I just never get around to doing it. And that that short story might explain whether it makes sense or not, you know, some of the reasons for that. And the final aspect of that is every time I’m gearing up to start cycling, I’m making videos about where I am, such as in Melaka. And then it becomes so clear to me how hard it would be to make videos like this while cycling where combining cycling with documenting your travels for YouTube, it seems almost like an impossibility the way I do it. So then I end up like delaying my departure on the bike ride as I try to figure out well how am I going to do this where I’m cycling and then I’m shooting video all day but at the end of the day how do I sleep in my tent at night and now I got to charge up all my batteries and copy all the video files but in my tent no I have to stay in hotels but then I need a whole day maybe two days to edit that video from one day of cycling. How does anyway combining a full-on bicycle tour with like day-to-day videos of recording your journey offered up a lot of logistical problems. So then if I found myself interested in the history of Melaka. So now the the easiest path to follow it’s sort of like well right now I can get on my bike and have all of these problems or I can stay in Melaka and have a really amazing time learning about this city and its history and making videos about Melaka while having a home base where all the editing, copying video files, charging up batteries is easy to do. Then I end up I’ll just stay for another few days. I’ll stay for another 4 days. Ah, another 4 days. And then the bike ride never began. So, you did not miss anything. The bike ride up the east coast of Malaysia never started. I never really got underway, but soon.

Next question number 13. Hi Doug. You sometimes mention that at some point you may need to find a way to earn an income again. How long do you think you can continue traveling the way you do now? And are you hoping to find work that allows you to keep traveling? Yeah, money has come up a lot. My own input and questions. Yeah, cuz it’s on my mind a lot these days. As I said, I had my issues with my ATM card practically catching on fire and it’s like done and blocked. So, I have to somehow get over that problem before I can move on with my life. Yeah. How long do you think you can continue traveling the way you do now? Well, not much longer. I’m pretty much at the end of my line when it comes to this kind of lifestyle. So, I have to switch over to something that earns a steady income. I mean, obviously, it would be ideal if I found the the secret that unlocked YouTube popularity and if my videos were watched by a lot more people and I had a YouTube AdSense income. Again, I’ve talked about this in the past. It doesn’t have to be very much because I have such a simple lifestyle and I’m very happy living the lifestyle that I do. So, I can live on a very small amounts of money, but the way I shoot videos, I guess my personality, my style, the things I do, the way I do them just don’t really gel with widespread popularity on YouTube. Interestingly enough on a related note, I mean when I was in Kuala Lumpur before Melaka before all of this, I managed to meet up with the American hobo in person. He’s an American who started cycling out of northern Vietnam and he cycled all through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and then he started a YouTube channel just for his own interest and then he got a fair amount of more than he expected like response to his videos and he thought wow that’s kind of cool all these people watching my videos like not not on an Itchy Boots level you know he was getting whatever 500 100 views, a thousand views, and people leaving comments. And I can relate to that because when you first start out on YouTube, it seems kind of surprising that anybody would watch your video. Like in like in your normal life, like in Daniel, the American hobo normal life before he started his YouTube channel, you know, he would have he he’s been traveling for a long time. He really is a hobo. He lives a homeless life in the United States and around the world when he’s traveling. And then he has all these experiences and he has these experiences, but he’s not re other than the people he meets in real life. Like nobody’s particularly interested in what he’s doing. He’s just living his own life. And then you post your first YouTube video and even if there’s 50 people who watch the video and 10 people leave comments, it’s really kind of fascinating. It’s like wo like when I’m doing my normal life and I’m traveling, not one person in Canada cares like for my entire family and friends and whatnot. It’s not like I’m getting people’s like, “Whoa, you’re in Malaysia now. Wow, tell me about it. Like, nobody cares. Like, you just live your life. So, when you’re on YouTube and suddenly 10 people leave a comment about your experiences, it’s it’s kind of like, wow, there’s more people interested in that video from YouTube than from all of the rest of my life put together, right? It’s kind of a kind of a fascinating kind of a fun thing. It gives you an outlet for your thoughts, your ideas, photos you take, videos, thoughts you have. It’s it’s one of the great benefits of having a YouTube channel. You just meet a lot of people online and you have a lot more people in your life that you can talk to that you’re sharing your life with. So, yeah, it’s fascinating. So he did that at the beginning and then he got more and more into YouTube and he bought a real camera, a DJI Pocket 3. So his video quality and audio quality went way, way up. His videos got longer and more detailed. He started watching other YouTube travel channels, taking ideas from them, how they shoot, how they set up things, how they talk, stuff like that. And then he completed this whole journey. But it nearly, you know, looking back, it nearly did him in because he was posting a video every single day. That was his goal, post a video every day. And then so he would be doing something all day and then all night he had to edit. And he was editing on a smartphone. He didn’t have a laptop or anything like that. So he was able to edit like sleeping in a hammock, sleeping outside cuz he was still doing a lot of this homeless lifestyle. And he would stay up until 2 3 in the morning editing every single night. So he just poured himself heart and soul into making videos for YouTube. And he reached a point, I guess, where he his videos were popular by YouTube standards. You know, 2,000 views, 3,000 views. And I was following his journey. And then when he came to KL in Malaysia, I happened to be in KL. And then I arranged to meet up with Daniel, Daniel. And I spent a few days with him hanging out with him, shot a few videos with him in it, me in it. And I got to know Daniel on a personal level. And I could relate to all of his struggles because yeah, he had to work so hard, put in so many hours making YouTube videos because editing just takes so much time and he was getting, you know, a minimum amount of feedback. He recently said that the most he ever made in a month from YouTube was like $160. And that was when he had some like really popular videos that hit. And even then, like $160 in a month. That was a lot of money. That was the most he ever made from YouTube. Flash forward to him leaving Southeast Asia. He went back to the United States. At that time. He he also has all the same troubles I have with banks because he doesn’t have like a mailing address and a shipping address. No way to handle these things. And he decided it was best to go back to the United States cuz he needed to get a new bank card. His bank card was expiring. And his entire lifeline, financial lifeline was based on the money being deposited to that bank account. And if he lost that bank account, lost his bank card, well, he’d really be finished. He’s not living on, you know, $30 a month from YouTube with the occasional, you know, $100 spike. Yeah. He needs that bank. So, he decided to be very serious about it. He flew all the way back to the US just so he can make sure he can get that new bank card. And while he was in the US, he decided to go back to his homeless lifestyle and start riding the trains, which is a whole train riding hobo lifestyle that is quite popular in the United States. There was a YouTuber called himself Shoestring and he was like the classic hobo train rider with a YouTube channel. Had a really big following. Everybody loved his videos. And then he passed away. And then Daniel the American Hobo, he started a new channel, brand new. His original channel, American Hobo, was monetized. But then he created a new channel, American Hobo Train Riding, you know. So he started from nothing. Zero subscribers, zero videos, not monetized. But he thought it would be better to start fresh. And then he started riding the trains in the United States like illegally. It’s like that whole lifestyle where you sneak into the train yard and you find a train with has an open door or a little platform and you sneak in there and you lie down and you hide so that the security guards don’t see you and then you ride the trains around the United States without getting caught and you have all these adventures and experiences. He started making those videos and the whole thing just took off. Where hundreds of thousands of views per video subscribers like let let me look it up right now. I’m sure I can find his channel pretty quickly. Where is Okay, here it is. American Hobo Train Riding. Let’s click on that. So now he already has 50,000 subscribers. He posted 82 videos so far in total. And then if I click on popular videos, half a million views, 400,000 views, 400,000, 250,000, 140,000, 140,000, on and on. So, at a minimum, he’s getting like 30 to 40 to 50,000 views per video. And then his main videos are getting up to half a million views. And because people in the United States and around the world are so interested in this hobo train riding genre when he does live stream, not lives, he doesn’t do live streams right now. That’s too hard. But he does premieres of his videos and then people send him money through super chats, donations, through PayPal, through cash cards and everywhere. So anyway, his channel has exploded. So he’s reached a point where he could probably just keep doing what he’s doing, traveling, following his interests, and he would be making enough money per month just to keep doing what he’s doing forever. And as he he mentioned himself several times, compared to when he was in Southeast Asia cycling, the workload has dropped to nothing. Like when he was here, he worked like 24 hours a day essentially. Like just all he did was film video, edit video, film video. 24-hour a day cycle cycle worked himself to the bone. Stress, exhaustion, illness, problems, endless problems. It was just exhausting. And he was getting like no money at all. And now he goes to the United States, found a subject that people are interested in, hundreds of thousands of views, and he can post one, two videos a week that take no time to make at all. He’s not like posting a video every day making videos about his day-to-day life. Like every time he’s getting on a train, riding the train. Oh, let’s film. That’s my video. And so his workload is like maybe 10% of what it was in Southeast Asia when he was cycling and he’s making 100 times more money. You know, what whatever the math is. So anyway, I just thought of that because of this question for me about money. How long can you continue traveling the way you do now? And if I stumbled across some sort of an angle, an idea, a a style of video that found an audience like this, yeah, I mean, I would just do it for the remainder like for the for the foreseeable future anyway. As long as my health would allow me to do it, I would if I had that kind of income, that kind of popularity, I would just go from Malaysia and then just based on what I’m interested in and what people are interested in, I’ll just pick a new country, fly there. I don’t think I would cycle. Cycling is like a tough thing to combine with YouTube. I’m learning. So, I’d turn into a backpacker and then if I could make enough money from YouTube, I would just do that for years and I would start going country to country to country. I’ve got a long list of places I’d love to visit. So, that’s what would be that would be ideal, but I’m assuming that’s not going to happen. So, in the near future, very quickly, I guess I would have to find a job. I’ve kind of looked a little bit here and there, thinking about getting a job perhaps back in Taiwan. I considered teaching jobs in Indonesia and in Vietnam because they would be new countries. But I must admit that as soon as I started making inquiries about that kind of work, like getting a job in Vietnam, I ran like headlong into the reality of that lifestyle where now you’re getting emails from a school in my case that might hire me as an English teacher and then they start giving you the long list of requirements, all the documents you have to supply to them, the amount of, you know, in order to get a work visa, to get a teaching visa, the hours you’re going to have to work, the amount of control that they have over your life, everything you do, where you live, how long you stay, and then all the bureaucratic challenges for these jobs. You got to get a police clearance from your home country, and then on and on, health checks and going to hospitals, and it’s so much. And then when you’re getting these emails from these schools, they’re so cold. They’re so formal. They’re so official. And when you’re living the kind of lifestyle that I do, I like recoils like and I would send them emails and messages back. And I try to lower the the coldness of our communication because I want to feel good about this job. I want to relate as a human being. So I’ll send back kind of a chatty message like, “Oh yeah, this sounds amazing. Yeah, you know, here’s some of my background as an English teacher and and then you know, you get an email. Dear sir, in order to proceed with the application, we need to go from phase 4 and if you succeed, you will move on to phase three. And at phase three, I’m like, well, come on. It’s like you have to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life just to apply for that job and get accepted to have the privilege of working for them at their school so they can kind of pay you a minimum amount and control you with the work visa for that country. And when I got to that stage in my communication with these schools, I just like I just recoiled that I don’t think I can live that life. How do you get over this initial hurdle? And in the past, the way I did it in South Korea and in Taiwan is I just skipped all of that. I’ve been thinking a lot about my previous life in South Korea and Taiwan where I worked in the ESL industry where I was in Canada back in the 80s, you know, late 80s and then I learned about this possibility of teaching English overseas and then I started doing research into it and the the normal path would have been send a letter to one of these schools, make a phone call. Does did email exist in 1989 1990? I I think email might have existed by then. I can’t even remember. But the idea is you would apply for this job long distance, jump through all these hoops and then from your home country you go to like the Japanese embassy, submit your passport and you get the work visa processed in Canada and then you fly into Japan. They pick you up at the airport, take you to the school, your teacher apartment, you get your work visa, you know, and and then you start working full-time, you got to wear the school uniform. This is everything that I learned. You got to learn the school song. You sing every morning and, you know, pledge allegiance to the school and, you know, very, very formal, very rigid. And I thought, yeah, no thanks. And luckily, friends of mine had done this and they basically told me, “No, you don’t have to do any of that. Best thing to do with your personality, just fly there. Like don’t try to arrange a job from long distance cuz that’s exhausting and you give up so much independence. So what you should do is just fly to Korea, fly into Seoul on a tourist visa and then when you’re in Korea then you look for a job and then you have more independence, you have more control over your destiny and then you can just go out walking from school to school. You walk into the school, you meet the people you’re going to be working with, and you have that informal, casual conversation. And back in those days, schools needed teachers, a lot of them, and fast. So, you could just arrive in Korea, go out for a walk, pop into a school, hey, do you guys need an English teacher? Yes, we do. Come in, come in, come in. Next thing you know, you’re in front of a classroom teaching English. It was very casual, very easygoing. And yeah, so in terms of this question about getting a job, yes, I would do it if I absolutely need to, but I would probably like fly back to where maybe I’m comfortable, place like Taiwan, and then look for work. And then ideally, option one, yeah, YouTube is a success and I can travel the world as a low-budget YouTuber. Option one, by far, my favorite option. Option two would be to keep traveling around the world, but combine it with other online work. I don’t know whether that’s a possibility for me because a lot of the work that I used to do is now done by AI. Like I used to do a lot of voice recording in studios and editing and proofreading and writing all in the English world, but a lot of that is now done by AI. So I think a lot of that work has vanished. But if I could find some kind of online work that allowed me to stay mobile, I can do the work, you know, in Malaysia, then I can fly to Vietnam, go to Hanoi, and then continue doing the same work, and then fly to Cambodia, then to Bolivia, then to, you know, Uganda, pick a country around the world, and I can work independently, freelance, and make enough money to travel, maybe combining YouTube with other work. That would be ideally number two. So, but that’s to answer. Are you hoping to find work that allows you to keep traveling? Yes. Number one, number one option over here. Like I said, my foray into getting a real job where I get, you know, a work visa and I’m tied to that work visa to that school and I have to do everything they tell me. It’s just like, oh man, I had a horrible allergic reaction to that. As soon as I dip my toe in that water, it’s like, I don’t I don’t know if I can do that. I could work full-time at a school teaching English, but I think I have to physically go to that country, go to the school, get hired when I’m there rather than arranging it long distance at least. But ideally, no. I want to keep traveling. I want to stay mobile. I want to live out of a backpack. And be be free to go anywhere I want to go and just keep earning just enough money to survive. That’s the Planet Doug dream.

Next question 14 from the RD McGee Doug. Longtime viewer, first time question poster. Do you ever have days where you just can’t face going outside? And what is an average day for you like on those days when you’re not filming a video? I used to read your blog when you had that. And I envy your ability to spend long amounts of time in one place. When I have tried emulating that, I find about 3 days in one place is my limit. How do you do it? Thank you and safe travels. So, are there days when I can’t face going outside? No, never. I mean, I never ever ever have that feeling. I just love going outside. And I’ve talked about this quite a bit in the past. It’s actually a weakness that I’ve turned into a strength where I’m not very good at the weekend warrior lifestyle. Like if you live in Canada, have a real job, real house, car, commute, go to work, 9 to 5, weekends are your time to shine because that’s your those are your days off. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, you have to look ahead to Saturday, Sunday, plan for big adventures on Saturday, Sunday, and then you can do all your real living on the weekend. I could never do that. I don’t know, it just didn’t really work out for me. And financially, I couldn’t afford to do it in Canada anyway. And then I discovered that when I’m in another country like Malaysia or pick a country, you know, Ethiopia, anywhere in Africa, Asia, South America, you don’t have to do anything to have an interesting life. Life just happens to you. Step outside. I mean, the the world around you is just everywhere. The noise and the activity. I mean, I, you know, all the times that I’ve gone back to Canada in between trips, the number one reaction I always have is how dead it is, how empty and quiet. It’s like, where are the people, where are the markets, where are the food stalls, where are the traffic jams, where’s the noise, where’s the animal life? I mean, where’s the variety of everything? In Canada, everything happens inside buildings. Everything is hidden. And sometime I mean that can be a good thing. And if you’re capable of weekend warrior life and then you have enough money to take advantage of that life then yeah you can have a pretty good existence in Canada. But I was never able to do that. So I discovered that if I spend time in Canada months go by and nothing interesting happens. But pick any other country in the world. Well, you don’t have a choice. You step out of your hotel, step out of the airport as soon as you arrive and life just hits you over the head with a sledgehammer. You are forced to be out there like go outside to get a meal like in Melaka, in Indonesia, anywhere here in Southeast Asia, pick a country. You’re in your hotel, you’re hungry, you want to go outside. It’s hard to do. You have to man it. You have to fight through the language barrier and the physical barrier. It’s hot and sweaty. You’re sitting outside, sweat pouring down, and you don’t know how to order. You don’t know what to order. And I mean, even getting a meal is a big adventure. And whether you enjoy that adventure, I guess that’s a personality thing. But I discovered early on that when I’m in another country, life is much more exciting, much more interesting. Stuff happens all the time and you don’t even have to work that hard to have adventures. Adventures just happen all the time. So that’s kind of what what I enjoy. So it never occurs to me that I can’t face going outside. I mean, it just doesn’t fit into that that experience, you know? I love going outside. And what is an average day for you like when you’re not filming a video? Well, unfortunately, it means I’m editing video. If I’m not filming a video, I’m editing a video. So, my life when I’m not working on YouTube, well, when I’m not out filming a YouTube video, it means I’m sitting here in Planet Doug Studios and I have this on my lap and I’m editing a video and then I’ll go outside to get something to eat and then I come back and I just edit video all day long until I finish the video. And once that is done and it’s uploaded, then I have a new subject. I go outside and I film another video and then I’m inside editing the video. I don’t really have any off days. There are really no non-YouTube days. It may seem ridiculous. When you look at my videos, you might go, “What’s so hard about that?” To be honest, I can’t tell you. I don’t know why it’s so hard, why it takes so much time. I often wake up in the morning when I have like right now I think I have five videos that I’ve shot that I haven’t had the time to edit yet. So that that is you know in the back of my mind right now and I’ll wake up in the morning think okay I’ll knock those out like I’ll do one this morning another this afternoon and then evening I’ll do three today and then two tomorrow I start working on video one suddenly it’s 11:00 p.m. at night I started at 7 in the morning it’s 11 p.m. I still haven’t finished the first video. So, I’m like, “What the, you know what, what the heck is going on?” You know, and that’s just the editing of the video. And even as you upload it, that takes forever. And then you have to do all the other stuff, the video description and the title and the thumbnail and the linking and this and that. And I just yeah, I’m either shooting a video or I’m editing a video and I go outside to grab something to eat in the middle or I might even spend an entire day in my hotel room. I don’t move. I never I don’t even go outside once. That happens quite a bit because I get so involved in the editing that I’m doing. And I’m a bit like a hibernating bear. I can go a long time without eating. I just drink instant coffee all day long and then I’m just too too tired to go outside to find food and then I’ll just I’ll I’ll eat tomorrow and then I just go to bed without eating for the entire day and then I wake up in the morning. I start editing again and I just go out to get something to eat. So yeah, that’s an average day when I’m not filming a video, I’m editing a video. There there really isn’t any other type of day.

And then his question about how do I stay in one place for so long? It’s an interesting question because it gets to something I’ve thought about a lot. It’s a kind of a making sure my microphone is there. A philosophy that I’ve developed about life. There are all kinds of human behaviors that we admire in another person and we think based on our personality that it takes effort to do what they’re doing because whatever they’re doing isn’t a natural fit for you. So we admire this person for doing something. We think, “Wow, how do you work that hard doing that?” You know or in his case like h how can you stay in one place for so long and he says he tried to do it I tried to emulate staying in one place and I I I couldn’t do it so his assumption from his perspective is it was difficult to stay in one place so therefore if I’m staying in one place for a long time I must be overcoming that difficulty like How am I enduring that discomfort? Like I’m like I’m working hard to do it. What is my secret? And in terms of staying in one place for a long time, the secret is it’s not hard at all. I love it. Like it just it’s what I do naturally where I love to stay in one place and sink my teeth deeper and deeper into that one town. And I’ve often talked about this where let’s say I’m in some small town in Indonesia like Tanjung Balai and you feel this pressure like well you got to go to the next town and the next town but at the same time what’s in the next town that isn’t in the town you’re in like in Tanjung Balai where I spent a lot of time in Sumatra. I spent a lot of time there. And I went out exploring everywhere. And despite all of that, there was still so many places I hadn’t visited, so many experiences I didn’t have, so many restaurants I didn’t try out. So maybe I can go to a new town and there’s a new restaurant there, but there’s like 150 new restaurants in this town I haven’t tried out yet. So it’s like, okay, why go until you’re finished with everything in that town? What’s what’s the big deal about going to the next one? Like I think in terms of countries and the atmosphere of that country more than the city and the place itself. So if I fly into use Indonesia again, I fly into a town on the island of Sumatra. I am in Indonesia. All the restaurants around me are Indonesian restaurants. All the people are Indonesian. The lifestyle, the schools, the mosques, the markets, the fishing harbor, the fishing boats. Everything around me is Indonesian. So, I can immerse myself in the food and the atmosphere and the culture and the lifestyle of Indonesia. And that’s what I enjoy. So, there’s no reason to go anywhere else. Like I could go I could move on to another island. Well, I got to move to to Bali. Well, Bali is not a good example because it’s completely different from everywhere else, but or just pick another city on Sumatra. I could move to another city up the road, but it’s still Indonesia. Like what I want is that Indonesian life to be immersed in that country. And I can get that by staying in one place. I don’t need to constantly go be going to new places. It is good to go to a new place because it wakes you up. You get a little bit complacent after a while. Things don’t seem as exciting and as fresh anymore. Like even in Malaysia, you know, Melaka all around me. I’ve pretty much gotten the whole Melaka experience. I haven’t done everything in Melaka even by a long shot. I haven’t been to I haven’t even been to half the museums historic sites. I’ve never once even done the riverboat cruise, you know, restaurants. I could spend another 6 months in Melaka and every day I would wake up with something new to do. But your brain does start to smooth out the edges a little bit. And if I hopped on a bus, if I didn’t take my bicycle and I just zipped up to Terengganu, you feel energized. New place, new excite, you know, you see everything with fresh eyes again. So there is an advantage to moving to new places. But for me to stay in one place, I don’t have to work at it. And that gets back me back to the philosophy I was talking about this idea of when you admire something in another person from your perspective, it looks like what they’re doing is hard work. When in if you were that person, you’d realize, well, it’s easy for them. It’s just what comes naturally. And you have to keep that in mind. Like I’ve had this sort of comment all the time when I’ve talked about keeping a journal, which I don’t really do regularly anymore because video is my new journal. But before I had a YouTube channel, every day I wrote in a journal. It was just my lifelong habit. And then I like I would write 20 pages a day. I wake up in the morning sometime if I’m traveling. I’ll wake up hours and hours earlier than I need to. 5:00 in the morning, 4:30 in the morning, just so I can have a cup of coffee, write in my journal before the day begins. That was just a habit I had. And then people would see everything I’ve written, see the journal or hear me talk about it and think, “Wow, I could never do that.” They say, “Well, I try to keep a journal. Like I make a schedule and I force myself. Every day I’m going to sit down for one hour and I’m going to write in my journal. And they have to force themselves to do it. And after one week they’ve stopped. Right? So then they would look at me and go, “You’ve been keeping a journal for 25 years, writing every morning. How do you do it?” Like, “Wow, that’s so admirable.” But of course, for me to do it, it doesn’t even take any work. It’s like the biggest pleasure I had in my life was writing like an email to a friend, a letter that turns into my journal. So, I would I would look forward to it. I would go to bed the night before excited at the thought of waking up at 5:00 in the morning, having a cup of coffee, and I could write all the stories of everything that happened that day. Now, it’s a pleasure. So, I can start typing right now and write for 10 pages, and I enjoy it. It doesn’t require any work. So that’s where this idea of admiring somebody else for what they do and then wanting to emulate them is kind of a dead end because it’s not the same experience from one person to the other. I’m trying to think of something that fits into that category for me. And I I it could be physical exercise because I will see someone who works out every day, goes for a run and runs 5 kilometers every day and when I see them doing that I’m like wow like how do you do that? Like it seems like hard work and then I might think that it’s admirable to do that. It’s valuable. And then I will try to do what they do. And then the next morning, you know, I’ll wake up and at 6:00 I’ve got I bought brand new running shoes. I’ve got running shorts and I go out for a run and I’ll keep it up for three mornings, go for a run every day. And then it’s too much work. I hate it. I don’t enjoy it. Every if I go out for a run, I’m missing out on my journal time. So then one morning comes along and I think well I don’t feel like going for a run this morning. I’ll break out my laptop and I’m writing in my journal and then I’ll sit down and write for three hours enjoying every minute of it and then I stop exercising. I don’t go for a run anymore and I think I’m a failure and I write to that person, how do you do it? How do you go for a run every morning like that? It’s like oh it must be so hard. But for that person, they love doing it. It’s what they look forward to. So, you can’t really transfer one person’s behavior to another and make it something admirable that you can emulate. If you actually have to try to do it, there’s really no point cuz you’re not going to do it long term. You’re going to quit eventually. So, you might as well just do whatever comes naturally to you and make it a valuable thing. Other people will look at what you’re doing and say, “Wow, that’s really amazing what you do. I wish I could do that, right?” Yeah. Just for me, staying in one place a long time, easiest thing in the world. It’s just what I do. Yeah. It’s for me, it’s not a hardship. It’s not something I have to work at to do. It’s just what I enjoy doing.

Next question number 15. Hi Doug, just wondering what’s your next destination? Are you still planning to ride around Malaysia? I really enjoyed your Melaka series as I was there only a couple of weeks before you got there. I only wished I had seen them before going. Thank you and safe travels. So I think I’ve talked about that more or less. Next destination is planning my bicycle ride up the east coast of Malaysia. And I’m hoping to do that in a relatively quick time period. Perhaps doing more focusing my videos more on the experience of cycling, the experience of traveling rather than turning my mental lens onto the history of the areas that I’m passing through cuz I’m I’m kind of worried that if I kind of switch to thinking about, you know, historical information about the east coast of Malaysia, each little town and the industries, I’ll end up moving too slowly again. Maybe I’m going to try to turn it into more of a travel experience rather than a yeah deep dive into information basically. But we’ll see how that goes. So that is my next destination, east coast of Malaysia. We’ll see how see see whether I can finally follow through on that or not.

Next question number 16. Hi Doug. Firstly, let me say I enjoy your videos very much. As a history enthusiast myself, I also liked visiting Melaka last time in 2023. You made many videos in Sumatra and that’s what my question is about. Do you know of the Dutch man Jacob Nienhuys who was one of the first Dutch planters in northern Sumatra during the former Dutch East Indies? He became a very wealthy man. Of course, not without the use of indentured laborers and other negative effects on the local people. Are you maybe related to him? Yeah, actually I know about this man. I remember hearing about him and reading about him when I was in Medan. I think Jacob Nienhuys, his name is spelled like N I E N H U Y S. My official last name is with an I instead of the letter Y, but essentially it’s the same last name. But yeah, he’s a well-known man from that era. His name came up in my online reading and research. Which I think his name came up in the museums that I visited in in Medan in that area. So yeah, I became interested in him because we share the same last name. But right now I don’t have all that information packed into my brain. I’d have to think about it. So I can’t say very much about him right now other than that. And am I related to him? I guess if you go back in time and follow our family trees, I think we would have to be at some point, but I think we would have to go back quite a long ways in time. I’m not aware at this point. I have no idea whether I’m related to him or not. I can’t tell you. I I don’t even know if I could possibly find out because my knowledge about my father’s family where the name Nienhuis comes from. My knowledge about that only goes back at most two generations. Like my father, his father, which would be my grandfather, and I know a little bit about my great-grandfather back in the Netherlands. I have photos going back that far in time with some names attached to it. But beyond that, I don’t have any information. So, I don’t know how far back in time you’d have to go to reach someone like Jacob Nienhuys’s family. So, probably related to him, but I don’t know in exactly what way.

Question 17. Any plans for other ASEAN countries? Still can’t get enough of your adventure in Myanmar. Sadly, that country nowadays not so pleasant to get around. Well, in terms of future plans, it all comes down to what happens in the near future. Yeah, I would love to keep traveling to other countries in this area. Vietnam is always at the back of my mind. I really enjoyed my recent trip there. And yeah, I mean, pick a country. I would love to go there. Though I I do have this nature where I don’t really need complete newness. I could go back to Indonesia, but I’d love to go to Sulawesi, for example. That island would be really cool to spend time there. In the big cities of Sulawesi and then travel through it a little bit. I could really enjoy that. For some reason, the island of Sulawesi has always been on my brain. Sri Lanka, you know, Vietnam. I could easily go back like to northern Vietnam. Based myself in Hanoi and then explore northern Vietnam, Cambodia at this point, not so much. For some reason, I’ve been to Cambodia twice. And I mean, I I’m sure I’d enjoy a return visit, but it’s not the first country that pops into my head for some reason. I don’t know why. Thailand, again, not so much. Myanmar for sure. I definitely have Bangladesh on my mind all the time because I did one trip to Bangladesh and I got a taste of the river boats which would be amazing to travel around Bangladesh by the river system hopping from riverboat to riverboat that that would be an amazing trip if I could do that. Beyond that countries I’ve never been to did I mention Sri Lanka already? Never been to Sri Lanka. India, you know, just India just makes me exhausted even thinking about going there because it’s so big. So many places, so much history, so much you could see and do there. It feels like every time I think about India, it’s like, well, it’s too big. My brain can’t grasp it. You have to focus on like one part of India. Like would you go to this city, this area, this region and then define it for me, show me some pictures from that region and then I’d get excited about it. I seem to be very visual that way where I have to see photographs of something before I can get excited about it. So if you showed me a bunch of pictures from India and say it’s from this region, it’s like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’d love to go there. Pakistan of course though Pakistan often seems challenging as well politically and and in many many different ways the security of traveling around the country. I guess that’s one reason I lean towards countries like Malaysia or Indonesia, Philippines where you don’t even have to think about that stuff. They’re tourism destinations and they just welcome you with open arms and nobody’s saying you can’t go here. No, that area is closed. That region is having political issues and you have to get a permit to go there and a police escort to go there, military checkpoints on the roads. I mean, as soon as you think about going to a country that has a lot of restrictions for security and safety and politics, you do start thinking, well, if it’s that hard to go to your country, why should I bother when I can go to a country that just welcomes me with open arms? I’d rather go there. And I I guess if you go to a country that’s really difficult to get into, well then you’re starting to get into like adventure tourism for YouTube. I mean, you start posting videos, you know, I survived the most dangerous road in Afghanistan. Well, click, you know, everybody’s going to click on your video, but I don’t have a my instincts don’t go in that direction. And even if I went to a place like Afghanistan, I’m not going to be able to make the clickbait headlines and titles to make it sound like I risked my life to go there. So, I may not even get the YouTube benefit of going to a place like Afghanistan cuz I can’t lean into sort of the fake danger of it all, making it all sound much more dramatic than it really was. I’d probably end up making videos about just the slog of it. Like, okay, I wanted to go to Afghanistan. Well, it took me three months to get the visa and 10 trips to the embassy and it cost all this much money and all these documents and I would probably document the whole experience as it was in real life and then landing in Afghanistan and all the problems you’re facing with immigration and then staying in a hotel and this and that, changing money, getting money. That’s just the the way my brain works. I’m more interested in what it’s really like to be overseas rather than the romantic whoa, you know, my I nearly died as soon as I arrived at the airport and only showing the fake glamour and fake drama of it all. So, who knows? For me, even going to, you know, dangerous countries probably wouldn’t work out that well for me anyway. My YouTube videos would probably be just as popular or unpopular as videos from a more stable country like the Philippines. So, yeah, any plans for other countries? Lots of plans, but I don’t know whether practically speaking I’m going to be able to follow through on going to any of those places. We’ll see how things we’ll see how things turn out.

Next question number 18. Ah, do you feel lonely at times? You have been away from your country for a long time. You are a friendly person and people react to you too, but these are Touch ‘n Go acquaintances in your daily life. Who do you call to catch up with when you are feeling down and out? Pretty simple answer in a way. Do you feel lonely at times? Actually, I don’t. I don’t know what that says about me, but I I never feel lonely. I just don’t. Maybe I’m missing some kind of a gene that I’m supposed to have, but I think my whole life I’ve always had a little bit of a solitary tendency. I love being around people. I enjoy people. I like having them all around me. But I also seem to separate myself from people at the same time. I can even come up with lots of physical examples of that where for example I remember one summer in Canada I had a job tree planting. This is kind of a rite of passage in Canada as a younger person. You get a job planting trees in the summer. It’s grueling, grueling physical work. If you’re good at it, you can make some money. Put some money in the bank and then use that money to go traveling. So, that was my idea. I’ll go tree planting and then I’ll make some money and then I can go traveling and I can do it every year. Turned out that didn’t work out very well. But when you go tree planting, you generally stay in a tree planting camp out in the bush. You’re not staying in a town. You have to sleep in a tent and then you have you’re in this you get hired by this company. This company takes you out to a place where you put your tent pitch your tent you sleep in your tent at night. They have big dining tents, shower tents that they set up and pay for and then you might be working with a team of 100 people and a hundred people all living inside their tents all pitched close together. So, as soon as I showed up in that environment, the first thing I did was pitch my tent 150 yards away from the center. I just needed my own space. It’s just the way it works. Everybody else, they all pitch their tents in a tight little group because everybody wants to, you know, hang out and party and have a good time and be in the middle of all these other people. I’m looking for a quiet little spot hundreds of yards away. I’m still part of that group. I can join the group and hang out with them, but at the end of the day, I’ve got my own little cave that I can retreat to. And then I’ve always been that way my entire life, even growing up as a kid. Yeah. Same thing. Actually, I remember going on camping trips with my family and my my family would have like a classic Canadian tent trailer, a little thing you pull behind the car and then you pull out all these sections and you’ve got beds here, beds here, and beds, you know, so two beds up here, two beds up here. So, my brothers would sleep up there. My mother and father, they sleep over here. And then there’d be like a dining room table that can be lowered, turned into another bed, and the whole family sleeps inside the tent trailer. And I went I would go off on one of these trips. And I just I would be miserable. And I eventually worked out this arrangement where, okay, let’s go on this camping trip, but I need to sleep in a tent outside the tent trailer. So, everybody in my family was perfectly happy sleeping inside the tent trailer, but I want to be in my own pup tent and, you know, a little A-frame pup tent and I will pitch it on the grass outside. And I remember my mother telling me stories from when I was younger that we’d be out there on this camping trip and like a big storm would arrive, you know, huge rain and wind and thunder and lightning. And my mother being a mother is worried about her children. And then she would be, you know, looking out the tent trailer thinking about her young son all by himself out in that tent, you know, at the risk of the thunder and the wind and the lightning. And I was there’s no way I’m going back in the tent trailer. Like I don’t care how uncomfortable it gets in the tent, how dangerous it might be out there or seemingly dangerous all by myself. I’m sleeping in the tent. It was like that was the number one priority for me was to have a place where I could just lie down and sleep by myself. When I’m in a group of people, I can’t fall asleep. I just cannot fall asleep. It’s just like physically impossible. So anyway, yeah. And then I mean I could go on and on and on about every situation I could mention where my tendency is to split away from the group and do something by myself. I just always kind of do it that way. And then sometimes I think I shouldn’t live like that, you know, just be normal and go with friends. But somehow going with a group of people just drove me crazy. I mean, I can I can even think of very trivial situations where I worked in an office in Taipei. Like a typical 9-to-5 job. I sat at a desk at a computer, worked all day, and I had all these co-workers. And then lunchtime would come and maybe Friday special lunch all the foreigners at my company, all these Americans, Canadians, Australians, Brits, we would have lunch together and say, “Hey, you guys want to go have lunch as a group?” And you would join like, “Wow, yeah, have lunch with a bunch of people.” By the end of that lunch, I was just about losing my mind. I could not stand it because now you’ve got five people trying to decide where to go. Like pick a restaurant and now you got five people trying to pick a place to go. The you know you talking and talking and discussions and like ah and then how do you get there? And they finally pick a restaurant that’s 5 minutes away by taxi and now you need to get into a taxi with a bunch of other people, communicate with this Taiwanese taxi driver in Chinese to get to this restaurant and then you get there and you got to get big table for five. Then you all have to put in your order. It’s so complicated and then the bill comes. How do you pay? You split up the bit. It’s such a hassle. You know, I would do that once or twice and it’s I just can’t face it anymore because I loved my lunchtime. I’m working all day and then lunchtime comes. I’ve got my book because I was always been a big reader and I’m so excited about lunchtime. I could go get a good meal and I’m going to go to the restaurant right beside my building. I step outside the building where I’m working. Boom. I’m in the buffet. I get my rice, my veggies, my chicken, whatever. I get sit down. I’ve got my lunch in front of me. Within five minutes, I can relax, enjoy the meal, get lost in my book, and just have the best lunch ever. Right. Compare that with the chaos of of having lunch with five other people. Yeah. So, I I get pushed towards most activities on my own, and that goes down to cycling trips. I’ve never gone on a trip with another person ever in my life that I can well going way back in time. I can think of one or two maybe. But in general, like I pl if I’m planning a big trip, I’m going to go to Cambodia with my bike for 2 months or Ethiopia for a year and ride my bike around Guinea. All the big trips of my life, everything I’ve ever done, I’ve done it by myself. And that’s just the way I’ve always lived. And yeah, never get lonely. Never ever get lonely. And the whole idea of who do you call to catch up when you’re feeling down and out? It’s not a big deal for me. I mean, sure, I feel down just like everybody, but the way I feel down is it feels like a more extreme version of the regular I’m feeling down. So the way the way I might feel down chatting with another person is not going to help. It’s like there there’s no connection between the way I might feel down. Oh, I’m going to call a friend and after I talk with my friend now I feel better. It it just doesn’t really work out that way. So there is no, you know, this kind of yeah, I’m just feeling down. It would be nice to hang out with a friend and feel better. That that whole scene doesn’t really do anything for me. It just doesn’t really work. So, yeah, I enjoy people, love hanging out with people. But I always need that private cave, you know, that I can retreat to at the end of the day and get some sleep, that sort of thing.

Okay, question 19. Oh boy. From broken armor girl. Hi Mr. Doug. Just curious. Years by years old age is coming and by that time you might not be as strong to travel a lot. So until when do you think you will travel? And is there any plan for you to ease into settling down somewhere? By settling down, I mean you have long-term permanent home somewhere that you can relax, enjoy your coffee, and slow life. I hope and pray for your health and safety so you can make more travel log. Hope it will last forever, but we are all human after all. So, short answer, I have no plans at all. Never even thought about it. Even if I had the opportunity, I have no plans to settle down in a permanent home where I can relax, enjoy coffee and slow life. Mainly because I’m doing it right now. Like I’ve been in Melaka for a long time, staying at a low-budget hotel and then in Melaka that is my permanent home for as long as it lasts. And then if I move on to Terengganu, if I’m in Kuala Lumpur, there’s that old expression, wherever I lay my hat is my home, that just comes naturally to me. So it doesn’t really matter where I am. It is my home by default. And then I’m just enjoying the slow life, drinking coffee anyway. Adding a home base actually reduces that. And particularly when I think about people who have a house in Canada, I mean it would be different, I guess, with an apartment, but in Canada, you have a house. Well, you got to maintain the house. So, a lot of your time is spent cutting the grass, watering the grass, shoveling the snow in the winter, painting the house, and you just naturally get involved in renovating the house. Oh, the roof needs fixing this summer. Oh, the furnace has to be replaced, the water heater. Oh, this has to be repainted. The front porch is falling apart. Time to tear it down, build a new front porch. Oh, you know, it’d be nice to have a garden in the backyard, a fish pond, bird feeders, you know, all of this stuff. And I don’t want to do any of that. I’ve never wanted to do any of that. Give me free time, like pre-YouTube, pre-internet era, I had my nose in a book. So my life was book here, coffee here. And that was pure enjoyment for me. That is what I enjoyed more than anything else. Just to sit down anywhere, have a cup of coffee, read a book, and happy as can be. Plop me down somewhere, give me a book, plug in the kettle. That’s all I need out of life back in those days. So yeah. I don’t need a house to do that. A permanent home to do that. I can do that anywhere. Just put me in a chair and shove me in the corner and I’m happy as can be. And then having a house, a permanent home interferes with doing that because of all the work you need to do. Now you’re suddenly working for your house all the time instead of waking up in the morning and grabbing the fresh book. And then ever since the modern era started, I became very very interested in movies and TV shows. And if you give me some free time and give me, you know, the DVD collection of some new TV series that I’ve never watched. Oh, I mean, happy as can be. And I don’t need a TV to do that now. I just need a tablet. You know, if I had the time and the space and I can download the complete Breaking Bad series and I’d never seen it before, that is unlimited, the purest measure of happiness I can find to start a brand new TV series that is good, but I’ve never seen before and I’ve got like eight seasons worth, you know, stacked up on my tablet. Amazing. So, yeah. Or give me the Alien quadrilogy. I I remember doing that one time. I I can I remember doing this several times where I was traveling. There was one time I was cycling across Canada from east coast to west coast. So, you know, I’m traveling all the time. And then I got to Montreal and I had friends in Montreal and one friend of mine had had a really nice all my friends in Montreal had amazing apartments. So I would visit with them, but then one of my friends was leaving for a while. Said, “Yeah, we’re not going to be here. The apartment’s going to be empty. If you want to stay in Montreal for a couple of weeks, yeah, just stay at my apartment.” So I took them up on that offer. And I moved into this friend’s apartment. And they had, you know, a TV and a DVD player and then a shelf full of like box sets of movie series and TV series. And you know, I just grabbed the first one off the shelf and it was just like it’s like opening the greatest Christmas present of all time and then just to have that freedom and the time and I’m popping in, you know, DVD after DVD and watching that whole series. And I was doing it in somebody else’s apartment. It wasn’t my home. It wasn’t apartment. And yeah, I didn’t need my own home to do that. And I I could think of so many times where I’ve done that in my life. So I could spend the rest of my life staying in low-budget hotel rooms in hostels, no problem. I can just move into a hostel, have my own little room in the hostel. It doesn’t matter that the hostel is filled with other people, travelers moving in and out, checking in, checking out, lots of noise and chaos. As long as I have my tiny little closet where I can sit like this with my back against the wall and then I can read a book, watch a movie, edit YouTube videos, I’m as happy as can be. That’s all I really need. So, no permanent home. Never don’t need it. Don’t want it. I mean, if I were a multi-millionaire and I could have an apartment somewhere and I can just leave it empty whenever I want. Yeah, absolutely. So then I would have I pick a pick a city in Canada, maybe Montreal, buy an apartment in Montreal, just leave it. I can just store all of my stuff there. And then every time I fly into Canada, I stay in my Montreal apartment. And then when I’m ready to go to Uganda, well, I just pack up and fly to Uganda, stay there for 6 months, and I could fly back to Canada. Yeah. If I were a multi-millionaire, sure. Then I would love to have a permanent home base, but I wouldn’t live there permanently. I would just use it as a place to store my stuff basically. That that’s what I would use it for, for storage, place to hang out where you can organize your next trip and then you leave again and then you can come back. So a home base from that point of view. But in my life, that never made any sense because maybe you worked for a year and a half to save up a nest egg to go traveling with and you want to maximize the value you can get out of that nest egg. And if half of that money you saved goes towards paying rent on your apartment when you’re not living in it, well, that’s just a waste of money. So, I I I never got around to doing that. I never made enough money to have a home base of that kind. The other part of the question, not as easy to answer, but getting older, health problems, what are you going to do then? And to be honest, all I’ve done is the ostrich approach when it comes to thoughts of the future, health problems, what are you going to do when you’re old and sick and you have no money? I’ve done the ostrich approach where I just stick my head in the sand and just, you know, cover my eyes and pretend that possibility doesn’t exist. I just cross my fingers and hope for the best. Basically, I’ll deal with that when it happens. And I mean, if you wanted to get a little bit serious or grim about that, perhaps. As far as I’ve thought about it, I’ve always thought that, well, if I do get really, really sick, a life-threatening illness, I’m just going to let it kill me. Like, I assume I’m going to get something. I’m going to get liver disease, lung, you know, some kind of cancer. I assume cancer is going to kill me because why not? But something is going to pop up one day. I’ll wake up in the morning. I’ll feel ill. I’ll have a horrible pain. Maybe I’ll go to the hospital and they’ll look and say, “Oh, you have this cancer.” My solution to that problem is, “All right, I guess my life’s over and I’ll just let the cancer kill me cuz I I mean, I’ve lived a long time already. I’ve had perfect health up until today. I feel like I’ve won the lottery. You know, I’ve gotten as much out of life as I can get. I’m not going to kick and scream and crawl and, you know, just desperately try to live as long as possible. Whether I can actually live up to that idea or not, who knows? Maybe when the end of my life comes, I’ll change my mind and I’ll try to live as long as possible. But at this point, my idea is h if I’m old now, I’m sick. I’m dying. All right, I’m done. And I’ll just let it happen and not going to try to prevent it from happening or find the best specialists on earth and the most expensive treatments I can find so I can live for one more year, that kind of thing. I guess it depends on what the illness is. Maybe I’ll treat it, maybe I won’t. I’ll just sort of let things happen as they happen and hope for the best.

Question 20. In line with a lot of the previous questions, second swing golf. If you won the top prize lottery, where would you live and would you still travel? Yeah, that would sure that that would sure be nice to win the top prize lottery. I’m not greedy. I’ll take the second or third prize lottery. I don’t need a lot of money to live on. Yeah, certainly a fun mind game to think about stuff like that. But yeah, if I had all this money, where would I live? Well, to be honest, I would live right here. I I don’t think I would live I don’t think I would change my living situation at all. I currently live in low-budget hotel rooms and I like these places. Even if I had a lot of money, I don’t think I would stay in fancy hotels. There might be time to time when I might jump up to a like a lower mid-range hotel just cuz then yeah, you can kind of get a nice breakfast in the morning served by the hotel and then fast reliable Wi-Fi. Things like that can make the life of a YouTuber like so much easier just to be able to grab some food without leaving your hotel and then just to have reliable Wi-Fi. H that can make all the difference in the world. But those are the only two things. I mean, a fancy hotel. I mean, they’re fun. You know, Planet Doug subscribers have treated me to a nice place. And yeah, they are amazing experiences for me because they’re so unusual to stay in a comfortable room with nice furnishings, comfort, hot water, rather than like a cold water shower. I mean, things like that are really, really nice from time to time, but I don’t know if you’d really want them all the time because maybe you wouldn’t appreciate it as much when you do have them. They just become normal. And of course, all the other things. I’ve talked about this already, like a like a five-star resort. It’s going to have the swimming pool and the sauna and the jacuzzis and the massages and the exercise room. I wouldn’t do any of those things. If there was a nice swimming pool that you could go to easily without a lot of trouble, yeah, I might take a swim from time to time, but I’m not I’m not going to do all the other things anyway. So, I wouldn’t take advantage of those things. And like really fancy, fine dining, that would be lost on me as well. I’m not that kind of guy. I don’t appreciate like really expensive food. I know the difference between basic food and then like good food, but I don’t have to live at the level of exotic delicacies all the time, you know, like millionaires do. I’m very, very happy with very basic food. So, even if I had won the lottery and had tons and tons of money, I think I would just stay in low-budget hotels around the world. I like these places. They suit me. I like the atmosphere. I like being in a busy part of town. I like hearing the city noise coming in from the outside, staying in a fancy hotel. You you don’t know what you don’t even know what country you’re in for the most part. You could be in New York, you could be in Kampala, you could be in Kuala Lumpur. You know, a fancy five-star Hilton hotel is a five-star Hilton hotel pretty much no matter where you are. So, where would I live? I I wouldn’t change anything. I would just stay in basic hotels and then I would just move from country to country to country to country. Yeah. I wouldn’t stop traveling. At this point in my life, I definitely would not have I I definitely would not stop traveling. I would continue. Given the opportunity, yeah, I would still travel. I might change some things, conveniences. One thing that would be really nice, again assuming unlimited funds would be to arrive in a country, fly in, and then buy a scooter in every country. Like just buy a new one. Like it doesn’t have to be a brand new one, but I mean new to you. So you would have all the advantages of your own transportation, but then you don’t have the hassle of crossing a border with it and then having to have a what do you call that? My brain isn’t working right now. You have to have a document that guarantees that you’re going to bring the motorcycle into the country and then take it out again. You’re not going to sell it. I forget the name of that document, but you have to buy this thing. You have to put down a big deposit. You got to get taxes and permits and licenses and everything. And I would much rather like fly into Thailand and then just grab a local scooter, fly into Vietnam, better example, and then just buy a motorcycle. Probably a scooter cuz I prefer scooters locally and then just hop on it and drive around the country for 2 months. When your visa expires, you know, you just hand it over to somebody here. Hey, you want a scooter? What? I don’t know if there’s any licensing involved or permits, whatever. Hand over all of that and say, “Here you go.” And you leave and then you fly to Cambodia, land in Phnom Penh, and then you just go down to the local market and buy a scooter there. And then wherever you go in the world, every new country, just buy a local scooter. Very lowkey, low-powered, 125cc. Use that to travel around the country. And when you’re done, you just park it, give it to somebody, hand over the keys, hop in the plane, go to the next country. If I had enough money, I think it seems like that would be an amazing way to travel. The best of all worlds. You have your own transportation, but none of the hassles of ownership and permits and licenses. And only certain countries would allow you to do that. Of course, you couldn’t fly into Canada, buy a motorcycle, and then just go riding. You know that in Canada, you have to have all the proper paperwork and insurance and license plate and everything, ownership papers. Otherwise, yeah, you’re going to be pulled over and they’re going to impound your motorcycle. But in a lot of countries, yeah, you can still like Myanmar, I did it. Thailand, I did it. Yeah, Philippines, any of these countries, Vietnam, you can just show up, buy a scooter, and then take your chances, just go driving. Yeah. So, that’s one change I would make in my life, I think. But other than that, I don’t think I would change much else. Yeah. Where would I live? In my low-budget hotel rooms, in all kinds of different countries. That’s pretty much what I would do at this point, though. With unlimited money. You know, I might fold in more experiences because there are lots of things I wouldn’t mind doing that on a low-budget income you can’t afford to do. Maybe certain like physical activities, say scuba diving is very expensive. I wouldn’t in my lifetime. I I was talking about this just the other day where long time ago I managed to scrape together like $300. I mean this was decades ago and I took a course in skydiving. This was like way back in my university days and I wanted to go skydiving. So, I signed up for a course where they train you in skydiving and then you get to do all these jumps during the training course and at the end of the course you’re a certified skydiver and then you can take some jumps and jump out of a plane falling, pull the cord, parachute to the ground. So, I did that, but then I could never afford to do it as a hobby. So, I never did it again. And I did the same thing with hang gliding. Scrape together a couple hundred dollars or $300, whatever it was, and I did an intense like 4-day weekend hang-gliding retreat where I was trained to become a hang glider and I learned how to do it and I got all this certification. I passed the course and did a bit of hang gliding. Never did it again after that cuz I can’t afford to. I mean, it’s expensive. It’s an expensive hobby. Parasailing, things like that. I I got became a certified scuba diver and did the course, learned how to scuba dive, went scuba diving, and then never went scuba diving again because I can’t afford it. Never never had an income where, you know, once a year you go skiing, once a year you go on your hang-gliding trip, your skydiving trip, your scuba diving trip, those are all very expensive hobbies. So, you know, if you if you go to a country like the Philippines, which has some of the most amazing reefs and sea life in the world and you have the money to do it, well, why not indulge in a little bit of scuba diving from time to time? So, I might do things like that. Maybe even try wingsuit flying. I’ve always wanted to try that. You know, the guys that just jump off. There’s no, you know, not skydiving or hang gliding, but you’re actually flying with a wingsuit. And then you pull the parachute cord at the very end just for landing. But again, that that would take money to do and you want some pretty serious health insurance to do that. Though then again, if you’re wingsuit flying and something goes wrong, chances are you’re dead. You probably don’t even need health insurance for that hobby. You know, you’re trying to thread through a cliff and you miss and you hit the cliff. Well, you’re not surviving anyway, so you probably don’t need health insurance for wingsuit flying, but for hang gliding, some good health insurance would be nice.

So, question 21. Yep. Second to last. The lighthouse hunter, it seems like you have visited many museums in Melaka. So, please shortlist five museums that are your favorites. One more thing, since that you always ask your AI buddy to help you in certain things, why not ask your AI buddy to generate the best thumbnail for your videos? In terms of the best museums that my experience in Melaka, there’s not really one that I would recommend because all of them seem to fall short. My dream would be to have like one museum that lays out the entire history of Melaka in chronological order that goes over everything so that when you leave the museum, you have enough knowledge to understand the things you see around you when you go out into the physical city. And I didn’t see any museum like that. But setting aside the dream museum, the ones that I enjoyed the most or that I thought were the most valuable are kind of the obvious ones, there’s the biggest one, the history and ethnography museum in the Stadthuys. That would be a recommendation. You kind of have to go there. And then yeah, they have a lot of exhibits there to work your way through. There is the Flor de la Mar. That’s like the Samudera Museum. It’s like the maritime museum. And it has three different museums in one. You see the ship, then there’s a maritime museum, then there’s the Malaysian Navy Museum, the Royal Malaysian Navy. It’s all three together. But even for that museum, you kind of have to do your research before you go there to even understand what you’re looking at. But that’s another one. That would be number two, the Sultanate Palace. Of course, it’s unique. It is not just a museum, but it is a reconstruction of the original Sultanate Palace. And to understand all of that helps you really understand Melaka, the well well, okay, Zheng He Museum, there’s the Cheng Ho Museum right in the Chinatown district. That I think is would be my number four. And again though, you kind of have to go there knowing why the sky is important before you get the me the most value out of the museum. And then for number five, yeah, it’s kind of a tossup. I was going to say the Independence Memorial, but to be honest, that is more about Malaysia than Melaka specifically. So if if you want to know if you want to get an overview of Malaysia, then Independence Memorial, but if you’re thinking about Melaka in particular, not so much. From number five, yeah, I think I would have to throw in the submarine museum, but again with the caveat that you know what it is before you go there. I remember watching a video from another YouTuber traveling around Malaysia on a motorcycle and he stopped by to see the submarine museum and he he filmed it pretty in-depth video but all he did was walk through it as a submarine. He didn’t know what it meant. It never came up because when you go to the museum, the submarine itself, unless you’re paying real attention, reading everything and putting things together, you don’t know its historical significance. But once you know its significance, then you can place it in Malaysian history. And that connects a lot of subjects together. Including that doesn’t have a lot to do with Melaka to be honest, the submarine museum. They just put it there because it was a convenient place, you know, somewhere to put it. But again, if you think of Melaka as a maritime center of trade, everything to do with the ocean, the Melaka Strait, then the submarine kind of connects with that. But you kind of have to know what the submarine is before you go there. But yeah, that would be that would be number five, I think.

Oh, AI. Why not ask my AI buddy to make the best thumbnail? Yeah, I talked about that already where an AI thumbnail usually looks like an AI thumbnail. It you you spot it instantly and it looks fake. You you just read it instantly. Oh yeah, that’s that’s AI generated thumbnail. And that’s a particular problem for videos like mine because as I talk about, I think their main value is in the fact that everything in my one of my videos is real. Someone might watch one of my videos and the reason they enjoy it is because they know me and I’m experiencing it and they’re seeing things through my eyes and if you slap a fake AI generated thumbnail on top of it, it just really is jarring. It’s just like, oh, that doesn’t fit the tone of of this video at all. I mean, if you could get an AI to create a thumbnail that’s still real, like instead of building it myself, I could take a screenshot from my video. So, an actual moment from the video and use that as the thumbnail, but then use the AI to put in the text and stuff like that, like just tell it the words. Oh, can you insert these words here in the top right hand corner and make them blue and give it a white background? You know, the graphic design of it. If you could get the AI to do that. Yeah. And then you just upload all the elements like you decide, okay, I want to use this screenshot and I want to crop in to here, put these words here, and put this element here. And you upload all those elements and you tell the AI assemble this. Yeah, that would be fine. It would you would basically be making the same thumbnail that I would make naturally except I normally do everything manually myself. I have to take the screenshot. I’ve got to zoom in. I’ve got to adjust the colors and I’ve got to put in a text box and write the words and expand it, change the colors. And that’s not such a big deal. But if you could do it, you know, instantly with an AI, yeah, then it would be okay. But I wouldn’t want to use AI just to say, you know, tell the AI, oh, I rode my bicycle along the coast of Malaysia and there was a beautiful sunset and a beach and this and that and a traditional Malaysian house on stilts. Can you make an AI showing that image? And it would put together a fake perfect sunset with a traditional Malay house on stilts. Me on my bicycle looking dramatic and heroic. Yeah. Then it would look absolutely fake because I know that during the day of cycling I never would have been in such a perfect scenic setting. You know that you can tell it’s just not real. So yeah, I wouldn’t want to do that.

Last question.

It’s kind of a repeat, I guess. Question 22. What’s your next destination after Malaysia? Any plan to resume your cycling tour to the east coast? My suggestion is to do it in stages if single marathon is too tiring for you. So, pretty quick answer, I guess. Yes, I plan on resuming my cycling tour to the east coast. That should be getting underway momentarily. And after Malaysia, I don’t know. I don’t have a next destination after Malaysia. That depends on a variety of circumstances. I honestly have no clue what’s going to happen after Malaysia. And my suggestion is to do it in stages. My cycling yeah, I don’t really need to do it in stages. It isn’t really the cycling as a physical difficulty like a physical challenge that is why I haven’t done it so far. It’s just I I just keep getting distracted with other things that I want to do. And then I got interested in the history of Melaka. So it had nothing to do with the physical effort of cycling that why I didn’t start it yet. And then I would actually have no trouble at all cycling. Like I don’t need to take breaks, but the problem is cycling and editing video. That’s kind of hard. Like I’ve gone on cycling trips in the past that were pretty long. Like I cycled across Canada and when I’m in the groove I would cycle every day. So like in Canada, I’m not I’m not like a huge athlete or anything, but I would ride 100 110 kilometers every day and then I would do it for 20 days in a row, 30 days in a row. And you know, after 20 days, you ride 100 kilometers every single day for 20 days. And now you’ve covered 2,000 km. And if that’s all you’re doing, it’s really not that hard to do. You you get into a routine. If you’re camping out, as I did in Canada, you wake up at sunrise early, first thing in the morning. You wake up, cook your breakfast at your tent, have a cup of coffee, pack up, you ride for 3 hours, you know, doing 20 km, like 15 km an hour for 3 hours. There’s 45, 50 km right there. You stop for lunch, ride for 3 or 4 hours in the afternoon. As the sun goes down, you set up your tent, cook spaghetti at your tent, have dinner, go to sleep. As soon as the sun goes down, you wake up at dawn, and away you do. Away you go. It’s an effortless day, and you could do it every day for the rest of your life without any difficulty at all. So, there’s no need really. It doesn’t have the same feeling as a marathon where, oh man, this is so hard and that you struggle to get to the end. You might ride four 5,000 kilometers across Canada, but you’re not doing it as a marathon where you start and then all the way to the end. You do it one day at a time. So, every night is a break. You ride all day and then climb in your tent, ride, ride. If that’s all you’re doing, you could ride your bike every day, 365 days a year, do a 100 kilometers a day, and yeah, wouldn’t be wouldn’t be hard at all. Yeah, it really not physically anyway. You might get a little bit bored, but physically you could do that forever without any problems. You don’t really need to take a break. So, not if you’re bike touring like that. The problem for me will probably come in with cycling and then well, you can’t cycle and edit at the same time. So, I would have to take a day off to edit the video. That’s that’s the harder thing to combine with cycling. Then you do have to take a break just so you can stop, start editing the video and posting videos from your trip.

And that brings me to the end of all the questions people submitted for the June July Planet Doug ask me anything video. Apologies as always for going on for so long. It’s just sort of what happens. I comfort myself with the idea that well there are chapter headings for each question and they should list you know the subject of the question and you can use the built-in YouTube menu system to jump ahead to the next question once I start going off on tangents. But at the same time, yeah, it’s a special bonus video I just want to throw out there and I love answering these questions. I love telling stories. I really like the question about my mother and father, how they came from the Netherlands. That opened up all kinds of ideas and thoughts and yeah, so I just let myself talk about that topic for as long as it felt natural and I think I just I think I spent 40 minutes answering that one question. So yeah, that’s just how things go on Planet Doug. So that is it. Shutting down the June July ask me anything video for Planet Doug and I will see you in the next one.