YouTube: BTS Podcast: Changing Hotels; Tech Issues; Travel Vloggers (October 1, 2026)

VIDEO SUMMARY:

• Sometimes paying more is less about luxury and more about survival. Moving from the brutally hot hostel to the M Candy Hotel has made a huge difference to my sleep, energy, work, and general ability to function.
• I’m increasingly fascinated by how much of YouTube is engineered. From heavily scripted motorcycle travel videos to apparently AI-generated personal vlogs, there is a growing gap between experiencing something and manufacturing the story of that experience.
• Melaka still seems to have an endless supply of stories that aren’t being told. My latest experiment—29 imaginary “Planet Doug invisible signs”—was basically my way of pointing out all the places where I think historical information is missing.
• And then there are the little technical battles that make up everyday life on Planet Doug: a mouse that doesn’t quite like my bedsheet, a GoPro microphone that may finally have been diagnosed, and an Olympus camera that seems determined to make everything unnecessarily complicated.

The Hotel Move Was More Important Than I Realized

One of the biggest changes in my life recently has been moving out of the cheap hostel where I had been staying and into the M Candy Hotel.

On paper, it was a fairly simple trade-off: roughly 20 ringgit for the hostel versus something closer to 45–50 ringgit once the hotel’s taxes and fees were included.

But the difference wasn’t really 30 ringgit.

The difference was sleeping properly, having air conditioning, having a private bathroom, having enough light to work, having somewhere to put my equipment, and not sitting in a puddle of my own sweat every night.

The hostel had become so hot that my clothes and bedding were constantly damp, and I was starting to worry about the effect of the humidity on my camera equipment and everything else I own. At some point, the savings simply weren’t worth the physical and mental cost.

And the funny thing is that I’m now appreciating the hotel precisely because I spent time living in the hostel.

If this room had been my normal baseline, I would probably complain about the broken electrical outlet, the slightly temperamental bedside lamp or the tiny television. Instead, I walked into the lobby and practically thought I had arrived at Disneyland.

“Wow. They have a lobby.”

You Can’t Always Judge a Place—or a Person—Instantly

The move also produced an unexpected lesson about the owner of the hostel.

I had always found him rather intimidating and unfriendly. He rarely looked up when I entered, didn’t seem interested in conversation and generally gave me the impression that he would rather I wasn’t there.

Then, when I checked out, something bizarre happened.

The same man suddenly became incredibly friendly. He asked where I was going, why I was leaving, whether there was a problem with the room, where I had travelled in Malaysia and what I thought of the country.

I was practically thinking: Where was this guy hiding for the last several weeks?

It reminded me that there is a difference between being unfriendly and simply not having a natural customer-service personality. Some people instinctively greet strangers with a smile and a “How can I help you?” Others apparently need a button pushed before the friendly version of themselves appears.

It was a useful reminder not to put too much weight on a first impression.

Every Hostel Has That Guy

There was another character I was actually rather happy to leave behind: the permanent hostel resident.

Every hostel seems to have one.

He’s the guy who appears to live there permanently, sits in the common area for hours, smokes constantly and spends an astonishing amount of time shouting into his telephone.

I have encountered versions of this guy for decades.

And I still don’t understand what these people are talking about.

I rarely make telephone calls myself. If I call someone, the conversation is generally something like:

“We’re meeting at two? Okay. See you there.”

Done.

But this guy could spend hours shouting into his phone. Every day. So I started wondering whether he was secretly negotiating international mergers, fighting ten lawsuits simultaneously or running some enormous multinational corporation from a wooden bench in a hostel stairwell.

I never found out.

The smoke, unfortunately, did make its way up the stairs and into my room, so I was quite happy to say goodbye to the resident telephone negotiator.

The Invisible Signs of Melaka

One of the more unusual Planet Doug videos I’ve been working on is the idea of “invisible signs.”

As I’ve explored more and more of Melaka, I’ve noticed how many places seem to have fascinating historical stories but very little information actually explaining them to visitors.

So I decided to put up imaginary signs.

Not real signs, obviously. I simply stand at a location and say, essentially, there should be a historical information sign here.

I ended up with 29 of them.

The main bridge across the Melaka River is a perfect example. Most people understandably see it as simply a bridge between Dutch Square and Jonker Walk. But that bridge has played an important role in the history and development of the city, including its strategic importance during the Portuguese conquest.

And once I started looking for missing stories, I couldn’t stop.

Bridges. Buildings. Streets. Fortifications. Places around Dutch Square. Jonker Walk. St. Paul’s Hill. Everywhere I went, I kept thinking: There should be a sign here.

The interesting thing was that I initially worried I was simply repeating information from my earlier videos.

But when I started talking through all those subjects again, new ideas emerged. Sometimes revisiting something you’ve already researched from a different angle reveals another layer that you didn’t notice the first time.

And importantly, I’m not pretending that every story I encountered is settled history. Some stories clearly need better documentation. In those cases, my imaginary sign is deliberately just a placeholder: there’s an interesting story here; somebody should investigate it properly.

The Video That Probably Isn’t Going to Happen

Then there’s St. Peter’s Church.

I really wanted to make a video about it. I tried several times.

The first time I went on a Monday and discovered that the church was closed.

The second time I went on a Sunday, despite checking the opening hours, only to discover that a service was taking place. To make matters worse, the service was being broadcast through loudspeakers outside the church.

So there was no way I was going to record a usable narration.

Then I planned a third attempt.

And by that point I had just moved into the hotel.

I was sitting in a comfortable, air-conditioned room with a pile of videos waiting to be edited and thought:

Why am I going back out into the heat to shoot another video when I could actually get some work done here?

And I stayed.

The St. Peter’s story is still interesting, particularly because it fits into the larger story I’ve been exploring about religion in Melaka: Portuguese Catholicism, Dutch Protestantism, the suppression and eventual relaxation of religious restrictions, and the relationship between religious communities and trade.

But sometimes a video simply doesn’t happen.

How Much of YouTube Is Actually Real?

This led naturally into one of the most fascinating YouTube rabbit holes I’ve fallen into recently.

I came across a Brazilian woman making videos about living alone in Malaysia in her 30s. Her videos were getting surprisingly large numbers of views.

But something felt strange.

Her first video used her real voice. Then, beginning with the next videos, the narration suddenly sounded like a computer-generated voice. The scripts also became increasingly polished, repetitive and philosophical.

The same ideas kept appearing:

Being alone is okay.

You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going.

You’re learning about yourself.

You can take things one step at a time.

And then, inevitably:

One step at a time.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I became curious enough to feed some of the scripts into AI systems and ask whether they sounded AI-generated. The responses were essentially: Yes. This is exactly the sort of thing I would generate.

What fascinated me wasn’t simply whether AI had been used.

It was the mismatch between the narration and the actual footage.

A video might show a major Malaysian celebration with thousands of people, fireworks and music, while the narration talks about the joy of wandering around and discovering the small, unexpected pleasures of an ordinary day.

Or she might deliberately visit a famous attraction while the narration describes the experience as though she wandered there without knowing what she would find.

The video is real.

The words are plausible.

But the relationship between the two is artificial.

And that raises a much bigger question about where personal vlogging is heading.

The old YouTube daily vlog was often chaotic, awkward and completely unpolished. You simply watched somebody’s life unfold.

We’re increasingly moving toward something else: highly engineered personal stories that feel spontaneous without necessarily being spontaneous at all.

And apparently, audiences don’t mind.

In fact, they may love it.

The Motorcycle Vlog That Feels Like a Commercial

I’ve been noticing a similar phenomenon in more conventional travel channels.

Some professional motorcycle travel vloggers have become so polished that the actual journey almost feels secondary to the commercial machinery surrounding it.

There are sponsors, products, Patreon promotions, tours, affiliate links and carefully constructed dramatic narration.

I recently watched a motorcycle sequence where the riders appeared to spontaneously discover a beautiful beach and decided to ride along it.

Except when you look at the footage carefully, you realize how much planning went into that supposedly spontaneous moment.

There are different camera positions.

Helmet footage.

Handlebar footage.

Shots from the beach.

Drone footage.

Multiple passes.

It’s not spontaneous anymore. It’s a production.

And that’s not necessarily bad. It’s just a completely different form of travel video from what I do.

My videos are often deliberately messy because I want the viewer to experience the day rather than watch a reconstruction of the day.

That’s one reason I’m increasingly interested in these other channels. I’m not necessarily recommending them. I’m studying them.

Every time I watch somebody else’s travel video, I find myself asking:

Why did they make that choice?

Why did that title work?

Why did they cut that scene?

Why did they narrate that moment that way?

What part of this actually happened, and what part was created later to make a better story?

The Mystery of “Ad-Free” Patreon Videos

Another YouTube mystery remains unsolved in my mind.

I keep seeing creators offer ad-free videos as a Patreon benefit.

But how exactly are they doing this?

Are they uploading another copy of the video to Patreon?

Are they uploading an unlisted, non-monetized copy to YouTube and giving Patreon members the link?

If so, how does that work with YouTube’s systems for detecting duplicate videos?

And more importantly, does “not monetized” actually mean “ad-free”?

I’ve personally seen YouTube put advertisements on videos that I wasn’t monetizing. So simply turning monetization off doesn’t necessarily seem to solve the problem.

I actually started experimenting with this myself by making a shorter version of one of my Melaka history videos and preparing it as a possible Patreon-only bonus.

But there is a significant amount of work involved in producing another version of every video.

And that’s the problem.

For a large professional channel, perhaps the economics make sense.

For Planet Doug, I’m not sure they do.

A New Mouse and a Very Planet Doug Problem

On the technology front, I’ve also replaced my ancient Logitech M720 Triathlon mouse with an M650L.

I never wanted to replace the M720. I was perfectly happy with it.

It broke.

So I had to.

Naturally, I assumed the particular version I wanted would be impossible to find.

Instead, I walked into the first store I visited in Melaka and discovered that the exact model I wanted was basically the only decent mouse they had.

For once, the Planet Doug shopping curse worked in reverse.

The new mouse is working well, although it has one interesting problem: it doesn’t seem to like the bedsheet in my new hotel room.

The old mouse worked perfectly on practically any surface. The new one occasionally glitches on this particular bedsheet.

So now I’m using my tablet as a makeshift mouse pad.

You can probably see why I don’t buy technology simply because a reviewer says something is “great.”

Reviewers don’t test the things I actually do.

Who tests whether a mouse works properly on a bedsheet while you’re sitting on a hotel bed with a laptop and a tablet beside you?

Apparently, nobody.

I Think I’ve Finally Solved the GoPro Audio Problem

I’ve also been dealing with mysterious audio problems on my GoPro.

Sometimes the microphone worked perfectly. Other times there was crackling, buzzing or complete loss of audio.

After a lot of detective work, I think I’ve finally figured it out.

The door on my Media Mod is broken, so I use a rubber band to hold it closed.

Inside the Media Mod is a USB-C connector that plugs directly into the GoPro. If the camera isn’t pushed completely into the Media Mod, that connection can work loose.

And because the broken door isn’t properly holding everything in place, walking around all day and shaking the camera may eventually disconnect it.

That would explain everything.

So now I’m deliberately pushing the GoPro firmly into place, making sure the connection is seated properly and tightening the rubber band.

Since doing that, the audio problems appear to have disappeared.

Sometimes the most complicated technical problem has an embarrassingly simple explanation.

Cameras Are Still Designed for Photographers

Which brings me back to the Olympus camera I used to record this episode.

It’s a much more sophisticated camera than the GoPro.

And that’s exactly the problem.

It has hundreds of settings, complicated menus, autofocus behaviour I don’t fully understand, a battery that can’t be used indefinitely from USB power, a recording limit, and even a recording indicator that gets partially blocked by the external microphone cable.

At one point I discovered that the autofocus box disappears as soon as I start recording.

Ironically, that turned out to be useful.

If the camera stops recording, the autofocus box comes back.

So instead of having a proper recording indicator, I can occasionally glance at the screen and think:

“Oh. The white box is back. I’m not recording.”

It’s a terrible solution.

But it works.

And that pretty much summarizes my relationship with this camera.

The Olympus produces nicer footage, but the GoPro is dramatically easier to live with.

Sometimes the best camera isn’t the one with the best specifications.

It’s the one that doesn’t make you think about the camera.

And Then There Is Television

Finally, I’ve been watching a few shows.

I’m enjoying Dark Matter, but I strongly disliked the latest episode because it spent an entire episode following a relatively minor character instead of advancing the main story.

It’s a beautifully made episode. It’s thoughtful, unusual and technically impressive.

I just didn’t care.

When a season has only ten episodes, I don’t want one of them to wander off into the wilderness.

I’m also still watching Lanterns, although I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of what I call the Lindelof Effect: introducing strange, mysterious things that look enormously important and then discovering later that they didn’t actually mean anything.

I’m perfectly happy with mystery.

What I don’t like is mystery without payoff.

Give me something complicated like Dark, where I may need a notebook to keep track of the characters and timelines, but where eventually everything connects.

I don’t mind working for my entertainment.

I just want the work to be worth it.

And I’ve also started The Fall of the House of Usher, which currently has far too many wealthy, dysfunctional family members for me to keep straight.

So I’m probably going to need that notebook again.

A Couple of Thoughts That Stuck With Me

“Sometimes the best camera isn’t the one with the best specifications. It’s the one that doesn’t make you think about the camera.”

And perhaps the larger lesson from the hotel move:

You don’t necessarily appreciate comfort until you’ve gone without it for a while.

After several weeks of heat, poor sleep and working in increasingly uncomfortable conditions, sitting in a quiet, air-conditioned hotel room suddenly feels like an enormous luxury.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning and welcome to a Planet Doug behind the scenes video for Thursday, October 1st, 2026. And this morning I’m using my Olympus camera. I have it set up on a tripod at the end of the bed. So it’s very very far away from me. And it feels weird because lately I’ve been doing it with my GoPro. And when I shoot this kind of video with the GoPro, it pretty much sits right here. It has to be this close to me. So, it’s like right in front of my face. But now the Olympus is so far away. I feel like whoever might be listening to me is like so far away. But it really makes no difference in reality. But the Olympus is a far more complex camera than a GoPro action camera, obviously. So, there’s like a thousand more ways to make a mistake in the settings. And one big advantage to using the GoPro is that I can plug in a USB-C cable and power it without a battery. And that means you don’t have to worry about the battery running out, which is kind of nice. And with the Olympus, I can’t do that. You can’t run it off a wall socket and record at the same time. That doesn’t work. I tried it in the past and the batteries don’t last very long and also the screen is not very clear. So, the battery can run out and I have no idea the battery died because there’s no indicator like no clear signal anywhere that the battery has died. So, anyway, the Olympus is a lot trickier to use in this situation. And hopefully everything works out. The timing might be a bit odd for a behind-the-scenes video because I just put out the notice about the Planet Doug ask me anything video asking people if they have any questions for me and then I record that video once all the questions have been submitted. But that’s a completely different topic. People ask me specific things and I’m answering their questions even though I’m sitting down like this in front of the camera and just talking behind the scenes. Of course, I’m talking about just the random things going on in my life. The stories of behind the scenes of shooting the Planet Doug videos that I’ve posted recently. And I like to talk about other YouTubers, particularly travel vloggers. I seem to end up focusing on people that are traveling by bicycle or motorcycle for some reason, but then I also talk about other vloggers as well, and I talk about pop culture stuff. So, it’s like a whole range of topics, whatever is on my mind. So, yeah, I just put out the notice asking for questions for the AMA video, and I’d like to give it a couple of days to give people time to notice and then submit their questions. And I’ll probably record that tomorrow morning. And I’m recording this inside my room at the M Candy Hotel, which is another reason I’m using the Olympus because at my old place, the hostel, there wasn’t enough room to set it up. It was like I have to put it on a tripod, which means I have to put the tripod on the ground at the end of the bed. The GoPro, I can put it on the mattress and it doesn’t really matter, mainly because of the stabilization is so good. And it’s not as top-heavy. So, even if I’m moving around on the bed and the GoPro is moving from side to side, it’s okay and it’s not going to fall over. But if I try to do that with the Olympus, I can’t put the Olympus on the mattress because it’ll just fall over. It’s too top-heavy. It’s a much bigger and heavier camera. So but at the hostel that room was so small, there wasn’t enough room between the bed and the wall to put the tripod. Like I have a small tripod, but the feet of it couldn’t fit into that space. So I couldn’t even set up the tripod in that room even if I wanted to. But this is a real hotel room, so I’ve got lots of space everywhere. Things work out well. And I think that is going to be the first topic in my behind-the-scenes video coming up next. Kind of the story of moving from that hostel to this hotel. I actually shot a video during the move, but I’ll try not to repeat the stories from that video too much and it’s not a very good video as I’ll talk about once I start the first section of this behind-the-scenes video.

Yeah, I just remembered that with this Olympus, the red recording light, it doesn’t actually have a light, which is a big problem with this Olympus. It’s one of the many features that’s missing. It doesn’t have a flashing red light on the front to tell you that it’s recording. It only has like a red circle on the LCD screen, but when you plug in an external microphone, the cord covers up the red circle. It’s in the top left-hand corner. So, you know, the Olympus engineers, the designers missed that. You know, they should have been testing this in every situation. And then someone should have pointed out, hey guys, I just plugged in a microphone and now it covers up the recording signal. Can we move it to the other corner? That would have solved the problem if it was in the right-hand corner instead of the left. But now I have to lean way over here, kind of look behind it. Okay, there’s the red light. I can see a tiny tiny red dot flashing in the top left-hand corner, but it’s covered up by the microphone cord. So, yeah, that’s just like one of the hundreds of things that camera designers can overlook. It’s they’re such complex beasts. But anyway, that’s another rant. I mean, when I could go on and on and on about how the camera industry has had over a decade now, how many years has it been since this kind of YouTube vlogging has become popular? They’ve had many, many years. And as far as I’m concerned, they still have not made a proper vlogging camera. None of them have. The closest is, of course, the Pocket series from DJI. I mean, that’s a camera that the vlogging community has embraced, but it does not fit my workflow. It’d be perfect for this. That would be an amazing camera for this situation, though. The Insta360 Luna Ultra, they made that one, right? The Luna that can give it a run for its money because the Luna has that amazing feature where the entire LCD screen and the controls detaches from the camera. And that’s that, you know, I’ve seen so many reviewers comparing the new DJI Pocket 4 with I think the Insta360 Luna Ultra. Is that the name of it? I wasn’t intending to talk about this, so I don’t have these names in my head, but I think that’s the comparison they’re doing. And I think most of them would conclude, okay, the Pocket 4 has the edge as the better camera, but then they always go back to that detachable screen and say, but I would still buy this one. I would buy the Luna Ultra just because of that screen. And all of these professional YouTubers, they all say that. They say, “Well, I wasn’t sure whether it would be just a gimmick, but as soon as I started using that camera, I detach the LCD screen all the time.” And I would do that here if I was recording with the Luna Ultra. I’d have it set up over there and then I would have the screen over here and I could see it quite clearly. Oh, okay, I’m framed, the exposure is right, and I can change all the settings right here without having to get up and walk over to the camera. Anyway, that is the closest camera, I think, to a vlogging camera. But of course, it doesn’t work for me because you can’t really mount it on a bicycle. I can’t really walk around in a market, a busy street using that camera. But inside cafes, inside restaurants, inside a hotel room, that a Pocket or the Luna Ultra could replace this Olympus beautifully. And it would, you know, it’s like super small and lightweight. So, that would be a big advantage. But the one thing they never cover in the reviews, no one I’ve never been able to find out whether those cameras you can plug them in and record at the same time because I remember years ago I had a Pocket 2 and I never ended up using it very much, but I tried to use it for recording behind-the-scenes podcasts and it wouldn’t work because the battery didn’t last. So, the battery would die after about 45 minutes. And now I have to switch to another camera. So, if I could have plugged the Pocket 2 into a power source like I can with the GoPro in USB-C cord and then just run it for hours, then it would have been pretty pretty good. It would have been perfect. Then I would have kept that camera just for that purpose. But I don’t know whether they’ve changed that. I don’t know whether the Pocket 4 or whether the Ultra Insta360 Luna whether you can plug in USB-C power and just record running off of that power. I don’t know whether that’s possible. Okay, that wasn’t supposed to be the topic. The topic is moving hotels. And I just remembered that I also posted a long article, an essay about it on the Planet Doug Patreon. And then I put a link to that, a little summary on YouTube, the community posts page. Yeah, that’s an interesting little struggle for me to this day because YouTube is not very good at laying out text. They created a feature called community and it seems like they want to develop an area on your YouTube channel where you can interact with your viewers where people can post things themselves and you can upload photos and links and things like that like an actual interactive like a Patreon page basically. But they haven’t developed it at all. So, every time I want to write something that’s long and insert photos, I can’t do it on YouTube anyway. So, I do it on Patreon and then I copy and paste my Patreon post to my website. I put it on the Planet Doug blog as well and then I do a little summary and post that summary to YouTube posts. So, they end up like three copies of it out there. The short one on YouTube, the full story on Patreon. So I wrote a long story I think about moving from that hostel to here. And the basic idea of course is the hostel room is cheap but very uncomfortable, very very hot in particular. That was the biggest problem. And then of course you have a shared bathroom all those problems. And then I got to the point where I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was really falling apart because of the heat, the lack of sleep, because it’s so hard to sleep when you’re sweating. I would be sitting on my bed in the hostel at night editing a video on my laptop and even with the door open trying to get some nighttime air to flow in. It would be so hot that the bed sheets would be soaked with sweat underneath me and the pillows would be soaked with sweat. So then I would. Yeah. Then you finally turn off your laptop, you’re just lying in a pool of your own sweat and that it’s just oh, it’s so icky. And then you have to wait for everything to dry. And yeah, it was pretty bad. So it was time to I needed a break and my clothing was soaked with sweat all the time. Starting to get moldy. All of my camera gear, everything I own, I could feel it was starting to suffer. So, I ended up moving and I found this hotel, the M Candy Hotel, which online on a weekday they had this room, a queen, a standard queen, big room, tons of space, really nice bed, furniture, private bathroom, hot water, good air conditioning, perfectly quiet, lots of light. That was another problem with the hostel. The room is so dark because they put in a tiny like 20 watt bulb way up on the ceiling and it’s just so gloomy in there. You can see I think in the video just how bright it is in here. It’s just such a nice environment to live in. And during the weekday it would cost yeah like 32 ringgit but then by the time you added all the taxes it would be about 50 ringgit. So you the price was two and a half times higher than the hostel by the time you factor in the tourism tax, heritage tax, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, you go I go from 20 ringgit to 50 ringgit for this room. And then on the weekend it jumps up higher than that. So, by the time you’re done on a weekend, this room could be 60 to 70 ringgit depending on when you get it because the price goes way up and down, weekday, weekend, things like that. But anyway, I decided to move during the week. And originally, I was only going to stay two nights. I booked two nights, but then I booked a third, then I booked a fourth, then I booked a fifth. So, I think I’m on my third night right now as I’m recording this. And it has been really, really nice. It’s so comfortable. Yeah. I got some feedback on YouTube from people who were so happy that I moved out of the hostel because they were feeling bad for me about how horrible that place was. And the general tone is why in the world would anybody stay in such a horrible place? But at the same time, it is nice to get the contrast. That is something I’ve noticed in life. Like if you stayed in hotels like this all the time, you wouldn’t appreciate it, right? You just accept it as your baseline and then you would probably end up getting annoyed at small things in a room like this. You wouldn’t really you would just accept it as your new normal. So it is nice to get out of your comfort zone, stay in a hostel like that. It’s like it’s like a throwback to the bad old days of backpacking where you always had a shared bathroom, you know, cold water, bucket baths, no air conditioning. I mean, air conditioning was unheard of back in the years when I first came to Southeast Asia, air conditioning was in hotels and backpackers. We couldn’t afford to stay in hotels, so air conditioning was just a dream. This was back in the days before, you know, before we even had internet and smartphones, right? There was no Wi-Fi or anything like that. Everybody was traveling with a Lonely Planet guide book to find their way.

But the difference is back in those days, the rooms were designed for fans. So even though it was a room without air conditioning, it wasn’t designed to have air conditioning. So it would have like a airflow, it would be cool enough to sleep, windows to the outside world, things like that. These rooms today, like even at the hostel, that room is supposed to be air conditioned. It was designed for air conditioning, windowless interior, like there’s no air flow of any kind. But then if the air conditioner breaks, which is what happened in my room, then then it overheats because it was never meant to be a non-air conditioned room. Anyway, that makes any sense. The other funny thing, when I moved, I said this in the video, but then I think I deleted it because it turned out it wasn’t fair. The owner and manager of the hostel, the Discovery Guest House. I got the impression that he was a very unfriendly man. I only encountered him twice, I think. And he was just one of these guys that grunts and doesn’t make eye contact. Like when you he’d be at the they have this weird courtyard with this like a junk room and a desk in the junk room and that’s reception for that hotel and that hostel and I was always dealing with this young guy but this time when I went in there there was like an old man older man sitting behind the desk and I understood that he was the boss and then he was just kind of rummaging through some papers and things and I came in and he he didn’t look up like I walked in and I always wait to be acknowledged. I don’t walk into a business and then shout for attention. I wait to be noticed. So I walked into his office basically and he just kept doing what he was doing and I sat down in the chair and I’m just waiting politely for him to look up and say, “Oh, can I help you, sir?” You know, something. But he wouldn’t look up. He just sort of kept and I sat there and I sat there and I sat there and he just ignored me the whole time and then he finally, you know, kind of looked up and just grunted at me. And I got the impression like, “Oh, good grief.” You know, why am I staying at this place? And he behaved that way all the time. And then I said that in my video at the beginning, like one advantage moving to a hotel like this, there’s going to be nice people at the reception desk who look at you and or they’re paid like the receptionists at the front desk to greet guests, right? And I was looking forward to that. And I remember writing I think in my post I was like, “Oh, I hope they I hope they’re nice to me. I need a little bit of customer service here. I like to feel welcome when I show up at a place.” But then this time when I was checking out of the Discovery at the beginning, the same thing happened. I walked into the room to drop off my key and get my deposit back because you have to leave a 50 ringgit deposit, which again I always I always find ironic. The worst places tend to be the ones that ask for a deposit. And I wonder if that’s like a loop where people show up at this hostel. They feel like they’re treated like dirt, like they don’t get customer service things. Everything is broken. Anyway, they end up having a bad experience. So when they leave, they decide to break something out of revenge or they steal something or maybe the people that stay at a hostel tend to forget to return the key and they walk away with the key. So then maybe the guests, the whole atmosphere there lends itself to things in the room being broken, stolen, or people forgetting the key. So then the cheapest hotels are the ones that ask for a 50 ringgit or a 100 ringgit deposit. But it’s like they they shoot themselves in the foot by making the conditions where they need to ask for a deposit just to make sure that people return the key, right? And then you come to a nicer hotel, they don’t ask for a deposit. But anyway, at that place, I had I did leave a 50 ringgit deposit. I wanted to get it back. So, of course, I’m returning the key. And then it was the same older man behind the desk. Can I walk in? And and he looked really annoyed with me. He was busy. Grunted at me. Oh man, I can’t wait to leave this place. And then out of nowhere, he turned into Mr. Happy. I return the key. And then he said, “Oh, so where are you going today?” I was so startled. Like he talks, he asks questions, he makes eye contact, he smiles. I could not believe it. And he turned into the friendliest man I’ve encountered in weeks. He asked me all kinds of questions. Oh, so you Oh, you’re staying in Melaka. You’re just going to a new neighborhood. Oh, why is there is there a problem with your room? Is that why you’re leaving? And we have this conversation about how, you know, I need air conditioning. I need to recover pretty hot. He laughs about that. Says, “Oh, come on, man. You’ve been staying in that room for a long time without air conditioning. How come you can’t, you know, come on, just put up with it, you know?” And then he’s, “Oh, so where where have you been in Malaysia? What did you think of?” And you had this long friendly conversation. And I was thinking, “Where the heck was this guy all this time?” It was really weird. Out of nowhere, this really friendly, inquisitive, chatty man emerged out of this grumpy shell that I had encountered all the other times. So, yeah, that was kind of weird when it came to checking out.

And I did notice in the reviews online, you go to Google Maps or go to wherever you can find reviews of that place, a lot of people said, “Yeah, the owner is such a nice man. We went out for lunch together. We had such a great time.” And I kept thinking, “Oh, that must have been the previous owner, because not the guy I’ve been meeting, but it turns out it was probably the same guy. You just have to find the button to push that turns him on or something. Yeah, it was very very strange. It shows you you can’t judge people by their instant demeanor. And maybe that gets to like customer service training or something where if if I walk into a store and the clerk just stares at me, I feel like they’re unfriendly. They’re unhelpful. Like that that first impression is what I’m getting at. And my first impressions of this man were very very negative because he didn’t smile. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have that opening act of being friendly. But as soon as you get beyond that, suddenly he was super friendly. So he doesn’t have that training where he sees a guest walk in. It’s not his instinct to look up. Oh, hey. How are Yeah, welcome. What can I do for you? You know, what do you need? Or like anything, he just ignores you. It doesn’t mean he’s unfriendly. It doesn’t mean he’s not helpful. He just doesn’t have that customer service feeling in his body. He He’s just not that kind of guy. But I guess you can’t judge people based on first impressions or second. Those were my third impressions. And then I got here to the M Candy Hotel. Yeah, everything went pretty well. Again, it’s not a full-service real. So, when I walked into the reception area, I mean, when I first walked in, I was looking around like I was at Disneyland, like a kid in a candy shop compared to the hostel, because it was like, “Wow, they have this they they have a lobby. Wow.” And look, they have a refrigerator. I assume I could use the fridge if I wanted to. They have a microwave. They have a water dispenser. Oh, wow. This is a nice hotel. That was my original impression. But when I edited that video and now I’m looking at the video from the perspective a couple of days in the future, then I was noticing that they did they had a sofa, but the sofa was covered in a big pile of laundry, like clean sheets and towels and things, and there was piles of debris and junk all over the place. So like a normal person who booked a real hotel room for 100 200 ringgit per night, they would walk into this lobby at the M Candy and they would probably go, “Oh man, what a dump. Look at this place. It’s like the whole front lobby has been turned into a storage closet.” So it all comes down to your perspectives, right? I didn’t even notice all the junk and how everything was kind of old and worn out. I was just noticing, wow, they have a lobby and there’s a front desk, but also when I when I arrived and came into the lobby, there was nobody at the front desk, right? And that that doesn’t bother me at all because I know it’s a low-budget hotel and their front desk staff usually do five different jobs. They’re cleaning the hallways and the kitchen and the back rooms. They clean the guest rooms and they take care of the front desk. So, if there’s nobody at the front desk, that means they’re busy cleaning the rooms and getting them ready because they do both jobs. That’s how it goes at a low-budget hotel. So, I walked in and there’s nobody there. So, I just sat down on the sofa and I just waited until somebody showed up. But again, if somebody paid 150 ringgit to stay at a regular hotel, yeah, they’re expecting somebody to be at the front desk whenever they go down. But at this hotel, every time you go down to the lobby, there’s nobody there. And now they have a sign. There was like a paper on the counter that said, “We are busy cleaning the rooms. If you need assistance, call this number.” And normally I just hate that. I’m not I’m not getting on a phone and making a phone call and then trying to explain over the phone what I need. I just leave or I sit down and I wait until somebody notices me. So again, it is a low-budget hotel, so you’re not going to find staff at the front desk all the time. Little things are going to be broken like the you have to use a key card here to turn on the power. Luckily, it’s not a programmable card. They don’t have to keep resetting it at the front desk, but you do have to insert it. And that unit where you put it in, it broke. Like it’s hanging off the wall by its wires. And you know, you know that’s broken. There’s two electrical outlets in here. I was really happy to see them, but only one of them works. They have switches on them to turn on the power. One, the switch works. The second one, I’ve been fighting with it ever since I moved in there. The the button will not turn on the power. And there’s there is a very convenient light, a bed like a bed lamp where there’s a switch right here beside the bed and I can turn on and off this little light. It’s really really handy because you can turn off all the main lights in the room, climb into your bed, get nice and comfortable, everything’s organized, and then you can click turn off the bed light. And in the middle of the night, you wake up, instead of getting out of bed, stumbling around in the dark, tripping, falling, stubbing your toes, finding trying to find a light switch, they got a convenience switch right here. Click. And it’s a it’s not a bright light. It just kind of lights up the room for convenience and for safety. It’s a really amazing feature. Low-budget places tend not to have them. Hostels, of course, don’t have them. You’re lucky to get any lights at all in a hostile environment. But they do have it here, but most of the time it doesn’t work because it’s got a weird kind of light bulb, an old-fashioned weird thing, and you have to kind of shake it to get it to turn on. So, okay, it has that feature, but in the middle of the night when I turn on that switch, nothing. It doesn’t turn on. So, I actually I do have to kind of get out of the bed, go to that light, and kind of shake it and wiggle it and move it. Oh, and then it finally turns on. So, again, somebody paying 150 ringgit a night, yeah, they’re not going to put up with this stuff. They’re not, you pay that much, things like that can’t happen. And then you would tell the staff, “Oh, this is broken. This is broken. This is broken.” You would be unhappy. But me paying 30 base rate around 45-50 full rate and then on the weekend 60 to 70 full rate. You expect things to be broken and there is a TV on the wall here but it’s a tiny tiny little TV which of course for a person like me a YouTuber we’re not going to be watching TV anyway so I don’t care about the TV. But again, if you paid 150 a night, you’re expecting a much bigger flat screen TV, and you’re not going to get that here. So,

that is yeah, the environment and that’s what’s been going on here at the M Candy Hotel. I’m fully rested. I feel great. I feel fully energized. I had one last thought about the hostel versus hotel business and it strikes me as funny. Every hostel in the world has the same character living in it. And this hostel had its version of that guy. And every time I saw him, he made me smile because I feel like it’s the same guy that I’ve seen for the last 40 years of my life. Every hostel has a version of this guy who lives in the hostel permanently. He’s like he’s got a job, but he doesn’t have an apartment or a house. He lives in the hostel full-time. And these hostels might have a as this place does, there’s a stairway, and they put a little bench in the stairway and there’s two bathrooms there as well. And it’s the common area that that always made me laugh at the Discovery Guest House, too, because all of the common areas end up being smoking areas. That’s what they are. And they just become really disgusting because smokers just throw cigarette butts and cigarette ash everywhere. And in this place in particular, it got pretty bad because there was like one plastic garbage can there and everybody who smokes, they put out their cigarette on the plastic of the garbage can. So the whole garbage can, there’s like this lid at the front of it, whatever. It’s a flat surface. is just completely black with cigarette ash because that’s where they put out their cigarettes and then they throw them into the garbage or throw them on the floor or throw them in the toilet, you know, whatever whatever smokers do. And it’s a really funny area because all it is is a bench place where you put your shoes, like a little thing in the side, a cupboard, and a whole bunch of junk everywhere. It’s a really dirty area. And then it says on the wall do not eat or drink in your room. So you’re not allowed to have any food or drinks in your room. And it says if you know you can eat your meals here in the common area, right? It’s quite funny to read that sign and then look around you and say who like who is going to eat their meal out here for Pete’s sake? It’s pretty funny. It’s a really dirty area and I don’t I don’t know if it’s ever been cleaned. You look underneath as you go down the steps, your eyes eventually reach floor level and you can look under the floor underneath. You can look along the floor underneath the bench and just like thick layer of dirt and dust and garbage under there like nobody’s moving it and mopping and sweeping. But here you may eat your meals here. And I’m looking around going, how? I mean, normally that means there’s a table and a bunch of chairs and things like that, but okay. I guess you could eat a sandwich by sitting there if you wanted to, but that’s about it. But anyway, at the hostel, every time I went in and out, the same guy was always sitting there. And he sits there for hours. He smokes and he’s on his phone every day, hour after hour after hour. The same guy sitting on that bench and then he’s smoking, smoking, smoking. And he’s on his phone and he’s often shouting on his phone. And I really want to talk to this guy or all the similar people that I’ve seen in hostels around the world to ask him, “What are you talking about?” Because these conversations will go on for an hour or more at a time, and it sounds like he’s arguing constantly about something. And I don’t think he has a life that is so complicated that it has so many things he has to fight about with so many different people. I mean, I rarely make a phone call, but if I’m ever on the phone, it’s Oh, yeah. Hello. Oh, you’re right. Right. We’re meeting at 2, right? Okay. I’ll meet you at the door. Right. At the door of the restaurant. I’ll meet you there at 2. Okay. Good. Good. Okay. See you then. That’s it. I’m done. That’s what you use the phone for. This guy every day, all day, he’s on the phone and just shouting and shouting and shouting and arguing and shouting and arguing. Like, is he negotiating the merger of of mega corporations worldwide? I mean, is he in the middle of 10 lawsuits? Like, how is his life so complicated living here alone? It’s, you know, he’s by himself. He’s a single guy. How can he have so many friends, so many business partners, so many relatives that he has to be on the phone like 24 hours a day arguing with all of these people? Who is he talking to about what? I I’m so curious about that. But anyway, I was happy to say goodbye to him because he smoked all the time. And that common room was down on the first floor. My room was on the top floor, but the smoke from him still went up the stairs into my room all the time. So, I could smell his cigarette smoke all the time anyway. So, I’m I wasn’t sad to say goodbye to the the resident common area smoker shout who was just like always there. And like I said, every hostel in the world has their version of this guy. So, yeah, I’m very curious about him. I’d like to get his life story. I did start up a couple of conversations with him, hoping, yeah, we’d get to know each other a bit. We were the only two people staying there during the week. I was the only normal guest like a tourist and he was the resident living there, but he he wasn’t interested in a he wasn’t interested in getting to know me. So, we never really had a conversation.

Moving on to technology stories. The first one is kind of a quick topic, I think. I’ve noticed that a lot of YouTubers that have a Patreon, the one I noticed recently, I’ll talk about them later on, too, 2Up and Overloaded, this is American couple. They’ve been I think they’ve been traveling around the world by motorcycle for 9 years, I think. And they’re currently posting videos from Malaysia. So, I’ve been paying attention to them again, watching their Malaysia videos, and they put a lot of advertisements into their videos. It’s gotten to the point they’re so professional, their YouTube video, their travel video, isn’t really a video anymore. It’s not a travel vlog. It’s really like a packaging for commercials for all the products that they’re selling. That’s how they make money. And the video really is just a vehicle for delivering ads. And one of the ads, of course, is for Patreon. They want people to sign up for their Patreon to support them. And the one thing they talk about, and many many YouTubers do this, is that on Patreon, they offer their members ad-free viewing of their videos. No advertisements. And I’ve seen this a lot. And to this day, I still don’t know how that works. So, I need somebody to explain it to me. Maybe somebody out there, you’ve actually joined a Patreon. Like, one of the tiers where you support them financially every month, and one of the benefits you get is ad free videos. If that’s you, what does that mean? Like, where are those videos? Like what does the YouTuber do to provide an ad-free video? Do they upload one copy to YouTube and then upload a brand new copy to Patreon? That seems unlikely to me because Patreon does not have very good like video loading technology or video storage technology. There’s no I don’t there’s no way you can upload 4K videos and you know 50 meg 50 gigabytes per you know it’s just not a platform like YouTube. So, I doubt very much that they are uploading two copies of their video one to YouTube one to Patreon and that would take forever. I mean it’s hard enough uploading one video to YouTube and now you upload a second copy to Patreon. That seems like it would be way too much work. So then what are they doing? I’m assuming they’re uploading two copies of the same video to YouTube. One of them is monetized, so it has advertisements from YouTube. And then the second copy they don’t monetize it, but they put a and they make it unlisted, so you don’t see it, but then they put the link on Patreon. So their Patreon members can go to Patreon, click on the link which can open the video in Patreon or take or you can go to YouTube and you can watch the video and it’s not monetized. Is that what they are doing? I’d really like to know because I know that YouTube is very sensitive when it comes to duplicate uploading. If you’re uploading a video and that exact same video gets uploaded again, their computer systems are flagging it. Hey, you’re duplicating. Those are those are the same videos. So, how do if 2Up and Overloaded is uploading two copies of the same video, one monetized, one not monetized? How are they getting past the YouTube algorithm, the computer police that are looking for all these problems? I don’t know how it works and I would like to know how. I actually did a little bit of an I was going to experiment and do it myself just as a test. I haven’t had the time to complete it though. I uploaded a video about understanding the history of Melaka through the number 50 and thinking about, you know, the year 1350, then the year 1450, 1550. I uploaded that video as a normal Planet Doug video, but then I made a second version of that video. I made it shorter, more streamlined. Like I took out some sections where that were unnecessary or I was repeating myself. And I removed the end credits where I mean I don’t I don’t think of the end credits as advertisements but I do have in there a page for Patreon you know QR codes for Touch ‘n Go and Buy Me a Coffee and Patreon things like that. So it’s kind of an advertisement. So anyway, I deleted all of the end credits and I uploaded that copy to YouTube and I was going to set it to unlisted. It’s not monetized. And then I was going to put a link to it on Patreon and say, “Oh, here’s a bonus video for Patreon members. You can watch this video without ads.” And I was going to do that as an experiment and see whether YouTube, you know, flags me, you know, do they delete the video or send me an email saying, “Hey, you violated our policies. You’ve uploaded like I made the changes in the video to make it seem like a different video.” So, they’re not completely identical. But I’m also worried about this whole claiming that it’s ad-free. So, I can say the vid I can not monetize the video. Okay. So, that’s fine. But I’ve noticed in the past that if I upload a video to YouTube and I don’t monetize it, YouTube still puts ads on it. If you don’t monetize it, all it means is you don’t get any of the AdSense revenue, right? Because it’s not monetized. But YouTube, they still put ads on that video. I’ve seen that in the past where I had videos that I uploaded like my time lapses and things like that. I don’t monetize those because I don’t want ads interrupting them and they’re just supposed to be fun gimmicky kind of bonus videos. So, I don’t monetize those. But then an ad will suddenly appear at the beginning like, “Oh, where where’s that ad coming from?” But it’s coming from YouTube. So, if you’re on Patreon and you say to your Patreon members, you know, one of the benefits, ad-free version of the video, how can you promise that you can’t control whether YouTube puts an ad on the video or not, right? Anyway, I’m really confused about this. I don’t know how it works. And in the end, I don’t even know if I could do it. I would like to do it. Why not? If it’s easy, but uploading a video is really hard. Takes a long time. Even after you’ve uploaded a video, there’s a lot of work involved in the video title, video description, video thumbnail, all the settings. So even though you’re uploading two copies of the same video, the second copy, it’s a significant effort involved in making that second copy, exporting the second copy, uploading it, and then doing all of the post-upload work. So it’s a significant time investment. So unless it was really important to my viewers, I don’t think I could do it. It would take way too much time. But anyway, that’s my question. How does it work? When a YouTuber with a Patreon says you get ad-free versions of the video, how do they do it? I would really like that explained to me.

I think I said at the beginning of the last topic that was going to be very quick and easy. Turned out I talked for quite a long time. But hey, that is what happens on Planet Doug. And I also believe this topic is going to be very fast, very quick. And that is just yeah, giving an update on my new mouse. Not exactly, as I said before, earth-shattering news. But I bought a new mouse, replace my old one. I had a Logitech M720 Triathlon. I had it for many, many, many years and it was breaking down and eventually became unusable. So, in the last couple of weeks, I went shopping and I bought a new mouse. This one is the Logitech M650L.

And it was quite amusing that I was able to find this mouse because after all of my, you know, research, I decided that this was given budget and what’s available on the market. This was the best mouse for me, particularly the L version, the large one. And I said, there’s no way on earth I’ll ever be able to find it because that’s how things work on my planet. The one thing I want, the one version of the thing I want is always the one version that is unavailable. The store will carry every other version, but the one version that I want is the one they don’t have. It works out that way all the time. And the very first store I went to in Melaka, they had it. It was the only mouse they had. Like the only good mouse they had. They had a bunch of cheap ones that have no buttons and and don’t have any capability at all, but the one actual high quality mouse they had on display was this one, the M650L. So, I couldn’t believe it. So, I got very lucky there and I bought it and so far, yeah, it’s working out pretty well. One big difference between this one and the M720 I was thinking about was the M720 has a regular mouse that clicks and then it has a button and then you click the button and then it switches to a freewheeling mouse so you can spin it. So you have a really long document. You don’t have to go scrolling scrolling scrolling to get all the way to the bottom. If you want to go quickly, you push that button and go zoom and it’s all the way down to the bottom and you click the button again and it goes back to normal. This mouse has the same feature, but it’s implemented differently. There’s no mode switching button. It’s supposed to happen automatically that if you go slow, it has a clicking action and if you spin it, the clicking disengages and it zooms quickly. And I’m a little bit leery of things like that because as soon as they make something automatic, it usually means it doesn’t work. Like switching modes manually with a button is very clear. You disengage the ratchet click, it spins. Re-engage the ratchet, you’re back to clicking. And then if you try to make it happen automatically quite often that mechanism is more complicated and it breaks down. So far though it’s working. So I do like this. But I can feel it. There’s like a gyroscope in there. If I even when I’m clicking I can feel this vibration like there’s a there’s a gyroscope in there or something. Even when the scroll wheel stops moving, I can feel something on the inside continues moving. So, there’s a complicated mechanism in there and it might break over time, but right now it is working working well. And the the side buttons were also an advantage. The M720 had side buttons, but they’re very tiny and thin and really hard to find. These ones are bigger and they’re placed better. So, I do use the side buttons on the M720. I never use them because they were hard to reach. But yeah, overall can’t can’t complain. One thing I noticed since I moved here, like I’m always sitting on a bed, so I need my mouse to work on a bed sheet. Like most mice, like a cheap mouse, you have to have a mouse pad in order for it, the light to work properly. But a good high-quality mouse like my M720, any bed sheet I put it on, it works just like it’s on a desk or a mouse pad. And when I was at the hostel, it worked this one worked on the bed sheet just the same as the M720. But ever since I moved here, this bed sheet, this mouse is glitching on the bed sheet. It It isn’t engaging. So, I ended up taking I have to take my tablet and I put my tablet on the bed and I use this like a mouse pad, which works fine, but I’m wondering whether this light is not as sensitive, not as well, not sensitive. But it’s probably more sensitive. Like the M720, it didn’t care about the surface. It worked on every surface, but maybe this one needs a better surface to work. So, that might be a disadvantage to this. I looked into that when I did my research. Like, I asked questions like, is the mechanism on this one as good as the 720? Will it work on any surface, including bed sheets? But of course, nobody does their testing that in-depth. That’s kind of a Planet Doug sort of in-depth dive, you know. But anyway, this is only a problem where I’m working on my computer, but I also need to refer to my tablet. Like I’ll have something open, something I’m researching or whatever. So, I’ll have this open as well as my laptop. And then I’m, you know, I have it sitting beside me and I have both. Now I can’t do that anymore. At least on this bed sheet and I because I have to close it up and use it. And of course I can buy a mouse pad. They’re pretty lightweight. I could travel I could I could add more stuff to my bags and then carry my own mouse pad as well. That’s probably the best solution overall. But anyway, yeah, pretty happy with the mouse. I would have been happy continuing to use my 720 forever. I never would have upgraded. I was very happy with the 720, but it broke down. So, I had no choice. And and since I was forced to upgrade, yeah, I think I made a good choice. Yeah, I like this mouse a lot.

One more technology story. And this technology story is related in a way to why I’m using the Olympus today instead of my GoPro because I wanted to talk about my GoPro. And recently I’ve had trouble with audio where the microphone has been disconnecting and I’m not aware that it disconnected or there’s been crackling, some loud buzzing and static in the background. I think even using the Olympus that may have happened as well. I’m not sure. But anyway, I’ve been dealing with this and trying to figure out like what is the issue with the GoPro. Is it the microphone? Is it the cord? Is it the GoPro? Is it the media mod? Like, where is the problem coming from? And I think I figured out what the issue was. And if this is the the cause, then basically I fixed it because I noticed that I will be out there recording with my GoPro and the audio was working fine and then the battery in the GoPro dies. So, I end up, you know, taking this off my mount, opening the media mod, taking out the GoPro, taking out the battery, putting in a new battery, then I put it back into the media mod. And I’m doing this out on the street, and then I close the door. But here’s the key. The door is broken. So, in order just to sort of hold it in place, I use a rubber band. I wrap this around the tripod just to hold it. Otherwise, the door is sticking out like that and it’s going to hit something and it it’s just annoying. So, I hold the door closed. But what I realized is that when I’m doing this out on the street and it’s, you know, there’s a lot going on, you’re sweating, it’s hot, you’re not really paying attention. I think what’s happening is that when I put the GoPro back into the media mod, I’m not pushing it in hard enough. You really have to seat it in the media mod because inside the media mod there’s a USB-C plug and on the GoPro there’s a USB-C port and you have to insert this into you have to basically it’s like plugging in a USB-C cable but the cable is built into the media mod and if you push this in and it doesn’t get pushed in all the way, it doesn’t connect. So, the microphone cord that goes into the media mod is not connected to the GoPro anymore. And with a normal media mod, that won’t happen because if you don’t push it in all the way, the door won’t click. So, basically, you have to really push it in, really get it in there, close the door hard, and then it clicks and it holds the GoPro into place. So, the USB-C plug doesn’t come loose. But since my door broke, the door is not holding it in place anymore. So, if it vibrates, you’re walking around all day shaking the GoPro, it might come free. You know, it works loose. It’s still in the media mod, but it’s no longer plugged into the USB-C. And I think that is where all the audio problems are coming from. So now I just have to make sure I really push it in there, get it firmly in place, and then when I close the door, I push on the door and then wrap the rubber band really, really tight to hold it. And then ever since I started doing that, I haven’t had any problems with the microphone anymore. So I think that is what has been happening. And I think I fixed it.

Time for some Planet Doug video behind the scenes stories. But before I jump into the first one, one funny thing I noticed about this Olympus camera, kind of funny. It’s like a problem with the camera, but the problem ends up helping out a little bit because one funny thing about the Olympus, it I have it set up for autofocus. So, it’s actually focused on my face and it’s trying to keep me in focus automatically. And I have to do it that way because if I use manual focus, I can’t focus on my face. I’m always blurry. I can because the camera is far away, right? I can’t focus on myself because I can’t hold the camera to do it. And I can try and make a judgment call. Like I can try to put something else here as a stand-in for my face. Walk over to the camera, focus on that object, and then leave it there. But it never seems to work. So, I have to use autofocus. But a weird thing about the Olympus, this model of the Olympus, is that when it’s using autofocus, it puts a little white box around whatever it is focusing on. And that’s really, really handy. You’re taking video and you can see, oh, that’s in focus. And you you move your camera and now oh that’s what it’s focusing on. This little white box shows you what it has locked on for focus. But as soon as you hit the video record button, that white box disappears, right? I was like, “Ah, Olympus, you drive.” When I figured that out about this camera, I just couldn’t believe it. It was like, “Oh, come on.” That’s what I mean about how video is always the forgotten child of cameras. There even like all Olympus cameras are still designed mainly for taking pictures. They they don’t think about video as much. So in this case as a vlogging camera there I am, you know, using it and I’m I’m the camera isn’t recording yet and I get this amazing white box showing me what I’m focusing on. Oh, wow. That is so handy. That’s going to be great. And then as soon as I hit record, oh, the white box disappeared. It’s like, oh, for Pete’s sake. So, while I’m recording, I have no idea what’s in focus. For all I know, the camera could be focused on another person behind me or a building over here. Like, who knows? Cameras. They have very sophisticated autofocus these days, but this is a bit of an older Olympus, so it’s not a perfect system. So now I never know what it’s going to be focused on, but in a way that’s an advantage because I mentioned that I can’t see whether the camera is recording or not. I can’t see the red flashing circle. But if something goes wrong and the camera stops recording, it’s no longer recording video, then the white box returns because it only shows up when I’m not recording. So, it’s kind of a handy way like if the memory card fills up and then the camera stops recording. This camera also has a time limit. It will only record for like 29 minutes, then it turns off automatically. And if if that happens and I don’t notice, I’m talking and talking and talking and nothing’s being recording. But when that happens, the white box returns on the LCD screen. So even though I can’t see the record button, the record light, if I suddenly see the white box around my face, oh, it’s not recording anymore. So, a problem with the camera ends up as almost a benefit. Of course, I would far prefer it if it worked normally and if I could actually see the white box while I’m recording, right? I want to see what the camera is focused on. But, yeah, this camera can’t do that. Anyway, I thought that was kind of funny. I’ve sort of lost track of the Planet Doug videos I’ve talked about and the ones I haven’t, but I think I have it straight in my head. And there’s a new video that I shot recently I don’t think I’ve told any stories about. And this is the video about the Planet Doug invisible signs. And I don’t know whether this idea of the invisible signs really comes across in the video or not, but the basic idea is that I walked all the way around Melaka again, like doing an overview of all of the main sites that I’ve become interested in. And everywhere where a sign is missing, like where I feel like there should be a historical information sign, what I did in this video is, okay, right here I’m putting up an invisible Planet Doug sign right here talking about this. And the idea is, well, the sign is invisible because I’m not putting anything up, but I’m putting up a Planet Doug invisible sign. And then it’s like a suggestion to the tourism authorities that they can put a real sign here. So I’m putting a Planet Doug sign up today right now and then in the future they can actually put up a real sign and I’ll let them figure out exactly what to put on the sign. So I don’t know people maybe they’ll listen to that video. It’s like you’re putting up an invisible sign. Why would you know why would you do that? I don’t understand. But anyway, it was clear in my head. But anyway, the basic idea is something like I went to the bridge for example, which is really an interesting topic to me. There’s the main bridge here in Melaka goes from Dutch Square across to Jonker Walk. And everybody just uses the bridge as a bridge, just a walk across the river. Probably never even think about it. But that bridge has a fascinating history going all the way back to the Melaka Sultanate. And as I described in the video as best I could, it was it’s really important to the history and evolution of the city. So even when the Portuguese showed up with their fleet of ships to attack Melaka and and conquer the city, they focused their military strategy on seizing the bridge. They thought if they could take the bridge, then they could defeat the Melaka Sultanate. Even though the Portuguese were heavily outnumbered, because by taking the bridge, they cut the opposing forces in half. Some of them are on one side of the bridge, the rest are on the other side of the bridge. So by taking the bridge, it’s like a strategic effort to to take that bridge and win the battle. And then the the bridge evolved over time. They designed and built different types of bridges under the Portuguese and the Dutch etc. and then the modern bridge today. So for me, I put a Planet Doug invisible sign right there on the bridge telling the whole story, the history of the bridge, its significance to the city. And it’s basically a suggestion that in the future if there’s a budget, the local tourism authorities, yeah, you know, they could put a big sign here giving the history of the bridge. And then I went all the way around the city. I think I ended up with 29 different signs. And even at 29, the only reason I didn’t keep going is I well, I think that’s enough. I It feels like I could have kept going and going and going, the more I thought about it, the more I walked around, the more signs I thought were missing. And I thought it was a really interesting idea. I really enjoyed shooting it. But in the middle of shooting it, I did have this feeling like I was just repeating myself because every topic that I brought up, I’d already made a video about that topic. I talked about the bridge, its history, its importance, its evolution in a Planet Doug video already. So every single topic has already been covered. So I felt h you know this is kind of I feel like I’m just repeating myself here. But then as I was talking it felt good in the moment and then when I was editing the video I also thought oh yeah this is kind of cool. I liked hearing me sum up all of these things and then new ideas started to come up things that I hadn’t talked about before. Again, getting back to the bridge, that’s the main bridge, but there are other bridges on the river. And each bridge has an interesting history. The name of the bridge needs to be explained. Like, where does the name of this bridge come from? And then I thought, well, as I walked up the down the river, I said, okay, let’s put a Planet Doug invisible sign right here at the Kampong Jawa Bridge. And that would tell the story of how during the Japanese occupation, the Japanese suspended severed heads from the bridge. They executed people and cut off their heads and then put their heads dangling from the bottom of that bridge as a warning to the local people. This is what happens if you resist us. And that that’s a part of the history of Melaka that I’ve read. I’ve never seen a photograph of it. It may be a story that in the retelling gets overblown and it’s become a little bit of a legend and and maybe the reality is not quite what people say it is. I don’t know. And I did mention that in my video quite often where I said, “Okay, here on Planet Doug, I have a feeling that there’s an interesting story here. So, I’m going to put up a sign here, but I’ll leave it to the experts to really figure out what goes on the sign.” So, yeah, I didn’t say, okay, exactly this, this, this should be on the sign. I’ll leave that to the historical experts to come up with the real story to put on the sign. But I think there should be a sign at this bridge giving its history, at this bridge giving its history. And I went on and on and on. Like I said, 29 signs in total. Up and down the river, around Dutch Square, near Jonker Walk, that whole area, up on St. Paul’s Hill. I mean, everywhere in Melaka that I’ve been, I revisited all of those places and then talked about old things I’ve already talked about and some new things that I haven’t talked about yet. So, that is a Planet Doug video coming up about the invisible signs of Melaka.

This is an interesting Planet Doug video because it doesn’t exist and I don’t think it will exist. I technically attempted to make this video three times and I or four times really and I failed each time. So the first time I went to St. Peter’s Church. I walked all the way up the river talking about the church, everything about it that I knew. And then I got to the church, but it turned out I went there on a Monday and I didn’t know the church was closed on Mondays. All the gates were closed and locked. So, yeah, that was a failure. I couldn’t go up to the church. I couldn’t go inside the church. So, I never shot the video. And then I went I decided to go back. I thought it was an important video to shoot because I’d visited Christ Church. I visited St. Paul’s Church. I visited Kampung Mosque, the Hindu temple, the Chinese temple on Harmony Street. And the story that I was trying to develop about these places fit quite nicely with St. Peter’s. So, I really wanted to tell that story as well. So, I went there again. I guess I wasn’t thinking very clearly, but I did look it up. It was a Sunday and I looked at the hours and it said, “Oh, the church is open from 9 until 1.” And in my head, I was thinking, okay, that must mean the church services are in the afternoon because they wouldn’t say it’s open to visitors from 9 to 1 if they’re having a church service, right? But anyway, it was a Sunday. Turned out that was the wrong day to go. I did it all. It was a rainy morning. It was actually raining and I still decided to go anyway. I went out there with an umbrella, walked all the way to the church with my cameras. I got there and it turned out they were having a service when I got there and I thought, “Ah, for Pete’s sake.” Yeah. The parking lot was jammed. People were coming and going. Lots of people were arriving, rushing inside for the church service. So, I wouldn’t be able to go inside. I still started recording my video, but then I couldn’t even like outside the church and I thought maybe the church service will be over by the time I’m done and then I can go inside with my GoPro. But then they turned on the speakers outside the church. So the interior service was being broadcast outside over these speakers. I was like, “Okay, well, I can’t I can’t compete with that.” There’s no way. Because I was trying to talk on my GoPro and yet I was being overwhelmed by the sound from the speakers. So yeah, I gave up again. Then I made plans a third time. I was going to wake up in the morning, go back to the church, but then I woke up in the morning here in this hotel and I just had other things to do. I had other videos I needed to edit that I’d already shot and I wanted to take advantage of the comfort of this hotel room. So, I was like, “Okay, I just moved into a really nice hotel. I’ve got air conditioning. It’s a great place to work. So, I don’t want to spend the day out shooting another video in the heat and humidity. Not take advantage of my comfortable room. Why not edit the videos I’ve already shot instead of shooting a new video? Like, am I even going to have time to edit it?” So, anyway, I just decided not to go. I said I’ll go the next morning. And the next morning came and again, I decided to cancel. So, I had not shot a video about St. Peter’s Church. And the theme I wanted to develop, I guess if I went to St. Peter’s Church. I would have talked about all the normal things that everybody talks about. They, you know, if you watch a video about St. Peter’s Church, all the YouTube videos about it, and they read all the tourist blurbs, I think it will tell you that it is the oldest functioning Catholic church in Malaysia, which is true. Everybody says that and it is true. And there’s a bell there that dates from, I believe, 1608. So the bell is even older than the church. And the bell is interesting because it used to be at a different church in Melaka. And I think that church, yeah, a Catholic church. I believe it was torn down by the Dutch because they basically banned Catholicism. So that that was the theme I was trying to develop the history of the suppression of religion in Melaka because when the Portuguese showed up, Melaka was an Islamic place, right? That there were mosques and things like that and the Portuguese came and they tore down the mosques and they built Catholic churches because the Portuguese were Catholic and under the Portuguese again I think I can get in trouble with this topic because historians can nitpick the details of exactly what was going on. But in general, the Portuguese promoted Catholicism and they suppressed or banned the public worship of all other religions. So technically Protestantism was not allowed. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, these religions were suppressed and the Portuguese wouldn’t let them build, you know, churches, mosques, temples for these religions. Again, according to what I read, they didn’t say these religions were banned like you could not be a Muslim, you could not be a Buddhist, but you had to be a Muslim in private. You couldn’t have a mosque where you had services and things like that. That’s my understanding. And then the Dutch came along, defeated the Portuguese, and they flipped it around. I talked about this in my Harmony Street video that now the Dutch were, you know, Christian reformed. They were Protestant and they either tore down the Catholic churches or converted them into Protestant churches and they continued this general suppression of Islam and Hinduism and Buddhism, all these other religions. They they were not allowed to be practiced in public, definitely inside the fortress, but I think even in the rest of Melaka on the other side of the river, they suppressed it there. And then we got to the 1700s and there was a treaty I believe in 1703. I don’t have all the notes in front of me, but there was this treaty between the Dutch and the Portuguese where they had a common enemy and they banded together, formed a kind of alliance in Europe. And as part of that alliance, the Portuguese negotiated for permission again in Melaka. Okay, we want permission to be able to build Catholic churches again. So they put pressure on the Dutch to stop the suppression, the banning of Catholic priests, Catholic churches, things like that. And my understanding when I read the history is that the Dutch were not happy with the economy of Melaka. And it turns out they discovered that if you want merchants to be active in your city, you want ships coming and going, buying and selling goods. Well, those ship captains and those merchants, they need a community to live in. So if you want a Muslim merchant to be buying and selling goods in your city, well that Muslim merchant, he needs to be in a Muslim community. He needs a mosque. He needs people around him who share his culture, his belief, his religions. And the Dutch were thinking, okay, this suppressing of all of these local religions, that’s not a good idea. It’s not good for the economy. It’s not good for trade. So, we have this alliance with the Portuguese pressured the Dutch to change their policies and I believe there was this idea of helping the economy. So, the Dutch lifted their restrictions. So, in the 1700s, that’s when all of those mosques and temples were built. So the Hindu temple there very famous one on Harmony Street the Kampung the Masjid Kampung Kling that mosque also very famous those were given land grants in the 1700s by the Dutch saying okay here’s some land you can build a mosque here here’s some land you can build your Hindu temple here and this all date this is all happening in the 1700s and that’s also when St. Peter’s Church, this new Catholic church was built in the time when the Dutch were lifting all of these restrictions. So that’s the history of the church I wanted to focus on. And this bell, the 1608 bell, most vloggers will just say, “Oh, that bell up there, it is from Goa and it was made in the year 1608.” So, it’s a very old bell. But I wanted to take the story a step further and talk about how well the the Catholic Church that that bell came from was torn down by the Dutch when they were suppressing Catholicism. So that’s the origin of that bell. And now that they were given permission by the Dutch to build a new Catholic church, they took that bell and then installed it here. So that that I thought it was a pretty important topic to bring up in the history of Melaka. I still think it is, but I don’t think I’ll ever get around to shooting that video. And inside the church, they have more tombstones on the floor. I think there’s 14 of them. And I wanted to take video of those tombstones. And since I shot a video about Christ Church, St. Paul’s Church, the mosque, and all these places, I thought, let’s complete the set and make a video about St. Peter’s. But I may not come up I may not have the time or the energy to do it. We’ll see.

My first travel vlogger story for a change is not about a cyclist or a moto vlogger. It’s like a personal daily vlogger kind of person. And it’s a really fascinating story. Again, when I focus on these travel vloggers, I’m not really focusing like I came across this amazing channel. You got to go watch the videos from this person. That’s not really how I’m approaching it. These are just interesting perspectives on how people make YouTube videos, all the different approaches and styles, you know, good or bad. Not really making a judgment of them, but I’m looking at it because I make YouTube videos and I think all the time about how to make them. Should they be this long or that long? Should I do this? Should I do that? Should I get a drone? You know, you think about all the things you should or shouldn’t do and then when you see other travel vloggers, it’s sort of like, okay, that’s how they do it. Interesting. Anyway, this one came out of nowhere and it’s so unusual. The channel is called Gabriela and it jumped out at me originally because a friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube channel based in Kuala Lumpur and it was being made by a Malaysian man who is I forget his age now. Forget the name of the channel, but it was something like Life After 63 or Life After 65. And he is a guy who just walks around I think he’s based in I can’t remember where he’s based, but anyway around the basically the KL metropolitan area. He doesn’t record audio while he walks. He only records video of himself walking and then he does a voice over narration afterwards. And he’s doing a kind of existential thinking out loud the meaning of life, my life, what has been good about my life. Now that I’m 65 years old, what does my what has my life meant to me? What is important about, you know, he’s basically doing out loud philosophical pondering while we look at a video of him walking around. Sort of like life after 60, life after 65. So, I had this on my mind and then I came across this woman from Brazil and she’s basically doing the same thing but as a woman living alone who is 34 years old and I first I saw this and I was going to send it to my friend who happens she’s a woman who sent me the channel about this guy and I thought oh you know you might be interested in this one because here we have a woman talking about what is life like in Malaysia for a woman living alone in her mid-30s and I was going to send her the link and as a suggestion because I watched the first video and you could hear her voice. She’s from Brazil. She doesn’t give a lot of information. She seems to be working online and she had plans to be in Kuala Lumpur for 2 months but she has a job like a like a remote job I guess and she makes more than enough money she you know pays for a nice condo for 2 months in KL and then while she’s working in KL she started shooting these videos and I could hear her voice you know typical Brazilian accent but she could speak English well enough you could understand her. But then I watched her next video and everything changed and then the next video and the next and the next and they all had very similar topics. Let’s see if I can call it up here really quickly. I have it open on my tablet, but I need to look at it from from another point of view. Give me a second here. Okay, I have it up here. She’s she’s posted 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 videos. They’re very popular. The most recent one 37,000 views. The one before that 200,000 60,000 160,000 15,000 24,000 48,000. So, I think she was kind of astonished that her videos were so popular. She really got the Malaysian bump. Like her second video on her channel, 50,000 views, the second video she posted. So, she’s kind of like, whoa, wow, that’s really something. And she did something very unusual in her second video that I’ll talk about in a minute. Anyway, you can get the tone here if I read the titles. Alone in Malaysia, starting over at 34. Living alone in Malaysia, learning to enjoy my own company. Living alone in Malaysia. What I’m working for at 34. A realistic day at 34. Living alone in Malaysia. One month living in Malaysia. What happens when I go out alone in Malaysia? And her most recent video, I came to Malaysia alone, then this happened. And her thumbnails have things like, I came alone, on my own, just me for what? I always quit. Things like that. And I got the impression that this was like hyper-designed to be catnip for a certain type of viewer that it feels like this is reaching out to women in their late 20s, mid-30s who are still well, you know, just they’re just single and living their life. You know, they haven’t gotten married and started families and things. And she’s speaking directly to this audience and apparently from the view count it really really works. But what she did in her second video and all the videos since then is used a computer voice which is really interesting. Like her her I was really confused at first because in her first video you hear her speaking on camera and she’s from Brazil and has a Brazilian accent everything like that and then I went on to the other videos and what the heck where where did this voice come from and it is a perfect English voice and it has I don’t know this quality to it. I find it really annoying to be honest. I find it hard to listen to. What’s that word I’m looking for? That kind of crackling little sound in the background. And it has this intonation, this rhythm that feels so AI-generated, computer-generated. I’ll play a little bit of it here for you where you can hear the the tone of the voice, the pauses and the intonation and then the subject matter. It’s so repetitive. She focuses on this same set of ideas, even repeating the same sentences over and over again. Again, I’m pretty sure it’s all AI generated. Like the script was written by an AI and the voice is created by a computer as well and she gave it a prompt. Like I think she had a basic script where she shot a video like she goes out into KL records a bunch of things that happened. She doesn’t talk on the video. She just basically sets up the camera and records things and then she writes a a script, but then she feeds that script into an AI and says, “Please create a a YouTube video script in the first person like it’s me talking using these events, but make it thoughtful and like I’m pondering the meaning of life and what it’s like to be a woman alone in her 30s and finding my way, learning about myself, learning to be alone, to be happy with only my own company. I don’t need other people. I’m I’m alone, but I’m not lonely. And that’s okay. It’s okay to live like that. And I’m just finding my way. And you know what? I’m happy to be alone. I’m happy with my own company. And that’s okay.” And it just goes on like that over and over again. And she’s hammering at this idea of it’s okay. And I just have to figure things out one step at a time. I just have to be alone and that’s okay. And I just have to take the next step, whatever that turns out to be. And that’s okay. And you know, you can you can tell I actually took her entire script and I fed it into an AI and I asked the AI, “Hey, did you write this?” Like, if I asked you to write a YouTube script for me as a woman in my mid-30s talking about being alone, is this something that you would have come up with? Like I basically fed it into a bunch of AIs and said, “What do you think about this? Did you write this?” And all the AI said, “Oh yeah, I definitely wrote that.” Like if you asked me, this is exactly what I would come up with. And the AI pointed out all of the speech patterns, the repetitions, the platitudes, like so many platitudes. It’s like you’ve opened up a big tray of fortune cookies. And every platitude in the fortune cookie is is produced in this script. So, I thought that was kind of amusing. The AI kind of went, “Oh, yeah. I I definitely wrote that or I definitely would have written that.” Anyway, here’s a quick sample of what I’m talking about. I’ll just play it into my microphone here and you can listen to the voice and listen to the the intonation and the things that she’s talking about. Let’s see. I’ll raise the volume.

This is probably my favorite part of traveling. Just walking around somewhere I’ve never been before and having absolutely no idea what I’m going to find. I really like that because it doesn’t match the content. That happens all the time because where she is, she’s at the mosque on the ghost island and it it’s a famous tourist attraction. Tour groups go there all the time, dozens of them every week because the mosque is out floating on the water and it’s very beautiful and everybody goes there for sunset and then at sunset they take photos and videos selfies with the mosque and the sunset in the background. So she went there deliberately she because it is a beautiful f she know she knows what’s there. She went there to visit the mosque and she knew it would be beautiful and interesting. But the script as written by the AI is all about. You know, this is what this is what I love about traveling on my own. I just go somewhere. I don’t know what I’m going to see. I just wander around and whatever I stumble across. That’s okay because but it doesn’t match the content. And there’s another video where she went to their Merdeka celebrations. She went to the big park in Kuala Lumpur. I shot my own video there because I knew it is going to be the biggest celebration of the year. It’s famous for that. You go to that big park in the middle of KL and thousands of people are going to show up. There’s a big performance. There’s fireworks. They’re celebrating Malaysian Independence Day and it’s probably the biggest celebration of the year, the biggest, craziest, wildest day in the Malaysian calendar. But in her script, she has the same thing where it says something about this is what traveling is all about where you don’t have to go to big events. You don’t have to have big attractions. You can just enjoy the little things of an ordinary day. The small things of an ordinary day. That is what is interesting. So I don’t have to go. So she’s talking about the joys of discovery of an ordinary day. The tiny pleasures you encounter in random wandering. But the video itself, she’s at the biggest holiday of the year. Thousands of people celebrating and fireworks and music and all of that. So there’s like a mismatch between what the script is saying, enjoy an ordinary day, the little things of life, but it’s connected to this huge celebration. And again, she went there deliberately. So that’s another clue that the whole thing was basically AI generated. Oh, this clip that I’ve been playing, by the way, it’s I forgot to mention it’s actually from Melaka. So she she is based in KL, but then on this particular day, she decided to take a day trip like a she signed up for a group tour. So it’s a group tour bus. She came down to Melaka just for the day. So she’s part of this, you know, big group and they take them to all the places, the main attractions of Melaka and that’s how she ended up at the mosque because, as I said, that’s where all the group tours go. But at the beginning of the video clip, she does say, “Well, okay, I did go on a group tour, but I’m still alone. I’m still on my own, and that’s okay.” And and then this this is where it picks up and I went back a little bit in time and I I still can’t think of the name of that this computer voice has that thing in the back of their throat. I think I’ve heard it in like California if you go into a coffee shop and it’s a very hip kind of place and the woman has this is like actually you know it’s it’s like a sound in the back of the throat has a there’s a word for it. I can’t come up with it yet. Maybe I’ll find it eventually. But I just love the intonation and the the pauses that lead into the and that’s okay and that’s what I you know. Anyway, let’s listen to this.

And honestly, I’ve started to really enjoy days like this.

I don’t need to know exactly how everything is going to go. I just have to show up and see what happens. Melaka immediately felt very different from Kuala Lumpur. It’s slower, more colorful, and everywhere you look, there’s another little detail that makes you want to stop. And doing this by myself means I can stop whenever something catches my attention, which happens a lot. But being alone and feeling lonely are two very different things. And I think it took me a long time to understand that. I’m still learning, and I probably will be for a long time. But for now, one step at a time.

Almost every video ends with that same statement, that one step at a time. It it it comes up again and again, even in the same video three or four times. You know, I’m still learning about myself and this and that. And that’s okay. I’m just living my life, learning one step at a time. Oh, this is the next step I have, you know. So, yeah, the whole thing is I think it starts with her real experiences in Malaysia and she writes something, but then she gives the AI prompt to turn this into a reflecting on the meaning of life being a woman alone in a foreign country in her mid-30s. And that’s okay. I’m learning to love myself. Again, it feels like I said like catnip for a certain audience. And then when you go into the comments, of course, the comments are she’s flooded with people praising her. Like every platitude she comes up with, every fortune cookie idea. Everyone like echoes it in the comments. Oh, that is exactly what I feel. And everyone, I don’t know. The whole thing is so weird, but it feels like it is a direction that YouTube is moving in that in its origins, especially for personal videos like these ones. It used to be like daily vlogs. There were like families out there who just posted videos of their daily life as a family. Just sort of raw, unscripted, chaotic, just stuff happening all the time. That was like made up the bulk of these YouTube daily vlogs kind of thing. And now this moving more and more and more into hyper-polished scripted like kind of fake documentaries in a way. And then this this is like a a big example of that where the whole thing is a computer voice and a computer-generated script as well. Oh, I forgot to mention also her photo changes all the time. If you look especially at the last two up until then it looks like her the thumbnails and the last two videos. Now she’s created a thumbnail, a fake version of herself. She looks like a supermodel all of a sudden. You know, she’s an attractive woman and she but in all the previous thumbnails, she looks like herself. The last two thumbnails, she clearly used an AI and said, “Okay, take me, but make me five times more beautiful.” And you know, just now she looks like a completely different person. And the thumbnail is completely computer-generated and she looks like a supermodel of some kind. But the interesting thing is none of this matters. The script is AI generated. The voice is computer-generated. Now the thumbnail like the actual picture of her is computer-generated. Is completely fake. But it doesn’t matter. On YouTube, that video where she has like a fake picture of herself has 200,000 views. And I think 150,000 of those views came as a result of people seeing how beautiful she is in that picture. It’s like, wow, that is a beautiful woman. And in the title, what happens when I go out in Malaysia alone? You know, it’s like, woo, I what? What? What? What? Click, click, click, click, click. So even though everything is computer-generated, it’s a very very successful video on YouTube. And I I think that is the future of YouTube travel vlogs, YouTube personal vlogs. They’re just basically going to be fake AI generated and they’re going to be very successful. Nobody really seems to care. People are pretty h are very happy with these videos and enjoy them even though it’s obvious they’re not real. They don’t represent the real thoughts of a real person. Even the photo is not of a real person. My brain started to work and I remember the word I was looking for like that quality of this voice you hear. It’s called vocal fry. And I think this computer-generated voice has that just a hint of that vocal fry. But I don’t I don’t know if I’ve properly expressed my reaction to these videos, but I’ve skipped ahead to another one of her videos. The best way might be to just have you listen to another example. This is at like the end of this video about what happens when I go out in Malaysia alone. And yeah, just listen to the ending of the video and it’s repeats a similar the same words in fact the same sentences and similar ideas to the ending of every video. Tried things I’d never tried before and obviously bought way too much food. I think that’s one of the things I’ve loved most about going out on my own here. I can leave the house with almost no plan and somehow the day always gives me something I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t suddenly become this super confident person who isn’t afraid of anything. I just realized that there’s nothing I can’t do if I take it one step at a time.

That that cracks me up. The once if I take it one step at a time. That’s repeated in every video. Sometimes two or three times in the same video. There’s also this idea of she talks a lot about working really really hard. She never says what she does for a living but I guess it’s on her computer and she’s like working so hard and I often wonder why am I working so hard and then she talks about how she’s saving money for her future family to take care of her family to support her family in the future. And that sentence comes up over and over and over again. And then this idea that money is not important. There’s all these cliched expressions like, you know, why do I need the most expensive phone? A cheap phone makes a phone call just like an expensive phone. I don’t need the best car in the world. The car just brings you from A to B, whether it’s expensive or cheap. And the sentences are all the sentence structure is all exactly the same. You know, not A but B. If this then this. There’s the same pattern, the same loop happening over and over again. And there’s all these ideas, even quirky things like over and over. She’s like, I always end up buying, you know, so much food. I bought too much food. Like, oh, I’m so bad. I always buy too much food. And that I think is like computer designed to appeal to women, this idea. And I don’t know, the whole thing seems so hyper engineered to to be a good video and keep people watching and that sort of thing. This is from a video where she talks about quitting, like I quit all the time. And again, that that feels very specific to me as well, like it was chosen to be relatable because at the beginning of the video, she talks about how she’s really good at starting things but not very good at completing them. She quits partway through. And again, that that feels like a Reader’s Digest platitude in a way because everybody does that. I think I can feel everybody go, “Oh yeah, me too. Me too. I’m really good at starting things. I’m just not really good at finishing them.” It’s like everybody can relate to that. But she never does talk about any specifics. Like everything is vague and general. There’s nothing about what what what did she start and and what did and when did she quit? Why did she quit? Like there’s no examples. They’re just sort of empty platitudes. And then it leads into her not her but the computer’s favorite expression. And when the distance feels too big, quitting starts to feel like a tempting option. So this time I’m trying something different. I’m just thinking about the next step, one step at a time. The step doesn’t have to be big. It just has to move me forward. I don’t need to figure out the whole journey today. I just need to make the next video and then make another one. Just one step at a time, then the next step. This video is the one I talked about where she went out to experience Merdeka. Like I said, you know, Hari Merdeka, the biggest holiday of the year here in Malaysia, the biggest civic holiday. Anyway, the government sponsored, you know, celebrating the independence of Malaysia. So, it’s a very, very big day here, a very unusual day, completely out of the ordinary. And then this is the video that she shot about that day. Today, I want to show you what an ordinary day looks like for me living here in Malaysia. No tour, no big plans. Just me completely on my own, getting some food, doing some work, walking a little around the city, and figuring out the day as I go because lately, I think these completely normal days are becoming my favorite part of living here. And this part as well kind of jumps out at me as being artificially generated because she’s still talking about just wandering around and and doing ordinary things. And then she goes to the Saloma Link Bridge in KL. And the Saloma Link Bridge is pretty extraordinary. It it’s an amazing looking bridge, a pedestrian bridge, beautifully designed. And when you get to one side of it, you have the bridge and then the skyline of downtown KL behind it. It it’s really a a highlight for anyone coming to KL to go look at the Saloma Link Bridge and then head over into Kampung Baru because she went there to try Nasi Lemak. Of course, she did that famous Nasi Lemak place that everybody goes to. Malaysians tell all foreigners to go to this one place in Kampung Baru to get the best nasi lemak. So, that’s where all YouTubers go. But here she is at the Saloma Link Bridge, which again is a a highlight, like a tourist attraction that everybody knows about. It’s just in all the brochures, especially at night with all the bright colors. But anyway, this is her experience there.

One thing I really like about Kuala Lumpur is how easy it can be to just walk around and somehow end up somewhere beautiful. I wasn’t really planning to come here today. I just happened to be walking in this direction and I’m glad I did. I didn’t really know where I was going at this point. I just kept walking and somehow ended up here. I still catch myself stopping to look at the Petronas Towers whenever they appear between the buildings. I don’t know if that’s something you ever really get used to. Even something as simple as a pedestrian bridge here can feel like a piece of modern architecture. Again, the wording just feels off. Like this idea that somehow it’s amazing that something so ordinary as a pedestrian bridge can be an architectural beautiful thing and yet that was the whole point of Saloma Link. I mean it was specifically designed in this artistic way to be unusual and beautiful and imbued with meaning so it’s not like seeing the beauty in a local pedestrian bridge. It’s seeing like a piece of modern art that cost a lot of money to build and then somehow pretending it’s just like an ordinary thing that you stumbled across. And at the end of this video, that’s when she goes to the the big park for the Independence Day celebrations. And then this is how how she describes it. And again, it feels like a mismatch between what the computer came up with and the event itself. It kind of missed the specifics of this. And I think that’s something Malaysia and especially the people here have been teaching me. I’m starting to see things a little more clearly. Maybe making the most of life doesn’t always mean doing something extraordinary. Sometimes it’s just getting the things I need to do done. Enjoying the little moments in between and appreciating an ordinary day for what it is.

I know what I want now. I think I’m actually more sure of that than I’ve ever been. What I’m learning is that I don’t have to get there all at once. I can enjoy where I am, make the most of these ordinary days, and keep moving towards the life I want, just one step at a time.

That really cracks me up. The whole idea of living, you know, finding joy in ordinary days, the little moments of an ordinary day. There she is at the biggest celebration of the year and then she winds it up with, you know, that positive platitude. I now, you know, Malaysia has taught me things and now I know what I’m working towards and I won’t get there all at once. Just one step at a time, you know. Anyway, the the idea I’m trying to get at here is that something as artificial as this is perfectly fine on YouTube. It’s popular with viewers, gets tons and tons of praise. Nobody cares that the same ideas are repeated over and over again. Nobody cares that the the script doesn’t match the scenes that they’re matched to. Nobody cares that it’s not her voice. Nobody cares that it’s not even her in the thumbnails. It’s just a a version of her made to look like a supermodel. You know, whatever makes people click on it and and watch it. It’s all It’s all fair game and hundreds of thousands of views. And yeah, she’ll keep making these videos just as long as she’s getting yeah, that many views. For all I know, there are lots of people in the comments talking about, “Hey, that isn’t really your voice, is it?” And what’s with all these weird fortune cookie platitudes? And maybe people are leaving comments like that and she just could be, you know, removing all of them and leaving only the the positive ones. But yeah, like most people are responding to the platitudes because people like platitudes like here’s a comment where somebody wrote, “It’s not the destination but the journey in life.” That’s what I have learned. So people respond to all of these platitudes and and yeah, people relate to them, but again, it’s not it’s not really coming from her. It’s coming from a computer that knows what people respond to. And you see more and more of that. Yeah, on YouTube these days.

The next YouTube videos, the next travel vloggers kind of tie in with that same theme of artificiality. And this is these are videos from 2Up and Overloaded that I mentioned I think earlier in this video. I’ve been following them off and on and I started watching their videos again because they started posting videos from Malaysia. Notice I didn’t say that they’re in Malaysia. They’re just posting videos from Malaysia. And in fact, their trip here was two or even 3 years ago. It’s taken them that long to post the videos from their Malaysia trip. And that ties in with what I’m going to talk about.

I remember when I first discovered these guys, their videos had a different style. They were doing voiceover narration, sort of like a behind the scenes story, but they did it with the two of them. It’s a man and a woman traveling together sitting on a chairs or a bench or sitting on a sofa and then they would tell the story to the camera of whatever they did the previous day or the previous week. And while they’re telling the story, while they’re narrating, they would insert actual video clips from those days. And that’s how they did all of their videos basically.

But these new videos, they’ve completely done a different style. They don’t do that anymore. They’re still narrating and it’s clearly a script that they’ve written. You can feel it that like nobody in real life uses that many adjectives. Like everything is overblown where in this video they’re riding their motorbike down the east coast of Malaysia. And the way they describe the beaches, I’m like, “What? What? What? What? What? I didn’t know Malaysia had beaches like that.” Like I know there are beaches and I’ve been to beaches in Malaysia and they’re nice enough beaches but they are not they don’t rise to the level of their descriptions. You know the emerald hue, the gorgeousness and the spectacular that and you know they did just way over-the-top descriptions of everything. And that happens when you write the script afterwards because now you’re trying to make a YouTube video to make your day sound more exciting than it really was in real life. You know, everything is amazing and astonishing and mindblowing and incredibly beautiful and you’re unbelievably happy and you’re so excited and the best food you ever had. You know, really over the top with everything.

The videos themselves, yeah, they’re very professionally done. A lot of work goes into them in terms of the music and the graphics and the video itself and drone shots and everything like that. Highly polished, very, very professional and very popular. You know, people love their videos. Lots of people watch them. But when I watch their videos, they feel I think I said this earlier, they feel like it’s only packaging for advertisements. And that’s why they can post the video 2 years later because they’re not really worried about telling the story. They’re not really conveying the day-to-day life on the road of their journey. They’re using the video to put in advertisements for all the products they’re selling. And from that point of view, it doesn’t matter if they’re 2 years old or whether they’re current. All of that is irrelevant.

So, I think their main business now in terms of making money is doing guided tours. So, they had a guided tour set up in Thailand and I think they’re doing one on Borneo now or something like that. I didn’t look into the details. So, you have this video about riding a motorcycle in Malaysia, but then there’s like a three-minute commercial in the middle encouraging people to sign up for their next guided tour where you get to pay to go on a motorcycle tour with them. So, they’re monetizing their status as a kind of local celebrity and their experience, you know, riding motorcycles around the world. And then people pay to join them on the tour. So that is what they’re thinking about. That’s what they’re trying to sell. That’s where their mind is. And they’re posting these videos almost as an afterthought just so they can put in commercials for these guided tours that they’re doing. And yeah, you can sort of feel how artificial their videos have become because of that.

And maybe I’m just cynical or maybe I’m just getting older or something, but this one video is called Only in Malaysia. We can’t do this in America. And I was kind of curious. So, what the heck is that? But then I figured out pretty early what they did was they rode their motorcycle down a beach. So, not on the road, but actually on the sand, you know, the packed sand, the wet sand near the water. And yeah, I mean, that is something cool to do. I’ve done it a few times in my life. And you know, you rent a scooter, you’re in the Philippines somewhere and then you’re down, you ride your scooter down to the beach and yeah, you zoom up and down the beach if it’s an empty abandoned beach and it’s fun. It feels like you’re on a Hollywood set all of a sudden and you can shout, you know, woohoo, woohoo, and ride along the beach. It’s not something you do every day, but their entire video talks about it in such a way that it is the most astonishing and mindblowing adventure that ever happened in the history of the universe. You know, it just all at the end of it, I’m like, come on. You rode your motorcycle down the beach. It’s not that big a deal. It would surprise me if you didn’t do that. And they did it. And it’s just like yeah, I guess maybe I’m a little bit cynical, but yeah, all that over-the-top narration, so many adjectives, the dramatic music, it’s all a little bit overblown to me. And it gives me that same sense of it wasn’t a computer that made this video. They wrote their own script pretty clearly, but at the same time, it feels engineered. It doesn’t feel natural. Again, the trip took place 2 or 3 years ago. You know, they probably don’t even remember how they felt at the time. So, it’s like now 2 years later, they’re watching their own video and writing a script that matches what they think they remember feeling or if this were a Hollywood movie, what would we be feeling? And then the script just naturally ends up being a little bit Yeah, it feels a little bit false. Like it doesn’t quite ring true for me. But again, it doesn’t matter because they are they have so many products they’re selling, even Patreon and these tours and they have sponsors as well. So, they get a sponsor, they get paid to input products into their videos, and it’s basically a commercial product now rather than just an honest summary of their journey.

Something that feeds into this whole idea is how far you can go on a motorcycle. So in this video, if I remember right, I think they rode all the way from KL to Johor Bahru because their Malaysian visa was expiring and they needed they needed well they wanted to do a visa run. So they’re going to hop over to Singapore for a day, come back into Malaysia. So they rode the whole way in one day I think from KL to Johor Bahru. And when they stopped off at the beach, I just I remember just having this feeling. I was thinking about the logistics about what a long hard day that would be to cover all that distance. And then when you watch the beach ride, the video is trying to convey this sense of freedom of stumbling across this beautiful empty beach and taking it that opportunity to ride up and down and how much fun it was. And yet, of course, they have all kinds of video from many different angles. I’ll have to go back and watch the whole scene again. I think they had video taken from the shore where they watch the motorcycle go by. So, basically, they had to set up a camera on the ground on the beach and then ride past it. And then they had, of course, all the POV video from their helmet cam and from their handlebar cam. And they had drone shots. So that carefree moment on the beach, you know, riding your motorbike up and down the beach, that took a lot of work. I mean, they had to, it was like a logistical effort to stop and discuss it. Oh, yeah. Let’s do this and we can put a camera here and let’s set up the drone. We’ll do it once and then we’ll go by again and you put the camera there. So, I mean, it was not a carefree, lighthearted adventure. It was a technical shoot basically. You could almost put a can of Coca-Cola in there and put some pop music and you could turn it into a Coca-Cola commercial. You know, it was basically a video shoot, but the commercial, their the product, their advertising is not Coca-Cola or something like that. It’s their tours, you know, motorcycle tours that you can join. And it just kind of had that feeling to me.

And if you’re going all the way from KL to Johor Bahru, you don’t have much time either. You’re on the clock. So, you know, you’re zooming along and you see these places like Beach, you don’t have a heck of a lot of time to stop there. Yeah, you got a schedule you have to keep to. They booked a room in Johor Bahru. Very cool hotel there. Me being me, of course, anytime anybody shows anything in a video, I’m doing a deep dive into the background. So, I found that hotel in Johor Bahru. Yeah, it’s 300 ringgit a night. That was a pretty fancy hotel that they stayed in. And now I was thinking, hm, must be nice. So, whatever they’re doing, it’s working for them in terms of the money coming in. Yeah, can’t can’t fault them for that. That hotel even had an elevator for their motorcycle. Like, instead of driving up the parking ramp, you know, they rode into an elevator and then that took them up to their floor, you know, to park their motorcycle. That’s kind of cool. And yeah, so I’m looking forward to the rest of their videos. I’ll watch them. Any video set in Malaysia, I’ll watch it. But like I said, it does have that overly produced, overly commercial feeling to it. Yeah.

And speaking of moto vloggers and covering a lot of distance very quickly, I watched a couple of videos from Lavi and Ollie. And I’ve known about these moto vloggers for a long time. They’ve been on the road for a long, long time. Shooting YouTube videos for a long time. They’ve had a lot of stages in their life, different ways of traveling, different countries, different styles of making videos. And over time, I think they’ve followed the same path as 2Up and Overloaded where they got more and more and more professional and more and more commercial.

So, they’re posting videos in Malaysia. I don’t know how current they are. I’m doing my Sherlock Holmes thing, looking for any information in the video that can give me the logistics like when they were here, how long they were here, how long ago it was. So far, I have not been able to figure out did this trip happen in 2026. I mean, it’s possible that this Malaysia trip also was 2 years ago, 1 year ago, 6 months ago, or they could be in Malaysia right now and they’re posting these videos kind of in real time. I have no idea, but I don’t think so because they’re so organized now. They’re so professional. I think they hit the road. I think they said they’re going to be in Malaysia for one month. So I think what they do is land in the country, zoom through in one month, record all the video, then they go somewhere else, and then they sit down and edit all the videos and start posting them. They’re not trying to post in real time, I don’t think. But I could be wrong about that. Yeah, they don’t they don’t include a lot of logistics, but they’ve only posted two videos so far, and I really enjoyed the first one. It was like a my it appealed to me and the video was essentially them in Kuala Lumpur getting their motorcycles. So they rented two motorcycles. They didn’t bring motorcycles into the country. They flew in, I assume. And then they went to a local shop. They probably arranged it in advance. They knew where to go. And they rented two 250cc Benelli motorcycles. And then they began their journey.

One really good thing about their videos, they have really nice headsets. So, they have two motorcycles. The guy Ollie, I think his name is Ollie. He’s the guy. I think he’s from the UK and Lavi is the woman. I think she’s from Germany. But they each ride their own motorcycle, which is interesting because that doubles the number of cameras. They run with a usual setup that all moto vloggers use now where they have a GoPro mounted on their helmet chin and then they have like a 360 camera mounted on the handlebars. So like 2Up and Overloaded, they they run that way. But these guys, Lavi and Ollie, they have to have double, you know, because they have two motorcycles, two 360 cameras, two GoPros, and they have a really nice audio setup like with an intercom system where they can talk to each other. They’re wearing helmets, so they’re fully enclosed, but they have a microphone and speakers inside their helmets, and they talk to each other in real time. It’s very clear, very crisp, and that audio gets recorded, I think, to both of their action cameras. That’s a beautiful setup. I don’t know how they did it, but the audio is really, really good. I don’t know if that really leads to the best video or not because you end up listening to their chatter, right, their conversation back and forth. And maybe too much of that is not so good either. I don’t really know. But yeah, the audio was crystal clear.

So I was really hoping, wow, they’re starting right at the beginning of the journey. We landed in KL. We picked up our motorcycles. We’re mounting our luggage. They talk about their luggage, the gear, and now I assume they were going to ride out of KL and begin their journey. So I was pretty excited. It’s like I love journeys that have a beginning point and they show everything. But then video number two just started in the middle of nowhere. They actually rode their motorcycles all the way from KL to Johor Bahru and then I don’t know how long they spent in KL. I don’t know how long they spent in Johor Bahru because they didn’t record any of that. They rode all the way to Johor Bahru, you know, the southern point of Malaysia. And then they spent time there getting ready, getting organized, and then they rode early in the morning. I guess they woke up early, rode their motorcycles to a place very I can’t remember the name of it right now, but there’s a national park down there, a little piece of land jutting out into the water. And it is the most southerly point, I believe, of all of Asia, all of Southeast Asia, the most certainly the most southern point of Malaysia. And I guess in their mind, that’s where they wanted the journey to begin. So, the journey begins there and they open the video with, you know, here we are, the southernmost point of Malaysia, and we’re going to ride our motorcycles all the way to the most northerly point and they’re going to follow the west coast. They showed a map. So my heart sank because ah I hate that kind of overly organized like they picked that spot to begin their journey and then they don’t hit record until they’re actually there. But what about you know all the ongoing preparations in KL the entire ride all the way through Malaysia all the way to Johor Bahru their hotel in Johor Bahru all the meals they had all the organizing they did all the logistics all the people they met I want all of that I want the journey to be documented day by day by day I want to see and hear everything and their video was kind of odd in a way because they started that video with you know here Here we are at the beginning of our journey, the southern tip of Malaysia. And then they stopped for lunch. And in the video, they talk about it like, “Wow, this is our first meal in Malaysia. We didn’t know anything about Malaysian food. Our first meal.” You know, they made a big deal of this being their first food in Malaysia, but they’d already been in Malaysia for one or two weeks or something. So what what are all the meals they had in KL? All the meals they had driving to Johor Bahru. All the meals they had in Johor Bahru. The breakfast they had that morning back at their hotel I assume. So you know there it injects this sense of overly packaged overly produced journey where okay they’re pretending that their journey starts here and they’re pretending that this is the first meal that they had in Malaysia even though they’ve been in Malaysia for weeks already many many days anyway. I don’t really know how long they were in the country. So yeah.

And then that video where they started at the southernmost tip, that video ended. So that was day one of their journey. It ended in Melaka. So again, when you’re when you have a motorcycle, you cover so much distance in one day. And it feels kind of natural to do that because you’ve got a motorcycle. If you don’t cover the all that distance, then why do you even have a motorcycle? It almost forces this fast pace on you. How how far is that? Let give me a second to get the actual distance. I guess it’s not quite as far as I thought. I always imagine Malaysia is a much bigger country than it really is, but it’s 200 kilometers following the coast road. But the thing is the video I mean their day began in Johor Bahru waking up in the hotel packing up their motorcycles riding from the big city getting out of that big city getting all the way to the southern point. Here’s the name of the place if even if I know how to say it properly. Tanjung Piai I think that’s how they said it. So all of that experience, none of that is in the video, but what is in their video is, you know, here we are at the southernmost point and then they ride to Melaka and then they show Melaka.

One thing that does amaze me about all these people is how much they do pack into a single day. Like if I rode a motorcycle from there to Melaka, I am done for the day. I’m not going out exploring Melaka at night. Good grief, no. Because I’m exhausted and I would spend the night organizing the videos from the day, getting a jump on editing that chunk of video. I need to rest, rehydrate, get a good night of sleep, and then in the morning, I can wake up and go out exploring Melaka. But they planned ahead of time to ride their motorcycle all the way to Melaka covering 200 km. They found their hotel. They parked their motorcycle and then they went for a walk into the historic core and they went up and down Jonker Street and they hired a trishaw to go on a tour. And yeah, all of that kind of drives me crazy because I know Melaka pretty well by now and I’m like yelling at the screen about everything they’re missing because I’m pretty sure that like one and a half two-hour segment where they just zoomed around Dutch Square, hopped on a trishaw went up and down Jonker Street, tried a bunch of food. That’s going to be their entire Melaka experience and in the morning they’re just going to hop on their motorbike and ride another two 300 kilometers you know and I’m like ah you know I want to grab them and show them everything else there is to see and do in Melaka.

And kind of a funny side story here is I’ve gotten familiar with a local historian I didn’t know anything about him at the beginning his name is Serge Jardin he’s French national like he was born in France I believe but he’s married to a local woman I believe from Malaysia and he lives here now he lives in Melaka and he is a historian in his own right and I guess he’s become very well known because here in Malaysia in Melaka he points out all the errors in all of the tourist information in the museums, in the guide books, in the maps, in the signs, all that kind of stuff. And I can relate to that because I do a fair amount of that myself. But the funny thing is that Serge Jardin, I’ve never met him. I think he’s I just found out that he’s in his 70s and he knows what he’s talking about. And when he talks about history, he sticks to what the actual history says. He goes back to primary documents written by people who were there at the time, right? He’s not scanning a guide book or reading a tourism brochure about Melaka and repeating what they say because he knows all of that is wrong. Distorted, misleading, simplified, all that kind of stuff. So, he focuses on the real history. So, when he’s telling people they’re wrong, he’s quoting some guy who wrote something back in 1581, someone who published their memoirs in 1739, right? So, he he trumps whatever you’re saying.

And the funny thing is he’s become aware of my videos and then in my videos I sometimes point out things in the local information that I find out is kind of misleading, is not quite accurate. So here is local tourism information, not very accurate. And then here’s my video or maybe make it above. Here’s my video where I think what I’m saying is more accurate. I’m correcting things they said. And then here comes Serge Jardin and he he’s commenting on my video and he’s way up here saying everything you just said is completely wrong. Right? So it’s like I’m local tourism is in my crosshairs. I’m saying what you said about this this fortress is not accurate. And then Serge Jardin, he watches my video and says, “Uh, what you said isn’t right either. Here’s the reality.” So, he’s correcting everything in my video. I’m correcting everything in the tourism information. And then you get people like, you know, Lavi and Ollie. They’re here in Melaka for one night and they take a trishaw ride. So they’re just repeating what the trishaw driver said and they’re repeating what they read in the local information signs, things like that. So yeah, they get everything wrong. And I can only imagine if Serge Jardin, he has so many issues with everything I say, pointing out all of my factual errors and all the things I said that aren’t technically true. I can only imagine how he feels when there are like a hundred casual YouTube vloggers every month who shoot their video about Melaka and just sort of say things. He it must just drive him crazy how wrong everybody is. Yeah.

Yeah, there was a recent interesting set of comments from Serge, if I can go off on a tangent because I posted a video about what I keep calling St. Paul’s Church on the hill here. It’s the one with all the big tombstones lined up along the walls. And those tombstones used to be flat on the ground and people were buried underneath them in the floor of the church. So, I went there, shot a whole video about the tombstones, and I focused on the names of the people as shown because there’s a tombstone with all of the writing on it, but of course, it will be in, you know, Dutch or Portuguese or whatever language. And then whoever organized that place as a tourist attraction, they translated what’s on the tombstones and put them on little plaques down on the ground. And in my video, I I even made a deliberate comment about how good these plaques are. And you know, I said, “Yeah, they I did comment that there’s a lack of information. You go to this tourist attraction, this historic site, you don’t you have no idea what you’re looking at because there’s no information really posted about the place. You just have to look everything up yourself.” So, I did say that there isn’t enough signage here, but they did a really nice job with these plaques, the translation, because you can read it in English and they’re they’re nice looking and they’re easy to read. So, I I said, “Yeah, they did a really nice job with these.” And then Serge left a comment on my video where he said, “Oh, by the way, when they first made those plaques, they were all wrong. Like they got the names wrong, the dates wrong, the years wrong, the occupations wrong, like everything was inaccurate, he said. And he wrote stern letters to the tourism authorities pointing them out how inaccurate all of those were. And he said like out of 37 plaques, I think he said 36 of them were completely wrong with all these filled with mistakes. And he told them that and then he said they replaced all of them except for six. So they actually listened to him and they corrected all these things because of his input and then they corrected all but six of them he said or something like that. You can see his comment on my video, the one about the tombstones of St. Paul’s Church. So, it’s really interesting that he he’s deep into this and he’s he was responsible for a local guide book being cancelled where some some somehow or other some organization working with a publisher, working with writers, however it came about, a guide book was published to Melaka and it was full of mistakes according to Serge and then he wrote a very stern letter or post or something about it pointing out all of these mistakes and they took it seriously enough that they cancelled that run of the guide book and then they tried to correct all these errors and then they republished it but they didn’t correct all of the errors that Serge pointed out.

So yeah, I’m learning quite a bit more about Serge Jardin and like I said I’m really in his crosshairs now. I haven’t read the comment that carefully yet, but I posted a video about Harmony Street. And I’m pretty sure in my video I made it clear that the street isn’t actually called Harmony Street. It’s that’s a tourism invention. This whole idea that there’s a Hindu temple, a mosque, and a Buddhist temple all side by side. So, religions living in harmony and therefore they call it Harmony Street. That’s a tourism name. It’s not the real name. It’s never been the name. It’s not a historical name. It’s not written down anywhere. But in general, people call it Harmony Street. And I made that point as clear as I could, I thought, in my video. But then Serge, he watched my video and he left a 10-point comment, 10 things he wanted to say about my video that was wrong or he wanted to correct. And I saw that list of 10. I went, “Oh boy, I guess I really screwed up on this video. I didn’t think I was that wrong.” But it I did read point number one, and his number one point was, “There is no such name as Harmony Street. It’s not called Harmony Street. That’s a tourism name. It doesn’t exist. You know, he went on and on about that and I was like, well, that’s what I said. I mean, that is what I said in my video. I mean, if I if that didn’t come across, then yeah, I guess I made a big mistake. But no, I’m pretty sure cuz my whole video was about this name. Harmony Street is not a real name. That’s just a tourism gimmick. And I tried to point out that in fact calling it Harmony Street is a bit ironic. I put that in the title of my video, the irony of Harmony Street because the mosques and the temples kind of came out of a historical trend of religious suppression by the Portuguese and by the Dutch and in the 1700s. Yeah, I talked about all this already in connection with St. Peter’s church, this whole history of religions not having harmony. In fact, the Portuguese said Catholicism is allowed and no other religion is allowed. No public worship, only Catholicism. And then the Dutch said, well, only our religion. All the other ones are suppressed. And then in 1700s, things kind of changed. And it was then that they put these temples and mosques side by side. So in fact this whole idea of this is a symbol of religious harmony. You could actually look at it as a symbol of a history of a lack of harmony. I’m pretty sure I said that but then Serge kind of pointed out okay this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. What do you mean about this? You’re wrong about that. I think there’s 10 mistakes that I made and he’s probably right. When you do these things off the cuff, you read all these things and like the date that the temple was founded, you know, it was founded in 1748 or 1781 or this or that. And I noticed one of his points was, “No, the temple was not founded in the year you said it was founded in this.” And he always lists his source for what he says. And his source always trumps your source. Like I would have gotten these dates from websites official and Wikipedia, things like that. You know, I look up the history of this temple and every website I go to says, “Oh, this temple was built in 1748.” And I just have to believe them because everybody says that. And I I confirm it as much as I can. But then Serge will say, “Nope, that temple was founded in 1696.” And he will quote somebody who wrote about it in 1697. Like, see this guy, he was there when the church was built. He knows. So, everybody’s wrong and you’re wrong, too, because you repeated what everybody else said. So that’s that’s kind of funny to be you do not want to be in the crosshairs of Serge Jardin. If you are, you better get your facts straight because he knows the real story.

So anyway, that all of that is just coming out of this idea of a casual like super super casual moto vlogger like Lavi and Ollie spending one short night in Melaka and then everything they say in their video is either wrong or missing the point or completely misleading. And I I think of poor Serge. Yeah, he he must go crazy when he he goes crazy when he sees my videos and I at least made a good faith effort to get it right. I still got everything wrong, but at least I tried. But then you get all these other vloggers who Yeah. I mean, they’re not here to talk about history. They’re just here to make a video that’s entertaining and they’re not really worried about getting their facts straight. So, that’s kind of funny. So anyway, that is Lavi and Ollie and I’m assuming there’s going to be more videos from Malaysia. In terms of travel, they’ve only had one video so far. This video crossing Malaysia by motorcycle, the adventure starts here. They did say that they paid $20 per day for the motorcycle rental per motorcycle, and they have two of them. So, it’d be $40 per day. It’s like $1,200 US for the month to rent those two motorcycles. So, yeah, it’s a it’s a big chunk of money for a for a month. But, I guess they’re they’re also very very professional. I think they make a lot of money from their social media and from their YouTube channel. So, they can they can pay that. And but yeah, they’re only going to be in Malaysia for one month shooting these videos, which is too bad. It’d be nice if they stayed longer.

One other thing I’ve noticed though is a lot of these moto vloggers, they’re still using GoPro cameras. You know, GoPro has become something of a joke lately online. They’re they’re a punching bag. Everybody’s dumping on GoPro all the time about how terrible their cameras are compared to DJI and Insta360 and how the company’s going bankrupt and there’s video after video after video, criticizing GoPro and talking about how great all the other cameras are. And yet, when you look at, you know, Itchy Boots, probably the the most famous travel vlogger, she still uses GoPro cameras. And from what I’ve heard her say, I think that she uses them because they just look better. The video looks better than the competition. So, what are you gonna do? And then Lavi and Ollie, they use GoPro cameras. Another guy I follow, Unamoto, traveling around the world by motorcycle, very popular moto vlogger GoPro cameras. So GoPros can’t be all that bad if all of the all of these big popular professional travel vloggers are still using GoPros. You know, they can’t they can’t be that bad really in the end.

One more travel vlogger and he’s another moto vlogger. This one I I did a huge deep dive into some of his videos yesterday. I wasted a lot of time on this. It’s a guy I think he’s from England, Bristol, maybe. I think I heard him say Bristol one time and I don’t know his whole story. I think he started in Australia on a motorcycle and he’s going to ride his motorcycle all the way from Australia all the way back to the UK, I think. And but I haven’t watched any of those videos. I only watched his videos I started with one of his videos because it’s called I shipped my bike to Malaysia by small boat with only a WhatsApp contact number. And to my amazement, he was in Sumatra on his motorcycle. It’s called Later Rider, by the way. That’s the name of the the YouTube channel. And he’s traveling alone. He’s a guy. I I think he might be in his 50s, maybe retired. He certainly has a lot of money to spend. He’s not worried about money. So, he’s probably been working his whole life, and now he’s retired with a a nest egg. And from what I can gather, he set up this motorcycle journey as a personal challenge. Can I in my 50s ride a motorcycle all the way from Australia to Europe? So, I say that because I might be critical of the content of his videos, how many things he’s missing because he’s traveling so fast. But that’s not his point. It doesn’t seem like he’s not out there to learn about the world and do deep dives into all these countries. That’s not the point of his journey. The point of his journey is a personal challenge at his age at this stage of his lifetime to ride a motorcycle. I don’t think he’s an experienced rider either. So, he set himself this personal challenge to So, that’s the point of the videos riding a motorcycle around the world. The countries he’s going through probably just backdrop. He’s not really that interested in them. So, that’s kind of his his attitude.

But anyway, the very first video I saw, turns out he wanted to go from Sumatra to Malaysia, but he has a motorcycle. So, he found some guy online and he found his WhatsApp number who had a boat in, get this, Tanjung Balai, my town in Sumatra, where I’ve spent months living in Tanjung Balai. And I I ended up living there quite a bit because there’s a ferry, the Indomal fast ferry that goes from Tanjung Balai to Port Dickson. And in the old days, it used to go to Port Klang. And I would go Port Klang, Port Klang to Tanjung Balai, back to Port Klang, back to Tanjung Balai. And I would use that ferry all the time to go in and out of Malaysia and Sumatra. And then it that died during the pandemic. That boat stopped running. And now I go Port Dickson Tanjung Balai. Port Dickson Tanjung Balai. So I know Tanjung Balai very well taking with my bicycle going across. But he has a motorcycle and he can’t put a motorcycle on the ferry. In fact, from his video, it sounds like he didn’t even know there was a ferry there. He had no idea. So he made arrangements to ride his motorcycle to Tanjung Balai, go to the dock, find this guy with a boat. He’d never seen a picture of it. He didn’t know what kind of boat. But the guy said, “Yeah, I can bring your motorcycle by boat to Malaysia.” And then he was going to drop off his motorcycle and then go to the airport, Kuala Namu airport outside of Medan, and then fly from Medan to KL and then pick up his motorcycle when it arrives and then continue his journey. So I was like, “Wow, this will be amazing to watch this video because I know Tanjung Balai so well.” And I’ve been to that dock area so many times and I know about the ferry and all that kind of stuff. I know I know that city as well as I know any city in the world.

So anyway, I watched his video and it was a little bit unsatisfying for me because like I said, his surroundings are not the focus of his journey. His his focus is his own personal challenge doing this and he’s not super serious about YouTube. He wants his YouTube channel to grow and he wants it to be popular, yes, but at the same time, he’s willing to just jump ahead in time. So, the video will just start in the middle of nowhere. He was actually staying at the Grand Sani Hotel, but of course, he doesn’t show that. He doesn’t show his room, checking into the hotel, the food he eats. He doesn’t show any of that. Just like Itchy Boots, the video starts with him riding his motorcycle away from the hotel in Tanjung Balai to go to the dock. That’s where the video starts. And as a detective, you just have to piece together. It’s like, oh, that hotel behind him, that must be where he was staying. He doesn’t say anything about it, but I know that hotel quite well. I stayed there myself, like two nights, I think. It’s the most expensive hotel in Tanjung Balai, so I couldn’t afford it. But I did stay there for two nights one time. It was convenient for when I was going in and out. I had to stay there. But anyway, that’s where he stayed at the Grand Sani Hotel. And then he rode to the dock. And I I thought that was so interesting because I’ve ridden my bicycle up and down that road. And I’ve done it on motorcycles. I’ve done it on the local becak, you know, the three-wheel motorcycles, things like that. And you go through a really busy area of fishing, fish markets, fishing boats, fish warehouses. And it’s a real crazy area. Everybody in Indonesia so friendly. Everybody’s shouting hello at you from everywhere. It’s a wild scene. So, I got to see him, you know, riding his motorcycle down there. He He had no idea where he was going. He’d never been there before. Everything was a surprise. And then he finally found the dock where he could drop off his motorcycle. But again, he didn’t really dive into the logistics. I don’t know how much it cost. I don’t know how long it was going to take, the preparations involved. He didn’t show loading the motorcycle on the boat because he had to go directly from there to the airport to fly to Malaysia.

And that always amazes me. Even I I was hinting at this with Lavi and Ollie, most other people, they do far more in one day than I would ever do. Like his plan, he planned it way in advance. He already booked the boat for his motorcycle and he booked his flight for the same day. So he woke up at the Grand Sani Hotel in Tanjung Balai and his plan for the day was to ride his motorcycle to the dock somehow find the boat, give the motorcycle to the guy, get all the paperwork done, whatever that involves, and then he somehow had to get from that dock all the way to the airport outside of Medan. He said his flight was in 5 hours and he had to get there to catch his flight and then he flew from there to Malaysia. I’m like, “Oh man, I would never do that in a million years.” Like for me, dropping off my motorcycle at the dock at a random boat that I’ve never seen. To me, that is enough for one day. You know, if I can get that done in one day, I’m happy. I’ll make 10 videos about that one experience because it’s so unusual. It’s so interesting. Like film everything, the fishing boats, the harbors, and all this kind of stuff. But mo and then if I did that again, my plan would be to drop off my motorcycle at the boat, film that whole experience, then I’m going back to the hotel and I’m crashing for the rest of the day. I’m done. Like if I got that done by 2:00 in the afternoon, started at 9:00, started at 8, and I’m done by 2, that’s my day. I’m finished. I’m going back to the hotel, going to copy the video files, copy all the pictures I took, do all my internet stuff, and then I’m done for the day. I’m not doing anything else. I can’t even imagine dropping off my motorcycle and then having to travel all the way to Medan, all the way out to the airport, going through customs and immigration in Indonesia, landing in Malaysia, customs and immigration, going to a new hotel from the airport to downtown KL. All of that in one day, not a chance. I’ll do one of those things, then I need a week to recover before I do anything else. Like I drop off my motorcycle, I’m staying in Tanjung Balai for another week just to recover and document the experience and explore Tanjung Balai and then I’ll go to Medan and get in, you know, go to the airport. But I wouldn’t even do that. Like I would never travel from Tanjung Balai to Medan then to the airport. I do I do it in stages. I’ll travel from Tanjung Balai to Medan and then I’m staying there for a week to recover from the trip to get there and then after a week of resting exploring Medan then I’d make the trip out to the airport fly to KL and then I need a I need a week to recover from the flight to KL. But this guy Yeah. Same day drives to the dock, drops off his motorcycle, finds like one of these becak I don’t know. And then yeah, he took him all the way downtown again. Then he had to find a taxi and the taxi had to take him all the way to the airport. Then he went from the airport, flew to KL, spent one night, and the very next morning he went to pick up his motorcycle. All of that like so fast. I would be exhausted. And to me, he’s moving so fast. There isn’t enough time to absorb everything happening. I need time to think about it, to ponder, to visualize everything, to really dive into the experience. But a lot of these moto vloggers, I mean, just fast, fast, fast. And I can’t do that. So that’s the first video from him that I watched.

And then I got very interested in everything else that happened in Sumatra. So I went back in time and I watched two other videos from him. The first one, Google Maps sent me down Sumatra’s awesome back roads. That’s episode 19. Then Sumatra motorcycle tour, the worst roads ever. That’s episode 20. And then the one where he shipped the motorcycle is episode 21. But again, these videos, I found them really fascinating because episode 19 starts in Padang. And again, Padang on the coast of Sumatra. I know Padang very, very well. I spent at least a month there with a scooter. So, an entire month just in Padang. And then I went all up and down the coast, every part of Padang I could possibly investigate. I went out every single day doing something new, hopping on my scooter, exploring this way, then that way, then that way. So, I know Padang pretty well. A lot of walking up and down the rivers there, the bridges, the back neighborhoods. I put in a lot of time getting to know Padang. So, I thought, “Oh, he’s leaving from Padang. I get to see that it.” And then he was gone. Like, he woke up in the morning at his hotel. He did go to the mosque. There’s like a big big famous mosque there. He rode his motorcycle to the mosque, looked at it, and then he left Padang, and that was the whole thing. That’s all he filmed in the entire city. And oh, it just broke my heart. I was so looking forward to seeing the city again in a new video. And he didn’t film anything there again. He’s not that interested in Padang. Or maybe he is interested and he went everywhere and had all these amazing experiences. I don’t know. But he didn’t film any of it. And in fact, he apologizes at the beginning of the video because he said his entire journey from Java all the way up the west coast of Sumatra to Padang, like he rode up the entire western coast of Sumatra for 3 days and he filmed none of it, nothing at all. And he kind of said something. It seemed to be he was saying that there was really nothing to film. Like nothing happened that I needed to film anyway, and I just wanted to take a break from the filming because, yeah, it takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort. He just didn’t want to bother. So, he did a 3-day journey up the coast on a motorcycle, the coast of Sumatra, and he filmed none of it. H broke my heart. And then his arrival in Padang was part of those three days. And he didn’t film any of that. So he filmed nothing in Padang at all. And all he did was wake up one morning, leave from his hotel again. I had to do the detective thing because I’m watching the video and I pause the video as he’s leaving the hotel and then out of in the corner of the video I see a a street sign and I’m trying to figure out where he was and what hotel is located there looking for a sign with the name of the hotel on it and then I figured out the name of the hotel and yeah it was a pretty expensive place like four five-star hotel so he has a lot of money and it’s really funny when I watch these videos because a lot of travel vloggers hide the logistics partially because they don’t want to be hassled by, hey, this video is 6 months old. Like, why are you posting them now? I thought you were in Malaysia right now, but this happened 6 months ago. Come on. People don’t want to deal with that. So, they don’t tell you when the video was shot. They want to keep that a secret. So, they’re very careful not to show anything that gives away the date. Most YouTubers do that. And I couldn’t figure out the date for this guy either. I watched all three videos so carefully trying to pinpoint what year it is, what month, and what day. But he never gave away anything. But the entire time he had his smartphone with a map. I don’t think it was Google Maps. Maybe it was some kind of mapping app on his phone and it was mounted on his handlebars and he had a chin-mounted GoPro. I think he’s also using a GoPro. I think so. No, may may have been a DJI. I can’t remember now. But anyway, the whole time that he’s riding his motorcycle, occas the camera would pan down and you can actually see his phone and you can read the screen. So I pause the video full screen. I take a screenshot and I zoom in on the phone just to see exactly what street he’s on, what city he’s in, where he is. And you can see the time, which is interesting. So it actually shows, you know, the time when he left from the hotel. It doesn’t, his phone doesn’t show the date, so I I couldn’t figure that out from the date. I had to switch to my GoPro, my Olympus. I’ve got four batteries for it, and I still ran out of battery. Now, the recording I’ve done so far, yeah, burn through all four batteries, and they’re all dead. So, and as I said at the beginning, there’s no way to plug in that camera and run it off USB-C power while recording. You can’t do that. So, I had to switch to the GoPro. So yeah, totally different look I assume. Yeah, I was just saying that with Later Rider Tony, his name is Tony. I could see his phone screen so I could see the time but I couldn’t see the day, the date, the year, anything like that. But it’s kind of interesting to see the time because you get these little insights into people’s lives. I’ve noticed that YouTube travel videos in particular can be an illusion, especially if the YouTuber only shows like a part of their day and what they choose to focus on. You as the viewer, you can end up with a certain impression of that experience, but it can be very different from the reality. And like in this case, there’s like little clues where I could see that he was leaving from the hotel. I think he was leaving at somewhere between like 10:45, something like that. So, it was kind of like that kind of sets the stage for me. He was going to go to Bukittinggi and then, you know, you just you get a sense of his lifestyle is basically what I’m saying. Like, what is his day like? So, he’s staying in a very nice hotel, four-star something or other. I’m sure they had a very nice breakfast buffet down in the lobby area in a nice restaurant. So, you know, he woke up very leisurely, went down to have breakfast, had a nice breakfast, a cup of coffee, and and then he just fiddles around in his room for a while getting ready, and then by 10:30, 10:45 in the morning, he’s on the road. So, you can sort of get a sense of that person’s day. And that would be very very different from say someone like Let’s Go Cycling. I follow him. He’s a he’s on a bicycle and he’s camping all the time. So like his day will begin at, you know, 5:30 in the morning with sunrise and then he makes a cup of coffee over a campfire on the beach kind of thing and then he’s on the road by 6:30 in the morning. So, you know, it’s a completely different lifestyle, a completely different experience, but you may not see that in a normal YouTube video unless you look for the clues because in his normal video, he didn’t show where he was staying. He doesn’t talk about what time he woke up or where he had breakfast or anything like that, what time he leaves. He just gets on his motorbike and as soon as he hits the throttle, he hits record on the camera. Yo, good morning. Here I am in Sumatra and off we go. You for all you know it could be 5:30 in the morning, could be 6:30, 7:30, 10:30, it could be 2:00 in the afternoon. You just don’t know. So what I do is the Sherlock Holmes thing and then I I look at his phone and I had a particular reason for looking at his phone to do with this particular video. But anyway, so on this day, yeah, he rode from Padang to Bukittinggi. And again, ah, he broke my heart. Because the video after this one starts the same way, but he’s in the town of Balige, which is on Lake Toba. It’s on like the southern tip of Lake Toba, like 400 kilometers away. So this video ends when he arrives in Bukittinggi and that’s it. It just cuts off. He’s in his hotel room in Bukittinggi and then the next video starts. He’s leaving from a hotel in Balige 400 kilometers away. It’s like what happened in between? Like he rode all the way to Balige and didn’t film any of it. It’s like broke my heart. And again, I know Bukittinggi quite well. I know Padang very well. And I was disappointed that he didn’t show any of that city. But Bukittinggi is that times 10 for me because I spent months around the Bukittinggi area. I stayed in this tiny village on the on the slope of one of the local volcanoes just outside Bukittinggi. And I just spent a lot of time there exploring on my bicycle. I had a scooter for a while and I explored that whole region on my scooter on foot and and on my bicycle and at least according to his videos he saw none of that like nothing at all. And I don’t like it just seems like such a weird choice to me because Bukittinggi is an incredible city all by itself. You could just go out exploring that city and the local neighborhoods, hanging out with the local people and having an amazing experience. All the markets and the restaurants and the cafes, the local atmosphere. So yeah, Bukittinggi and it’s very high up. It’s in the mountains. It’s really cool, nice temperature. You’re not sweating. You’re not hot. Anything like that. It’s an amazing place to visit. But he didn’t either. He didn’t do any of that. He certainly didn’t show any of it on video. He didn’t mention it. And right outside Bukittinggi is Lake Maninjau. And Lake Maninjau is like a massive volcanic crater. So it’s very very similar to Lake Toba where sometime thousands of years ago this huge volcano erupted exploded created a super volcano basically and then inside the crater a lake formed and it is one of the most beautiful one of the most stunning one of the most interesting places I’ve ever been and the fact that he was like 20 km away from it and he never went. I It just seems so odd to me. I can understand. You’re on a journey. You’re going around the world. You’re interested in getting some kilometers on your under your under your belt, under your wheels. Yeah, I kind of get that. But at the same time, when something like Lake Maninjau is right there, it just seems like a no-brainer to at least check it out. And if you’re a YouTuber and you have all the cameras and the gear and the laptops, microphones, and you’re editing anyway, man, riding your motorcycle from Bukittinggi to Lake Maninjau, that is an incredible ride. I did it on a scooter and then you basically ride into the countryside, which is stunning. Absolutely gorgeous. All the villages and the rice fields, that architecture of that region, it’s absolutely amazing. And then you ride to the edge of the volcano. You ride up to the top of this volcanic crater. And then you ride down a road from the lid from the lip of the crater to the lake. And they call it the road of 44 curves because it has 44 hairpin turns all the way down the edge of the crater. 44 hairpin corners to get all the way down to the bottom. And for him to do that on his 650 motorcycle, ah, that would be absolutely amazing. And then you get down to the lake, you can ride your motorcycle all the way around the lake. You could stay there if you want. They have amazing hotels down there. Play like bed and breakfast kind of places. It’s It’s just incredible. It’s like one of the most stunning places you can visit in all of Indonesia. It’s right there at your doorstep. And he didn’t go there. And then in the other direction there’s the Harau Valley. You ride from Bukittinggi to the next city, Payakumbuh. Just outside of Payakumbuh, there’s a Harau Valley which is stunning. Absolutely gorgeous to go there on a motorcycle. Yeah. As a day trip, absolute no-brainer. Like why wouldn’t you do that? And then beyond the Harau Valley, if you keep following that road, there is a place called Kelok 9. I think it’s Kelok 9. It’s this incredible sequence of highway nine curves that goes around and around and around. Scenically, you just cannot get anything better than Lake Maninjau, the Harau Valley, and these nine curves. Like just for a YouTuber looking for interesting video on your motorcycle. Absolutely stunning. And he didn’t go to any of these places, let alone exploring the volcanoes and the villages and the farming districts, all that kind of stuff. He didn’t do any of that. So yeah, he definitely broke my heart. And not only that, like when he arrived in Bukittinggi, he said there was a lookout point he wanted to go to. So he rode his motorcycle to this lookout point. And I recognized it as soon as he got there. It’s actually right in the heart of the city itself. It looks it’s like a cliff looking out over the Sianok or Sianok Valley. The Sianok Valley Panorama. You have to pay. It’s like a park setting and you pay a small amount of money and you go in and you get this beautiful view. So he went there and that’s the only thing he showed from Bukittinggi. That was like his entire experience. And there was like a tower you can climb up. He climbed to the top of the tower. He looked out at the the scenery and then he said, “Well, that’s enough of that.” And then he just went to his hotel and that was the end of his day. And we don’t see anything else from Bukittinggi. And even in that park where he paid his ticket to go into the park, that ticket also gives you entrance into the Japanese tunnels, which is one of the most amazing places you can visit as well because during the Japanese occupation, they built a tunnel complex underground in the cliffs. Now, of course, I went there and shot a video about it, and it’s so fascinating and so interesting. Just visually, it’s worth seeing. Even if you’re not interested in the history, the visuals are incredible for a YouTuber. And I guess he didn’t know it was there. He had no idea it was there. It never came up. And so, yeah, he missed that. He missed he didn’t go into the Sianok Valley. Like, you can look at it from the cliff. Sure, it looks beautiful, but when you take your motorcycle down the road into that valley and go exploring, it’s an amazing place. There’s so much to see and do in the Bukittinggi area. And again, it it drove me crazy because I know it so well and I spent so much time there. And to see someone arrive, see nothing, spend one night and leave. Yeah. Just breaks my heart.

And then it continued because the next video he started from Balige which I said is on the southern tip of Lake Toba. So he was waking up leaving from that hotel. That’s when the video started. And I just assumed he was going to go around Lake Toba, right? But he didn’t. He just left from Balige and he rode his motorcycle down to Tanjung Balai because that’s where he needed to put his motorcycle on the boat. So that video was all about riding from Lake Toba, the southern tip in Balige and then to Tanjung Balai. And as far as I can tell, he never checked out Lake Toba, which to me is is absolutely insane. Like I’m not the biggest in the world for I have to go to every big attraction, but as a natural setting, there’s nothing on the planet like Lake Toba. It it’s it’s astounding. It is so interesting, so beautiful. And he had his 650cc motorcycle with all of his traveling gear. Absolute no-brainer to at least ride around the lake. You know, you follow the roads, check out all the villages at Lakeside. You can go to the tourist area, you know, to Tuk Tuk out on Samosir Island. But that in itself is an amazing place. Of course, I mean, I spend months at Lake Toba. I I didn’t just show up, look, and then leave. I literally spent month after month after month living in Lake Toba. And my visa kept expiring. And every time my visa expired, I have to go to immigration, get an extension. So I stayed for like 6 months. And then when I ran out of visa options, that’s when I flew to Malaysia, came back into Indonesia, and then rode my bicycle up the coast from Lake Toba to Aceh. And so I I know that area pretty well. In the fact that he was on Lake Toba right there with a motorcycle and didn’t even bother to ride around it or at least he didn’t record that experience on video. Maybe he did it. I doubt it. I don’t think so. So yeah, he just left from there and then I was really doing my Sherlock Holmes thing because to my amazement, he went down the same road that I cycled. So my last trip there, I left from Tanjung Balai. Yeah, Tanjung Balai. And I was riding my bike. I was going to go up all the way to Lake Toba myself. And I chose this more remote, very scenic road that goes up this beautiful valley and then climbs steeply up to Lake Toba. And partway up that road, I found a little hotel right there in the middle of nowhere. And I ended up staying in that hotel for like 3 weeks, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, something like that. I based myself in that hotel. And then I just rode my bicycle up the road, you know, up climbing, climbing, climbing to just check out the region. Every day I just woke up and went for a bike ride or went for a hike or or did something. So I I know that area very well. So when I I saw that, hey, it looks like he’s going to he went down that exact same road, I got very very excited and I tried to figure out exactly where he went by, you know, looking at his smartphone screen and then looking at the time, like all the notes, everything like that. Yeah, it’s really quite I actually I kept notes. Do I have them here? Yeah, here it is. I I opened up a notepad and then I jotted down the time. So 12:03 he left from the hotel in Balige. So yeah, he left at noon and then you know 12:29 he turned down that road heading down the down the volcano, the one I was talking about. And then he visited this waterfall that you can see it right on the road. I of course I went there as well called Air Terjun Indah Walet and yeah it’s a it’s a very beautiful little waterfall. He arrived there at 1:27. I’m like I’m I’m this crazy. I made detailed notes about exactly what time and I had a reason for doing this that I’ll get to in a minute. And then again he broke my heart because he was so excited about that waterfall and it’s a pretty small one. It’s beautiful, but it’s a little waterfall coming off the cliff. And off that road, the exact road that he was on, there’s a side road. 2 kilometers down that side road are the highest waterfalls in all of Indonesia. At least that’s what a lot of people claim. It may not or may not be true. There may be bigger ones out there, but that is the claim to fame. These are the highest waterfalls in Indonesia called Ponot waterfalls. P O N O T. You can see it on Google Maps. And he was right there. He was 2 kilometers away from the highest waterfalls of Indonesia. And he got so excited about this little waterfall at the side of the road, but apparently he didn’t know about Ponot waterfalls. He he didn’t know that they that they were there. So he just rode right by them and never saw them. So he was going down this road. It’s a very, very rough road. I rode it on my bicycle, so I know how rough it can be. But he happened to be there when it was raining heavily. I was there when it was dry. So I had to deal with all the potholes, the rough asphalt, the rocks, the gravel, the unpaved parts. Pretty rough riding. And he had all that to deal with. And there were huge puddles covering the whole road and lots of mud that he had to get through and things like that. So I I was following his journey making little notes. He stopped for coffee at 2:15 at the Asahan River rafting site. And I know he didn’t show that place either. Like he didn’t take any video of where he stopped or the coffee chatting with anybody which is kind of disappointing because I I went there all the time and like just to grab food. And then the guy who runs Asahan River Rafting, he owns that little restaurant there and he speaks English really well and he has lots of great stories about that region and the white water rafting in the river and the dam that they built. And after they built the dam, the the water levels went way down. So it no longer has like crazy whitewater river rafting anymore because of the dam that they built. And then at 4:15, something changed because I didn’t recognize the road anymore. I was watching the video so carefully trying to figure out exactly where he was, but nothing was familiar. He went across a bridge right at 4:15. I was like, I I’ve never seen that bridge. And I’m looking and looking. I’m trying to figure out. I could not for the life of me figure out where he was. And then he was actually riding on the left side of the river following the edge of the river. And I rode my bicycle all up and down that entire road. And at no point does that road follow the river like that. So I was like, where the heck is this guy? I couldn’t took me forever to figure this out. I had to do tons of detective work where I was taking screenshots of his phone looking at the tiny piece that was visible and then I would go to Google Maps and zoom in. I’m trying to match up these tiny little roads and this bridge and that spot. And after a long time, I finally figured it out. And he got to this point that I remember quite well from my bicycle trip. You arrive at this village and there’s a monument there. Do I have the name of the monument? Tugu Penol. Tugu Penol. There’s a monument there, like a circular monument. And the road splits and goes to the left and the right. And the main road, the one that I assume he wanted to follow, the one I followed, goes to the right. That’s the main road. But he went on the left and that took him to this huge bridge across a river. And from that point on, he wasn’t on any actual roads anymore. He was deep inside the oil palm plantations. And all these little roads he was on, they’re like a grid pattern, but they’re just service roads for the workers to harvest oil palm and for the trucks to get in there to load up with the oil palm fruit and then take it out again. And that’s where the real adventure begins because he called that video

I’m on a different thing here. Yeah, he called that video where is it? Got to scroll scroll scroll. Oh yeah, this is moving into his next video, episode 20. And he calls it the worst roads ever. So, it started with episode 19 that ended on a cliffhanger cuz after he crossed the bridge, he ended up on these tiny service roads. They they weren’t bad. I mean, they weren’t like huge puddles or anything, but they were really slippery. The surface was very muddy and slippery, and he was having a lot of trouble staying upright. He was like right on the edge of dumping the motorcycle, and it was raining, pouring rain, coming down. He had trouble reading his phone because he didn’t have a cover on it and the rain was like triggering things on his phone. He couldn’t read the map very well. So, he ended up going in this in the wrong direction into the oil palm plantations. And then the next video, so the episode 19 ends on a cliffhanger where he’s in the middle of nowhere. He stopped his motorcycle and he said something like, “I think I have to give up. I can’t keep going. I think I have to turn around.” And then it stops and then episode 20 picks up and he does keep riding because a local person comes along on a motorbike and points. No, no, don’t go that way. Go this way. And this local person led him through the oil palm, got him onto a better road, and then on a better road. Better road. He finally got back to the main highway. And I figured it all out. Every single point on his journey, I noted the time exactly and I knew exactly where he was. So, by the time I was done, I had a Google Maps route. I could follow exactly where he was and I could see exactly where he went left when I think he was supposed to go right. Right. Which is kind of funny because the whole point of the video was how horrible the video the the roads were, how terrible they were, how difficult they were. And the reason they were so terrible was partially because he left the main road. He if he had if he had gone right it would have been 15 kilometers 15 easy kilometers and he would have been on Sumatra’s main highway and then it would have been straight shot to Tanjung Balai but instead of going right he went left and he ended up on this huge adventure. But where the timing comes in is quite interesting because from the video you get the impression that this was a big adventure. Like if all you watch is the video, you have the feeling that he was stuck in the mud lost for hours and hours and hours and hours. Like it was a a whole day of struggling to get through the muddy roads of Sumatra. But because I was paying attention to the timing, I knew he left at noon. Like he wasn’t even on the road until noon. And he didn’t even reach the muddy section that he focused on until 4:15. And then he reached the highway less than 1 hour later, exactly 54 minutes. So the video gives you the He didn’t do this on purpose. He wasn’t trying to trick anybody, but the video gives the impression that he had this big adventure where he spent the entire day stuck on these muddy backcountry roads. But then when you see the actual time codes, he was in that muddy area for 54 minutes exactly from the time he made the wrong turn until he reached the highway. It was less than one hour that he was getting through that muddy section. So that kind of Yeah, I just find that interesting in the sense that a YouTube video, even if you’re trying to tell the story honestly because you make choices about what to film, what not to film, like this guy, as soon as he got to the highway. He was out of the muddy parts. Now he turned onto the highway and he said, “Ah, I’ve reached the pavement.” You know, hallelujah. And then the video cuts right there. It’s over. Cuz from that point until Tanjung Balai, it’s all highway. Just riding down the highway and then you turn down another highway. And he arrived at his hotel, Grand Sani Hotel, the very nice hotel in Tanjung Balai. And he didn’t show any of that. He didn’t show the hotel. He didn’t show the highway riding. He didn’t show what he had for dinner, anything to drink, you know. So, he only showed the rough part of the journey that day. And it only lasted 54 minutes. The the other road, there were parts of it that were quite rough, but it was really just old asphalt that had fallen apart because of heavy traffic. It was all broken with potholes and mud. It wasn’t until he got into the oil palm that it was really slippery and he felt like he was going to dump the motorcycle many, many times. So, that was like, you know, the worst roads I’ve ever been on. You know in in Indonesia, but that whole segment in real life only lasted 54 minutes.

Anyway, I left a comment on his Tanjung Balai video where he put his motorcycle on the boat cuz yeah, I mean I know Tanjung Balai really well and I and I took the the ferry. He didn’t even know about the ferry. I think when he left he dropped off his motorcycle at the boat, like a fishing boat, and then he said, “Yeah, they’re telling me that there’s actually a passenger ferry here I could have taken.” But I didn’t even know about it. So, had he known in advance, he could have dropped off his motorcycle at the dock and then walked to the passenger ferry and then got the Indomal fast ferry to Port Dickson instead of going all the way to Medan and to the airport. Anyway, I wanted to, you know, touch base with the guy and say, “Hey, love the video and yeah, I spent a lot of time in Tanjung Balai and I told him a bit of my experiences and this that telling him about the Indomal Fast Ferry and how long ago you used to be able to put a motorcycle on one of those ferries that went to Port Klang, but you can’t do that anymore. You could put a bicycle on that ferry, but you can’t put a motorcycle, you you know, so I wrote, you know, a typical Planet Doug six paragraph comment and then his reply to that comment, I’ll track it down. So I wrote a typical very long, very personal, very detailed Planet Doug essay and then he replied, “That is such an interesting perspective on the area. Thanks for sharing your experience.” Smiley face. So that is clearly canned YouTube. Like if you’re a YouTube creator, I don’t use them. So trust me, you know, you’re not getting anything like that from me. But when someone leaves a reply on YouTube, the YouTube computers give us AI written replies. So you can just click on one and it just inserts it. So you can go through all the comments on your video, just go click, click, click, click, click, and let YouTube write the comment for you, you know, the reply for you. And he clearly did that because it doesn’t sound like him. That is such an interesting perspective on the area. Thanks for sharing your experience. You know, the AI read my comment, figured out that I was giving my personal experiences there, and then it wrote this generic reply, and then he just clicked on that. Yeah, it’s good enough. I’m not going to take the time. So, that kind of annoyed me. I did notice he does reply to other people, like personal responses, so maybe he wrote that, but I was kind of disappointed in the reply.

And then the next video, the one about the worst roads, I was really curious, did he like when he went left instead of right, did he do that on purpose or was it a mistake? Because he does talk a lot in his videos about how he wants to take the small roads. He doesn’t want to be on the highways. He chooses to go down the smallest road. So maybe when he got to that intersection, he looked at Google Maps and went, “Hm, I think I’ll try I’ll go left instead of right.” But I don’t think so because even the right option, that is a small local road. So it’s already challenging enough. He didn’t have to get more challenging. And when he went left, he really got in trouble because, like I said, those roads were never meant to be transportation. They’re just service roads for the oil palm. So, I really wanted to know what happened. Was that did you do that by accident or did you choose? So, I wrote another even though he gave me nothing in reply to my first comment. I thought, h I’ll I’ll I’ll write a second one. See what happens. So, I wrote a long comment on this video. That’s him, by the way. I don’t think I can do this.

That’s Tony. And he says there, I don’t know if you heard him, he says, I don’t know if I can do this. That’s when he that’s the cliffhanger from the last video. And it says on the thumbnail, I can’t go on. So, he’s Yeah. Presenting it as a pretty big adventure there. And then, oh, here we go. He did reply. How long is my comment? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 paragraphs long. Very detailed. I got a heart from him. He liked my video. What did he say?

Ah, okay. This is a real reply. That’s great. He says, “That’s amazing. Wow. No one has ever tried to trace my route before. I’m very impressed. To be really honest with you, it was a few months back aha that I did this ride and so I don’t really remember why I turned off from the main road. It certainly wouldn’t have been my intention to ride the secondary roads, especially considering the weather at the time. I just would have been following Google Maps. By the way, I’ve watched a couple of your videos. They’re excellent. Congratulations on the success you are having with your own channel. Love it.” Ah, I love to get a nice personal reply like that. Yeah. And he knew what I was writing about. And I got that extra information that these videos from him are actually months and months and months old. I was hoping he would be in Malaysia right now. How cool would that be? But no. No. Months ago. Yeah. Terms of popularity, like these last three videos, he he got the Malaysia bump. The third video back, 3.6,000 views in Sumatra. Then the second last video, he does mention that he’s on his way to Malaysia. So that doubles the view count, 7.6,000 views. And now that he’s in Malaysia, his last video has the big thumbnail saying Malaysia. And I shipped my bike to Malaysia. That has 11,000 views 3 days ago. So, he definitely got the Malaysia bump in his view count. Maybe if he’d posted this video in real time and he realized that Malaysians would be very interested in his journey, maybe he would have stayed in Malaysia longer and then traveled all around and posted a lot of videos. So, but since he this he was in Malaysia, he says several months ago, many months ago, he didn’t know maybe how interested Malaysians are in following foreigners who travel in their country. Anyway, I’m very pleased with that reply. I’ve had that experience in the past, particularly with technology channels. Someone will do a review of a GoPro or a microphone or something and then I have a lot to contribute. So, I write this long detailed, you know, breakdown of everything I know about that topic and then that YouTuber never replies, like there’s no response at all. And then I’ll let my comment sit there for a couple of weeks or something. And if the YouTuber never replies, I go back and I delete my comment because I figure me taking my time to write to you and post it on your channel, I’m adding value to your YouTube channel. The least you can do is like it at the very least. Give me a smiley face or best of all, you know, reply to what I wrote. Say, “Oh, yeah, that’s a, you know, that’s cool. I never knew that about the GoPro.” Or, “Give me something.” And if he doesn’t, then I just delete my comment because they don’t deserve my comment. So, with with Tony, I was hoping I could make a connection with him because his videos, I’m enjoying them very much. Even though he’s skipping everything that I find interesting, driving me crazy because he’s moving so fast. He’s very personal. He’s very real in his commentary in the videos. He doesn’t show, you know, his personal life, where he’s sleeping, where he’s staying, what where he’s eating, all these sorts of things, but he is being very upfront and, you know, it doesn’t have that fake quality of all the other YouTubers that I’ve been talking about. So, I’m glad I managed to make that connection with Tony that he replied to my comment. Awesome. So yeah, that that is it for my travel vlogger section.

And now we come to the final section of this behind-the-scenes podcast, pop culture. It’s actually the next morning now. I ran out of time yesterday. I had to move on and do some other things, so I couldn’t finish up the video. I just woke up recently here. You can hear the gravel in my voice. I haven’t used it very much yet. Hair still wet from my morning shower. And I noticed I burnt my forehead the other day, which is really weird. I was just chatting with there was a woman staying at this hotel from the Philippines. I I I noticed her in the lobby of the M Candy Hotel because she was really like exuberant like she was talking with the receptionist and very like laughing and smiling and I said, “Oh, you know what? I think that’s a that’s someone from the Philippines.” I just recognized the tone of a Filipina. And then I ran into her outside and we were chatting about what she’s doing in Melaka, why I’m here, things like that. And then she looked at me and said, “Dude, you’ve got to use some sunscreen. You know, look at your forehead.” And I’m like, what? And I I can’t figure that out. Like, why did I out of nowhere burn my forehead? Like, my whole face, I think, got burned because I’m out walking in the brutal sun of Malaysia hours every single day. It’s not like I’ve been hiding inside. And then my last video, I went out into the sun. I’m always out there in the sun. I figured I’ve adjusted to the sun, so why in the world would the last time I went out shooting a video, it was nothing unusual. I wasn’t out in a hot sun for the first time in weeks, I wasn’t out there longer than normal, so why in the world did I burn so badly, but I guess I don’t know. Something happened. Anyway, so yeah, you can see I’ve got yeah, kind of burned my face there. And yesterday, even though I stopped recording, I did take the time to copy the video files that I shot from my Olympus and my GoPro to my laptop. I always do that. I’m very good about that where you never want to wait when it comes to that. As soon as you shoot something, soon as you export a video, copy the files and make a backup. So, I I just do that automatically, like recharging batteries, copying video files, making backups of everything. I I do that right away. And then I check the files and I notice something really awful. The video files that I shot with the Olympus, for some reason, the audio is blown out. It’s like way too high and the top is all cut off. It’s clipped, but it’s also distorted. I don’t know whether you could hear that, but I could really hear it. It sounds awful to me. So, I don’t know. I don’t know what I did wrong. I really should keep notes about the best settings. I’m wondering whether on my Rode Wireless Go, did I accidentally hit a button and raise the volume like way too high? No. This is the one that I was using, the Rode Wireless Go, and it’s set to my normal settings. I checked the Olympus. It’s set to my normal settings. The Olympus is really, really sensitive. It has audio recording for video, like you can set the level. I have to go down to like the lowest possible. It’s like minus 10, whatever that scale means. I’m not sure. You can go from 0 to + 10 to minus 10. I have to lower it all the way down to minus 10 because it records way way too hot. So I I set that to the minimum and I have the normal setting here. It normally works out, but yeah, it sounded terrible. And I I originally took the time to replace all of that audio because that’s the audio that was recorded on the on the camera, but I also have a backup audio recorded in the microphone itself. And that’s like a pre a be there’s no preamp, nothing at all. It’s just like the pure audio signal directly from the microphone. And I don’t know, I guess people like that sound like it’s so clean and empty, but at least there it wasn’t blown out. But I find the levels on this copy, the backup copy, way too low. It’s like tiny tiny little waves and I have to raise it up like a huge amount in the editing program and to me it just sounds lifeless. I guess it’s pure and it’s clean and maybe that’s the point and maybe if you’re an audio engineer you add some life to it. You add kind of a preamp quality but it it just sounds dead to me. But I I did try to take some of it and insert it and replace the blown out audio with this audio because it’s perfectly clean. It’s not blown out at all and there’s no distortion. I went through all that work. I put it all in and then yeah, I synced it all up, but it just sounded so dead to me. I thought, ah, I’d rather have the original video, even though it’s distorted, it just sounds like there’s more life to it. So, I just deleted all of the all of the you know, backup audio, the pure audio, and I’m just keeping I I lowered the levels a little bit, but you can still hear the distortion. You can hear that it’s clipped. H I don’t know. These things happen. Oddly enough, I think I mentioned that at the very beginning of the video that the Olympus is, you know, it’s a much more powerful camera than my GoPro, but it’s also much more complex and so many more things can go wrong. And the biggest problem with it is the recording time is weird. I can’t figure it out. It It has a built-in 29-minute limit. It just shuts off at 29 minutes. That’s because of something going on in the European market when this camera was made. Some sort of a restriction that Europe put on the camera because of taxes and import duties or something. But when you start recording for a long time, it starts cutting off at 7 minutes. So every 7 minutes, the camera just turns off. And I don’t know why. Well, the camera doesn’t turn off. It just stops recording. Seven I think it’s 7 minutes 29 seconds. It’s like a setting and it’s nowhere in the menu system. I don’t know why why this is happening. And then every 7 and 1/2 minutes it stops recording. I’ve got to get up, go to the camera, check, relisten to the audio to see where it got cut off, turn it back on, sit back down, set everything up again, and then start up again from where it left off. And after 7 and 1/2 minutes, cuts me off again. So, yeah, the GoPro actually ends up being a lot a lot easier to work with, a lot more reliable. So, yeah, I’m on the GoPro this morning, even though I could use the Olympus, but I don’t know. It’s just it’s a tricky tricky camera for some reason. It’s got the most complicated menu system of any camera brand. Olympus camera. Like, menu systems are notoriously unintuitive and difficult to understand. But anyway, this is supposed to be pop culture and I don’t have very much to talk about when it comes to pop culture. I’m just going to put it all into one chunk. I’m not going to divide it into chunks based on the show because I don’t have entire shows to talk about. I just have like two episodes. One is from Dark Matter, a show that I’m really enjoying. Talk about it a lot. I’m on like season two is coming out right now and I just watched season 2 episode 8 of Dark Matter. It’s called Love and Be Loved and it’s an interesting episode to talk about. I actually I went online and I asked a question. I think I was chatting with Gemini, you know, an AI, and I just like, what is the reaction out there from viewers and critics to season 2, episode 8 of Dark Matter? What are people saying about it? And then the basic idea I got from the AI says that this episode has emerged as the most polarizing and discussed episode of the series to date. And I yeah, I was expecting that answer because it’s a good episode. It’s very well-shot. It’s a great story. It’s very thoughtful. It’s well-acted. Everything about it is very good, very entertaining, very engaging as an hour of television. But I hate it because it’s a tangent. It’s like a bottle episode or a a special episode where you’ve got the main story line that you’re following all the main characters and there’s a plot boom boom boom boom boom boom boom 1 through seven and then episode 8 it just picks a minor episode that you’ve never met before while you did meet him but you don’t know anything about him. You’re not following his story. You don’t care about him at all and it’s got this episode has nothing to do with the main plot and it’s just like a side story and the way it’s shot is in silent mode. You don’t hear people having dialogue because characters are deaf and they’re doing sign language and there’s a lot of totally silent scenes even when they’re not signing to each other. It’s just you’re watching people and you’re you do see them talking and communicating, but you’re not hearing them. And then there’s these long big time jumps. It reminds me of there’s a a really cool Rick and Morty episode with a segment where Morty plugs into a video game called Roy. And it turns out in this video game called Roy, you live an entire lifetime inside the video game. So you plug into your brain and then Morty becomes Roy as a as a child and lives his entire life from childhood to death. And then the video game, that’s basically the game. You live somebody else’s life and then at the very end you get a score. How did how well did you do living a full lifetime? And to the person playing the game, it feels like it went on for 60 years, 70 years, however long the character lived. So, it’s a really freaky idea that you follow an entire life completely separate from the episode itself. And that’s what this Dark Matter episode is. It’s basically an entire lifetime of some minor character that you’re not following in the main story. So, of course, it’s all, you know, it’s very deep and it’s very emotional and that’s all well and good and I would like the episode if there were 22 episodes in total, but there aren’t. I think there’s only 10 episodes. Like these days, TV series are so short. There’s only 10 episodes. So, you cannot waste an entire episode without advancing the story. I mean, if there were 22 episodes and you wanted to give me an experimental artistic episode, sure, love it. You want to give me a Christmas episode, sure, great. Because I’ve still got 20 episodes where you’re telling me the actual story. But if there’s only 10 episodes and you’ve got a story as big as Dark Matter with so many characters all split up, each group of main characters with a different story line, you don’t have enough time. You’ve only got 10 episodes to cover that entire complex plot. You can’t waste one on some bizarre artistic experiment because your writers and your director thought it would be fun to do. Yeah. I I mean, I get it. Stretch your wings artistically. Do something different. And it is a very it’s very well done, but I just like, oh, for Pete’s sake, I don’t care about any of this. All I care about is what’s going on with our main characters. Can we get back to the real story? So yeah, this this episode I think was was very very polarizing. And if there’s two polls, I’m on the poll where I didn’t like the episode. Not because it wasn’t good, not because it wasn’t entertaining, because it was just wasting my time. I wanted to get back to the main story lines. Anyway, that’s kind of how I felt about it.

And another episode I’m also watching the show Lanterns, all about the Green Lantern. Kind of a modern retelling of the lantern the lantern story. And this was season 1, episode 7 not a whole lot to talk about except I’ve mentioned before that I have a personal vendetta against Damon Lindelof and his style of writing. He’s burned me so many times with so many TV shows and movies. I call it the Lindelof effect where I don’t I guess they hire him because he’s very good at hooking viewers with wild and crazy looking stuff. But all that wild and crazy looking stuff never has anything to do with the story, right? I don’t mind wild and crazy. I don’t mind things in a show that you don’t understand. Like something really like whoa and they don’t explain it. I’m perfectly fine with that. But you have to pay off that moment later in the show. There has to be some sort of a basis for it, a foundation, a reason for it. And with Lindelof, you don’t get that. He just insert crazy stuff. He’s got a pen and he just puts in a little arrow and writes a paragraph. Yeah, I put something really weird here like have some crazy thing happening on the wall and you know images and crazy creatures and monsters and this and that. Just throw every crazy idea you have like a dream basically. Just introduce a dreamscape with a bunch of insane images that don’t mean anything. Oh, it’ll look really cool. People will love it. But I don’t love it because you watch all of that and you think it means something. Oh, that that’s important. I wonder what that’s all about. And then you find out by the end of the show, none of it meant anything. He doesn’t explain any of it. He doesn’t pay it off. And this episode had I could pretty much see some Lindelof stuff going on. There was, without giving away the plot, there was something about taking a boat across a dangerous, deadly body of water. And they’re in a place that is very dreamlike. It’s so dreamlike. As a viewer, you can’t help but wonder, okay, are they dreaming? Have they gone to an alternate reality? Because the physics of this place doesn’t make any sense at all. And you’re wondering, is this real or are they dreaming? Is this an alternate dimension? There’s just all these weird things. And then crossing the body of water. It’s It reminds me, you know, crossing the river Styx. It reminded me very much of Harry Potter with Harry and Dumbledore having to cross the water in this sort of magical boat and with all these dangers around them. It it just it was reminiscent of all of these things. Had a lot of imagery in it. And I’m pretty sure none of it means anything. All the weird physics in this world, the dreamlike quality, none of it will mean anything. It just it’s just there even though it doesn’t make any sense. The water, the boat, the this, the that, none of it makes any sense at all. Has nothing to do with the plot. And it’s just classic Lindelof. So, yeah, I wasn’t a big fan of all of that. It was still, you know, it was still a good episode. The whole season to me is unnecessarily complex. Again, I don’t want to come across as someone who doesn’t want to work for their entertainment. I think I used the example the other day I talked about Lanterns. I talked about the German series Dark, which is like one of the most challenging TV shows you can watch. I remember watching it the first time and then the second time I sat down with a notebook like pen and paper and then started watching and every scene I would pause the show and start writing notes the names of each characters some something specific and drawing arrows between different things happening different characters different events cuz you had to pay attention but the thing is with Dark everything that happens in that show means means something and everything gets paid off. You’re not just wasting your time with all these weird things going on. So, I’m I’m more than willing to put in the work. I’m more than willing to watch an episode and then at the end of it, I don’t really know what happened or what was important about it because I know that in the next episode or the next or the next, they’re going to explain all of that eventually. So, I don’t mind that kind of show. But this one, Lanterns with the Lindelof effect, they’re jumping around in time. For example, they’ll go back, you know, the show will open with, oh, 2016, and you see something that happened in 2016, and then, oh, now it’s 2024, now it’s 20, 2019, or whatever. They’re jumping around different times, different things. And normally, I don’t mind that, but it doesn’t feel necessary for this show. It’s like, you don’t need any of that. It’s not adding to the story. You could just tell the story in a linear fashion. And yeah, it it I don’t know. Overall, it’s I love the characters. I love the concepts. I love the approach they’re taking. More of a gritty, down-to-earth. I talked about this before. It like a true detective tone to a comic book, which is really quite interesting cuz I think of Green Lantern as pretty pretty out there. You got Guardians of the Galaxy basically with a power ring where they can manifest anything they can dream of. Anything they can imagine, they can build it using the power of the ring. And everything is green. You know, whatever they make, it’s green, which is really weird. And they have a lantern, like an actual looks like a kerosene lantern. And they have to charge up their power ring using a secret incantation to power up their ring. And it’s just it’s a weird show, a weird comic book, very bright and colorful and in with godlike beings and spanning the galaxy. And you take all of that mythology and then you put it down on Earth with a guy who looks like he just spent the night in the alleyway after getting drunk at the bar. He’s dressed in dirty clothes and like a be detective story like true detective and he’s like sol trying to solve a murder mystery kind of thing. I I like that juxtaposition. I’m cool with that but they just made it overly complex. The Lindelof effect I’m hanging in there. I’m still enjoying it. People might like it, they might not. You have to really like superhero shows in order to enjoy Lanterns.

And the only other show, I just started it, I can’t really talk about it yet. I don’t know anything about it, is called The Fall of the House of Usher, which I know is based on a Edgar Allan Poe story or poem. I think it’s a story. I read all of Edgar Allan Poe in my lifetime, but it was a different lifetime. It was before I became a YouTuber. I used to be literary. I used to read books, but not anymore. I used to remember books, but not anymore. YouTube has fried my brain. Video takes over your entire life. You don’t have room for books anymore. So, yeah. I can’t remember the fall of the house of Usher. I don’t remember the story. So, in this is like a modern retelling where the the house of Usher in the TV show is a wealthy family from our time and they’re the head of a major pharmaceutical company that is embroiled in some kind of scandal and a court case. And then they mix in the typical supernatural backstory of the fall of the house of Usher. And I’ve only watched one episode so far. I’m going to have to rewatch episode one just to remind myself because there’s so many characters and I think there’s like a bunch of stuff I missed. But anyway, that’s the the new show that I’m watching, The Fall of the House of Usher. And I don’t really have anything much to say about it other than yeah, I’m enjoying it so far. It reminds me very much of shows like Succession, you know, the uber wealthy family with the head of the family. He’s the, you know, the power figure and then he’s got all of these children and they’ve married. They’ve all gotten married and all of his children are like worried about their position in the family. They want, am I still in the will? What am I getting in the will? And they’re all infighting amongst themselves. And they’re all twisted and weird because they’re the children in a really really wealthy family. It always ends up being like the patriarch, like the guy who founded the company, who made all the money. He’s a bit more grounded because he started life poor like a normal person and then he made all this money. So, he’s still relatively sane. But then all his children are born into wealth like in Succession. And of course they’re all nuts, you know, because they were born wealthy. And they don’t live normal lives. They’re not grounded in any way. So all of his children and their spouses or their partners, they’re all self-indulgent, twisted by money in one fashion or another, and self-entitled and just weird in many different ways. But I couldn’t keep track of them. I couldn’t tell the names of all his various children, their spouses or partners. I I couldn’t keep track of them all. So, I’m going to have to do the Dark thing and rewatch episode one and open up a notepad on my phone this time and just write down the names of each character and who they are. Okay, that’s the eldest daughter. That’s her husband. That’s the youngest son. And you know, I’m going to have to I’m going to have to draw a schematic before I can figure out who all these people are and move on with the show. But other than that, I don’t know the directors. I don’t know the writers. Oh, the writer is Edgar Allan Poe, but somebody else adapted it for television. I don’t know who did that. I don’t know the producers. I don’t know anything. But yeah, Fall of the House of Usher, my next entertainment.

And that is it for this behind-the-scenes podcast. I’m actually going to keep talking this morning because I’m also going to record the ask me anything video today. I put out a call for any questions that people had. I haven’t looked at the questions that people have submitted. I glanced at one or two and they did strike me as, you know, relatively straightforward questions that I can answer pretty quickly like what are you going to do this following month, right? You know, what are your plans for the rest of your time in Malaysia? Things like that. So, I I don’t think I’ll be, you know, talking as long as I normally do, but I always say that and I always find a way to talk. We’ll see what happens. But that’s what I plan to record next. And I’ll probably record it on the GoPro. The Olympus is just yeah, it’s beyond my pay grade. I don’t know how to run that camera. It’s just too challenging. I’d still use it, but that 7 and 1/2 minute, you know, cutting off every 7 and 1/2 minutes, it’s just it’s just too much trouble. It’s a good camera if you want to shoot B-roll. You’re out shooting a regular video and you want some close-ups and you got a nice zoom lens and nicer video quality. Yeah, it’s very handy for that. But, yeah, it’s too much too much work to keep that camera running. Yeah. All right, that is it. Shutting down the Planet Doug behind the scenes podcast. Hope you enjoyed that. And I’ll see you in the next video, which in my world is the Ask Me Anything video. In your world. It’s probably another Planet Doug video, a normal travel video or a look at Melaka history. I’m not quite sure what video will come right after this one, but I hope you enjoy it. See you next time.