VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Good morning Planet Doug community! 🎥 In this Ask Me Anything video for April & May, I answer all your questions in one big honest chat.
From my most-watched videos (Myanmar Water Festival, Thaipusam, and that wild train ride to Bagan) and why they were more popular, to whether I’ll ever go back to Canada, my thoughts on the new GoPro Mission One Pro, my absolute dream job, favorite TV shows I watched recently, and my honest take on religion and becoming Muslim.
I also dive into video length struggles, my delayed Malaysian bicycle tour plans, road safety in Asia, big life regrets, dream destinations I still want to visit (including Africa and Bolivia), Grab Pay vs Touch ‘n Go, long-term apartment living vs cheap hotels, Forrest Gump-style travel moments, and much more.
As always, it’s raw, real, and a bit longer than planned — exactly how things always end up on Planet Doug.
Thanks for watching and supporting the channel.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning and welcome back to the Planet Doug Ask Me Anything video for April and May. It’s now the beginning of June, but that’s kind of the way I do these Ask Me Anything videos. I have a post up on the Planet Doug Patreon. It’s always pinned at the very top of the feed and it just says, you know, Ask Me Anything. If you have a question for me, leave it here as a comment and then at the end of the month or if there are no questions at the end of two months, then I assemble all the questions from YouTube, from Patreon, from anywhere else. And then I put them together in a handy dandy list on my tablet and I answer them. And I have 18 well 18 questions to answer but I think one question has four. So it’s like 23 or 22 or 21 questions in total something like that. So I’m just going to dive straight into them. And for this Ask Me Anything. I’m going to try to keep my stories to a minimum. try to stay focused on the question and the answer so it doesn’t balloon into a 4 hour gabfest where I go off on all kinds of tangents. We’ll see if I’m capable of doing that.
Question one from Rai R A I. What is your most watched video and why do you think it was so popular? Looking back, what do you think you did particularly well in that video? And have you ever tried to recreate those elements in later videos? I don’t know which one video is the most popular. I mean, I’ve never had a video go into the hundreds of thousands of views or millions, nothing like that. But I’m pretty sure the most popular videos are the ones I shot in Myanmar during the water festival. I booked a trip. I booked a flight to Myanmar without even thinking about the time of year. It was just time to leave Malaysia and I picked Myanmar, flew there and it just happened to be coinciding with the water festival. So I shot three videos there, one video for each day of the festival. And those videos have been consistently popular. And my other video from Myanmar is also, I think, popular. The one where I rode a train from Yangon up to Bagan where they have the ancient temples that you can tour there. And that train ride video is consistently popular as well. So I think what makes those videos unusual or special oh there’s one more perhaps when I went to Thaipusam in Kuala Lumpur the big Hindu festival at Batu Caves I had one video where I just happened to be downtown near the main Hindu temple down there and the procession was beginning. So there was a crowd of thousands of people there watching the Lord Murugan procession going from there to Batu Caves. So I took a video of that very very simple video but that for some reason was very popular and then that inspired me to go to Thaipusam a full-on immersive experience at the festival and shoot a video about attending at Batu Caves and that video is popular. So looking at that set of videos, there’s a pretty common theme, big events like a festival because that festival shows up every year. So every year at the time of that festival, those videos get tracked down, they get promoted, whatever, because oh, it’s the time of year for Thaipusam. And then Thaipusam is an active subject and then my videos pop up and my festival water festival in Myanmar videos I just happen to be there. I think that is the last thing that they’ve had because right after that they had the military coup and when the military took over the country again they shut down everything. So, I don’t I’m sure thing yang maybe has happened on a small scale in the years since then. I don’t really know. But from all the comments on the video, it seems like I happen to record a lot of video of the last water festival that they were able to enjoy before the military shut everything down again. So, it was kind of a significant event. So, I think that’s why those videos are popular. They’re big events. their festivals. The names are well known. And then the train ride video is popular because it’s going from A to B. And it was a bit of a dramatic train ride. Quite an exciting, interesting, bizarre kind of experience on that train. So, those seem to be popular videos like a big festival and travel days. Anytime you’re going to a new place, there’s like a burst of interest in that video. If you stay in one place, the interest just drops off a cliff. But as soon as you go to a new place, new place, new country, new city, new place, that keeps people interested. So I think that’s the lesson to be learned. To be popular on YouTube as a travel vlogger, you really should focus on names that people are familiar with, which of course is not something I do as a rule. So like I go to some small town in Sumatra and then live in a village that no one has ever heard of. That’s not going to be a popular set of videos. You should go to Bali because Bali is popular. And yeah, that just doesn’t really fit into my mindset though. But yeah, so you should go to big festivals and go to places that are well known that people that are popular places in order for your videos to be popular. And I’ve thought about doing things like that occasionally. I’ve sort of looked for regional festivals that I can attend and I can combine the excitement of the festival with sort of my own lowkey grounded Planet Doug style, but I’ve never managed to put those things together.
Question two is from Farooq. Hi Doug. Would you like to travel to Canada and relive the memories of your life there? Recording a few of those places will be really interesting for your viewers like me. Have you ever thought of something like that? I believe many of us will be willing to partially fund sponsor your trip back to Canada if you announce such a plan. Thanks for the opportunity to ask a question. Yeah, the clear answer is yeah. I mean, I think about visits like a trip back to Canada to visit all the time. In recent years, I haven’t been back at all. So, I think it’s been, if I do the math, 18 I think I’ve been outside of Canada permanently, like consistently for the last 18 years. So the last time I was back in Canada was 2008 or 2009. Then I left and I haven’t been back since then. And I thought about it a lot. It would help me out a lot in a way just to go back to Canada, touch base, kind of remember who you are, get a sense of identity. Ah, this is my culture. These are my people. And then you touch base with friends and family. You kind of touch base with your life. you know the flow of your life and then when you go back to Taiwan, back to Malaysia, back to Indonesia, Africa, wherever you go, you have a sense of connection with your past life and it just sort of feels better. So yeah, and if you go back to Canada from time to time, it would have helped me out a lot because your life falls apart the longer you’re away when it comes to official things. Like I’ve lost so much documentation. Like my driver’s license expires. There’s no way to renew it, keep it updated when you don’t go back. Bank accounts get shut down. I recently Oh, it’s so crazy. I have one remaining bank that’s hanging in there with me. I’ve managed to keep it going. And I had two accounts, a checking account and a savings account. You know, very little money in each one, but you know, there’s money in those accounts. And I woke up like two mornings ago and I woke up to an email saying, “Your savings account has been cancelled.” Well, it hasn’t been cancelled. It has been inactivated. I was like, “What the heck? What do you mean?” Cuz I did have some money in that account. So, I logged in online and then it basically got a message from the bank saying, “Well, yeah, you haven’t used this account in a long time. You haven’t transferred money in or out. You haven’t done anything with it. you’ve just had all this money sitting there doing nothing. So, we’re you can no longer access that account. You know, that’s why I hate banks so much. And I’m sure they have legal reasons for doing that. But now, in order for me to reactivate that account and have access to my own money, I have to go back to Canada to do it. They say the only way you can do this is go to an ATM in Canada with your ATM card and do a transaction, withdraw money, deposit money, do something with that account in Canada and that will turn it back on again. So, there’s nothing I can do from here. And then I run into those situations all the time. And so had I gone back to Canada like even every 5 years it would have made sense to go back to Canada just reset reorganized mentally reset. So but then I never did it because every time I thought about it I just looked at the money the cash it’s expensive and I don’t have anywhere to live in Canada. So if I fly into Toronto then what do I do? I mean, if I can fly into Medan, I can fly into Penang here in Malaysia and I can go from the airport to a hotel that I can kind of sort of afford, but I can’t afford any hotels in Canada. Like, nobody can. Everything in Canada is so expensive. So, I do this mental thing about, okay, I fly into Toronto, grab my backpack, I exit from the airport. Now, what do I do? I mean, I have nowhere to live. I don’t have a house. I don’t have an apartment. I can’t stay in a hotel. All I could do is contact a friend and go couch surfing. You know, I’m in Canada. Can I come to your house? And do you have a spare bed? Can I stay with you for a while? Can I sleep on your floor? And then I’d have to go from place to place homeless basically. So I add up the airfare, the cost of everything in Canada, the fact I have nowhere to live, nowhere to stay. It just kind of like rather than spend thousands of dollars doing that, I would much rather spend a month in Malaysia or Sumatra or Thailand, Myanmar, back to Vietnam. So the money goes a lot farther if you go to Vietnam than flying back to Canada. But if I had a regular income, like a sufficient income, then I would do it instantly. Like right now after my time in Malaysia, I would love to fly back to Canada. I’m way overdue for some time in Canada, but I don’t unless Yeah, unless something very unusual happens. Um yeah, that’s that’s that’s not going to happen. At least not for a long time.
Question three from Street Level Critic. It’s actually four questions and I’m going to answer all four of them. Question one, what are your thoughts on the three new GoPro cameras and their new specs that are releasing? In a dream world with absolutely no budget restraints, which of the three would you prefer to use for your channel if you could only choose one? Your thoughts on gear are always fun, fascinating, and insightful to hear. I know this is a juicy question that will spark your geek tech side. So, if you must go all out and get into this question, I’d respect if for time constraints you wanted to skip my other questions, even though I hope not, but I’m going to answer all four because actually question one is pretty easy to answer. GoPro released a new camera. It is called the Mission One and they have three versions of it. The Mission One, the Mission One Pro, and the Mission One ILS. And if I had to pick one, I mean, it’s pretty obvious to me I would get the GoPro Mission One Pro because that is the actual highest spec action camera. the ILS. I mean, it’s a GoPro, but it has a camera mount on it for micro four thirds lenses. So, you have the body of a GoPro, but then you take an actual camera lens from micro four thirds and so you can change lenses, but that’s a specialty camera meant for very specific situations. For me, in my life, I wouldn’t have any use for it. And the other two, the Mission One and the Mission One Pro are basically the same camera, same lens, same processor, same sensor, but the Mission One Pro just has higher specs for everything across the board. It’s like their premium version. So, if money were not an issue, I would just get the GoPro Mission One Pro. Yeah. I could talk a lot about the GoPro cameras, but I’m going to hold back and just take that far. The Mission 1 Pro, and I think it would be a huge step up from the Hero 12. I wasn’t entirely happy with this camera when they announced it. I was hoping for another GoPro Hero, the Hero 14, but using the new processor, the GP3 processor, because that would give you better low light, much much better battery life, and no more overheating. It would fix those three, which are the main problems with my GoPro Hero 12. So, I was hoping that’s what they would do, but instead they designed a whole new camera, the Mission, based on a 1 in sensor. And when I look at the video, like a basic vlog video, I don’t see a difference. I don’t see a big improvement with from the 1 in sensor. I don’t need the 1 in sensor is what I’m saying. So, I was hoping they were going to come out with a GoPro Hero 14 with the new processor, but they built a brand new camera from the ground up. So, it’s pretty expensive, a little bit bigger and heavier, chunkier. But I guess it doesn’t overheat anymore, much better battery life, much better in low light. So, those would be advantages. I would get the Mission One Pro. Question two. You’ve been talking a lot lately about getting a regular job to help maintain things and live on. What would your absolute dream job be? Have fun with this. I’d love to hear you elaborate on why you’d pick that position, how much you’d need to make to comfortably maintain your lifestyle, and what style of non remote job you would prefer that would still allow you to make your daily living, sightseeing, biking, and bike travel videos.
So, yeah. Ideally a regular job, the best one for me, I don’t really care what I do, right? If someone had a job and I had the skills to do that job, the ability to do it. I don’t really care what the job is to be honest, as long as it doesn’t absorb your entire life. So, I have a real problem that when I do something, I tend to go way too deep into it. I dive in head first. So, I take jobs way too seriously. And if a job gives me more and more scope to keep working more and more, I usually end up doing that. So for example, when I was an English teacher, it just took over my whole life because there is no end to the work. When you’re teaching English, you might have four, five, six lessons a day you have to teach. And at the end of the day, the day isn’t over because you’ve got six more classes the next day. You have to prepare lesson plans for all six hours. and then the next day and the next day. So, it absorbs all of your energy, all of your time. You never escape from the job. Like when the day is over, you’re still thinking about it. You take your job with you everywhere you go. So yeah, something like that is not what I want. I would like some kind of a job that I could do. It’s a very simple job and yet when the work is over I can mentally switch into say shooting YouTube videos. So I work and then at the end of the work day whatever I don’t have to even think about it until the next work starts. So and I would like a job ideally a dream job would be one that allowed me to do contract work around the world. So for example, you know, I know I don’t know anything about this world, but I have thought from time to time, you know, if you could do your life over again, it might have been a good life for me to get into movie and TV production. Not even not as a director or writer, anything fancy, but just a guy who holds the microphone, you know, like a boom operator, a lighting guy, a gopher. I don’t really care. But I could be sitting here in Malaysia shooting YouTube videos and then I get an email. Oh, you know, dear Doug, we have a shoot in Morocco for the next 3 months. You know, are you available? Yes. And then they fly you into Morocco. You get to stay in a cheap hotel with the rest of the film crew, have an enjoyable life, go out every day working on set, and then you work for 3 months, save up enough money that you can go to another exciting country for 3 months on the money you made. And then at some point, you get another email. Oh, Doug, we’re going to China to shoot this commercial. We need you. So, that like that would be my dream job, a contract position that is in different locations all around the world. So, I would get to go to new places all the time and you don’t get stuck in one place. So, I don’t know how many jobs like that there are in the world. I thought long ago teaching English would fit that. I thought, “Wow, I can teach English in any country in the world.” But I’ve already talked about how when I teach when I taught English, it was really hard. It was really stressful and just completely drained me. And there are very few countries where you can make any money at it. So, it kind of limits I remember I went to Ecuador one time. I spent six months in Ecuador. And part of my plan was to settle down and teach English while I was there so I could make money while I’m living there. And I started I brought all my teaching material with me. I put advertisements. I tried to get private students to build up like an English teaching business. But the amount of money that they’re capable of paying in Ecuador is practically zero. I mean, you could work all day and you haven’t even made enough money to pay for your day’s expenses. It’s so the salaries there are so cheap. So in the end I was in Ecuador intending to teach English and then I realized I was just wasting my time. If I really wanted to teach English, go back to a country that has a better economy. Go back to South Korea, to Taiwan, to Japan, name another country, and then you can work there for 6 months, save $1,000 a month, whatever it is, and then you can go back to Ecuador. and on that $6,000 you can live there for a year kind of thing. So that that would have been the better approach. So actually traveling around the world teaching English is kind of a waste of time because in most of the countries you can’t make enough money to live anyway. So that’s kind of out of the picture. But anyway, contract job where I can work on a short-term basis in various places around the world. That would that would be my dream or would have been my dream. Might be too late now.
Oh, also how much money would you need to make? Not much. I mean, I have a very basic I mean, Malaysia is the most expensive place that I’ve lived in a long time. And I mean, in a place like Sumatra, if you pick and choose how you’re living and you’re living a low-budget life, I mean, $1,000 a month is like luxury. In a place like Indonesia, most of the countries I would want to visit tend to be less expensive. So, even $1,000 a month, which, you know, would be more than sufficient. You might have trouble saving money. So, if you want to say $1,500 a month, you know, that would be amazing. I could live on half of that and bank the other half whenever there’s some kind of an emergency or something in the future. So, yeah, not very much. It’s one of the reasons I’ve stuck with YouTube as long as I have, even though apparently I’m not very good at it, because it doesn’t seem like it it doesn’t seem like it should be that hard to reach like $1,000 a month income. Working as hard as I do. And then, you know, with in all of social media, it looks like it’s a reachable goal, but in all the time I’ve done it, it’s still it’s just not a reachable goal at all. So yeah, question three, what TV shows and movies did you watch in the month of May that you really enjoyed? I don’t have anything that just blew my mind lately. I’ve been on a bit of a dry spell when it comes to really good TV, really good movies. Nothing has been nothing has impressed me enough that wow I really got to talk about this show. I mean I have watched a few things. I remember I dove into a show called Ghosts which I mean I wouldn’t run around the world telling everybody, “Oh, you got to watch this. It’s so amazing.” But it was perfectly fine. It was fun. There’s two versions. British. It was originally a British show, five seasons, I think, maybe seven or eight episodes per season. And then they made the American version of it, also five seasons, more like 22 episodes. And it’s kind of a fun, light-hearted sitcom, I suppose, where a woman has an accident and then when she wakes up, she has the ability to see ghosts. So, it’s a bit like the six sense. I see dead people basically, but all these ghosts are friendly, nice ghosts. They’re not monsters or anything like that. And what makes the show fascinating is that these ghosts span all of time. So, in the British version, one of the ghosts is a Neanderthal. So, he’s basically a caveman who has been living on Earth as a ghost for tens of thousands of years, all pretty much immortal. And then every few hundred years, another person dies in that same location and becomes a ghost. So, now you’ve got a Viking who’s a ghost. And then you’ve got in the more modern era, you might have a jazz singer from the 1920s, a robber baron from the 1800s in the United States. So, you’ve got this rag tag collection of ghosts from all of history and now they’re interacting with a living person and that gives them a huge range of stories that they can tell and they are surprisingly heartfelt. They It’s not a cheap show. it it’s actually especially the American version which I think is the better version and they actually dive into the lives of the ghosts like when they were alive and uncover stories from their life history and they grow as people. They learn things because each ghost is a product of their century or of their millennium. But now they’re interacting with people from other periods of time, including a living woman from the 21st century, and they learn more about the world and about themselves. And it’s a surprisingly good show for something that is so lighthearted. And I’ve watched a few other shows, but to be honest, there’s really nothing that jumps out at me as anything special. I watched the final season of The Boys and I mean it’s a great show and I enjoyed it because of the subject matter, but the finale and the buildup it it it all kind of fell flat. I think a lot of fans of The Boys would agree with me that the finale was disappointing. They were building up to this huge confrontation between Butcher and the boys and Homelander, the uber powerful anti- superhero. And I think we were expecting a major battle with world stakes and massive set pieces and fights and destruction like I thought they would like ratchet it up to like an epic scale and then they just sort of ended the show. They went, “Oh, here. Okay, Homelander’s dead. We won. It It was all It all kind of felt flat to me. I watched a show called The Burrows, which was made by the same people that do Stranger Things, and it’s professionally done, and the characters are kind of fun. The story is interesting in a way, but it’s basically Stranger Things, but set in a retirement home. So instead of having a bunch of kids from the 80s racing around on bicycles, now we’ve got retired men and women in their 60s and 70s in the modern era in a retirement community way out in the desert like a gated community. And of course there are evil shenanigans going on and monsters and things like that. But it felt I hate to say this in a way because it’s such a it’s almost like a cliche now, but it felt like the script was an AI script like they just said, “Oh, let’s can you write a script for a TV show like Stranger Things but set in a retirement home?” And then AI just had a checklist. Oh, to do that, we need this and this and they just kind of went through the motions. And there were so many things in the show, they never paid off. It was like the writers were just creating crazy things. Oh, let’s do this crazy thing and let’s put this symbol here and we’ll hint that it’s so important and this crazy thing and you’re thinking, “Wow, what’s the what’s the answer to all these mysteries and when the show ends, they never answer any of the questions.” So, you could tell the writers didn’t really know what they were doing. They decided they just made up a bunch of crap, threw it at the screen, and made it look fun. And anyway, you get to see some pretty a good set of actors, I guess. Gina Davis, Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman, which in a way made the show a little bit less enjoyable because there’s so many famous actors altogether. It was hard to see each one as the character. All I could see was Gina Davis being Gina Davis. All I saw was Bill Pullman being Bill Pullman because there’s so many famous actors. It was hard to see past their actors and see the characters. But anyway, it was nothing special. It wasn’t terrible. You could easily sit down, breeze through the burrows, enjoy it, move on with your life, but it’s not anything you’re going to remember. I watched Hijack, the new Hijack with Idris Elba. This Hijack, the first one quite good, was on a plane. This one is on a subway train that gets hijacked, but I didn’t enjoy it very much. Idris Elba, of course, is magnetic. He held the whole show together. I watched the whole thing just because he’s so charismatic on screen. But the story expanded into this huge political intrigue with corruption at the highest levels and spies and bombs and this and that. And I lost track of the plot. I had no idea what was going on. Some guy that was in a safe house and this government and that government and I didn’t know. It was like I knew something was going on. Something big, something important. And meanwhile, you had the hijacked subway train. apparently can continue moving in the subway for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles. Like the show just went on and on and on and on and you’re wondering where is this subway train going? Like how? It felt like it’s a train that’s going around the entire planet. Like eventually they got to reach the end of the tracks, right? But there seemed to be an endless limitless supply of underground subway tracks. And this train just kept going and going and going and going and going. It was like it started to get a bit ridiculous after a while. But the one show that I’m really enjoying right now, well, two shows. Rick and Morty, the new season of Rick and Morty just started. There’s only been two episodes. Major thumbs up. Planet Doug approved. I just love Rick and Morty. And even now, I don’t know how many seasons maybe this is season nine, but they have not lost a step. I don’t think I enjoyed both episodes so much. So, Rick and Morty is happening. And a movie I wanted to watch was Hail Mary because everybody seems to love it, but I haven’t been able to watch the movie. But I have watched reactions to the movie on YouTube, so I know the whole story. I know the characters. I know everything that happens. I just haven’t been able to watch the whole movie. But I’ve watched several reactions to it and it seems to be very good. And of course, it’s right up my alley. Science fiction, aliens, you know, all that kind of stuff. And looks to be very, very well done. So, I would like to see that the full movie at some point. And I think that’s about it for pop culture.
Question four. I have watched all your videos and would be happy to invite you to embrace Islam and become a Muslim. A Muslim believes in one God and makes no partners with God. We believe in all the prophets of God, including Jesus, son of Mary. Ask yourself why God guided you to live in Malaysia. Indeed, God does love you so much. I live in Putrajaya and would be happy to meet up and take you through saying the shahada and teach you the basics of Islam. What are your thoughts on becoming Muslim? Yeah, interesting question. I think the best way for me to answer that question is to say I’m just not a religious person. Like I don’t have that thing inside me that a lot of people have where they’re looking for meaning. So they’re out there looking for something that gives meaning to the world and their life and everything everything happening. I don’t have that gene. I just don’t have that impulse at all. So like converting to Islam, it’s almost like you have to convert from something to Islam. But I have nothing to convert from. So it’s not like I have no particular connection with Hinduism, you know, I have no desire to look into Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, like any of the religions. I’m not out there looking for meaning. I just don’t have that impulse. So when it comes to Yeah. I mean, would you be interested in learning about Islam and becoming Muslim? Not really. No, I’m not interested in that. But it’s the same. I would say the same thing. I’m not interested in becoming Hindu or Buddhist or Christian either. I just I’m just not a religious or spiritual person in any way. So I I’m not pulled in that direction at all.
Question five. Doug, your video stretched too long. Probably one hour max, minimum 30 minutes would be ideal. Now I think it is 2 hours, which can make it tough to upload or watch. Yeah, absolutely agreed. It’s something I’ve struggled with from the beginning where the way I shoot videos and the way I think of them naturally produces a long video. So basically I got into video with the idea of making like a travel journal. So instead of writing my journal like I have some adventures yesterday and I wake up in the morning, have a cup of coffee and then I write down my story of what happened the day before. I thought, huh, YouTube is a thing now. Why don’t I record my day on video in real time and post it as a video journal? So that that’s how my head works. That’s how I think of it. And I and that naturally leads to a long video because I’m not picking and choosing events. Like I don’t start the day already knowing what I’m going to film. Like I don’t have a story in mind. All I’m doing is recording the day. And when I start that way, it’s like, well, if it’s a travel day, I wake up, I start recording, packing up in my room, carrying my bags down to the bicycle, loading up the bicycle, riding away. Every step of the day, I shoot a little bit of video. And as I’m shooting the video, I have a thought. So, I start talking about something, which adds more time. And then I don’t stop filming until I get to the new town, unpack my bike, carry my bags up into the room, unpack, make a cup of coffee, get out, get something to eat. So I’ve recorded the whole day. And that always, if it’s a relatively easy day, it’s like an hour long video. If I have like a big adventure in there somewhere, I talk a lot, it can be an hour and a half. And yeah, it just sort of happens. And I know that’s not a good thing to do for YouTube. And I’ve tried I’ve really tried in the past to make my videos shorter, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. It It’s hard for me to do. I think I actually have to go into my head and change a switch. I have to switch out of keeping a journal mode, showing what life is really like mode to more of a create something that is entertaining mode. I don’t mean fake like I’m not talking about clickbait and dramatic over sensationalism. I could never do that. That’s not part of my personality. But I could focus on highlights if I wanted to. I wouldn’t enjoy it as much because it it’s not my instinct to make videos like that, but I could definitely try and it would probably be a good idea for my channel for YouTube. Some people enjoy the long form. In fact, most of the people who reach out to me directly that I meet who say they enjoy my videos, that’s the one thing they always say. I like your videos because they’re long and real and indepth. So they they stand out from the short fluff that you normally see on YouTube. So I kind of get pulled in both directions. Seems like the one good quality I have as a YouTuber is I bring myself fully into the video and tell everything in detail and show the good and the bad. People like that, but then that ends up being a long video and a whole Most people don’t like that. And again, I understand it. I mean, you think about you have an hour and a half of your life to do something. What do you want to do? watch some random guy’s travel video or watch Hail Mary, supposedly one of the best movies ever made. It’s like, hm, I think I’ll watch Hail Mary, you know, a production that cost $300 million to make and has star power and you know, who’s going to pick my video over watching a blockbuster movie when you have a choice, right? So, it feels like for a YouTube travel video, you should aim small and itchy boots style, 30 minutes at the most for a video. But yeah, I don’t even know if I can do that. So, I should try, but I don’t know if I can do it.
Question six, easy questions again. When will the Doug Malaysian Bicycle Tour 2026 really start? And when will you be going? The last plan was to go south alongside the West Coast to Johor Baru and then north alongside the East Coast to Kota Bharu. Is the time enough? And also, if this is your plan, did you follow up with the changes the Thai government has done to the VA? Shorter time and cash is required. Uh do I remember it correctly? 10,000 baht. What is your plan? Alternative go do Johor Baru, enter Singapore on VA, stay some days in Singapore and go back to Johor Baru and then up to Kota Bharu. From there go west and from Langkawi for example to Indonesia. What do you think? Well, in theory, the bicycle ride around Malaysia already started. I left Melaka twice already, but both times I failed. Yeah, it’s a long story and you you’ll see it in the videos when they came out, but I actually I packed up my bike, got on, I started pedaling early in the morning and I left from Melaka. And one of the reasons I did that was because it was another big holiday in Malaysia. So many holidays here can drive you crazy because during the holidays the hotels are full and the prices double and triple for all the hotels across the country. It’s just a terrible time to be traveling. So here I was in Melaka and I tried to extend my stay and I couldn’t because the hotel my room was booked out from under me. So, I had no choice but to leave. And I tried to get another hotel room, but they’re they were all like way too expensive. So, I got on my bike and I was leaving the city. But before I got to the edge, I got an email from a Planet Doug subscriber here in Melaka and this mystery benefactor invited me out to dinner and I explained that I I’d love to, but I can’t because I’m right now on my way out of Melaka. And I says, “Yeah, you know, I hotel rooms, this sort of thing.” And then my mystery benefactor wrote back and says, “Hey, no problem. Um, what if I what if I book you a hotel? You know, I’ll treat you to a room here in Melaka and then we can meet up for dinner.” So, even though I had left Melaka, I didn’t even make it to the edge of the city. And I said to the Mr. Benefactor, “Oh, that would be amazing. Thank you very much.” And then my Mr. benefactor ended up booking me two nights at a really nice hotel and I had a bonus day in Melaka and on that bonus day I went out touring, cycling, exploring. So now I had more video to edit which means I then extended my stay and so I ended up staying another four or five days in Melaka without meaning to and then I finally packed up again. I left Melaka intending to cycle down the coast going to Muar but I wanted to follow the water. So I tried to cycle right along the water but that brought me to rivers, fishing harbors, all kinds of interesting countryside scenery, farms, goats, cows, and then I came across an opportunity to take a boat out to an island. So, I parked my bike, locked it up, hopped on this boat, like a local public ferry, went out to an island, spent a couple hours out there, came back, and then the day was over and I was only 15 kilometers outside of Melaka. So, I was like, well, for Pete’s sake, I spent the whole day cycling and exploring and I was so close to the city, I just turned around and rode back to Melaka. And so I tried to leave and I ended up coming back again. And then I realized it was time for the Ask Me Anything video. So then I put out the notice, you know, anybody have any questions? So now I need a day to record this video and edit it and upload it. So it has been difficult to begin the bicycle journey. It’s supposed to be starting right now and it’s going to be tight again. I shot myself in the foot by staying in Melaka so long. So now when I begin cycling, I think I still have enough time to cycle up the east coast and get to the border with Thailand. So that is still the plan. And I’ll be leaving over the next couple of days. And going into Thailand with the new visa system. I heard something about it. I’m not worried about the VA because what I would do is basically cross the border, stay in Thailand for just a short amount of time, you know, we’ll see and then come back into Malaysia to continue cycling to maybe, you know, Langkawi, Penang, Kuala Lumpur and finish the loop. But whether you have to show money 10,000 baht or something like that at the border to get the visa, I don’t know anything about that yet. I’ll have to look into that.
Question seven from the ding ding. Hi Doug. Have you ever considered doing a circle around Penang? It’s so beautiful, especially the mangroves on the east. Yes. I’ve been to Penang in the past and I actually did go around Penang, but it was like a day trip with a Planet Doug subscriber and a friend of mine and we went in his car. So, he invited me to hop in his car one day and we drove all the way around Penang. And I’ve always had in the back of my mind if I was there on my bicycle, it would be really cool to ride my bike around the island. But I’m not totally convinced it’s a good idea because the road is way too narrow. It’s narrow. There isn’t enough room. So I think it’d be very dangerous on a bicycle. very windy and curvy, tight corners, no room at all. So I think on a bicycle you’d be terrified the whole day like little it’d be it would be like cycling in Sumatra where I had to hug the side of the road with those huge trucks just thundering past all day and on a busy weekend in Penang with all the tourists riding a bicycle I think you’d have a lot of cars going by. It may not be the best thing to do. Rent a scooter would be the perfect way to do it. go around Penang by scooter. But yeah, I have thought about it.
Question eight, Starbucks or Tim Hortons? I haven’t been to a Tim Hortons for a very long time. I mean, I haven’t been back in Canada very much, so I’m not that familiar with it. I remember enjoying Tim Hortons a lot, but mainly because it was so simple. Like I would never in the past I just drank coffee. Like you go into Tim Horton, they make a good cup of coffee, like a Tim Hortons regular coffee in Canada, it’s hot, it’s tasty, it’s cheap, and it’s just a simple informal atmosphere. You go to Tim Hortons, get a good cup of coffee, get a refill, chat with your friends. It’s a good time. Starbucks would be more about getting a good cafe latte or an espresso or something like that. So, I mean, if it was like a Canadian Tim Hortons, I think I would pick Tim Hortons because I know I could get that simple cup of coffee in a unpretentious environment. You go to a place like Starbucks and you feel like your game is elevated. You know, it’s like a bigger event. And I’m I imagine it’s much more expensive than Tim Hortons, but they do make an amazing hot latte at Starbucks. But in the end, I’d probably go to Tim Hortons.
Question nine. Melaka Tourism Board owes you a big thank you. You have made sense of Melaka to others like me who have had visited Melaka before but never truly understood the state. It had a thriving economy and attracted lots of people to come and conquer it. There was so much more to Melaka than Jonker Street, Nyonya Food and Assam Pedas Melaka. Yeah. Well, that’s certainly my perspective on Melaka. To be honest, in the past, people would say to me, “Oh, you got to go to Melaka. You got to go to Melaka.” And I was kind of hesitant because my mental image of Melaka was what they’re describing, Jonker Street, and basically a big market of food. And then you see the big bright trias with the music playing. So the the heavyhanded tourism, it it didn’t excite me. So it I never really I mean I would say to people, “Oh yeah, yeah, I’d love to go to Melaka someday.” But it really wasn’t on my radar that much because it didn’t seem like my kind of place. But now that I’ve been here, I love the place because you do have Jonker Street and this and that and everything else, but you’ve got the indepth history here. Melaka understanding Melaka is like the key to unlocking Malaysia as a whole. It’s the starting point for understanding everything going on in the country in the modern country of Malaysia today, its history. It gives you an in a perspective to kind of comprehend the country of Malaysia from so many different angles. And I love all the museums. And then it’s got some beautiful riverside scenery. So you can go into the heritage zone and then you can choose how much you want to dive into more of the vacation holiday side of Melaka and just go to all the good restaurants and cafes and things like that. I clicked on a video recently, like one of the more typical YouTube travel videos from Melaka was a very popular European couple or they might even have been Canadian now that I think about it. But their video had, you know, many, many tens of thousands of views and hundreds of comments. It was very popular. So I thought, “Oh, wow. What does a popular video about Melaka look like?” So I started watching their video and they they basically did those things. I mean there was no story about getting to Melaka and the logistics and this and that. It just sort of opens with them on Jonker Street. You know the typical the what I should be doing on YouTube I guess is like here we are on Jonker Street in historic Melaka and then they went into a restaurant. They went into a chocolate store and they went into a cafe and had some street snacks and things like that and they just kind of jumped around to a bunch of fun places on Jonker Street and that was the whole video. So you can do you can have that experience if you want, but then you can do things like what I did one day. I just wanted to walk along the river with my camera as far as I could go, as far as the tour boats go and then just take a slow ramble and I got to see the otter and all the fish and the macaques and the big monitor lizards and you get a close look at day-to-day life in Melaka, Little India, Chinatown, all those sorts of things. And then I rode my bicycle all the way to the end of the boardwalk. is like 10 kilometers outside of the city and then back again and then there’s all kinds of interesting areas around Melaka outside of the heritage zone. So yeah, it’s got an incredible appeal even to someone like me. I think it’d even be a good place to live where if you’re trying to pick a place to live in Malaysia, I think Melaka could be a very good choice. You kind of get the best of all worlds. So anyway, yeah, they did say Melaka Tourism Board owes me a big thank you. Maybe like my videos don’t get a huge response. So it’s not like my videos will be boosting Melaka tourism, but perhaps hopefully my videos have supplied a slightly different perspective on the city. Particularly, you know, I tried to summarize it in the last video I posted. I called it, you know, the lost history of Melaka where my own experience as a visitor was that it took me a long time to really understand the significance of Melaka despite even going to all the museums and being interested in the history. So I think I picked four topics in that video just talking about how Melaka tourism in general didn’t do a very good job telling its own story. So even someone like me with an interest in history going to a lot of museums even I misunderstood big parts of the history. You know, one example I gave was I think everyone has this idea about the Portuguese coming and conquering Melaka that they just did it. They showed up with their fleet of sophisticated European warships with all their cannon and they just sort of showed up and shot some cannon and took over Melaka. But the reality is the battle for Melaka between the Portuguese and the Melaka Sultanate took 40 days. It was a 40-day long battle with strategy on both sides and it’s an incredible story to read. I mean, it should be a movie and I just scratched the surface in terms of the details of that battle, but I found that to be such a fascinating story and exactly how the Portuguese gained an advantage and eventually drove the sultanate forces out of the city. But it was a much more interesting story than I realized and I don’t see that story on display. And the founding of Melaka, I made a big deal about that. You know, there was a big painting or graphic showing Parameswara. I can never say his name properly. The founding of Melaka and it illustrated how he decided to start to found his city here and why he chose the name Melaka. So it was like a picture of it but no real explanation about the the origin of Melaka, the founding of Melaka, the omen that led to the founding of the city. None of that was put as a big sign, you know, guiding tourists to understand the significance. Anyway, yeah, great city and yeah, I really I’ve really enjoyed my time here.
Question 10 from Second Swing Golf. Have you witnessed any fatal road accidents in Asia? Is it as dangerous as people say on the roads there? I’ve never witnessed a fatal accident. I’ve barely witnessed any accidents at all to be honest. I’ve seen the aftermath. you know, you occasionally see a truck flipped over in the ditch or something like that and you know something happened, but I don’t think I’ve ever even witnessed one. And personally, I do not find it dangerous at all. I’ve talked about this quite a bit when it comes to cycling that I’ve cycled across Canada and I found cycling on Canadian roads and highways more dangerous than cycling here. mainly because here they’re more accustomed to a certain informality on the roads. In Canada, it’s all very hyper organized for cars and the cars are going very very fast and they’re all going at the same speed and there’s very little room on the shoulder for a bicycle and you really feel you’re under threat from the cars the whole time. But here in places like Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, I’ve scootered and cycled in all of these places quite a bit. You get such a variety of traffic, all moving at different speeds, going in different directions, crossing this way, going against traffic, and from the outside it might look like chaos, but the result is everybody’s kind of accustomed to that. So you as a bicycle, you’re just one of many different types of transportation. There’s, you know, a classic farmer’s cart being pulled by a bullock rumbling along. There’s somebody on a three-wheeled petticab going in the other direction. There’s somebody on a scooter going mildly faster and then a motorcycle, then a big truck, then a bus, then a car. There’s so many different types of vehicles on the road at the same time. often going in different directions and people are just kind of aware of the chaos going on around them and people see you and make room for you. You hear of a lot of foreigners having pretty bad accidents, but when you dive into the stories, there always seems to be some context. Like for example, someone in Thailand who crashed on their scooter and their arms and their legs are all scraped up and they got cuts and everything. But it turns out they were in the bars until 2:00 in the morning and they came out at night mildly drunk and then they’re driving too fast and they had an accident. Something like that always seems to be connected to the accident. So like my standard rule of thumb of course is I don’t ride my bicycle at night. I’m not going to ride a scooter at night and I don’t stumble out of a bar half drunk and get on my bicycle or scooter. Like I don’t do any of those high-risk behaviors. So I think my chance of having a an accident, let alone a fatal accident, are like way way way lower than you would think. If you cut out that risky behavior, there can still be a catastrophic accident. I know there have been a couple of round the world cyclists that were killed because they got rearended. And there was one recent, not recently but like 3 4 years ago. I saw the big stories about it. A couple I think from the United States on bicycles going around the world and a Thai man was drunk driving at high speed on a pickup truck didn’t see them on the road and just plowed into them from behind and they both I think they both died in that accident or maybe one of them died. But so you do hear stories like that from time to time, but again it seems to be alcoholrelated. Somebody’s drunk, doesn’t see the cyclist and hits them from behind. There’s nothing you can do to prevent that. So yeah, my answer I’ve not witnessed any fatal road accidents and I don’t think it’s as dangerous as people say. I really don’t. In Sumatra when I was there cycling, that was pretty dangerous, but that was an Yeah. one main highway was the only highway I could follow and there wasn’t a lot of room and then there’s so many trucks going by. But my experience was the drivers were pretty considerate. They would see me ahead of them and then they would go they would swing out around me for the most part. The drivers seem to be aware of me. So yeah, I don’t think it’s as dangerous as people might say.
Question 11. Looking forward to your road trip. Contrary to others, avoid Singapore. Expensive and not safe riding here as city is congested. Desaru would be nice. Ride safe. So there’s no question there. But saying in terms of going around Malaysia and going through Johor Baru, there is the option to pop over to Singapore. and they’re saying may not be a great idea for you. It’s not great for cycling because it’s congested and it’s expensive. So, I’ve been to Singapore twice, so I’m aware that the prices jump up dramatically when you go from Malaysia or Indonesia into Singapore. So, I would think twice before going to Singapore for sure.
Question 12 from longtime viewer Bing Lim. Doug, some may say that your videos go for too long, but to me, you can go as long as you like. I regularly watch Planet PEP, a podcast and YouTube videos about American politics that usually goes on for over 3 hours. So, I do love detail and indepth analysis of a subject matter. Chaz also hosts the Australian ABC TV program, would you believe it, Planet America. So, there is some support for the long form Planet Doug videos. And he does mention podcasts. And I that’s I often mention that that I sometimes think of my videos more as a video podcast than a video travel vlog basically. And then that if I think of it as a podcast, it like gives me permission to make it very long because I think of a podcast as something you don’t I listen to long podcasts as well. There’s one podcast I listen to that is four hours long, comes out every week, and then I just start playing it and then whenever I’m taking a shower or doing something in my room, I take out my phone and I hit play on the podcast. Picks up where I left off and I’m listening to the podcast as I’m doing things. And then when I’m finished, I stop the podcast. So I don’t listen to four hours all at one sitting. I listen to it over the week in bits and pieces. And video is not quite the same as that of course, but yeah, video podcast maybe you can maybe you have permission to go a little bit longer if you like.
Question 13. What are your regrets in life? Yeah, that’s an interesting question. And the the whole concept of a regret for me is a very powerful tool. You can use that idea for understanding life and talking about it because there’s so many different ways of thinking about the concept of regret. And I know for cool people the the instinct is to say ah I don’t regret anything. Like what’s the point of living with regret? I don’t regret anything in my life. But in my brain, I tend to see both extremes. Like if you ask me, do I regret anything? I can say honestly, I regret everything I’ve ever done. But I can at the same time say I regret nothing. Both can be true at the same time because yeah, I mean I can go back, think back over my life now, and I can recast events to see that every single thing I did was a mistake. From beginning to end, every choice I ever made was the wrong choice. I can go back in time and I can see that very, very clearly. I can always look back in time and see what my options were and it’s like, “Yeah, that that was the wrong choice. You should have done this.” But the logic is a bit faulty because now that you’re looking back in time, you’re not that person anymore. You are a completely different person in a different situation. and you saw the results of that decision. So, you can regret it, but it doesn’t really make sense to regret it because you’ve completely changed. You don’t remember. You don’t understand who you were at that time anymore. And in my case, I will make a decision based on the facts and beliefs I have at that time. But then that decision puts me on a learning process. And by the time I get to the end of that learning process, that decision doesn’t make sense anymore. I’ll give you an example that might make that clear. I originally went to university to study what they call international development because I grew up in Canada at a time when we thought of many countries around the world as being very poor, right? We divided the world into first world and third world. That’s how we viewed, you know, we’ve got rich people here, poor people here. And because I didn’t have any personal ambitions, I didn’t have any ambitions for myself. I thought, well, I can dedicate my life to helping other people. So my idea was to study international development and then I was going to have a career working in NGOs going to Africa helping the poor people in Africa that was the career that I chose basically it was a little bit of a default choice because I couldn’t think of anything else to do like I don’t have any desire to be a hot shot lawyer and make millions of dollars or be a doctor and make millions you know I don’t have any of these ambitions and I thought Since I’m not very good at living my own life, why don’t I dedicate my life to helping others live their life to the fullest? So, I will work in international development. So, I went to university. I chose to study that topic. But as I studied that topic, by the time I finished my degree, I had concluded that that kind of international aid is pointless. it doesn’t help at all and in most cases it does more harm than good. Plus, the more I got into that world, the less I liked it. Like I remember graduating from university and then I looked for a job kind of and you you kind of go online or wherever you are and you find job postings from Oxfam, other NGOs and I would see the job listing and it would be like 500 words long, a job description. I’d read that whole thing over and over and over again. But no matter how many times I read the job description, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do if I got the job. There was so much jargon in the world of international aid. the the the the buzzwords of the moment. And every year the buzzwords would change and all these people that work in international development, it seemed to me like all they did was go around the world, go to conferences and give presentations and sit on committees and and and and I don’t know, they just talk and talk and talk and talk all these buzzwords. And I would look at the job and go, okay, what is the job? Like if I got that job and now I’m working for Oxfam, I show up in the office. If I sat down at a desk, I would have no idea what my job is. It’s like I I couldn’t tell. It’s such dense verbiage, the the buzzwords and the jargon. And anyway, that whole world was completely unappealing to me. And then when I started traveling, all I saw everywhere I went in the world were well-intentioned aid projects in all these villages in Africa that had completely failed and completely ruined the local economy and caused more harm than good. So I made the decision to study international development in good faith. It was the correct decision at the time, but by the time I got to the end of the degree, spent four years studying it, I wasn’t even interested in that job anymore. Right? So, that was a mistake. So, I regret taking international development in university, but I didn’t know at that time that I would regret it. At the time, it seemed like the correct choice. See what I mean? So I regret it but at the same time I don’t regret it because it made sense at the time. So but that is something I regret. I regret studying international development. Thinking back now, I would have been better off taking a technical topic where you study something and you get a technical skill and then you could use that technical skill to go around the world, make money so you could travel using this skill that you learned in university. So whatever it is, so in my mind now, I’m thinking that would have been the better choice. But I’m willing to bet if I made that choice, I would have regretted that choice as well. Because something I’ve noticed in my lifetime, a lot of people start off thinking they want to have a life of freedom traveling around the world. So they pick a job that’s going to give them an income so that they’re able to travel around the world. So they they develop this skill in university. They get a highpaying job and then they get stuck there. They just start living their life and they never actually go around the world. That was their plan. That’s why they studied this topic to make money and then they have the freedom to travel. Teachers are a good example of that in Canada. I met so many teachers when I remember cycling across Canada and I met so many teachers who would talk to me and say, “Oh man, I wish I could do what you’re doing.” And they said they chose to become a teacher because every year they will get three months off in summer and then so they teach for one year and then they’re going to go traveling for 3 months, work for a year, travel for 3 months. But that would be 40 years ago. And not once have they ever gone on a trip during the three months because now they’ve got a steady job. Now they have an apartment. They can’t leave their apartment for 3 months. They’ve got a car. They’ve got family responsibilities. They get married. They have kids. So had I chosen in university to pick a better subject that led to paying work, maybe I never would have gone overseas because I just would have lived in Canada doing that job and maybe I would have regretted that choice. You see what I mean? So I have millions of regrets. I regret everything I have ever done. Every single thing I’ve done in my life seems to me like it was a mistake. And everything I do from today forward is also going to be a mistake. I’m going to regret every choice I make. But you just that’s that’s that’s just my brain, I guess. And I just have to live with it. And yeah, you can just go on with your life despite that because as I said, you can regret everything and regret nothing at the exact same time.
Question 14. Have you ever considered visiting China? Canadian passport holders can now visit visafree for up to 30 days. Also, what are some country you’ve always been curious about visiting but haven’t had the chance to visit yet? And among the countries you’ve already been to, which ones would you most like to return to and explore again? I’ve been to China. I’ve been to China three times, I think, in my life. Way before YouTube, way before the internet existed, that that kind of time. No smartphones, no digital cameras, no Google maps. So it was a very different time in my life. So I have been to China but that was the old China before the modern economic boom. So I could go to China again today and it would be a completely new experience because the country is a new place entirely. But am I considering going again? No, I’m not. I just don’t have any interest in China. It’s very opaque to me as a country. I don’t know what’s there. I don’t understand the geography. I don’t understand the politics, the economics, the everything about the country. It just doesn’t I don’t have a an inroad into understanding the country. It doesn’t feel welcoming to me. It feels like a country where they don’t want you to be there. They make things difficult for you. And when that starts to happen, my instinct is like, “Ah, well, you’re going to make it that hard for me to go to your country? I I’ll go to a different country. I’ll go to Indonesia where they want me there and they like it that I’m there. China is just too big. It’s like a Yeah, it’s too big for me to grasp to understand. If I had nowhere else to go, I suppose I would enjoy going to China. But if you gave me a ticket right now and said, “Here, Doug, you can go to any country in the world on this ticket, you know, choose from this list.” I would choose 50 other countries before I ever got to choosing China. There’s so many other places I would go instead. So, but that’s also because I’d been there already. I’ve been there three times. And you know, I’ve been to Beijing. I’ve been to Shanghai. I’ve been to lots of different parts of China. I’ve been to the other side of things. been to Hong Kong a few times which is kind of you know part of China. That’s how I entered China. I remember one time I went in overland through Hong Kong. I remember taking a boat from Korea to China one time. So, you know, I’ve had a lot of experiences in China, but it was a long time ago and it was a very different country back then. So, what countries am I curious about but haven’t had the chance to visit yet? Yeah, well, that is a very long list. Off the top of my head, I always end up thinking about Africa. I’ve been to two countries in Africa, Ethiopia and Guinea. Both of them big cycling trips, cycling and hiking and that sort of thing. But I’ve never been anywhere else in Africa. So, I would love to go to anywhere else basically. The idea of going to West Africa appeals to me. Like those all those little tiny countries, Benin, Togo, Ghana, that little grouping of countries right there. I kind of like having those. I like a country to be kind of small and accessible, not some giant thing that you can’t comprehend. And they’re all so close together. So that would be like a nice sample of West Africa, East Africa, you know, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, that sort of set of countries there I’ve always been interested in. So I’d love to go there. Those two parts of Africa, Bolivia, I’d love to go to Bolivia in South America. I’ve been to Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico. So, in terms of those Spanish-speaking countries, I’ve kind of had an experience there, but I’ve always had this idea that Bolivia would be a very interesting place to visit. So, I’ve got Bolivia on my mind. And yeah, where else? Those would be probably my main interests. There’s probably a lot of other countries that would interest me, but then you start getting into places that are difficult to get into, visa restrictions, that kind of thing, and places that are very expensive. I suppose much of Western Europe falls into that category. I mean, who doesn’t want to visit Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Germany, any of these countries? Denmark, Sweden, Finland. But yeah, too expensive basically traveling through Europe. You’d need money to go there. I did think in the past that if I were cycling, I would somehow be able to go through Europe on a low budget because you could camp out every night. But I think that was more realistic decades ago. I think modern Europe is less accessible than it used to be. Now that it’s all the Schengen you know it all has one visa instead of every every time you cross a border your visa resets and you get another 90 days for Greece and then 90 days for Italy and I don’t know it just doesn’t Europe is not really on my radar. I would go there just because it’s there but it’s yeah it’s just too expensive. And then you’ve got all these countries that yeah I don’t have a huge amount of interest in them. all the stans which again I just don’t understand them at all. Tajikistan and Kazakhstan and all all the stans central Asia I guess you would call it. I’ve always had an interest in Turkey Istanbul I think would be amazing to spend some time there. So yeah I I could go on about that. Among the countries you’ve already been to which would you most like to return and explore again? The thing is with that is I would go back anywhere because the world has changed so much. I mentioned I went to Guinea and Ethiopia. I would love to go back to either one of them because we now have digital cameras and video cameras. Like when I went there, I just had a I had a film camera taking slides, you know, pictures. And it would be amazing to go back to that same country but with the power of Google Maps, the internet, smartphones, digital cameras. It would be a completely different experience. I would love to go back. like this the capital city of Guinea, Conakry was just an amazing place, scary place, difficult place in so many ways, but also really fascinating. And I looking back at my time in Guinea, I’m not sure that I dove into the country as deeply as I could have. And if I went back there now to Guinea or Ethiopia with all of my digital tools, I think I would have a much richer experience. Now, Google Translate would allow you to do so much more while you’re there. But also Bangladesh I only had just a taste of Bangladesh and I only stayed in Dhaka in the city in the capital city and went up and down the river a little bit but my sense is that there’s so much more mainly the river system in Bangladesh getting on those huge river boats and traveling everywhere those boats go I think that would be an amazing adventure. So yeah, so Ethiopia would be the number one on my list to go back to despite how difficult Ethiopia was. I would love to revisit the place and have a second look. And then Bangladesh would probably be number two.
Question 15 from Dynamics Watch Reviews. Hey Doug, my question is, have you considered a video all about Grab Pay e-Wallet? I find it much better than Touch and Go in Malaysia because Grab Pay can also be used at any place that has the red do it now QR logo. Also, Grab Pay is better for food deliveries and transport. The only downside is it doesn’t have the Visa option and the Kuala Lumpur LRT card. Luckily for me, my main destination in Malaysia is not KL, but rather Johor Baru, where TNG is not used for buses. Johor has the MyLink system instead. Anyway, I was just curious on your thoughts. Looking forward to your Q&A CC forever. I hadn’t considered making a video about Grab Pay, mainly because I don’t use it. I guess I don’t I didn’t even know it was a competitor to Touch and Go. I just sort of got sucked into, you know, I got pulled into the Touch and Go universe and I’m quite happy there and I’d never thought about using Grab Pay. I guess in the past I had trouble with Grab in general and that kind of put me off Grab. I don’t even think I could tell the story, but I just have this memory of going to new countries and then I would want to get a Grab car, but somehow I would open up the Grab app, but it would be the wrong one for the wrong country. And I don’t know, there was something about Grab in was different in each country, and I couldn’t get them linked up somehow. And Grab just confused me every time I tried to use it in a different country. Maybe I just didn’t understand it. But anyway, I had these negative experiences with Grab over the years and that kind of pushed me away from Grab in general. I don’t I can’t describe exactly what my problem was with it, but something about it confused me and every time I tried to use it, it wouldn’t work properly for me. So, I just didn’t have this instinct like, “Oh, Grab, another ewallet. Let’s try this one out and see how it works.” I mean, now that you’ve given me the idea, maybe I can look into it. I can see I don’t know anything about it. I would have to start from zero. I don’t know how you add money to Grab. I don’t know how anything works with Grab Pay. So, I’d have to do a lot of research, start using it myself, and learn as I go before I could make a video about it. So, yeah. Yeah, that’s about it. Yeah, I have never considered it, but now I am, so maybe I will.
Question 16. Hi, Mr. Doug. Is it your bike ride around Malaysia may take 2 years cuz traveling is slow? Yeah, absolutely. I talked about that earlier a little bit. There’s a real tension for me right now where the cycling is interesting to me and it’s a way of getting somewhere, but then when it comes to combining cycling with shooting YouTube videos, then I’m finding it hard to make those match sync up. Yeah, cuz I came to Melaka intending to hit the road and start cycling, but then I started shooting videos here in Melaka and I, every time I shoot one video, it shows me something else that’s interesting. Oh, I should look into that, look into that. And that’s kind of what I enjoy doing. And then you get on the bicycle and start riding. And what is your video about? you know, okay, I’m on the bike and I’m riding and I’m still riding and here I am on the bike riding. You know, where’s the video story, right? So, I like the cycling lifestyle, but I’m having trouble making it mentally connect with travel experiences. And and it seems there seems to be a conflict between making videos about traveling by bicycle and making videos about a country. Like for example, I follow a guy from Morocco called Let’s Go Cycling. He’s a cyclist and he makes YouTube videos and he’s able to do it. But his videos are about cycling. They every video opens with him waking up in his tent at the side of the road where he camped overnight and he makes a cup of coffee on his little pot and then he’s packing up his bike and then he rides all day and okay, here’s a really steep part. Oh, this is going to be so steep and now we’re going downhill. and all the video is of what he sees around him on the road. And then the video ends with him setting up his tent at night. That’s a cycling journey. But I watch all of his videos through all of one country. But because he’s so busy only cycling, he never gets to learn anything about the country itself, right? The focus is riding the bike, not the country. So, every every time every time I kind of, you know, I’m going to start riding the bike around Malaysia, I kind of get pushed away from it because I don’t want to make videos about cycling. I want to make videos about Malaysia. And then somehow there’s a bit of a conflict there. So, but that’s just explaining why I’m going so slowly that I got to Melaka and I just got interested in the city. So, I started making videos and I got delayed and delayed and delayed. So yeah, my bike ride around Malaysia could take two years.
Question 17. You have been posting updates on the community tab, but have you ever considered actively doing your realtime daily updates on Instagram or maybe YouTube shorts? just something you can record casually without complicated editing because it’s just a short video or picture updates. Maybe it could be a sneak peek of your longer vlog. Just a suggestion so we can excitingly follow your journey. Yeah, great question. The Have you ever considered doing Instagram, YouTube shorts, all that kind of stuff? Yeah, I consider it all the time. And there have been times where I started doing it and then over time I stopped doing it because it it’s really hard to do for a couple of reasons. the main reason is time and energy. It may seem like it’s so easy, like, oh, you know, during the day today, I’ll post a couple of pictures to Instagram, a short to Tik Tok, a short to YouTube, something to Patreon. All of these will link to my main video that I’m going to make about the day. And it does seem like it would be interesting to do. And then by the time you you start doing it and the day is over and that’s all you’ve done, it takes for me anyway. Maybe I’m just not smart, it takes a lot of time and a lot of energy to update social media in real time. For me anyway, it it always ends up taking a lot more time, a lot more energy, and a lot more mental focus than you realize. So, that’s the main reason, just time, and mental energy. It requires so much time just to shoot and make a YouTube video. There’s like nothing left over for Instagram and Facebook. I know I’m supposed to be doing those things, but I just run out of time and I run out of energy. The other big problem that I run into is when I start doing that, I end up living in two different timelines, right? Because the YouTube videos are always going to be behind by a little bit. Even if you work as hard as you want, as hard as you can, and you post as fast as you can, you’re still going to be days behind. It takes you a few days to finish the video, probably a week. For most big YouTubers, they’re months and months and months and months behind. They can be a year behind and it doesn’t seem to hurt their YouTube channel at all, which is kind of interesting. In my case, I like to keep it a little bit more current. So, but it’s still like a week behind, maybe something like that. And then if you’re posting in real time, now you’re living on social media in real time and you’re living a timeline where you’re one week behind. And mentally, you get split. You forget what timeline you’re living in. You get confused. So now I’m out there with my GoPro exploring Melaka and I stop. Oh, I I I should post something to YouTube shorts cuz I’m standing in front of this interesting thing. And then I like turn on my or Instagram, post photos to Instagram, whatever. And then it’s like, oh, take a couple of pictures. And you type up a little thing and you post it to Instagram and you’re done with that and say, “What was I doing again?” Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. GoPro, what what am I what am I? You know, you you get split. Your mental focus gets divided between the two. And now you’ve got two different timelines where you’re interacting with people. You’ve got people reacting to what you did today in real time, leaving comments, asking questions, and you’re chatting back and forth with them. And now that you’ve had these conversations with people and you’ve posted photos and video clips and everything from that day, when you finally get around to editing the video of that day, mentally to me it feels like old news. It’s like, why the heck am I posting this video about something? I I I already posted photos and clips and I’ve been talking with people about it and it feels like it’s a finished experience because I’ve already posted so much about it. And now when I get finally around to editing the video I shot that day, I don’t have the energy for it anymore because it feels like I’ve already dealt with this topic, right? It’s almost like you have to pick which route you want to go down. like stick with posting the videos as they are finished editing or like doing live streams, posting in real time, everything is immediate. When you try to do both, when I try to do both, I get mixed up. I get confused. I get tired. I just don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I I get all mixed up. So, from time to time, I feel inspired where, oh, Instagram. I forgot about Instagram. or I want to engage with people on YouTube community posts and I I’ll come up with an idea like the one you suggested where you post something as a teaser for the video. I did that recently kind of I got this idea that okay one way I can balance this is you know I know this video is coming up and then I can take a little story from that and post it to Patreon and then YouTube community tab and just say and not dive into the details don’t explain everything just a little hint and then just say upcoming video wait and you’ll see this in in an upcoming And that seemed to make sense to me. But then days will go by and I realize, oh shoot, I haven’t done any YouTube community posts because it takes so much effort and time to do the videos. I forget that I started this project. It’s like I guess I I just don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough energy to to maintain Patreon, YouTube, community tab on YouTube, and then Instagram and Facebook. Occasionally, I start doing that because I think it’s a good idea, and then over time, they all start dropping off one by one because I just can’t keep up with it. I just can’t find the energy. So that’s yeah kind of a kind of a some of some of my thoughts about that topic. I should do it. I’ve tried to do it but I haven’t been very successful and I don’t really know how to do it.
Question 18 from AM Rose or AM Rose. Have you ever had a Forest Gump moment in your travels? Do share if yes. The scene when he summarized what he had experienced while walking back and forth across America. Yeah, I remember that scene very well. I know the Forrest Gump movie. I’ve seen it. I’ve watched it so many times. I know it quite well. And there’s a scene where Forrest is talking to Jenny. She’s back at their at his farmhouse and she’s ill and she’s in bed and he talks to her and starts describing some of these magical moments that he experienced over the years even in Vietnam and then mainly while he was running back and forth across the United States. And most of the scenes were moments like sunrise and sunset because those are always, you know, the most magical times of the day. and he’s just describing the feeling of these incredible moments that he had. So he’s asking, “Have I had a Forrest Gump moment like that?” And yeah, I have to do the horrible answer again of well, yes and no. No, because my I’m not a very romantic I’m not a romantic person from that point of view. If I’m if I’m describ I often run into trouble with this because people will ask me a question like, “Oh, what was Ethiopia like when you went there?” And I can give two different answers. I mean, I can give the romantic answer and just say, “Wow, Ethiopia is amazing. The whole northern section of the country, this beautiful mountainous plateau.” And I can go on and on about describing the beauty and the amazing nature and the scenery and the villages and on and on and on. But at the same time, the actual experience for me of cycling through Ethiopia was borderline awful. I mean, the actual dayto-day moments were brutally difficult from on every level you can imagine. And so it’s like a mixture of this incredible beauty that you’re cycling through. You can stop and appreciate that, but there’s also the reality of everything you are experiencing in real time in in real life. And my brain is more interested in the reality than the postrip fantasy, if you know what I mean. So, like when it comes to Forrest Gump running back and forth across the United States, it it comes across as like this amazing experience because they’ve got the soundtrack, like that incredible song playing and they show him running through amazing scenery. so it looks like an amazing thing. Like, wow, I want to do that someday. But what they don’t show, of course, is him being out in the middle of nowhere and now he needs to go to the bathroom and and he’s running with no water, no food, no shelter, nothing of any kind. So, how is he sleeping at night? Like, they don’t they don’t show any of that. They don’t show the sun going down and he’s in the middle of nowhere and he just what curls up in a ball at the side of the road and lies on the gravel till the sun comes up and then keeps running again like he has to eat, he has to sleep, he has to get water, but he’s not traveling with any of these things. So, a lot of these romantic moments I tend to be suspicious of them because they’re not telling the whole story of what it was really like. So, that’s the no side of the equation. But there is the yes side because there are mixed in there. Even in Ethiopia, there are moments of serenity and very exactly the same as those of Forrest Gump. And I could think back over my lifetime. And of course, I can come up with a lot of them. And they tend to be just as it was for Forrest Gump around sunrise and sunset. There were times in Ethiopia where I was sort of out in the middle of nowhere and I was camping, sleeping in my tent. And I remember one night in particular being out in the countryside. And when you’re in the countryside in Ethiopia, you are really in the countryside. It is dark, pitch black, because there are no cities anywhere. There’s no city lights. There’s no light pollution. So on a clear night, you look up at the Milky Way and yeah, you’re stunned, like absolutely stunned by the beauty of it. You just lie there and you can hardly like believe what you’re seeing. And I had moments like that in Ethiopia. And I remember one night in particular, it was a night like that, black sky, the Milky Way in stark contrast, and then there was a huge meteor shower. And I remember looking it up in the news later on that there had been a major meteor shower. And I did the sky just filled with, you know, meteors burning up on entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. And yeah, that that’s kind of a moment that only comes around a halfdozen times, you know, in your lifetime. And I’ve had moments like that. I remember in the Philippines being on a beach at night again, pitch black, amazing day, had gone before an incredible night. I’m on this perfect tropical beach with a moon. The moon is out. There’s moonlight and then I went into the water and you move your arms through the water and this happened to be a time when there was that fluorescent algae in the water. If you’ve seen that, you know what I’m talking about. There’s YouTube videos about it. As your limbs move, it just leaves behind trails of brilliant blues and greens because all of the algae in the water lights up with fluorescent light. So, you’re out there swimming in the dark with the moon and all around you the water is glittering blue and green as you, you know, you feel like you’re in a dreamscape. It it was like a stunning kind of moment for me. And then there are other times that were sort of in between. When I was in the Philippines, one of the things I did was go swimming with whale sharks. It was sort of like a bucket list experience. I happen to be cycling by a very popular place where you can pay to get in a boat and then go snorkeling with whale sharks. So, I did that and there were so many parts of that experience that were just typical Planet Doug experiences, right? You’re in the middle of the Philippines, you can’t get any information from anybody, you don’t know what’s going on, you’re exhausted. I spent the night in this town and I woke up early in the next morning to go do the whale shark thing, but you don’t know where to go and you have to pack for the day and that’s complicated and timeconsuming and I finally get down to the harbor on my bicycle. Where do I park the bike? Like what what’s is there a schedule? Is there a boat? Who do I talk to? Do I buy a ticket? like is all that chaos and confusion that you have to fight through which is just normal day-to-day life overseas as a foreigner because you don’t know how anything works. Nobody has any information. You can’t communicate with anybody. You don’t know what’s going on. And then eventually I figured it all out and I found myself on the boat and you’re with other people and the sun is beating down. You’re burning alive from the heat of the sun on and on and on. So you have all that’s the reality of the experience, but then I went into the water, snorkel and a mask and there’s supposed to be whale sharks out there and I’m floating in the water like I’m swimming under the water and I’m not seeing anything. And then I turn around and the whale shark is coming. And I mean, you have not lived until you’re in the water with one of these behemoths like just coming up behind you with its huge mouth open and this massive fish just so big your brain can barely comprehend it. And this thing is coming up behind you and then it goes right by you. This huge body flowing past and then that massive tail. So yeah, like that that moment too was like sublime, but it it’s in the middle of all of the chaos and the confusion of getting in the water to be with the whale shark. So you you get that kind of experience as well. So yeah, if I go back over my life, I could easily come up with a Forrest Gump series of moments like that. And those, yeah, those are just like three or four of them that jump into my head right now.
Question 19 from Shane Bronson. Haven’t seen any videos with you and Daryl from Wander Eats for quite a while. Have you stopped collaborating or just giving it a rest for a while? Yeah, I guess Daryl and I haven’t made videos together for a while and I haven’t seen Daryl for a while. I guess that that’s the main reason to be honest. There’s nothing nothing going on behind the scenes. There’s no reason why I wouldn’t be shooting some sort of hey, I’m getting together with Daryl for breakfast videos, which I did do quite often. It’s just that I haven’t seen much of them lately because the last few months I’ve been in Melaka. Well, I was cycling. I was in Port Dickson for a while and then out of Port Dickson I started cycling and then I went to Sumatra for a month and I’ve been back here for a month. So I just haven’t seen Daryl for a long time. So that’s why there haven’t been any videos with him and I having our morning breakfast kind of thing. I’m just I haven’t been in Kuala Lumpur. And Daryl I think he also took put Wander Eats his YouTube channel. He put it on hold for a little while. I think he was doing an experiment to see if he can reset the algorithm like the the mysterious YouTube algorithm where maybe it pegged his channel as a channel that makes this type of video and he wanted to take his channel in a new direction. So he wanted to just stop posting videos for a while, have YouTube algorithm kind of forget about him and then when he posts new videos like with a new subject matter or a new style, he will have reset the algorithm and they’ll treat it like a brand new channel and then will be more likely to promote his videos, right? Rather than shadowbanning them or whatever it is YouTube does. So, his YouTube channel has not been very active lately either. And Daryl has had a lot of stuff going on in his own life. A lot of trips going overseas, flying to other countries in and out of Malaysia. He’s been very, very busy. He’s always a busy guy. So, he makes time for me when I’m in Kuala Lumpur and we get together for breakfast. things like that. But, yeah, I just haven’t been around. I guess we’ve both been very busy and we just haven’t done a classic yeah going out for breakfast video for a while.
Question 20 and I think this is the last one from Side Trip Life. Yeah, great uh great YouTube channel Side Trip Life based out of Thailand. fellow Canadian I believe side trip life me writes you mentioned continuous travel costs add up particularly accommodation costs would you consider finding an inexpensive apartment versus a hotel to use as a base in each area for a month at a time and exploring from there advantages are many from often more comfort perhaps more reliable internet if included, better to edit from, ability to receive parcels via Shopee pay, etc. to a generally healthier lifestyle, uh, including the ability to cook, a fridge, and window usually. Disadvantages, you’re committed for a month or longer, depending, may lack the charm of a cheap but welcome hotel room. Also, you’re restricted to filming around your selected area and may lack regular interaction with hotel staff, etc. Perhaps a plus in some instances, lol. So, I think SDL he kind of answered his own question. He asked the question and then he sort of answered it at the same time. Yeah, of course. I’ve often considered all the many advantages there could be financially in particular if I commit to staying in one place for a month. So for example, I I was just in Sumatra for a month and it would have been a lot cheaper if I got a room and paid for it for the month and just stayed in that room rather than staying in a hotel night after night after night. So, and there might be other advantages to that. staying in a like renting a room somewhere, renting an apartment for a month rather than staying in hotels. So, there could be, you know, you could have a kitchen and a fridge and a stove, maybe even washing machines. Life could be a lot easier, but then there also could be disadvantages when he talked about those. But anyway, yeah, I’ve thought about it a lot, particularly after I’ve been somewhere for a month, and then I think back and think, man, I I should have gotten a room and paid for a month, and that would have been so much better and so much cheaper. But the problem with that, for me, I guess, is that I’m just not organized enough because when I went to Sumatra, I didn’t plan to stay for a month. I was only planning to stay maybe for a week and then turn around and come straight back to Malaysia. That was the original idea. So, what always ends up happening to me is I’ll go somewhere and I have an idea I’m going to stay there for two or three nights. So, it makes sense just to get a cheap hotel room and then I’m there. But then before I know it, I’ve gotten interested in that town like I have in Melaka and I’ve ended up spending an entire month in Melaka. I spent an entire month in Dumai in Sumatra, but that wasn’t my plan from the beginning. So my problem is I keep changing my plan which makes it difficult to commit to anything. so yeah, it would have been better financially if I had said in advance, I’m going to go to Dumai. I’m going to stay for one month in Dumai and I’m going to get a room, cheap room for the month. That would have been the wise choice for someone financially. But I didn’t have that idea to begin with. It just sort of happened by accident that I stayed for the full month. But also, how would you arrange it from a from afar? Like at least with a cheap hotel, you got a go. You can just book the room. You got something ready to go. How are you going to track down this room that is cheaper? You know, you normally need local contacts in my experience to do something like that. So I think it’s very difficult to organize in advance. I don’t know how to do it. And I did it once recently in Port Dickson. That was the one time I committed in advance. Like I didn’t have any plans to stay in Port Dickson as long as I did. But a friend of mine, KY, he said, “Hey, um I know a man, a friend of mine in Port Dickson. He has a room in his house and he can rent it to you really, really cheap. Why don’t Why don’t you do that?” So I committed to that and was like, “Huh, you know, that sounds like a great idea. I have a local contact. he knows somebody with a room. We made the arrangement. You know, the price was was good. Everything was fine. And then it just ended up not working out at all because like a dozen details, unforeseen problems come out of nowhere. Now that you’ve involved several other people in this arrangement, you’re trying to arrange for something longterm and you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into. And the whole thing just exploded. imploded. It just fell apart and I ended up having to move out of that really early. And then I found another room like a long-term rental kind of place and it was my only option and I moved into that place and now you’re looking at there was no internet. Like I didn’t know in advance this place had no internet. So suddenly I was really stuck because I had this room but I couldn’t spend any time in the room because I had no internet. So now I was out in Port Dickson all day long every day hanging out in restaurants and coffee shops just so that I could use their Wi-Fi. I didn’t even have any mobile internet because the room I’d rented was deep inside a house with cement on all around and mobile couldn’t penetrate. So I had no internet access at all. And the the entire month that I was there was kind of miserable because I was just I need the internet. It’s like oxygen. So, and the room itself, of course, was just kind of a bare room. So, now I’m spending days. I had to fix the shower, you know, go out to a hardware store. I bought new shower a new shower head and shower hose and I’m installing that cuz it’s easier to do like trying to contact the person who owns the place and say, “Oh, listen. There’s no w I mean, the the shower doesn’t even work.” It takes longer to do that than to just fix it yourself. So now I’m in this place and I’m trying to fix I’m trying to make it liveable. So now anyway, it all snowballs and becomes far more complicated than you think it’s going to be. Now you’ve involved other people in their arrangements. There’s complications, misunderstandings, deposits, who knows? So I I’ve never been able to make that work. Main reason is I don’t plan ahead well enough. And then these sorts of rooms are more difficult to get to set up and make comfortable than you would expect. And the third reason might be what STL said. There’s a certain charm to lowbudget hotel adventures and you’re always in kind of an interesting neighborhood. Once you’re renting a room in an apartment, you tend to be out in the suburbs where there’s nothing. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve never used Airbnb either. I mean, I watch all these YouTube videos from other travel vloggers who come to Kuala Lumpur and a lot of their video will be about this amazing condo that they’ve gotten on Airbnb. And on the surface, it looks so much better than my lifestyle because they’re in this brand new beautiful building on the 30th floor with an elevator, security, and they’ve got this huge apartment with a washing machine and a dryer, kitchen, and a balcony. Up on the roof there’s an infinity pool, and you think, “Wow, Airbnb, that’s the way to go. You can get a place like this.” But then they always end up looking to me really boring. Like I wouldn’t want to live in a place like that because there’s nothing there. I see them leave from the Airbnb condo and they’re just out in the middle of this huge complex of towers and they have to walk for 20 minutes before they get out of that neighborhood and into anything interesting. So, I would far prefer to have a cheap little hotel room right in the heart of Chinatown, which is where I stayed in Medan. You know, I found this cheap hotel that’s right in the heart of Chinatown. And you’re just surrounded by life. You step outside, you’re right in the alleyways of Chinatown, bustling and filled with people and restaurants and things like that. And in KL as well, all the neighborhoods I stayed in are just really interesting neighborhoods. You’re right in the thick of old downtown districts when you stay in these cheap hotels. You know, if you look for a like a student housing, sometimes student housing has like a room for rent for students and you can get information about those, but they tend to be at the university which will be 5 kilometers away from downtown or you’re end up in a condo building where you’re just isolated in this little enclave of luxury and then I I just what would I do in those places? It’d be nice, but I’d much rather be in a room with no window and my friendly cockroaches and things like that if I can be in the downtown core where all of you know life is around me. So, yeah, makes sense though. It would make a lot more sense to especially the way that I’ve been traveling lately, which means not traveling at all. I end up going to one place and staying there. If I could rent a room cheaply by the month, yeah, makes a lot more sense financially. But there are a lot of issues that come with setting that up, I think. Yeah, that would be the my answer to that question or my thoughts about that suggestion.
There you have it. The April May Planet Doug Ask Me Anything video. At the beginning I said I was really going to try and keep my answers short to the point, not go off on tangents, but I failed once again. But I failed for a good reason. I just enjoy doing this. I enjoy talking. I enjoy telling stories. I enjoy diving into little ideas here and there. So, I do more than just like someone asking me the question, you know, do you want to go to China? I could say, I’ve already been to China several times and I don’t really want to go to China again. I’d rather go to a new country. 15 seconds and that’s my answer. But I end up spinning out and telling more stories. So, I’ve been talking a lot longer today than I planned on, but that’s how it goes on Planet Doug. And I hope you enjoyed some of the stories that I told along the way. There were a lot more stories I wanted to tell, so I did rain myself in a little bit, and I tried to keep it a little bit shorter, but we’ll see. Hopefully, you enjoyed some of that. So, thank you very much, Planet Doug, community out there. All the questions that you submitted. Great questions. I really enjoyed those sparking a lot of thoughts, a lot of ideas. Thank you very much for submitting them and I hope you enjoyed this video and I’ll see you next time.